जंगली गुलाब/Jangli Gulaab (Briar Rose)
by Shveta Thakrar
So red this rose
Brambles burst from my mouth
(Stammers strangled into sterile silence)
Ink for a Verbal Contract
by Sean Monaghan Gemma felt the pain right away. She sighed, stretching, angling her limbs and hips, trying to find a more comfortable position. She blinked, looking at the Arhend side table strewn with folders.
Beneath Red Regolith
by WC Roberts
Striding tall on spider legs it scans the regolith
the ping of refined metal set off
the protocols
antenna disk cocked upward
Ambiguous Utopias
by Sheila Finch Utopian or dystopian, the view of the near future adopted by an author owes much to the political and social climate of its time. Two dystopian works by Paolo Bacigalupi, out of the many that have appeared in recent years, illustrate this point:
Windblown
by Nancy Fulda The vase cracks against the hardened floor of our street-house, splitting into a dozen pieces. Shards fly everywhere – under the workbench, across the floor, even beneath the gears of the big mechanical clock that Grandfather brought down the hill this morning. Everyone in the room freezes.
A Vision for “James Gunn’s Ad Astra”
by Jean Asselin, Editor - Our namesake, James Gunn, says that fantasy and science fiction (SF) are literatures of discontinuity—the world of the story differs from the one we live in—with one essential difference.
Excelsior!
A look at the outgoing editor's view of the past few years, and an introduction to the new era of the magazine.
Yet Part of the Scheme
by Joshua Shaw Midway through her love story, in which we are slow dancing atop a creaky fire escape, a boozy swooning to the snow’s pitter-patter as I say I love you I love you for the first time, I interrupt Eleanor to point out that if she loved me she would stop unscrewing my [...]
The Quantum Treatment
By Jeff Pfaller Dane peeled back the chain-link fence so Riley wouldn’t catch her curtain of hair as she ducked through. One more glance at the sliver of road between buildings, really just piles of stone instead of anything functional. No one drove on the Upper Roads this time of night. Driving a car meant [...]
Heather
By Anne Carly Abad Every cell in the bud’s body vibrated to the girl’s voice. “Fern, cattail, lily, sedge, violet, anemone,” she imparted her knowledge of the wetlands. They were all distinct, and the bud saw them as the girl did: the fiddleheads that characterized ferns, the creamy clusters of meadowsweet, the heart-shaped leaves of [...]