Fictional Worlds

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer The sirens start to wail behind us. I hate this bit. “Time to do one!” Adey swings his backpack onto his shoulders as he starts running, dodging the spotlight of a hunting drones as he goes. Must be nice, being that fit. “Auntie Jin?” I look down at Little Em. […]

Against All Odds By Anna Mikhalevskaya Translated by Elvira Rizaeva   Time is slipping away drop by drop, along with sweat on deceptively calm faces. He runs through the shafts of stairs, through abandoned tunnels. Seeps through the ceilings into echoing hangars, stumbles upon crooked figures, shakes oilcloth curtains, rolls empty mugs, beats metal on […]

Author: Hillary Lyon “Hey, citizen!” A voice rasped from the shadowed alleyway. Bhodi glanced at the man but kept walking. “I said, hail citizen!” Bhodi stopped to look in the man’s direction. “Yeah, you,” the man rasped, waving Bhodi over. He approached the old man, assuming he wanted to sell him a contraband gadget. Grinning, […]

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer “Have you decided, Jared?” Eagle. The disk spins high into the air in the low gravity, polished metal reflecting the light from the fires about him. Jared smiles. If he had the acuity of vision, he could probably distinguish the reflections from the spotlights of the waiting army. Watching from […]

Author: Majoki I fancy myself quite a reader. I mean, I read everything. Everything. Even “Know your 8-inch Howitzer” published in 1984 by the Department of the Army, Headquarters, US Army Armament, Munitions and Chemical Command. I’m not particular. I wasn’t programmed to be. I’m a brute force. Scraping and scooping up every bit of […]

The Golem Lover by J.H. Siegal     I have learned of a lace that runs through my little village. Geilevska, nestled within the bosom of nearby hills, rests upon these strands, sewn around the fertile patchwork of letters learned in the men’s yeshiva, through the words traded by merchants, beneath the whispers of the […]

Author: Cliff McNish Eventually, once we’d screwed up everything in the ecosystem, Naomi and I were the final ones left – the last man and woman on Earth. Unfortunately, we didn’t get on. We felt some vague responsibility to repopulate the world, but kept avoiding sex. We did it politely, but even so. ‘Mm, what […]

Author: Timons Esaias This would be a nice planet, if not for all these places where the seabottom is sticking up out of the worldocean. It is most unseemly and immature. We are trying to be generous about it, trying to convince ourselves that this planet is too young, that the worldocean will tear down […]

A man using a social media app that reaches across dimensions to talk to himself in different timelines, discovers some of his problems are universal...and some are not...

Always had the sages known that they would come. The first princess, in her bed of jewels and smelted gold, had dreamt of them; dreamt their terrible faces, their terrible claws, their endless hunger that is greater than the mountain and deeper than the deepest-diving seam. She had wept in the night, to have such dreams, and some say that her death---as the deaths of all princesses since her---came hard and early, because she could not know the peace of slumber.

We have traveled here, to this most innocuous of country landscapes, to make good on a promise made by my grandfather, Carlton Whitmore, to a girl he loved in his youth. How foolish that sounds, writ down so! But it is true. Grandfather met her on the banks of the Bolton Strid, where she stood naked and confused, water drying on her skin. His notes state that she knew no modesty, and that “she was pale as the belly of a deep-river fish."

Tasha’s avatar smiled from the screen, a little too perfect to be true. That was a choice, just like everything else about it: When we’d installed my sister’s new home system, we had instructed it to generate avatars that looked like they had escaped the uncanny valley by the skins of their teeth. It was creepy, but the alternative was even creepier. Tasha didn’t talk. Her avatar did. Having them match each other perfectly would have been . . . wrong. “So I’ll see you next week?” she asked.

A child will tell you, if asked, and if they are in the mindset to answer questions as they are posed and not as the child’s mind would have them interpreted---for the ears of children seem to work differently than the ears of adults, to be tuned to a different set of sighs and susurrations, not to the clean consonants and simple constructions of the adult vocabulary, and the answers of children are often similarly distorted.

Aden had never once forgotten his gear for bulk trash day, but he found it touching that Nura still taped a monthly reminder note on the door from the kitchen to the garage. Sweet of her to remember, given how exhausted med school had her these days. He ducked out to the garage to toss […]

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

I’d always known Calam would run. He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted through stretches of dead space. A sullen crease between the brows, whenever I tried to ask how he’d landed in that dead-end Martian workshop at seventeen. But after ten years, why now?

It has been one hundred and thirteen years since our mother’s pear and red date soup slid along my tongue, and now I taste only the sweetness of soil and rot...

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

Content Note: All Possible Warnings Apply click here for full note Warnings: violence, incest, cannibalism, fratricide, attempted infanticide just as in the original…   Children don’t generally assume their father will abandon them to die in the snow. But under certain circumstances, they might get an inkling. If their mother had died the year before, […]

The fourth and final installment of a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey...

The third installment of a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey...

The second installment of a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey...

Introducing a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey...

A woman visiting Las Vegas for a fun weekend encounters her ne’er-do-well ex-husband, who begs her for a favor that gambles with life and death…

Unknown forces attempt to stop Judge Dee and Jonathan from transporting a mysterious and possibly dangerous prisoner, who holds a secret about the Judge, to an executioner in France...