Author : Willis Weatherford The piercing rays of a fiery star filtered through thickly opaque clouds to light Gerder’s face with a rosy hue: his first dawn on NovaTerra. As he peered through the na…

Author : Rodger Parr If you have ever awoken in the morning to find yourself with the body of a human and the head of an insect then you must surely empathise if not at least sympathise with me. Fo…

Author : Dakota Brown “We are born out of darkness,” she told herself begrudgingly. “Certainly it holds no true power.” Around her, the frightened masses had gathered (after, of course, a stretch o…

Author : Rachelle Shepherd We stopped at the Drug Market for clone-cloves, street illegal copies of Indonesian spice and porn-shop perfume. They were thick rolls of black steel with bands of gold i…

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer The bricks are antique but the ferropoxy used as mortar is a giveaway, after you scrape the film of cement coloured paint mixed with sand off. “This is the pl…

Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer “Hello, Mum.” She stands in the doorway, arms crossed, deciding whether she has the guts to enter. The intervening silence is broken by the repetitive hiss-thu…

Author : Robbie Kowalski “Hey Marv, have you ever wondered where all the shit goes once you flush the toilet?” “I don’t know Joe.” Marv said unenthusiastically as he tried to figure out a crossword…

Author : Bob Newbell I remember the day things started disappearing. I was driving into work listening to the news on the satellite radio. Astronomers had observed that a galaxy called MACS0647-JD …

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer It was a beautiful day for a ship launch. These are the things I remember: I remember the sun shining down out of a blue sky that arced from horizon to horizon…

Author : Trent Isaac The man wrestled a pile of rods, plates, wires, lights, and fingers through the door and let it crash in a heap. “Or there’s this one,” the man said as he swabbed his bald head…

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer Billy-Jim Crenshaw was snoozing in his swamp shack when the explosion shook him fast awake. “What th’…?” He scrambled to his feet and, throwing the crooked door …

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer “Brigitte! Slow down!” I thought I loved Adrian. I really did. I even fooled myself for the first year of our Outer Reaches tour. Then on Certys I had to stop him t…

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer The white Silracan clicked its chest-legs together and reared back in what was the human equivalent of a bored sigh. Between it and the hologram of the Earth f…

Author : Kellie Warren We never thought we would be the ones. We weren’t smart enough. To discover new worlds, new planes of existence, new life. You had to be intelligent for that. Some might have…

Author : Glen Luke Flanagan “These monstrosities are a threat to national security, to morality as we know it, and to our very sense of self.” Senator Ethan Calhoun punctuated the last statement by…

Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer I needed to disappear. Fast. I never wanted a criminal life. It’s not like I killed anybody, or stole the nation’s pension plans, unlike some governments which…

Author : Thomas Keene Every metal surface inside the cabin sang, and the readouts flickered. A steady, pure note that Charles called “the Banshee”. Evan clenched the crew telemetry read…

Author : Scott Shipp Ian was cornered. He had run straight into a dead end alley. Right on his heels were two cyborg cops, and he had the money credits hacked from the bank all over his data stores…

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer John Jones leaned heavily on the counter in the hotel bathroom, a haggard face he barely recognized staring back at him from the full width mirror. Six o’cl…

Malcolm should have been thinking about shrimp, but he was thinking about Sumitra’s smile instead. He hated himself for it, but he was almost glad for the leak in the shrimp pond, since it ga…

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer I’d always wanted my own planet, and now my dreams were about to come true. Sure it was my entire life savings plus everything of value I had. But what a deal! I…

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer The cigar from the dead guard’s pocket has a red and gold band that says it’s from Havana, the first pleasant surprise of tonight. “Ricky. Help me.” I look across t…

Author : Dina Leacock I sat at the table for two and waited for my date to arrive. We’d been emailing since we first “met” on “Find-True-Love.com and now we were finally going to meet. Taking the m…

Author : Mordecai J Banda Michael had come back from his daily walk. He had eaten his breakfast and attended to various things to keep himself healthy. Now it was gaming time. This past month the F…

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer The shapeshifting aliens are untrustworthy. It’s not their fault. They see the world for what it is, through a kaleidoscope. Us humans, we only get to se…

Author : Philip Berry “Just see what you can do with it Tak, if you’d be so good. No great urgency.” muttered Johnson, Alec Tak’s immediate superior in the Office of Colonie…

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer My eyes were the first to go. They’d been deteriorating since my mid thirties, and after a bacterial infection in my early forties I couldn’t focus on…

Author : Joseph Lyons A few years ago I was lucky enough to land a reasonably well paid job. Like most well paid jobs in this system it meant not great work in a not great place. It was a mining fa…

Author : Tiasha J. Garcia “This was not how I imagined this going.” The words drifted into the pristine silence, disturbing nothing and no one. “I–I thought there’d be more time.”…

Author : Joseph Lyons I put my mother in a home a few months ago when her Alzheimer’s became too much for me to deal with. Now here I stood with early-onset, refusing to go the same route. The doct…