Miriam opened the door of the caravan-turned-time machine. Dry, hot air blew in. She shaded her eyes against the brightness. They had landed where they had planned: at the base of a range of hills, nothing around them but arid land that matched the …

In the beginning, humanity looked to the stars, and saw gods. In their golden age, they went among the stars, as if they were gods. via Pocket

Brochures fanned across the lace tablecloth in Grandma’s dining room. Up close, I saw the recruiter’s immaculate makeup starting to crack, the silver showing against auburn at the part in her hair. She slanted forward with briefcase on knees and wei…

The disease passed quickly and no one was spared. First, it neutered the men. Women became infertile. Men atrophied and women thickened. Hair sloughed off and torsos turned flat. The two sexes equalized and thus division was lost. via Pocket

Two neutron stars, ten times the mass of the sun collided, unleashing a cataclysm—an explosive kilonova, whose massive gravitational waves undulated through the dark mantle of spacetime, forging in their course a planetary system composed of fifteen…

‘So, what’s your star sign?’ Mary asked, and took a sip from her glass, she watched him closely over the rim. It was one of her stock questions on first dates. You could tell a lot about a man, depending on how he reacted. His actual star sign was i…

Tapestries hang on the walls of a room where anatomical diagrams and scientific charts would have been, centuries ago. Two men stand reading a display that floats above the supine form on the chrome table at the centre of the room. via Pocket

Author: David C. Nutt “How’d did your last trip go Vincent?” (Sigh) “Not good Director. We keep hitting the same walls. No matter what we do, nothing has an effect.” “Nothing?” “You heard it right chief, nothing.” “Maybe we should go for a larger ef…

Rick saw the Universe in folds. He coded a program that could make anything in origami. You put in, say, a rhino, and it would make the plan, complete with lines for the folds, and when you were finished, it looked exactly like that rhino. Exactly. …

That’s how I imagined the interaction playing out, anyway. In reality, they scoffed and entered into a passive-aggressive line of questioning. This as if my parents’ finances were actually of interest to the other members of my first grade class. vi…

Mei Huang considers the merit of an objection and quickly finds it inadequate. The threadbare comfort of a riposte will not put rice in her bowl, or ingots in her purse. Worse, it might even soil her reputation, diminish her standing. So many hours,…

Once again it was that horrid time of year when the cashmere silk spiders crept from the bowels of the city of the angels and spun their pale web across its spires and domes, and Lukas the vendor of miracle tea felt a deep shudder begin in his testi…

Astor did not want to discuss their coping plan. They didn’t want to think about their coping plan, or the trip itself, or the airport, or the subway, or— “No, thank you.” It had been worth a shot. “Never mind.” via Pocket

It made headlines. It was the talk of social media for a week which is, like, forever. No one knew who and that was cause for amazement too; since World Citizenship came online there simply weren’t any unknowns left. It was crazy! via Pocket

Sean sighed as he leaned his head back against the tree. The good ones always left him with this amalgamation of thoughts and feelings, this clash of excitement and longing with the realization of routine and boredom. via Pocket

From H.G. Wells’s tripod-controlling Martians to Douglas Adams’s poetry-loving Vogons, from the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to the scholarly Sorns of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, science fiction writers and readers alike have long be…

To-Do List for July 18, 2039 Kill my duplicate from another dimension. Get rid of all this stupid kale. Top Five Reasons I Hate Kale Kale is like broccoli that wishes it were lettuce, or lettuce that wishes it were broccoli. Get your own identity, k…

Three and a half hours to interview, 270 miles to LA, 94 mph The mass of writhing tentacles that slithered onto the passenger seat a minute ago probably isn’t a hallucination. Correction: given that I had to blow into a tube to start this rental, it…

She’s four years old, wearing footie pajamas with giraffes on them, and she wants the moon. She’s very specific about when and where. She would like to have the moon on a plate with her breakfast. That way she can look at it while she eats, and when…

The Thing Inside Pluto was displeased. So was Aimee. Its roiling muscle-goo made her queasy, and she’d dressed for pilates, not for two bland government spooks kidnapping her to negotiate with an alien. She lit a cigarette to block the ozone smell. …

Author: Alex Z. Salinas I pressed my palm against the reinforced window in my bedroom. The glass felt cool, exactly like they felt in my previous life. The difference was that on the other side of this one, there was stretched before me an infinite …

The atheist awoke in the machine. Body had he none. Merely a consciousness, who even dead, yet hath his mind entire. A good line, that. Where did it come from? Around him was a sort of prison of flat light, was it light? Prison, because he could not…

Meychezhek is big, even among badhar-krithkinee, a circumstance exacerbated by the fact that I’m both already nervous and kneeling in anticipation of her entrance. Her skin is purple-black, more textured than human skin. Her head crest, flattened no…

Author: David C. Nutt The Bailiff stood and took a deep breath. Once he prided himself on being able to do his entire spiel in one breath. However, with the newest fad of rolling one’s last three past lives into one’s current name…well, breath frequ…

Jiang Xiaoyu didn’t move. “Time to ratchet things up a notch.” Max didn’t seem to have noticed Xiaoyu’s trepidation. “We can’t let your trip be in vain. Now then, down on Earth, you might try to jump the last three steps of a staircase. via Pocket

Alls I want is a goddamn tampon. Is that so much to ask at the end of the world? Yo. Name’s Enfys. This is, uh, my channel as I wander in search of tampons and the meaning of life in what’s left of Western Europe. Seems, I’m, um, immune to the phage…

Ostap is putting the finishing touches on a cartoon tardigrade when Alyce calls him. The render is blown up to the size of a sumo, its butcher-paper skin creased and wrinkled around chubby tendril-tipped legs, its eyeless head dominated by a lamprey…

Author: Jae Miles, Staff Writer Where did your rock ‘n’ roll fable go, Ella May? Did it get lost way back amongst the evergreens, or did it get too close to the railroad tracks, and go under them drivin’ wheels? “Can I help you?” I remember when you…

The queue was massively long. Fridays were always the busiest. Everyone would clock off early so that they could get a decent night’s sleep. Garth was probably thirty people away from the check-in point and the building’s entrance. He checked his wa…

Tomi Mura, a specialist in inter-planetary law, sat aboard a six-person capsule en route to Planet Arazan. The magnetic-field modulator of the small hyperbolically propulsed vessel gave her the sensation of gliding gently through the depths of an im…