"10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days" by Samantha Mills in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 63, March/April 2025 by Samantha Mills Narrator: Erika Ensign
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction, short stories
Series: Uncanny Magazine, Issue 63, March/April 2025
Pages: 10
Length: 44 minutes
Published by Uncanny Magazine on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads
The March/April 2025 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine.
Featuring new fiction by Samantha Mills, G. Willow Wilson, Wen-yi Lee, Charlie Jane Anders, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Stephanie Malia Morris, Kirsty Logan and J.L. Akagi. Essays by John Wiswell, Angela Liu, Amanda-Rae Prescott, and J.R. Dawson, poetry by Rafiat Lamidi, Ai Jiang, Abdulrazaq Salihu, and Lesley Hart Gunn, interviews with Wen-yi Lee and Eugenia Triantafyllou by Caroline M. Yoachim, a cover by Galen Dara, and an editorial by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas.
Uncanny Magazine is a bimonthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in November 2014. Edited by 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 Hugo award winners for best semiprozine, and 2018 Hugo award winners for Best Editor, Short Form, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, Betsy Aoki, and Monte Lin, each issue of Uncanny includes new stories, poetry, articles, and interviews.
My Review:
This is the final entry in my Hugo reading. It’s being posted, fittingly enough, just before this year’s Worldcon in LA, where the Hugos will be announced. I wanted to hold one review until I got closer to the con, although I promise I read/listened to this last story before I turned in my ballot.
Also fittingly, this is one of the weirder stories in the category, which is saying something because they’re ALL weird in one way or another. Part of me wants to make a joke about if one wants a list of realistic short stories one should not be looking at the Hugo list. Or the Stoker list. The Edgar list is probably hit or miss.
What’s interesting about this particular story is that its weirdness is a bit TOO close to reality. While the individual scenarios are, for the most part, science fiction or fantasy or horror, the idea that the world as we know it might come to an end, and specifically might come to an end now or soon because it feels like everything is FUBAR’s beyond our collective ability to cope, feels read and right here and right now.
Then again, the idea of a Hellmouth opening in California isn’t all that far-fetched. After all, we’ve seen that story before. Maybe Buffy wasn’t quite as fictional as we once believed. Or hoped.
This story isn’t about the ways in which the world might end. That’s not its point. The key word in that long title is “self-care” because the unnamed narrator in this story isn’t telling the tale of ALL the various horrifying futures that she’s seen, she’s only talking about “the good ones”.
Which aren’t necessarily great outcomes in any way – at least not for the world as a whole. Those “good” outcomes, such as they are, are defined by one, simple thing. The good ones are the ones where the family stays together. Where they all survive. Not unchanged – in a few there’s an actual demon baby, not unscathed – no one lives with a demon baby unscathed or unscorched. But they all have each other, all of them together, and that’s the only definition of good that matters when the world is coming to an end.
Escape Rating B: As I was listening to the podcast for this story – read by the always marvelous Erika Ensign) I had a weird thought to go with the weird story. In my head, this story combines Robert Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice”, with Naomi Kritzer’s Hugo and Nebula Award winning novelette, “The Year Without Sunshine”.
If you’re wondering which poem I’m referring to, it’s this one:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Frost’s poem is a bit downbeat – at best. Also memorable, as that first line gets quoted OFTEN. He certainly gets the point across that it doesn’t really matter how the world ends, just that it will happen, humans will probably be responsible in one way or another, and in the end (ahem) how it ends doesn’t matter, just that it does.
Kritzer’s story won Best Novelette in the 2024 Hugos. Very much on the other hand, it’s a hopepunk story. Not that things aren’t terrible, because they definitely are. It’s hopefule because the community survives because they all stick together and help each other through. Not out of enlightened self-interest – or certainly not just that – but because they’re better together if they all live to see the next sunrise. However long it takes.
The particular scenarios in THIS story go by quickly. This is a short story and the vignettes inside it are VERY short. They are also all homages to various SFnal and Horror disasters. Not just Buffy’s Hellmouth, but the Cthulhu Mythos rears its ugly head more than once, and climate change effs up the world more than a few times.
But the particular scenarios aren’t the point. The point is that (the right kind of) togetherness is all it takes to turn something truly terrible into something survivable.
I’m glad I saved this one for last. I’m ALSO happy that the Hugo announcements are coming soon, as I can’t wait to see how it all turns out. And I’m already looking forward to next year’s Hugo readings!
