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's been caught in move her in time as well as space, and the city she returns to is sometimes centuries in her past, other times centuries in her future. As Mika attempts, again and again, to return to her own time and the children she left behind, she witnesses the convolutions of history: invaders rebuffed and succumbed to, technologies adopted and abandoned, the shift between differ­ent systems of government. The city maintains a book where the testimonies of lost travelers like Mika are recorded, though knowing about future calamities somehow never seems to serve to evade them. Mika herself is desperate not to read the book – what if she learns that she never found her way home? But what is the cost of standing outside of history, and how long can such a state be maintained?

Next, I reviewed The Weathering, by Ukrainian author Artem Chapeye, translated by Daisy Gibbons. A post-apocalyptic tale in which most of humanity "weathers away", its focus is on how the society that the survivors build in this calamity's wake recreates the prejudices and class system of the old world. The result is at once specific to its Ukrainian setting, and universal in its observations about human weakness and the allure of fascism.

Chapeye, who is currently serving in the Ukrainian army, observes in his foreword to Daisy Gibbons's English translation that while The Weathering was originally published several months before the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, its composition and events were deeply affected by the 2014 war that followed Russia's annexation of Crimea. To a reader with only a glancing familiarity with Ukrainian history and politics, this influence can initially feel hard to discern. To begin with, The Weathering feels very much of a piece with the postapocalyptic fiction that we are familiar with – a fact that the narrator even comments on, when he observes that "We cannot perceive existence in its raw state, we have lost the ability to perceive reality without pop-culture references." Soon, however, the specifics of this short, affecting novel’s setting shine through.

My final review in the April 2026 issue is of The Dead Man's Empire by W.P. Wiles. This is the second novel in a (projected) trilogy that began with 2022's The Last Blade Priest. As I write in my review, this installment has all the hallmarks of a second volume in a series, but reading it reminded me of why I enjoyed Blade Priest so much, and made me look forward to the story's conclusion.

Most of the key characters of The Last Blade Priest, including its two protagonists, are either absent or glimpsed only briefly in The Dead Man's Empire – an early indication that this novel is telling only part of a greater story. Its focus, instead, is on the aftermath of collapse. In the Mirolinian royal court, a low-ranking princess named Syzenne arrives from a former vassal state as something between a diplomat, a gift, and a prisoner. She quickly observes both the dissipation and decay of the court, and the self-satisfaction of its key players, who still imagine themselves to be the rulers of the known world. Fleeing the ruins of the Tzanate is Duna, the former ward of a League official, who has taken up with Elecy, a young priest who dreams of re­storing not only her order's power, but its moral and political authority.

Locus subscribers will already have access to the June 2026 issue, which includes several new reviews by me. For the rest of you, however, I hope these three reviews will tide you by.

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