Part 1 The soldiers made no secret of their arrival; far from it. The lead pair of riders galloped into the outer courtyard below, scattering the peacocks, who set up a furious and discordant song …
Drugged and dying, Bigby thinks about dreams. How, long ago, maybe two or three beers in, he told his roommate he wanted to be an umpire. He was going to drop out of school. He was going to spend y…
Author: Majoki Francis was helping the elderly lady cross a busy street when the call came. He waited until she’d thanked him with a little pat on the arm and entered the drugstore even though the shelves were almost bare. His phone was still buzzing. Oscar. He hesitated, but knew that was impolite and so […]
Three pieces of toast—dark on one side, light on the other. A cup of coffee. Rosh’s preference is Blend 14, with hints of Sub-Saharan Africa and caramel, delivered tepid with more milk than expresso.
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer My peers are very fond of saying how they ‘were fortunate’ or ‘spotted an opportunity’. The more honest have momentary shadows in their eyes when they say it. The raw truth is that to accumulate this much wealth, we’ve taken opportunities, money, and even lives from others. Not theft or […]
Author: Majoki You gave them the names. All of them. Jelenik, Szmania, Guar, Imhotep, Salasi, Yun, Indrasutthan, Porter. Faisel knows it. His broken face, his darkened eyes tell you in the sterile moments of your visits. You wrap his lacerations, dampen his fever, moisten his battered lips, force morsels past his chipped teeth. His pulse […]
Author: Hillary Lyon Kaz tumbled through the centrifugal force of the prismatic vortex, finally landing on the planet’s surface with a cruel thud. Medical nanobots lining the interior of his suit immediately went to work, infusing themselves through the pores of his skin, worming their way into his bloodstream. From there, the minuscule bots traveled […]
Author: Dave Ludford Had he been walking at a faster pace or with any real sense of purpose Ryan Jennings would have missed it completely. Scuffing the forest floor aimlessly however with first one foot then the other, his meanderings revealed something that he at first thought was some kind of weird seed or pod […]
In the land that is now Malaysia, there once was a tribe of monkeys called the Mawahs, whose king was appointed by King Solomon to be the Raja of the jungle. Raja Mawah built himself a throne on the south bank of the Perak River and ruled the jungle fairly.
Lewis was poking at his tablet, trying yet again to open the training module from Station Commerce, when the sensor above his shop door chimed. “Not now!” he snapped without looking up. “But… but I….”…
It's so dark. Black-orange-bloody-bruised. Flashlights throw long beams across the sand. Police lights flicker blue and red, blue and red, blue and red, and the Ferris wheel on the pier glows an obscene neon. No one thought to turn off the calliope. It echoes off the empty boardwalk, cheerfully macabre.
Strange Horizons - In the Late December By Greg van Eekhout
Santa goes down the list, pushing the team relentlessly across the black. Little girl after little girl, little boy after little boy, absent, vanished into the emptiness of the old, dying, dead uni…
Tor.com is pleased to reprint “The Difference Between Love and Time” by Catherynne M. Valente, as featured in Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance—available from Solaris. Even time travel can’t unravel love Time-travel is a way for writers to play with history and imagine different futures—for better, or worse. When romance is thrown into […]
And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side - Lightspeed Magazine
He was standing absolutely still by a service port, staring out at the belly of the Orion docking above us. He had on a gray uniform and his rusty hair was cut short. I took him for a station engineer.