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Another World Isn't Possible
The stories of Brendan C. Byrne are spinning vortices of uncertainty where the past ceases to exist, the present is a slow burn, and the future is a vision from hell. With apocalyptic lucidity and enervated sarcasm, he summons a timeline you never agreed to live in—yet somehow already do. In Byrne’s world, an acid gaze obliterates all hope.
Everyday urban tales on the surface, imperceptibly they turn to darkness. Endings bring no resolution, just a clammy clingfilm of unreality. Byrne’s stories linger like static or the taste of metal.
Another world isn’t possible. This is the one we get, and you won’t forget these stories until it ends.
Everyday urban tales on the surface, imperceptibly they turn to darkness. Endings bring no resolution, just a clammy clingfilm of unreality. Byrne’s stories linger like static or the taste of metal.
Another world isn’t possible. This is the one we get, and you won’t forget these stories until it ends.
- GenresHorror
236 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2025
5 people are currently reading
20 people want to read
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June 26, 2025I was attracted to the title—how could I not be? But from then on, my experience hasn't been all that great. The first story was okay—a riff on the vampire trope. The second was an exploration of AI, but it lost me at the third, with Thiel. I don't care about Silicon Valley at all. I might return to the collection at some point, but for now, I'm moving on.
January 5, 2026
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: Another World Isn’t Possible is scalding, horror-bent sci-fi that treats the internet like a haunted organ and capitalism like a prank that got out of hand. Byrne jumps from faux reports to listicles to intimate grief stories, landing more often than not with sharp jokes and sharper dread, even when it gets willfully messy.
Brendan C. Byrne was born in Washington, DC, lives in New York City, and has previously published three novellas (The Showing of the Instruments, The Racial Imaginary, Justice). He’s also picked up a couple of notable nods (including being a Shirley Jackson Award nominee and a Locus Award finalist). Byrne’s stories read like they were written by someone who grew up straddling the pre-internet world and the digital abyss, then spent the next twenty years side-eyeing every new “innovation” like it was a cursed object with a monthly subscription. In interviews, he frames Another World Isn’t Possible as basically a “complete stories” sweep from 2006 to 2024, tone all over the damn map because it is just his shit, no brand-friendly guardrails.
That range matters because you can watch him worry the same nerve from different angles: immanence versus transcendence (a fixation he credits to M. John Harrison), where “transcendence” keeps showing up as either digital escape or death, and death keeps sounding like the healthier option. Add in his ex-Catholic allergy to soothing narratives, his self-appointed “imagist” challenge to load objects and moments with meaning, and his political disgust with granting empathy to scumfucks in the discourse machine. That is how you get the collection’s signature move: bodies trying to live in the concrete world while capital’s meaning-factories grind everything into listicles, archives, and ideology cosplay, with Byrne laughing, grimacing, and sharpening the knife the whole time. Here’s a brief description of each of the collection’s entries:
“Her Threshold”: A young woman’s life is framed by screens and inherited religion, until a figure at the door turns “home security” into a personal apocalypse.
“The Master of Go”: A cool, prophetic collage that uses Go and AI mythology to talk about mastery, obsolescence, and the weird spiritual stink of “progress.”
“The Three Stigmata of Peter Thiel”: A vicious, funny techno-saint satire where Thiel returns as a mutilated, upgraded omen of plutocratic immortality.
“Post-Truth and Irreconcilable Differences Commission”: Bureaucratic scripture about a preserved Twitter corpus and an “Official History” machine that keeps compelling speech even after the platform “dies.”
“Flesh Moves” (w/ Adam Rothstein): A parent and child navigate a world where transit, bodies, and authority blur into one long, sweating system.
“Outside”: Post-human infrastructure as roadside nightmare: “freedom” looks like a world emptied out, still running on rails and bad plastic.
“Sophokles in His Cave”: A storm, a media worker, and a barge become a stage for surveillance violence and the numb terror of being recorded, not rescued.
“4 Paranoid-Rationalist Horror Stories About AI…”: A listicle that reads like an annotated panic attack, roasting a very specific brand of tech-doom self-mythology.
“a Stone and a Cloud”: A relationship story wrapped around a bizarre “cloud” experience so stripped down it becomes spiritual, erotic, and deeply unsettling.
“5 SF Stories Every Neo-Reactionary Should Read”: Another fake critical list, this time skewering ideology-as-aesthetic with a straight face and a hidden knife.
“The Glassblower”: A music-critic / true-crime spiral that retools Pied Piper dread into something modern, mean, and quietly fatalistic.
“Lungs”: A grim, tender road story where friendship and rot meet in a literal, disgusting image you won’t forget.
