Over at GigaNotoSaurus, editor Rashida J. Smith surveys every single story they published last year, which is awfully handy for latecomers like me who’ve just started following this fabulous magazine.

2015 concluded my second year as editor (officially my first full year of choosing stories) and looking at the stories that did make the cut it’s easier to see themes emerge.

In “Serving Girl,” “The Business of Buying and Selling,” “Blow the Moon Out,” and “Quarter Days,” relationships play an important role in navigating the strange new worlds the protagonists find themselves in.

“The Stars, Their Faces Uplifted in Song” and “And the Ends of the Earth for Thy Possession,” tackle the complexity of faith in distant futures and alternate worlds.

We published two stories where the fey play a central role: in spite of my usual resistance to all thing faerie land. “Drinking with the Elfin Knight” and the “The Faerie-Maker” took two unconventional takes on faerie, by two protagonists that don’t often have voices in faerie tales.

Resistance and rebellion, no matter the cost, feature prominently in “Greys of War,” “The Body Corporate,” and “Sacred Cows: Death and Squalor on the Rio Grande.”

And what can I say about “Bears Punching Bears!” except it was one of few stories that made me laugh out loud, with the hijinx of humans on a broke space casino and the search for a new interstellar Elvis impersonator.

Several of these stories are from first time authors, others from established names in the speculative fiction crowd. All of them make me proud to be an editor.

Read Rashida’s complete editorial, 2015 Year in Review, here.

This month’s story is Sandra M. Odell’s “Godfall,” which Xavier at Goodreads described as follows:

For unexplained reasons, dead gods start falling onto Earth, their behemoth corpses crushing cities and millions of people in the process. Yet, their bodies are full of much needed resources, so the sites soon see teams of scrappers rushing to them. This time, it’s Maya, from the Hindu pantheon.

“Godfall” uses a unique and fascinating premise, that had this mythology-lover salivating.

Read the story free here, and read Xavier‘s full review here.

GigaNotoSaurus is edited by Rashida J. Smith, and offers readers one story, between 5,000 and 25,000 words, every month. It has been published since November 2010, and appears on the first of every month. It is online only, and completely free.

Check out the complete back catalog of fiction at their website, including Nebula Award winning stories from Ken Liu and Ferrett Steinmetz, as well as Black Gate‘s C.S.E. Cooney and S. Hutson Blount, and many others.

This next issue will be available on February 1. We last covered GigaNotoSaurus with the December 2015 issue, featuring “Quarter Days” by Iona Sharma.

Our January Fantasy Magazine Rack is here, and all of our recent magazine coverage here.