Fictional Worlds

Nature - You must remember this.

Author: David Barber This was back in 1937, in Wheaton, Illinois, where Grote Reber built a radio telescope to track down persistent background noise that was annoying Bell Telephone Labs. The Depression still lingered and Bell wouldn’t employ him, but in his spare time Reber built a 30-foot dish in his mother’s back yard and […]

Princess Mwadi of Everfair teams up with American actress Rima Bailey on a reconnaissance mission in Egypt in an attempt to thwart the European spies intent on destabilizing Everfair and its business interests. . .

After two days of the carriage’s relentless jolting, Darya felt battered to the point of numbness.

Before she died, Ethel gave Julie a stapled packet of parchment paper, plump and noisy with seeds.

The Curator hummed as they descended to the Archive’s power core.

(Download the audio version of this story here — read by David Binks.  Story illustration by Ronnie Tucker.) Cordigan flicked his cigarette into the water. The river that bisected the city wa…

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redstonesciencefiction.com: She heard a faint hissing sound, or thought she did. She wasn't quite sure — perhaps this was just what absolute silence sounded like, the silence of death, of

(Story illustration by Galen Dara.) I don’t expect you to believe this story.  I don’t want to believe this story.  I wish that I didn’t. All of this  happened earlier tonight — just another …

worldsf.wordpress.com: Speculative Fiction from Around the World

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Beneath his feet lay the warm wood of the walkways. Mosquitoes buzzed around the yellow swamp flowers and spindly birch trees. The hills, overgrown with ancient pines, obscured the lake where Michael went, following a path strewn with fallen needles and gnarled roots.After swimming, he settled in the shade with one or another book picked from the sanatorium's library. Assuming that, besides him, some other space pilots also resided in...

Author: David Tam McDonald Colin gave a polite cough to start the meeting. As team leader he sat at the head of the table. Brian, the secretary, sat to his left, perusing the agenda, which was blank and absolutely not taking any minutes. Tony, Richard and Lyndsey sat facing them, all eager to begin. “I […]

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer The squad’s sitting there having breakfast when Tommo’s head explodes. Just like that, we’re all on the deck. Except Bert. He’s still sat there noshing his way through a bacon butty. “Bert! What the frack?” He swallows before replying. “When was the last time they missed? We’re the ones who […]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

An emergency meeting? What did Cornelius want to complain about now?

According to the story about Harry Potter, his parents were killed that fateful night on Halloween 1981 and little Harry somehow miraculously survived the encounter when the dark lord's curse rebounded off him and struck the evil wizard down instead. Only he didn't die and Harry had to face him again and again as he grew up until their final confrontation when Harry was seventeen. Somehow Harry was the victor again and Voldemort was gone for good this time.

He lifts the onion to the lantern’s lone light, and in it, I suddenly see: the goldwork towers and walls of the Old City; the broken bridge, jagged after a recent bombing yet still shining; rows of humble houses etched in ebullient metal; the curve and sway of the historical museum. I reach out my hand, and he drops the city into it. It feels warm in my palm.

Her family brings their best to the table and talk unreservedly in their first language. Rviv cannot keep up with the conversation. She understands the words, the phrases, but not why they make her parents laugh or grimace. They reference a place Rviv has never seen and a history she has not lived. The stranger and her parents commiserate about living in such a strange country. Together they laugh at the way the Cuialo smile with their teeth and eat meat with their hands. Her parents wait with excruciating patience to ask what news of home.

This was the mood the second time my late guest arrived. They were still dressed as a witch but this time wore a cloak of ambiguous cut that masked it from a casual observer; the slashing diagonal weave might be a witch’s style, or it could be the even horizontal line a breath-person would wear turned askew in the weather. Something in the ambiguity called to me, an enticing possibility, though I was still unwaveringly comfortable folding my clothes into the straight hems and smooth lines of second-childhood. I nodded as they entered but waited several moments for them to settle before approaching their table.

“That would be a fine thing, to hear that fiddle played as it should be,” the ferryman said, mostly to hisself. He cast an eye over the dark expanse of river, dotted with white ice cakes. “You sure, jacks? A trip like this, it rarely takes you where you’re planning.”

"Grandpa, you don't have to." Dovan's little hand rests inside his. Cyfris closes his fingers around it. "I know I said before that I wanted you to tell everything, but I changed my mind. You don't need to tell this part."

“We found something,” Matias began. He had rehearsed what he would say and was determined now to watch their expressions. To see if this was a revelation for them—or if they already knew. “We’re expanding the palace kitchens, putting in a new hearth and tables. The builders knocked out a wall—turns out it was a closet that had been sealed up. In the closet was a body.”

The Poet Laureate was fetched from his retirement in a lighthouse on the far shore of the Founder Mer to compose a song of eighty-six interlocked stanzas like steps on a stairway spiraling down into a cool dim quiet. But on the forty-seventh stanza of its recitation, the Governor squinted into the space over the Poet's shoulder and said, "listen, any deeper and we shall hear the words those beasts sing as they pass" and demanded that the previous stanzas be read in reverse; "back to the surface," he said.

27. Parsifal confessed to me that she has never dreamed of Valis. Not once. In her youth, she learned of the city in a book: a philosophical dialogue where a poet, a knight, a musician, and a madman argue about the nature of reality while awaiting the arrival of a fifth person. Near the end, the madman recounts the story of Valis, which the others think is nonsense. Parsifal disagreed, and the city quickly became an obsession (she herself used the word 'obsession'). She said all this while pacing back and forth, refusing to look me in the face until the end.

Whatever the mallepulpus’s moral stature, it would not allow its enemies an uneventful exit. Even as Jacob, dripping and shivering, urged the Abbess and the canonesses to back away from the shore, a portion of the swamp coalesced into a roaring and amorphous mass of silt and muck. With a noise like a thousand oxen breaking wind, the monstrous pudding detached itself from Paludis Cochlea, flopped onto the shore, and undulated forward, seeking to suffocate its parent bog’s tormentors.

Gorel could smell the sea. It was always there, the water like a black mirror, upon which glided the enormous black ships with the seven-pointed star on their hulls. From time to time spells crackled in the air above the port. Wind-mages and speakers-to-whales and astrologer-navigators and sun-talkers and battle-sorcerers with the power to level whole cities. Goliris’s fleets sailed across the World and brought the civilising influence of the empire to its furthest reaches. They came back laden with the World’s goods; with all the riches the World had to offer.

The three stare at me—Hayrick, Handsy, and Ben whose name I wish I didn’t have to know. I want them to believe me, to see the possibility, to think about the smiling faces they’d seen while pestering the market-goers and stall-keepers, and how little their targets had been frightened. Sometimes young men like these Boys do listen. Sometimes all they need is to be shown a new direction. But this time, my best isn't enough.