2024 read #66: Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Summer 2024 issue.

Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Summer 2024 issue (17)

Edited by JW Stebner

43 pages

Published 2024

Read June 6

Rating: 3 out of 5

Ever since my first story was published in Corvus magazine in 2012, I’ve loved small press magazines. Heck, go back even farther, to when I printed the first Scareship zine in 2002. I’ve been around zines and indie litmags pretty much my entire adult life. Some of my favorite stories and poems (my own and those of others) were first printed in amateur and token payment markets. Yet I don’t think I’ve read a single one cover to cover this whole time, my own editorial efforts excepted.

Most volunteer-run indie mags fold within a couple years. My own From the Farther Trees magazine made it just a hair over two years. (I hope to revive it someday, but who knows.) Scareship lasted longer, appearing in fits and starts from 2002 until 2013, but I only published ten issues in that time, and the final batch of four had nothing but the name in common with the original six.

Hexagon is something of a venerable elder in this scene, still producing quarterly issues here in its fifth year. Never having read an issue in full, only individual stories by writers I know, I wasn’t expecting that this issue would follow such a clear theme: fuck the billionaires. I’m here for it.

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“Heat Devils” by Madi Haab is a quippy eco-heist with cyberpunk elements, an entertaining and cathartic middle finger to extinction capitalism.

“Feathers and Wax: A Triptych” by André Geleynse is a tiny but vivid piece of eco fiction, another middle finger to the billionaires. Quite good. Packs a lot into 300-some words.

“Smugglers Without Borders” by Christopher R. Muscato is a tale of boycotting a global corporate monopoly.

“An Epicurean’s 10 Steps to Utopia” by John Eric Vona is a string of food-related vignettes illustrating pampered lives of extreme privilege witnessed by a footman who can never taste the dishes, only serve them. Another vivid microcosm packed into few words. Excellent. My favorite piece here.

“Wonders of a Plastic Ocean” by James Cato is the longest story here by far, a novelette of climate refugees who find uses for plastic pollution. I enjoyed the creativity and strangeness of its setting.

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A brief issue, though that’s understandable when an editor pays by the word from their own pocket. I hope to read many more indie litmags soon!