L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 42: Illustrated Edition Featuring the Next Generation of Science Fiction & Fantasy by L. Ron Hubbard, Jody Lynn Nye, Ciruelo, Orson Scott Card, Nina Kirki Hoffman, Brian C Hailes, Larry Niven, Thomas R Eggenberger, Dorothy de Kok, Michael T Kuester, Elina Kumra, Mark McWaters, Brenda Posey, Zach Poulter, Kathleen Powell, Joseph Sidari, Thomas K. Slee, S.J. Stevenson, Mike Strickland, BAFU, Nathan Deiwert, Tracy Eire, Art Ikuta, Anna Malone, Josie Moore, Amuri Morris, Karah Richardson, Tray Streeter, Roddy Taylor, Zhang Haotian "Allen"
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, science fiction, short stories
Series: Writers of the Future #42
Pages: 480
Published by Galaxy Press on April 28, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Future Is Here.
If 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, Volume 42 asks the questions worth thinking about.
Discover the next generation of science fiction and fantasy with twelve emerging authors and three powerhouse storytellers. These unforgettable short stories deliver everything readers love—time travel, first contact, magical realism, monsters, fairy-tale twists, and pulse-pounding science fiction and fantasy—crafted to surprise, thrill, and keep you turning pages.
Dive into a time-rescue gone wrong, a beauty treatment with a terrifying side effect, a detective battling a body-hopping killer, and a homesteader uncovering a truth that rewrites Earth itself. Explore whimsical, high-stakes fantasy as a baker braves the fairy underworld; confront supernatural horror in “Ghost Dog”; and experience the emotional and ethical tension of love trapped in virtual reality in “As Long as You Both Shall Live.” Whether you’re seeking the genre-bending innovation of “Bloom Decay,” the emotional epic of “A Girl and Her Dragon,” the humor and chaos of “The Triceratops Effect,” or the visionary mystery of “Skinny-Shins,” this volume delivers standout stories readers will recommend, review, and remember.
Featuring original stories by Orson Scott Card and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.
Perfect for fans of:
Orson Scott Card, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Blake Crouch, Brandon Sanderson, V. E. Schwab, Naomi Novik, Michael Crichton, Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, and Black Mirror.
Includes:
*12 illustrated stories from emerging stars of speculative fiction*3 bonus stories by bestselling authors*3 articles on the craft and business of writing and illustrating from top creators
Selected from thousands of entries worldwide, Writers of the Future Volume 42 brings together a new generation of emerging authors and illustrators—your launchpad into the future of science fiction and fantasy.
Get it now.

My Review:

This is now my fourth review of the annual Writers of the Future collection, and I think I’m starting to get the hang of things. By that I mean sussing out the themes of the year’s collection. It’s not that the collection starts out having a theme – because it doesn’t. These stories were the top three in each of the quarterly Writers of the Future contests last year. But this is a Fantasy and Science Fiction collection, all of whose stories were written or at least finalized during roughly the same time period.

The world, as always, is with us, and the stories tend to speak to something about their present moment. Something that is true in this collection as well.

Among this year’s winners, there are several stories that successfully combine science fiction with mystery, particularly mystery of the hard-boiled noir school. I’m not sure whether the number of these stories in the collection means anything more than just that SF/mystery is having a moment – which it is – but I’m delighted either way. Time travel and its consequences are more widely represented this year than they have been at least in the last few collections. While this year’s collection is more weighted towards SF, there are several standout fantasy stories so there’s plenty here for every reader of short-form SF and Fantasy to love.

As I said in previous years’ review, and I’ll repeat it because it’s still absolutely true, as with most collections, there were a couple of stories that just didn’t work for me, but for the most part the stories worked and worked well. I’d be thrilled to see more work from all of these award-winning authors.

While I will do some very fudgy math at the end to come up with an overall rating for the collection, that’s not fair to the individual stories, so I have brief thoughts of a review type and a rating for each of those new, individual stories so you can see which ones were the best of the best – at least in one reviewer’s humble opinion.

“Form 14B: Application for Certification of Consciousness Transfer (Post-Mortem)” by Thomas Slee, illustrated by Art Ikuta
This didn’t go quite where I thought it would go. I thought it was going the same place as Scalzi’s “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years” in being a story about the bureaucratic red tape that is likely to surround the most SFnal of future possibilities when they intersect with humans. Instead, OTOH it’s a story about potential fraud, and OTOH, and much more importantly, it’s a story about a real, true, honest-to-paperwork possibility of a fresh start provided by a tired but still vigilant bureaucrat. And it’s a redemption story, even if that redemption comes secondhand. Escape Rating A-

“Saffron and Marigolds” by Kathleen Powell, illustrated by Bafu
A human, a fairy, and a dragon. It sounds like the start of a really cute story – and it could have gone that way but is better because it doesn’t. It’s a story about love (not just romantic love), a story about wanting, and a story about wishes that really do have power, especially in the sense of the kind of power that corrupts until it becomes absolute and absolutely corrupting.

