Word Count: 1859 | Reading Time: 7 min
Greetings, and a very warm welcome to another issue of Dimensional Diaries. Fall is almost here—what little we get in this city—and for someone like me, that usually means oscillating between cold-again-hot-now temperatures. The kind where you sweat during the day and snuggle under a blanket post evening with one foot out beneath a barely moving fan because too much speed feels harsh on your skin. Anybody else going through that already? It is only the sensibility of fictional worlds that usually gets me through these contradictory weather ailments, and so I bring for you a long list of stories to keep you company.
The tales overviewed herein include stories from Pseudopop, Dark ‘N’ Light, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed, all published in the third quarter of this year, July to September, 2025. Also spotlighted in the end are some very exciting new reads that we dearly hope you’ll be adding to your TBRs.
And so, let us begin.
###
A Land Called Folly by Amal Singh – Clarkesworld, July 2025, Issue # 226
“…what place are you returning to? A loveless, heartless place, more so than the world you left behind. You saw a rot, left for a garden. But the rot is everywhere. Where, then, are you? You’ve fought and left behind so many worlds that you’re now world-less.”
How does one define a place called home? Is it made by the people, the memories, or the land where you used to catch tadpoles as a child? If you could traverse multiple planets across galaxies, where would you choose to live and why? These are layers of truths the protagonist of this tale excavates one space station at a time, and simultaneously, so does the reader. Singh employees the second person perspective masterfully, making the emotions—guilt, stubbornness, heartbreak, confusion—ring true and rooted amid the dazzle of a multiplanetary, wandering world. The protagonist, both a wanderer as well as lost, strolls through it all, grappling with his human follies as he slowly makes his way back home. Touching and introspective.
“You’ve taken the entrails of this past and coiled them around a dead thing and kicked it to dust. You now know it no more. You don’t want to live it.”
#
My Heart in a Snow Globe by Archita Mittra – Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 11th July 2025, Episode 984
“…no one ever said that motherhood would be easy.”
An uncanny, macabre fairytale. What lengths would a mother go to protect her children from harm? Mitra twists this question onto itself, turning the metaphor of helicopter parenting into a reality that is nothing short of shocking. The magic, like the prose, is thinly balanced on the edge of beautiful and eerie, as fragile as the glass of a snow globe. Woven through it are the threads of a devastating, unspeakable grief, and the way they can cut, twist someone from inside out. Subtle, effective, unnerving.
“It breaks my heart, but I must save him. The sooner, the better. That sense of urgency takes over my nerves.”
#
About the Space of Half an Hour by Nandini Banerjee – Stories at the End of the World, Dark ‘N’ Light
“Remembering made her hungry, but eating was impossible. She didn’t know what the company had placed in her pantry, and without the voice guiding her she couldn’t prepare any meals.”
What does abrupt silence feel like in a world that is completely caged in, and where your constant company everyday has been an artificial voice guiding you how to go about your days? Banerjee makes you live the terrifying answer to this question—right alongside the haunting dystopia of the query itself—in this tale which won the second place in the Stories at the End of the World short fiction contest. This is an eerie read, exploring the tricks time and memory play on another, and the petrifying weight of learning to make choices when one has known nothing but the terrible cocoon of constant surveilled isolation. Unsettling, timely and effective.
“She had never known silence like this. Her mind, unused to stretching, struggled to remember the last time there was no response.”
#
Postman, Soldier, Traitor by Vijayalaxmi Samal – Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 25th Aug 2025, Issue # 439
“He tries not to think about the letter, but it hangs like a lump of someone’s heart in his pocket.”
A postmaster’s son turned soldier is compelled to deliver a letter, given to him by the boy he killed on the battlefield. Raw, emotional and devastating, Samal creates a realm that sings and cries at the same time. Both acts seem to wound the reader the same. What does it mean to be brave, the story asks between the lines. What does it mean to be good? Are the two—can they be?—mutually inclusive? The heaviness of this war and tragedy-broken world is evenly matched by the juxtaposition of emotions and the iron-fisted ideas we hold dear. Glory vs home. Enemy vs family. Loyalty vs traitor. A poignant read that will linger.
“Akshar only realizes he has crossed a border somewhere when there is red cloth fluttering on closed doors instead of his familiar blue.
The land around him has not changed, though. The road and the people look the same.”
#
It Might Be He Returns by Fatima Taqvi – Lightspeed, Aug 2025, Issue # 183
“The first item he was sent to find was easy enough, but returning to the mirror with it taught him the ways of this other world.”
