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Jan 31, 2025 | 
strangehorizons.com | Rich Larson |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |Paul Kincaid
[content_warning type="drugs, sex, blood, death, murder, autonomy"]This story is one of five winners of the Stop Copaganda short story contest, run in collaboration with Fight for the Future, Rightscon, and COMPOST Magazine.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
strangehorizons.com | Maddison Stoff |Corey White |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland
[content_warning type="blood, death, murder, autonomy, racism, vomit, homophobia, transphobia, drugs"]This story is one of five winners of the Stop Copaganda short story contest, run in collaboration with Fight for the Future, Rightscon, and COMPOST Magazine. Michael sips his coffee, watching the screen automatically cycle through vidfeeds coming in from across the country, lingering just long enough to hit the relevant button.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
strangehorizons.com | M. L. Clark |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |Paul Kincaid
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” (1843) generally isn’t taught as science fiction, though it has all the core elements of many configurations of the genre. In it, a scientist named Aylmer becomes obsessed with removing the one perceived imperfection on his wife, a red birthmark on her cheek.
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Jan 30, 2025 | 
strangehorizons.com | Tristan Beiter |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |Paul Kincaid
Chanlee Luu’s The Machine Autocorrects Code to I is an ambitious new entry into a larger field of feminist Asian American speculative poetics. This includes Margaret Rhee’s Love Robot (2017)—which placed third in the 2018 Elgin Award for Best Full-Length Book—Franny Choi’s Death by Sex Machine (2017) and Soft Science (2019), and Lo Kwa Mei-en’s (also publishing fiction as Lois Mei-en Kwa) The Bees Make Money in the Lion (2016).
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Jan 29, 2025 | 
strangehorizons.com | Jacqueline Nyathi |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |Paul Kincaid
Thinking about the future—prospection—is supposed to be a sign of our intelligence, something that sets us apart from “lower” forms of life. But has anyone asked those forms what they’re thinking about? In fact, humans are not unique in this: Many animals seem to plan ahead, or at least anticipate things that may be coming. And as humans we’re thinking about the future all the time: when we’re planning, fantasizing, making predictions, imagining.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
strangehorizons.com | Paul Chuks |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |Paul Kincaid
Abu Bakr Sadiq has established himself as a speculative poet who uses speculation as a didactic tool in examining the most inevitable human feeling that people of all classes experience—loss. As such, the reader is greeted with didacticism in the opening poem of his latest book, “Introducing Bhabi to the Cyborg”:just so we’re clear, you're not allowed to askhow these scars came to be. i don’t usually respond to questionsconcerning lineage [...] (p.
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Shinjini Dey |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |Paul Kincaid
And so the author vanishes—that spoiled child of ignorance—to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works. “Cybernetics and Ghosts” in Uses of Literature, Italo Calvino (1980)Antoine Volodine’s Mevlido’s Dreams folds fitfully into the universe of post-exoticism, a space of self-enclosure.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | David Hebblethwaite |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |Paul Kincaid
Ali Smith’s new publishing project takes a step into the near future, and it’s a future of banal oppression. Young siblings Briar (our narrator) and Rose return home with Leif, their mother’s boyfriend, to find a red line painted around their house. Leif takes them away in the campervan to a supermarket car park—only for a red line to appear there in the morning, and the van to be towed away.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Christian P. Haines |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |Paul Kincaid
Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, Absolution, frustrates. It pokes and prods. It needles. It absolves nothing. If anything, Absolution intensifies the mysteries of Area X and the Southern Reach, as if the series’ preceding novels (to which this is a prequel) were a nest of coiled intestines, not a trilogy with a beginning, middle, and end.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Melanie Ramdarshan Bold |Aishwarya Subramanian
At the end of Michael Bond’s Paddington Marches On (1964), Paddington is preparing for a trip to Peru to visit Aunt Lucy. By the start of the next book, Paddington at Work (1966), he’s already en route back to England. Although Bond’s series hints at Paddington’s Peruvian origins, readers are never actually taken there. So, it was a major departure when the writers of the recent Paddington films decided to take the bear there in the latest instalment.