Arthur’s life was saved – and damned – when he baked a gingerbread cake that the fae king coveted so much that he sent his best agent to kidnap Arthur. Only she refused, leaving Arthur and her pet dragon while she did her damndest to work off her debt to a fae king who was NEVER going to free her. Arthur – and Wandley the dragon – decide to fix that all by themselves, and find a way to get the fairy Menura out from under her debt for all their sakes. This could have been a slight and simple story about the power of friendship, but the deeper it – and Wandley – got into the faery Underearth, the better and more powerful the story became. Escape Rating A

“Bloom Decay” by Elina Kumra, illustrated by Tray Streeter
In the end, this one reminded me of Thomas Ha’s Hugo nominated novelette, The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video, mixed with a whole lot about the way that “the algorithm” narrows our individual worlds by ‘optimizing’ what we see and hear, whether that’s in service of following our own preferences and predilections, in service of optimizing profit that can be raised from us in the marketplace, or in service of the prevailing winds of government or merely the status quo.

It begins by focusing on the homogenization of art through the packaging of artists and creators, then it expands outward into the world that serves, the company that promotes it and profits from it, and then turns its eye inside out to bring those who fight against it from the shadows. Not that they fight through weapons of war, but that they resist the dying of the light of creativity by protecting those who hold its spirit. The story was utterly human, totally thought provoking, and overwhelmingly beautiful. Escape Rating A+

“Shell Game” by Zach Poulter, illustrated by Tracy Eire
This has the gritty noir sensibilities of John Scalzi’s Dispatcher series. The central concept is that there are beings among us who are more than human, who are able to wear ordinary humans as meat-suits. It’s not that gruesome, except when it is. Because those with the ability dip into our minds see the world through our eyes for just a little bit at a time – except when they take over. But they are human in the worst ways, in that some of them get greedy for power and money and ‘clients’ and experiences so they muscle in on each other’s territories – meaning us – to take what they want.

In the end, like the Dispatcher series, this is also an SFnal noir mystery series, in that one ordinary human cop joins forces with one of these beings in order to stop a killer of both kinds of ‘people’ and they form an alliance. It might be the start of a beautiful friendship. But it makes for a fascinating story even if it isn’t. Escape Rating A-

“Canary” by Brenda Posey, illustrated by Roddy Taylor
This was interesting. I’m on the horns of the dilemma that it was a good story but it just didn’t grab me personally. The idea that someone would want to live ‘off grid’, especially in the midst of an ever-worsening climate apocalypse, has been done. That she’s so aggressive about being alone, also seems sensible. That an alien race would preserve humanity as an experiment is even plausible – and in some senses has been done and reminds me a bit of And Side by Side They Wander. I do love that she worked out a deal with the aliens that preserved both her choices AND still saved humanity. But it just didn’t gel for me and I think it’s a me thing. A good story but not a fave. Escape Rating B

“The Triceratops Effect” by S.J. Stevenson, illustrated by Art Ikuta
This was just fun. Also a bit sad in its way. It combines bits of Parker’s Making History, Boy with Accidental Dinosaur, Kaiju Preservation Society, Extremity by Nicholas Binge and pretty much every story about time travel, causality and human nature’s tendency to fuck up whatever it touches.

In the same way – but opposite – that I could see that Canary was a good story but it didn’t work for me, “The Triceratops Effect” just plain worked for me BECAUSE it carried so many elements of those other stories, all of which I enjoyed for either their very charismatic megafauna or the way they played around with time travel and its inevitable consequences. It’s hard to go wrong with a dinosaur story. Escape Rating A

“A Ready-Made Bubble of Light” by Thomas Rudolf Eggenberger, illustrated by Haotian Allen Zhang
This one was just plain weird. I mean really weird. Or it didn’t work for me. Or it’s so busy trying to be mysterious that it turns out to be impenetrable. Or all of the above.

The idea is very solidly SF, and in a peculiar way it’s similar to “The Triceratops Effect” – it just doesn’t work as well. It’s also very noir in the way that “Shell Game” is noir. The idea, and we’re back to “Triceratops” again, is that humans have figured out how to play with time travel and have broken causality. But differently, because in this case they’re breaking time and causality and putting time out of sync in the process – kind of like the way that long-haul space travel at near the speed of light takes the traveler out of sync with their time. Except that’s a universal constant while in this story the lack of sync is not. To the point where it’s going to break the universe. And, much like climate change, which it’s a stand in for, no one is going to believe it’s happening until it’s too late to fix – only with universe spanning consequences.

