April Reviews in Locus, by Samantha Mills, Artem Chapeye, and W.P. Wiles
I had three reviews in the April 2026 issue of Locus , and they are now all online. First up, I reviewed Samantha Mills's collection Rabbit Test and Other Stories . The title story was one of the most talked-about pieces of SFF short fiction of the last few years, racking up multiple award wins due both to its topicality—it is a story about America backsliding on reproductive health published just as this happened in reality—and the excellence of its execution. In my review I try to detect how a collection built around a single, attention-grabbing story manages to buttress it with other readings, and what those other stories tell us about Mills as a writer. One of the earliest pieces, "Strange Waters", feels almost like a first attempt at the framework that would eventually become "Rabbit Test", relying, like it, on a sense of the ebb and flow of history. Mika, a fisherwoman, has been swept out to sea, away from the city she calls home. But the currents she...