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Nov 20, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Amritesh Mukherjee |M.C. Childs |Susannah Rand |Catherine Rockwood
“The first words were born in the voices of the first Speakers.” (p. 285)Close your eyes and think. Think of words as living beings. Not the living, breathing entities that can be meek or overbearing as we know them in our minds, but physical, sentient beings with emotions, personalities, and speech. Anxious might trot and stutter at infrequent intervals, fretting about the state of the world and the hiccups she’s been having throughout the week.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Susannah Rand |Claire McNerney |M.C. Childs |Catherine Rockwood
https://d3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net/staging/2024-10-19/390122725-44100-2-5a1f704b52b85.m4aIn this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Little Lila by Susannah Rand, read by Claire McNerney. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: SpotifyLike this:Like Loading... Susannah Rand was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and has since been trapped in a vortex that prevents her from leaving. Despite this, she lives happily with her two cats and partner.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | M.C. Childs |Catherine Rockwood |Amritesh Mukherjee |David Lewis
Content warning:Show warningsSomehow we’re now Harold Lloyd/Jackie Chan, letting go of the minute hand, droppingourselves right onto Magritte’s moving steam locomotive:If we time it just rightI bet we could get it tocatch us,dead on thetailbone. Right betweenthe washout plugsand whistle. Zero-backspin earthunder us, itty bittycloudsall around us. Like this:Like Loading...
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Catherine Rockwood |M.C. Childs |Amritesh Mukherjee |David Lewis
The stories and poems in Geoffrey W. Cole’s Zebra Meridian imagine the factors that might determine success in extending the lifespan of objects, relationships, people, ecosystems, planets, universes. Salvage and repair are central concerns. Don’t read Zebra Meridian because you want reliably feelgood stories: the book seems to offer odds of about forty per cent on positive outcomes for crisis-driven human(ish) reconstitutive enterprises.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | M.C. Childs |Catherine Rockwood |Amritesh Mukherjee |David Lewis
Lightvessel requires assistanceHave you encountered ice? Close drift iceOpen drift iceMy starboard warp has partedMy port warp has partedOnset was suddenI have cut the warpsIt is dangerous to stopIt is dangerous to remain in present positionIt is dangerous to proceed on present courseI can only assist if you will make all efforts to followThe Trawls are engagedCan you lead me into port?
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Abdulrazaq Salihu |E. N. Díaz |Victor Forna |Catherine Rockwood
On the night my father died,My mother is caught huntingMosquitoes to protect ourBodies from being stungLike insects do to flowers. Something visits the earth,Forgets its beauty and castsAn alien glow over the loweringOf my father into his grave. I catch all the auroras beforeThey fall into my father’s graveAnd this is the only thing whisperingDarkness into my mothers eyes. I carry the pebbles and arrangeThem around my mother’s acheI forget to glitter. Because I knowNo other light than my mother’s.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Victor Forna |E. N. Díaz |Abdulrazaq Salihu |Catherine Rockwood
The Vermilion RoadWe’re two thousand light-years from home. Earth gravity, beaten. Solar System. Milky Way. I hear fire, I hear creaking, I hear prayers to evanescing gods—I hold my sister’s hand. We’ve made it, halfway,with so much making it left to do. Between the 2nd & 3rd pillarsI blink, and how many aeons are in asecond of darkness? Sabɔ-finɔ looms over me, sweet star-voiced sister, silhouetted against the rays of an unfamiliar sun. She bends, helps me to my liquid legs. You okay?
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | E. N. Díaz |Victor Forna |Abdulrazaq Salihu |Catherine Rockwood
VoyeurI cut my foreskin with my sewing scissorsand buried it in the backyard. I watered it for daysuntil another boy that looked just like meclawed out of the earth’s womb. I inspected him carefully,tracing his cherry red lips with my tongue,biting his bubblegum pink nipples until they bruisedand he moaned. I placed him on all fours over the warm mossand spread his furry cheeks—his scent, just like mine!You have to be sweetlike sun-warmed honey,that’s what daddy says.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Catherine Rockwood |Victor Forna |E. N. Díaz |Abdulrazaq Salihu
This enormous, skilful volume is the sequel to Griffith’s 2013 Hild, which narrates the early life of the seventh-century woman who would come to be St. Hild of Whitby. The earliest book in the Hild Sequence covers about eighteen years and concludes with Hild’s perilous marriage to the warrior or gesith Cian. It is 535 pages long. Menewood covers about the next four years, from roughly 630 to 634 AD, and is 681 pages long.
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Nov 27, 2023 | 
strangehorizons.com | E. N. Díaz |Abdulrazaq Salihu |Victor Forna |Catherine Rockwood
Two contrasting approaches to climate fiction characterize Octavia Cade’s new book, You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories: the hope of what we can preserve and restore, and the guilt and grief associated with what we will lose. The eighteen stories in this collection complement and overlap with Cade’s previous climate fiction books, The Stone Wētā (2020) and The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (2021).
