Read (or listen to) “The Smog Society” by Chen Qiufan. http://t.co/Y5yt6Rsbh6 #FreeFiction #SF http://t.co/fjCSzdTH3D

LIGHTSPEED fiction: “Life-pod” by Vandana Singh. http://t.co/8k42C4uK2z #FreeFiction #SF http://t.co/RzpYxCLGcb

LIGHTSPEED fiction: “Python” by Ursula Pflug. http://t.co/cEjyqMbgNI #FreeFiction #Fantasy http://t.co/rXDa9blWNt

Read (or listen to) “And We Were Left Darkling” by Sarah Pinsker (@SarahPinsker). http://t.co/7pIxH4fjdc #FreeFiction http://t.co/jjSgc2onfm

LIGHTSPEED fiction: “Civilization” by Vylar Kaftan (@Vylar_Kaftan). http://t.co/815nfce3j5 #FreeFiction #SF http://t.co/MjIij9eVcG

Read (or listen to) “Ghosts of Home” by Sam J. Miller (@sentencebender). http://t.co/tCTj3xBqQL #FreeFiction #Fantasy http://t.co/nomPW18OsF

LIGHTSPEED fiction: “God Mode” by Daniel H. Wilson (@danielwilsonpdx). http://t.co/GL0wIiF2lH #FreeFiction #SF http://t.co/r5XEWuuaSp

Read (or listen to) “The Ninth Seduction” by Sean McMullen. http://t.co/86rIiolYU3 #FreeFiction #Fantasy http://t.co/oJN8za9Ft4

LIGHTSPEED fiction: “Estella Saves the Village” by Theodora Goss (@theodoragoss). http://t.co/p4j6WJbf9Y #FreeFiction http://t.co/Gk2diG0Y7V

LIGHTSPEED #FreeFiction: “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” by Delia Sherman (@deliasherman). http://t.co/VBSldBVlMU http://t.co/nI6i3BZwUz

Read (or listen to) “Solder and Seam” by Maria Dahvana Headley (@MARIADAHVANA). http://t.co/j3O7N2ub4A #FreeFiction http://t.co/AOl9Uatcmm

We have a history of missed connections, you and I. Years ago, when you called goodbye from the shuttle launch, my flight was landing in Zurich. I’d changed planes, been re-routed from Frankfurt. That’s why you got my voicemail. I’d have answered if I could, and would’ve wished you luck, even if you wanted a life without me. I never managed to see Europa, like you did—just Europe, where I met my first husband. The one I wished was you.

The Makers had been dead for billions of years, yet Umos discovered one caught in the starship's net. A young one, naked, with still-fused dorsal fins.

Paul Bunyan has died. Paul Bunyan has died and Johnny Appleseed is heading north. Not for vengeance, like Paul would have wanted. Not to beat the hills red or divert a river over those responsible for killing the legend, but because it finally seems time to revisit old scars, old pains. “We were the fire in the night,” Johnny remembers Paul saying one night, so long ago.

Every night I come home and I drink. I trade away the hope, the guilt, the fear, even the love---I think it’s love, crazy as it seems. I trade them for oblivion, because otherwise I won’t sleep at all. I drink until there’s no life left in me, until I’m able to forget for just a little while the chrome vessel in the corner and what’s at stake. Sometimes I hope that I’ll dream of her.

Daya opens her eyes to the colors of dusk, though she smells and hears midday. Soft light picks out yellow and turquoise stones and the bright fire of Gul-Mohar flowers; but the heat is Surya at his fiercest, making all else pale before his glory. She turns over, dazed and sluggish, listening to the distant clash of copper pots, breathing in spices cooked in coconut oil.

This is 2015. A party on a westside roof, just before midnight. Some Mia or Mina or throwing it, the white girl with the jean jacket and the headband and the two-bumps-of-molly grin, flitting from friend circle to friend circle, laughing loudly and refilling any empty cup in her eyeline from a bottomless jug of sangria, Maenad Sicagi. There are three kegs, a table of wines and liquor, cake and nachos inside.