But that story is wrapped in a story about a mega-corporation playing with the time travel mechanisms in order to understand and then break them, as the story gets told to two time technicians who KNOW a crime has been committed but don’t believe in the justification, which might not be right in the first place. Escape Rating C because this one got to be a slog long before it ended.

“Thickly” by Dorothy de Kok, illustrated by Tracy Eire
I think this story works on two levels. From one perspective, it’s about the beauty industry, and the way it convinces women that they are not “beautiful” enough to be worthy of happiness or a successful future or marriage or all of the above. Local standards of beauty may vary, but the concept itself is unfortunately universal.

And on the other hand, and much more SFnal, is that this is a story about women taking up more space in the world, about being seen, and about refusing to suppress their own voices. But the way that happens is through questionable pharmaceuticals that, at least on the surface, seem to be ‘improving’ the women but in truth is turning them into more popularly acceptable versions while reducing their original selves to ghosts on the fringes of what used to be their own lives.

This is a story that you think about a LOT after it’s finished because the implications can be taken in multiple ways and they’re all chilling. Escape Rating B+

“Ghost Dog” by Mark McWaters, illustrated by Anna Malone c2026
I loved this one because it pulled at my heartstrings really hard, and if you’ve loved and lost companion animals over the years it will yours too. On the surface, it’s a story about a haunting, along with more than a bit of a good ‘old skool’ paranormal romance. But the ghost doing the haunting isn’t human, it’s a spectral hellhound who wants to horn in on the beautiful relationship between tiny, fierce Bentley, a cute little Westie, and Mark, a human who has loved each and every one of his best dogs over the years with a fierce and wonderful affection. When the hellhound breaks in, it’s not just the little Westie that protects his person, it’s the ghosts of all the dogs who have come before him, just waiting for the chance to save their mutual best friend, beat off the interloper, and help their person get his happy ever after. Escape Rating A+ and be prepared for the dust in your eyes at the end.

“In Living Color” by Michael Thomas Kuester, illustrated by Nathan Deiwert
This is definitely noir in the same vein as another entry in the collection, “Shell Game”. It’s a police procedural investigation into a serial killer, but set in a world where ‘Talents’ are on the rise. In this particular case, it’s centered around a ‘Talent’ who helps the police with his psychometry. He can see the past of what he touches through pictures. He’s touched pictures of multiple crime scenes drenched in blood like ink with a killer who is a complete emotional and psychological void at their center. The reluctant investigator and the gleeful killer circle around each other, manifesting opposing aspects of the same Talent, until a chance encounter puts them in each other’s path for one brief and decisive moment. Escape Rating A: if you like SF mysteries, and I do, this one is terrific.

“As Long as You Both Shall Live” by Michael Strickland, illustrated by Karah Richardson
Coming close to the end of the collection, this story made me realize that there are no robots or artificial intelligence stories in the collection at all. That’s neither a good or a bad thing, more a comment on how commonplace AI stories have become in real life that they might be too ‘real’ to be SF. This story is the closest, although it’s not an AI story. It’s a story about living in a completely AI constructed world, and what that means for the humans who are living within it. It’s also a romance, but the romantic aspects made the story surprisingly predictable and made the story a bit lighter, in multiple ways, than most of the collection. A fun read but not all that deep. Escape Rating B

“A Girl and Her Dragon: A Life in Four Parts” by Joseph Sidari, illustrated by Josie Moore
This one, on the other hand, went very deep, was very nearly heartbreaking, and yet still managed to pull a light and happy ending out of a whole lot of angst. It’s a bit of alternate history, in that it takes place in our world, even in our time period, but a world where dragons and other magical creatures not only exist but have long and storied true histories.

But it’s also VERY much our world in the way that humans are gonna human – and be litigious – especially towards large, predatory animals that might be dangerous. So the last dragon is chained in the Bronx Zoo for decades, his only champion one young girl who believes in his magic and campaigns her entire life to get poor Ash unchained. It’s told from her perspective in a series of letters and letters to the editor of various newspapers and newspaper reports and ‘tweets’ and other social media posts. But the message is one that no one wants to hear because the powers-that-be have decided that Ash is dangerous and that he might hurt someone and that he needs to be chained for everyone else’s own good even if it is literally killing him. Which is when his lone champion, looking at the waning years of her own life, decides to stage a jailbreak – and find the land of Honah Lee that she’s been searching for all of her life. Escape Rating A+ and a fitting end to the collection.

Escape Rating A- for the collection as a whole, which fits as well as it did in previous years because I really do escape into these collections. Mostly one or two stories at a time – or an evening – because the whole thing is a lot. Generally delicious, but still a lot. I keep having a grand time with these collections, even though there are always one or two that don’t quite work because that’s the nature of the beast.

What it does mean is that I’ll be back next year with the 43rd volume in the series, with expectations of another collection of great stories that I expect to be fulfilled!