Fictional Worlds

The camera high up in the opposite corner of the room was watching, I knew, its clever algorithms ready to alert my supervisor the second its analysis of my bearing caught me going “inattentive, di…

"I think I do not believe in ghosts. But if someone had asked me, three months ago, if I believed in spontaneously bootstrapping artificial intelligence, I would have said no to that as well. The w…

E.Z. came to me. Not the man in the flesh, I reckon he has had enough of flesh, but his words came pouring into me until they had nowhere to go but pour out on the page.

Just ahead of The Incredibles 2, there is a groundbreaking short film, Bao: the first computer-animated Pixar short directed by a woman, Chinese-Canadian Domee Shi. via Pocket

The jumbie finds him swilling the dregs of a wasted evening out behind the club, rum on his breath, the beat of the bassline still shuddering through his body. The streets at the end of November shine with the slick of rain and the club’s neon glow …

She takes the usual accoutrements of a resurrection from a drawer in the night-stand: two damp cloths to go over Frances’s eyes, and a C# tuning fork to sound the life back into her.

I am here to rescue my husband, she rehearsed in her head, trying to ignore how the red sap trickled through her hair and how the railroad ties sank and splintered underfoot. I am here to break you…

Strange Horizons - Copy Cat By Alex Shvartsman, By K. A. Teryna, Art by Shel Kahn via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2LVrJmv

How convenient, this loose-fitting thing called a kimono. When the sky was not light enough to see me properly, not dark enough for people to feel too alarmed, that was the time of day I'd walk around among humans. I loved the thrill. Just waiting f…

Every marriage is a marriage of many different people, Justine said. We all change over time.

The woman was in her face now, dress billowing, a white cumulus of afro contrasting with the blue-black of her skin.

Smaran lingers here in this old home, gnawing on names and the stories that go with them. She is as I left her, which is more than I can say about myself. Her long dark hair coiled around her in sw…

Eyes, eyes, eyes. So many eyes on my long arms. If someone gave me these eyes to punish me, they made a huge mistake.

A skeleton woman was supposed to look beautiful only to those whom she had enchanted. Scaring people was only a recreation at best. What we wanted was a human's strength, and a little money to make…

For five years in the city I worked as a receptionist at an English language school, where I had to deal with countless, groundless complaints and had developed a Noh-mask on my face devoid of any …

"Little Brother™ isn't like your other toys, Peter," Mommy said. "You have to be extra careful with him, as if he were a real baby."

She came up out of the ground even more beautiful than when she had gone down into it. Her face was as white as snow, and her hair as black as ink, and her lips as red as the blood on her graveston…

Here are the friends who have left or fallen out of contact in the last few years, and we thank them for their gifts, kindnesses, and dedication.

The goddesses are so suicidal anymore. We lost Jemma and Iwahana in one day last week, Jemma to poison and Iwahana to self-flagellation. None of us were trained in seeing the signs of self-flagella…

People call him. People he doesn't know. People who don't want anything to do with him or the things he hunts. They leave him messages—skeptical, frightened, defiant, crazy. They don't believ…

Isa met me here, dressed in black with a gun strapped to his hip and a rifle slung across his broad back. I pushed open the door for him.

There were people running back and forth with mouths like Os and taxis sliding across the road like shiny black beetles.

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today on #diversestories - Santos de Sampaguitas by Alyssa Wong @crashwong in @strangehorizons Oct 2014! http://t.co/zRBkyMVAie

just a reminder that last year's @strangehorizons funding drive brought us this story by @RoseLemberg http://t.co/CXhGQkve1r #diversestories

Gr8 story RT @bogiperson: today on #diversestories: Rib by Yukimi Ogawa @fluoritewitch in @strangehorizons, June 2014 http://t.co/oI3zUAPCel

today on #diversestories / #diversepoems: An Inventory of Ghosts by @natalia_theodor in @strangehorizons Apr 2015 http://t.co/4NmwmSDY7w