“Human Child”: A bartender with bone-deep ache meets a kid who feels like a glitch in the human category, and the night slides sideways.
“The Ideal and the Actual”: Academic intimacy and alienation, written like a memory you don’t trust but can’t stop replaying.
“Wasps/Spiders”: Post-9/11 city grief, desire, and newsfeed reality collapse into a love story that keeps catching on sharp edges.
“There Is No Comte de St. Germain For I Am He”: Immortal-voice bragging turns into a threat, then into a confession about the obscene boredom of not dying.
“The Loa and the Gaping Jaw”: Haitian Vodou ceremony and cultural awe filtered through mounting dread, where “zombie” becomes a social wound, not a costume.
“Donald Asshole and Los Elementos de Rock”: A comics-world freakout that’s hilarious until it’s horrifying, about sameness, perception, and the terror of losing your human anchors.
Standouts for me: “Her Threshold” (pure creeping-dread craft), “The Master of Go” (big-brain elegy that still bites), “Post-Truth Commission” (the bleakest laugh), and “Lungs” (gross, intimate, and sad in the best way).
Byrne’s big superpower is form-hopping. He’ll hit you with a perfectly straight bureaucratic paragraph about a “cleansed” platform archive, then pivot into sweaty body-horror transit logistics, then drop a line that makes the whole future feel like a damp basement you can’t ventilate. He can sketch an entire worldview in one nasty little detail, like “old catching-out rules apply: miss and you get your legs crushed under the wheels.” And he’s not afraid to say the quiet part out loud, that all these “elsewheres” are basically trauma storage: “a place to hang meat traumatized by reality.” It’s funny, it’s ugly, it’s honest. It’s also, occasionally, the kind of writing that dares you to keep up, which I respect even when it pisses me off.
The prose runs hot and cold: clean, declarative thesis-sentences, then these sudden smear-frames of image and texture, like the world is buffering while it decays. Even when it’s “just” people talking, you feel the author choosing cadence like a weapon. In “The Ideal and the Actual,” the dialogue lands with that lived-in, slightly self-loathing realism, “We talked about shit television; we talked about great television.” In the more overtly speculative pieces, he stacks specific nouns and hard sensory grime until the future feels less like prediction and more like a bad smell you can’t wash out.
The one real drawback is that the collection’s deliberate shapeshifting sometimes works against its own momentum. A few entries are such perfect pastiches (the listicles especially) that they can feel like brilliant radioactive snacks rather than full meals. Still, the voice holds the whole thing together, and when he wants to build a sustained atmosphere, he absolutely can.
The core theme is escape that curdles. Every “outside” is just another system, every platform death becomes a new platform in a different outfit, and the body keeps showing up like an unpaid bill. The horror machinery does that classic move where abstraction becomes viscera: “They crawl over you, and they put themselves in you,” and suddenly “there” isn’t even a place anymore. I finished this feeling like I’d been laughing in a burning server room, which is, honestly, the vibe of our era, so… good job, I guess? Shit.
A strong, frequently brilliant collection that recommends itself often, because even when it’s messy, it’s alive, and it knows exactly which parts of modern life are already haunted.
This feels like a greatest-hits map of Byrne’s obsessions across nearly two decades of publishing, from early surreal lit-comedy to later “technosphere nightmare” work, and it lands as a sharp entry in that transreal, horror-bent SF lane where the joke and the abyss are basically roommates.
Read if you crave near-future dread with teeth, not vibes, formal experimentation (reports, lists, fractured memoir), or satire that still manages to be scary as hell.
Skip if you need tidy plots that behave nicely, consistent tone from story to story, or your tech horror to be “neutral” or polite.
TL;DR: Another World Isn’t Possible is scalding, horror-bent sci-fi that treats the internet like a haunted organ and capitalism like a prank that got out of hand. Byrne jumps from faux reports to listicles to intimate grief stories, landing more often than not with sharp jokes and sharper dread, even when it gets willfully messy.
Brendan C. Byrne was born in Washington, DC, lives in New York City, and has previously published three novellas (The Showing of the Instruments, The Racial Imaginary, Justice). He’s also picked up a couple of notable nods (including being a Shirley Jackson Award nominee and a Locus Award finalist). Byrne’s stories read like they were written by someone who grew up straddling the pre-internet world and the digital abyss, then spent the next twenty years side-eyeing every new “innovation” like it was a cursed object with a monthly subscription. In interviews, he frames Another World Isn’t Possible as basically a “complete stories” sweep from 2006 to 2024, tone all over the damn map because it is just his shit, no brand-friendly guardrails.