A child steps into a mirrored reality whereby he is ultimately bestowed with a new life that he has always desired. But will he return to make the city a better place, or will he, like many others, succumb to the pleasurable cocoon of comfort and privilege? That’s a question the personification of Karachi on the other side of the mirror asks, and the one that readers are left wondering. Taqvi paints a dystopian world that is complex and strange but also deeply familiar. What happens to seeing when magic appears eccentric and cruelty mundane? Is one because of the other or despite it? How does one go about separating the edges where the mirror echoes the image from the corners that shape it? Can one even do so without breaking the mirror itself?
Simultaneously haunting, hopeful, cynical and moving, this short is not unlike the city the story is based in. There’s also an accompanying author’s spotlight. You can read more about the author’s thoughts and inspirations here.
“It will unmake him, he thinks. The amnesia. He can feel the lure of thinking that it wasn’t just luck that rescued him. It was himself… He deserves this life.”
#
Heart of Thunder by Raahem Alvi – Clarkesworld, Aug 2025, Issue # 227
“Memories are approximations. They are stretchy, squishy, and fluid things. And, as time stretches to its elastic limit, the mind begins filling certain subsections of time with fiction. And then it eternalizes those fictions as fact. Then fact and fiction fuck and grind against one another until they merge into a twin-headed zombie thing.”
A hard science fiction novelette dealing with neurodivergence, capitalistic exploitation, job market and tech. Proper employment requires surgical “augmentation” that businesses “help” pay via large wage cuts. Like present day subscription models, these augmentations routinely require new, expensive updates. Better employment requires more augmentation requires increased pay cuts, and so the cycle goes. Our protagonist is one of the many cogs stuck in relentless grinding wheel, complete with physical and neural enhancements that have led to an AI stuck in his head, among other voices.
It is a devastating read. Alvi paints a picture that is as vast as it is hard and stark with few corners to hide in. This complex futuristic world may have colonies, industries and, of course, war, on various planets, but life is still very much being held hostage by big corporations, more so for people with mental health issues. Cerebral, moving and tragic.
“The thing that identified as Damian could no longer identify its mind with its body. Body and soul had separated, and perhaps he was already a zombie. The augmentations were a cordyceps-like growth on his form.”
#
The World Will End in Slow Motion by Kuzhali Manickavel – Dark ‘N’ Light
“…people will keep scrapbooks on the end times, taking pictures of the dying sun and the falling giants.”
A detailed account of the apocalypse as it unveils slowly and expectedly. Manickavel creates a fantasy that is both surreal and believable. You get to know this futuristic yet familiar world as it rusts and decays bit by bit, only it’s a decay that is both visible as well as unperceived simultaneously. You watch it, talk about it, even take pictures to commemorate it. Everyone’s a spectator, no one’s a participant, and yet we all die. Like sitting on a park bench and taking a selfie as you watch death walk towards you with dancing feet. Unnerving, dream-like, revelatory.
“Everyone will feel like good people, even though the world is ending.”
#
Spec-Fic Spotlight: New Releases We’re Excited to Read
First and foremost in our list of shoutouts today is Small World City, a Dhaka-based online literary magazine. Their ninth issue, a 2nd anniversary Bangladeshi-only special, went up this August and our team at Tasavvur would like to offer our heartiest congratulations! Cheers to the entire team at SWC and all their published authors and artists for this amazing feat. There is some truly great fiction, non-fiction and poetry available so, dear reader, be sure to check them out.
On the book front, we have two new major works and two spectacular reissues to spotlight. The later includes a novel and a novelette, the former two fabulous anthologies:
- The Last Dragoners of Bowbazaar, by Indra Das
- Mad Sisters of Esi, by Tashan Mehta
- Between Worlds: The IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, Vol. 1, edited by Gautam Bhatia
- Lastly, our very own Usman T. Malik has a new story out in The End of The World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
###
And that marks the end of Dimensional Diaries for this quarter. We’re really excited for this issue of Tasavvur and we hope you’ll love it as much as we do. Our team works incredibly hard to bring you new, exciting stories so please give them and our authors and artists a cheer on your socials if you can. If you would like to join our newsletter, make a donation or are generally interested in knowing about other ways in which you can back and encourage our little labor to love, please visit our support page here. To join our newly launched Tasavvur Book Club, just drop us a DM on instagram.
I’ll bid you adieu with a gentle reminder: If you are a South Asian author who would like us to overview or spotlight your new release here, please don’t hesitate to write to us at: hello@tasavvurnama.com.
I’ll be back next quarter with more stories for your TBR. Until then, happy reading!