Stories

Daya had been in no hurry to become a mother. In the two years since she’d reached childbearing age, she’d built a modular from parts she’d fabbed herself, thrown her boots into the volcano, and served as blood judge. The village elders all said she was one of the quickest girls they had ever seen—except when it came to choosing fathers for her firstborn. Maybe that was because she was too quick for a sleepy village like Third Landing. When her mother, Tajana, had come of age, she’d left for the blue city to find fathers for her baby.

In his later years, when he spoke, a faint whirring came from his lower jaw. His mouth opened and closed rhythmically, accurately, displaying a full set of human teeth gleaned from fallen comrades and the stitched tube of plush leather that was his tongue. The metal mustache and eyebrows were ridiculously fake, but the eyes were the most beautiful glass facsimiles, creamy white with irises like dark blue flowers. Instead of hair, his scalp was sandpaper.

Of course I can be angry. But I wear a headscarf. The moment I’m angry, you put me in your mental box labeled “TERRORIST” in neat, tidy small capitals. You store me under “Potential Danger” in the warehouse of your mind. When I cross the parking lot to the grocery store, sometimes people hit the gas, not the brakes. And this is a university town, supposedly liberal---or is it? I’m not a Muslim, but it’s not like most people around here can spot the difference.

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: The Undiscovered Country: Planets of Dead Stars by Julie Novakova

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Soldierin’ by Joe R. Lansdale

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: The Power is Out by A Que

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Obliteration by Robert Reed

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Umbernight by Carolyn Ives Gilman

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Deep Down in the Cloud by Julie Novakova

After battle with the Fleet of Honest Representation, after seven hundred seconds of sheer terror and uncertainty, and after our shared triumph in the acquisition of the greatest prize seizure in three hundred years, we cautiously approached the massive black hole that Purth-Anaget orbited. The many rotating rings, filaments, and infrastructures bounded within the fields that were the entirety of our ship, With All Sincerity, were flush with a sense of victory.

Travel to Scandinavia if you can, the older cats told me, the queens in their raftered kingdoms. The coffee there, they said, is bitter as an old lie. The Norsemen are beautiful, their women even more sublime, but most importantly, they are quiet. Preoccupied only with Nordic things, disinterested in the outside world. This is crucial. This is what makes them safe. But this is not the only reason I am here.

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: A Cigarette Burn In Your Memory by Bo Balder

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: The Lighthouse Girl by Bao Shu

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Sour Milk Girls by Erin Roberts

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Say it Low, then Loud by Osahon Ize-Iyamu

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.

The dead man was a nail-biter, tucked up in the back seat with old theater magazines and a water-stained Baedeker of Malta, his free hand still nearly white-knuckled around the haft of his oar. All the way from the North Shore, he had complained about her music until Delia popped the tape with a sigh and a protesting click of plastic and stopped the radio on the same alternative station she had spent her first few years out of college waking up to, and they passed the last few miles on I-95 peaceably enough on the White Stripes and the Black Keys and the Decemberists.

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again by Michael Swanwick

“Life is the only indulgence,” was the Ames motto, and today was meant to be the latest, grandest example of that philosophy: Fecundity given breath and shadow, with the promise of ludicrous profits tomorrow. The “I do’s” were to be held exactly at noon on the summer solstice. A thousand species of expertly crafted, first-of-their-kind foliage stood on the island’s highest hill, creating a church of pigmented cellulose, perfumes and pheromones and wet-earth stinks. The honored guests were carefully shaped and then firmed by regenerations.

One of the doors in the closet, behind the boxes, leads to a harsh desert world. The first time you stepped through, you didn’t bring water, and nearly died as you crouched beneath the sun, waiting for the door to open again. You were saved only by the unexpected appearance of someone draped in gray, who gave you water before showing you a mottled face of lizard skin. You screamed. By the time you returned, you could barely stand. Your head pounded; your skin was badly burnt.

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: A World to Die For by Tobias S. Buckell

The difficulties of transporting wine over interstellar distances are manifold. Wine is, after all, like a child. It can bruise. It can suffer trauma—sometimes the poor creature can recover; sometimes it must be locked up in a cellar until it learns to behave itself. Sometimes it is irredeemable. I ask that you greet the seven glasses before you tonight not as simple fermented grapes, but as the living creatures they are, well-brought up, indulged but not coddled, punished when necessary, shyly seeking your approval with clasped hands and slicked hair.

I seem to make an outcast of myself every time I’m a teenager. Which is fine, I guess. I’ll take one good dog and one good friend over being a phony and fitting in. Alicia points. “There he is, Jamie!” A couple hundred feet away, our trailer park’s newest resident grabs a box from the van parked in front of his single-wide. He’s gray-haired and buff, like if The Rock were an old man. Alicia and I are sprawled on top of a wooden picnic table in the park’s rusted old playground.

The unhappily married Lady Abergavenny sat alone at the banquet table waiting for her husband. Her husband, of course, was Lord Abergavenny. The big, brave, handsome Lord Abergavenny. The night was dark. Supper had gotten a bad chill on the banquet table. The goose had goose bumps (this was unsurprising), but so did the potatoes and the turnips and the hunks of dark, sour bread, the region’s specialty. “Ghastly,” said Lady Abergavenny.

The city surrounded him while he slept. He had been fleeing it for four days. Long before its walls became visible, it was a grayish smudge on the horizon, beneath which the air shimmered in silent testimony of its radiant heat. It was one of about ten living cities he knew of and he had avoided it for as long as he could, staying out of their usual migratory paths, contenting himself with the company of the small tribes who had also managed to keep out of the reach of the cities, living on roots and the small animals that fell to his bow.

The mule nipped at Marjan’s hand as she burdened it with her packs. She pushed its nose away, careful not to hurt it. She needed the mule to be well. Her life — and her unborn child’s — depended on it. She led the mule outside the stable and carefully latched the door behind them. She didn’t want the other animals to suffer from the cold. Bad enough she was stealing the mule.

Come back. You hear the call as the lander breaks up around you. You’re aware of the entirely arbitrary concepts of up and down before you realize what’s happening, and then they’re a lot less arbitrary. Down is not so much a direction as a function of possibility, of what might happen to you, of what is happening now. You finally get down as an idea.

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Falling in Love with Martians and Machines by Josh Pearce

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Darkness, Our Mother by Eleanna Castroianni