That range matters because you can watch him worry the same nerve from different angles: immanence versus transcendence (a fixation he credits to M. John Harrison), where “transcendence” keeps showing up as either digital escape or death, and death keeps sounding like the healthier option. Add in his ex-Catholic allergy to soothing narratives, his self-appointed “imagist” challenge to load objects and moments with meaning, and his political disgust with granting empathy to scumfucks in the discourse machine. That is how you get the collection’s signature move: bodies trying to live in the concrete world while capital’s meaning-factories grind everything into listicles, archives, and ideology cosplay, with Byrne laughing, grimacing, and sharpening the knife the whole time. Here’s a brief description of each of the collection’s entries:
“Her Threshold”: A young woman’s life is framed by screens and inherited religion, until a figure at the door turns “home security” into a personal apocalypse.
“The Master of Go”: A cool, prophetic collage that uses Go and AI mythology to talk about mastery, obsolescence, and the weird spiritual stink of “progress.”
“The Three Stigmata of Peter Thiel”: A vicious, funny techno-saint satire where Thiel returns as a mutilated, upgraded omen of plutocratic immortality.
“Post-Truth and Irreconcilable Differences Commission”: Bureaucratic scripture about a preserved Twitter corpus and an “Official History” machine that keeps compelling speech even after the platform “dies.”
“Flesh Moves” (w/ Adam Rothstein): A parent and child navigate a world where transit, bodies, and authority blur into one long, sweating system.
“Outside”: Post-human infrastructure as roadside nightmare: “freedom” looks like a world emptied out, still running on rails and bad plastic.
“Sophokles in His Cave”: A storm, a media worker, and a barge become a stage for surveillance violence and the numb terror of being recorded, not rescued.
“4 Paranoid-Rationalist Horror Stories About AI…”: A listicle that reads like an annotated panic attack, roasting a very specific brand of tech-doom self-mythology.
“a Stone and a Cloud”: A relationship story wrapped around a bizarre “cloud” experience so stripped down it becomes spiritual, erotic, and deeply unsettling.
“5 SF Stories Every Neo-Reactionary Should Read”: Another fake critical list, this time skewering ideology-as-aesthetic with a straight face and a hidden knife.
“The Glassblower”: A music-critic / true-crime spiral that retools Pied Piper dread into something modern, mean, and quietly fatalistic.
“Lungs”: A grim, tender road story where friendship and rot meet in a literal, disgusting image you won’t forget.
“Human Child”: A bartender with bone-deep ache meets a kid who feels like a glitch in the human category, and the night slides sideways.
“The Ideal and the Actual”: Academic intimacy and alienation, written like a memory you don’t trust but can’t stop replaying.
“Wasps/Spiders”: Post-9/11 city grief, desire, and newsfeed reality collapse into a love story that keeps catching on sharp edges.
“There Is No Comte de St. Germain For I Am He”: Immortal-voice bragging turns into a threat, then into a confession about the obscene boredom of not dying.
“The Loa and the Gaping Jaw”: Haitian Vodou ceremony and cultural awe filtered through mounting dread, where “zombie” becomes a social wound, not a costume.
“Donald Asshole and Los Elementos de Rock”: A comics-world freakout that’s hilarious until it’s horrifying, about sameness, perception, and the terror of losing your human anchors.
Standouts for me: “Her Threshold” (pure creeping-dread craft), “The Master of Go” (big-brain elegy that still bites), “Post-Truth Commission” (the bleakest laugh), and “Lungs” (gross, intimate, and sad in the best way).
Byrne’s big superpower is form-hopping. He’ll hit you with a perfectly straight bureaucratic paragraph about a “cleansed” platform archive, then pivot into sweaty body-horror transit logistics, then drop a line that makes the whole future feel like a damp basement you can’t ventilate. He can sketch an entire worldview in one nasty little detail, like “old catching-out rules apply: miss and you get your legs crushed under the wheels.” And he’s not afraid to say the quiet part out loud, that all these “elsewheres” are basically trauma storage: “a place to hang meat traumatized by reality.” It’s funny, it’s ugly, it’s honest. It’s also, occasionally, the kind of writing that dares you to keep up, which I respect even when it pisses me off.
The prose runs hot and cold: clean, declarative thesis-sentences, then these sudden smear-frames of image and texture, like the world is buffering while it decays. Even when it’s “just” people talking, you feel the author choosing cadence like a weapon. In “The Ideal and the Actual,” the dialogue lands with that lived-in, slightly self-loathing realism, “We talked about shit television; we talked about great television.” In the more overtly speculative pieces, he stacks specific nouns and hard sensory grime until the future feels less like prediction and more like a bad smell you can’t wash out.
