Stories

Author: Cliff McNish Eventually, once we’d screwed up everything in the ecosystem, Naomi and I were the final ones left – the last man and woman on Earth. Unfortunately, we didn’t get on. We felt some vague responsibility to repopulate the world, but kept avoiding sex. We did it politely, but even so. ‘Mm, what […]

Author: Timons Esaias This would be a nice planet, if not for all these places where the seabottom is sticking up out of the worldocean. It is most unseemly and immature. We are trying to be generous about it, trying to convince ourselves that this planet is too young, that the worldocean will tear down […]

A man using a social media app that reaches across dimensions to talk to himself in different timelines, discovers some of his problems are universal...and some are not...

Miguel is a foolish, ill-informed, spoilt youth of the cyberscraper culture. It's Saturday night, and he's alone in the family apartment with the beautiful Maria Del Fuego. But what, exactly, does it take to turn her on?

Always had the sages known that they would come. The first princess, in her bed of jewels and smelted gold, had dreamt of them; dreamt their terrible faces, their terrible claws, their endless hunger that is greater than the mountain and deeper than the deepest-diving seam. She had wept in the night, to have such dreams, and some say that her death---as the deaths of all princesses since her---came hard and early, because she could not know the peace of slumber.

We have traveled here, to this most innocuous of country landscapes, to make good on a promise made by my grandfather, Carlton Whitmore, to a girl he loved in his youth. How foolish that sounds, writ down so! But it is true. Grandfather met her on the banks of the Bolton Strid, where she stood naked and confused, water drying on her skin. His notes state that she knew no modesty, and that “she was pale as the belly of a deep-river fish."

Tasha’s avatar smiled from the screen, a little too perfect to be true. That was a choice, just like everything else about it: When we’d installed my sister’s new home system, we had instructed it to generate avatars that looked like they had escaped the uncanny valley by the skins of their teeth. It was creepy, but the alternative was even creepier. Tasha didn’t talk. Her avatar did. Having them match each other perfectly would have been . . . wrong. “So I’ll see you next week?” she asked.

A child will tell you, if asked, and if they are in the mindset to answer questions as they are posed and not as the child’s mind would have them interpreted---for the ears of children seem to work differently than the ears of adults, to be tuned to a different set of sighs and susurrations, not to the clean consonants and simple constructions of the adult vocabulary, and the answers of children are often similarly distorted.

Aden had never once forgotten his gear for bulk trash day, but he found it touching that Nura still taped a monthly reminder note on the door from the kitchen to the garage. Sweet of her to remember, given how exhausted med school had her these days. He ducked out to the garage to toss […]

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

I’d always known Calam would run. He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted through stretches of dead space. A sullen crease between the brows, whenever I tried to ask how he’d landed in that dead-end Martian workshop at seventeen. But after ten years, why now?

It has been one hundred and thirteen years since our mother’s pear and red date soup slid along my tongue, and now I taste only the sweetness of soil and rot...

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

Content Note: All Possible Warnings Apply click here for full note Warnings: violence, incest, cannibalism, fratricide, attempted infanticide just as in the original…   Children don’t generally assume their father will abandon them to die in the snow. But under certain circumstances, they might get an inkling. If their mother had died the year before, […]

The fourth and final installment of a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey...

The third installment of a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey...

The second installment of a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey...

Introducing a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey...

A woman visiting Las Vegas for a fun weekend encounters her ne’er-do-well ex-husband, who begs her for a favor that gambles with life and death…

Unknown forces attempt to stop Judge Dee and Jonathan from transporting a mysterious and possibly dangerous prisoner, who holds a secret about the Judge, to an executioner in France...

Simon thought he left his fascination with the infamous “Sunshine Killer” and his cult, the “Sunshine Circle,” behind in childhood, but the past may be closer than he realized…

Kelly's friends were all getting a little sick of Kelly, even before the doppelganger showed up. And sure, it probably wants to kill her; they're just trying to decide if that's worse...or better.

Misunderstanding threatens a commune whose survival is dependent on precise communication with another species...

Set after the events of Everfair, espionage, betrayal, and political intrigue follow, when the estranged son of a founding member of Everfair visits his sister in Zanzibar . . .

An android who knows nothing besides his work in a factory, is given one final week to explore the world before he is forced to undergo mandatory reprogramming, in this bittersweet precursor to TJ Klune’s IN THE LIVES OF PUPPETS, now available in trade paperback!

Author: Mark Renney Darren had come to dread having to decompress. He wasn’t alone and yet no-one was talking about it, even the media were quiet on the subject but then hardly anyone now was exempt. The evidence was everywhere and decompressing people had become a commonplace sight across the city. Old people, old bodies, […]

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer The corridor is just far enough off-true that it messes with your vision and balance if you’re not careful. Or if part of you relies on an exoskeleton to function. “You okay there, Zeno?” I flick a glance and grin towards Leroy. “I’m seventy-one, godammit. Been doing this war shit […]

In Which Caruth is Correct by Carolyn Zhao