I had bought half an hour with Malka and I was making the most of it. Lots of Off girls, there’s not much goes on, but these Polar City ones, especially if they’re fresh off the migration station, they seem to, almost, enjoy it? I don’t know if they really do. They don’t pitch and moan and fake it up or anything, but they seem to be there under you. They’re with you, you know?

In the Tenth Court of Hell stands the Wheel of Rebirth. Its spokes are of red lacquered wood; it creaks as demons pull it, dragging its load of souls back into the world. And before the Wheel stands the Lady.

She paced the stones, her feet separated from the chill by sable-lined slippers. She was cold despite them, cold from her toes to her crown. Perhaps it was the vengeance of the fire, that she had not joined her husband in its embrace. Long ago, he had decided that he wished to be immolated in the manner of their ancestors.

I’ve sought a world with a higher-than-average ratio of sunny days and a pharmaceutical industry that developed a decade before my own. Sun, of course, improves mental health. And a more developed pharmaceutical industry implies a more liberal outlook towards chemical intervention, a more specific range of treatment plans. It isn’t easy to write equations for these variables.

It starts as a twitch. Or that’s what I thought it was. At first. A jitter in my thumb. Then it’s in my wrist, a jolt of energy running up my arm. All at once, too fast to know exactly where it had come from. There it is, I would start to think, but it was over before I had finished the thought, and there I was, gun in hand, smoke weeping from the barrel.

Terrorist. That’s what they call me, but I am something worse: both successful traitor and failed saboteur. I want to die, for all of this to be over. For my last request, I asked to have paper and pen to write my last will and testament. They won’t let me have it, forcing me to use the mindsynch. Damned Traveler tech. Maybe they’re scared I’ll ram the pen up my nose, scribble on my brain, and cheat the hangman.

This is the thing about my sister and I: we’ve never gotten along, even when we’ve gotten along. This is what happens when you have parents who fetishize family, and the viscosity of their blood relative to water: you resent the force with which they push you together with this person who is, genetics aside, a stranger. And that’s what my sister is: a stranger.

As late as ten years ago, a mad scientist with a dream could expect to turn a decent profit with his lesser inventions and build enough capital to put his (or her!) real plans into play. Those days are sadly over, although my father, fool that he was, claimed that they never existed.

Pepper’s vision fades slowly away in the empty midnight as he tumbles end over end. His eyes frost over, moisture crackling and icing over pupils, hardening against his eyelids. The pinpoint stars fracture behind the fractal cold of the ice, then shatter into a multitude of glittering refractions. Unseeing, he still stares wide-eyed into the vacuum.

It took James Washington forever, almost literally forever, to remember that his wife and children were as dead as he was. For a while, he barely even realized that he was dead himself. Heaven, for lack of a better word, is bliss, and as anybody who has known euphoria can tell you, bliss doesn’t always allow room for rational thought.

There was one girl I really liked in school when I returned to Earth, but it took me three months to say hello. I wasn’t good with human beings. We’d just gotten back from Pitipek (a red-dwarf star system “just left” of Tau Ceti, as the joke goes). My father had been stationed there for two years with the TU’s Planetary Safety Agency, and living with the slow, enigmatic, bipedal Pitipeki---especially in one of their villages, and under those endless clouds---tends to make you lose your people skills.

You have been trying to start a family. And failing. The problem, it will turn out, is with you. This is what they tell you at the fertility clinic at the medical center. The first thing, discovered during a physical exam, is that your testicles are smaller and softer than average. At the time of this revelation, your wife actually says to the urologist, in a tone of maternal defensiveness: “That’s strange, because I would say his penis is a little too big.”

He was in the bathroom cleaning the taps. I could only see the back of him—an overlong measure of spine, the lean, narrow shoulders hunched forward slightly as he polished the chrome with the yellow duster—but there was no doubt in my mind that it was him. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years and had received no news of him in all that time. The first thing I thought of was Cambridge, the cleanliness and order he had brought to his shabby basement rooms. He must have sensed me standing there because almost at once he started to straighten up.