The one real drawback is that the collection’s deliberate shapeshifting sometimes works against its own momentum. A few entries are such perfect pastiches (the listicles especially) that they can feel like brilliant radioactive snacks rather than full meals. Still, the voice holds the whole thing together, and when he wants to build a sustained atmosphere, he absolutely can.
The core theme is escape that curdles. Every “outside” is just another system, every platform death becomes a new platform in a different outfit, and the body keeps showing up like an unpaid bill. The horror machinery does that classic move where abstraction becomes viscera: “They crawl over you, and they put themselves in you,” and suddenly “there” isn’t even a place anymore. I finished this feeling like I’d been laughing in a burning server room, which is, honestly, the vibe of our era, so… good job, I guess? Shit.
A strong, frequently brilliant collection that recommends itself often, because even when it’s messy, it’s alive, and it knows exactly which parts of modern life are already haunted.
This feels like a greatest-hits map of Byrne’s obsessions across nearly two decades of publishing, from early surreal lit-comedy to later “technosphere nightmare” work, and it lands as a sharp entry in that transreal, horror-bent SF lane where the joke and the abyss are basically roommates.
Read if you crave near-future dread with teeth, not vibes, formal experimentation (reports, lists, fractured memoir), or satire that still manages to be scary as hell.
Skip if you need tidy plots that behave nicely, consistent tone from story to story, or your tech horror to be “neutral” or polite.
June 1, 2025
I was provided an advanced copy through Netgalley. This anthology published on 5/28/2025.
I'm sad to say I did not finish this book. I stopped reading at about 15% into the book.
It started off alright, the first story, Her Threshold, was weird. But it felt scattered.
The next story, The Master of Go, confused me. It felt like I was reading a textbook for school. It seemed out of place for what I had expected from the description of the book.
Next, The Three Stigmata of Peter Thiel, got my hopes up. It started off strange and kind of funny. But then it just ended, like the author decided they were just done writing and wanted to move on to the next story.
Sacrifice is a technology was just a two page list of people who died and the country/organization that was "responsible" for their death.
The last story I read before I dnf-ed was The Scapegoat, and even this story could not get me to keep reading.
Often, it felt like they went to the thesaurus to find a more fancy way to say simple phrases. I don't think everything should be written at middle school grade level, but sometimes the big smart word hurts the flow of the story more.
.
As a whole, the part of the book I read felt either rushed, scattered, or just unfinished.
I'm sad to say I did not finish this book. I stopped reading at about 15% into the book.
It started off alright, the first story, Her Threshold, was weird. But it felt scattered.
The next story, The Master of Go, confused me. It felt like I was reading a textbook for school. It seemed out of place for what I had expected from the description of the book.
Next, The Three Stigmata of Peter Thiel, got my hopes up. It started off strange and kind of funny. But then it just ended, like the author decided they were just done writing and wanted to move on to the next story.
Sacrifice is a technology was just a two page list of people who died and the country/organization that was "responsible" for their death.
The last story I read before I dnf-ed was The Scapegoat, and even this story could not get me to keep reading.
Often, it felt like they went to the thesaurus to find a more fancy way to say simple phrases. I don't think everything should be written at middle school grade level, but sometimes the big smart word hurts the flow of the story more.
.
As a whole, the part of the book I read felt either rushed, scattered, or just unfinished.
July 3, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley and Wanton Sun for an ARC in return for an honest review.
One of those "Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover" situations that left me underwhelmed. I was frustrated by this read that left me skimming through in the second half. I get what much of these stories were going for in its sort of "LLM-punk" dispatching of various societal ills and well-intended grievances, but then so much of the prose is--as another reviewer mentioned--dry history dumps as if written for a textbook coded in Python. Some read as listicles, others are literal walls of text.
Maybe this eye-catching artwork completely encapsulates a given story from this collection (maybe "Flesh Moves"?), but I'm struggling to see the connective tissue. I'm sure these experimental structures work for some, but it was a miss for me.
One of those "Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover" situations that left me underwhelmed. I was frustrated by this read that left me skimming through in the second half. I get what much of these stories were going for in its sort of "LLM-punk" dispatching of various societal ills and well-intended grievances, but then so much of the prose is--as another reviewer mentioned--dry history dumps as if written for a textbook coded in Python. Some read as listicles, others are literal walls of text.
Maybe this eye-catching artwork completely encapsulates a given story from this collection (maybe "Flesh Moves"?), but I'm struggling to see the connective tissue. I'm sure these experimental structures work for some, but it was a miss for me.
June 20, 2025
Byrne's stories are like dazzling nightmares from the day after tomorrow that burn into your consciousness and haunt you in the best possible way. Unputdownable!
December 21, 2025
Short stories of the near future, recommended.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews