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Dec 23, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Shinjini Dey
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 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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May 7, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | R. Lazarus |James Cheng |Varsha Dinesh |Shinjini Dey
dear you’re dead. i saw it happen,the click-clack of the hammer as you cocked it back,the fat tears rolling down your cheeks like pearls fresh from the oyster. it looks so real sometimes. i jumped when i saw you that morning,pale and tired and violet-dark eyes,but breathing. in and out. it happened to my grandmother too:i dreamt of wood cracking and limbs flailingand woke to the sound of my mother screaminginto our bathroom floor. today you smiled at me. and i knew it was over.
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May 7, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Varsha Dinesh |R. Lazarus |James Cheng |Shinjini Dey
In his early days in slivermoon, Saki worked the phone lines. Companies in slivermoon stressed in prestige magazines and press releases that it was too hard for them to employ bodies. Bodies were expensive to sustain. Bodies needed food, warmth, and shelter. The market was not what it used to be, and labor laws tied the hands of employers. Having a body in this economy was like throwing a fight before it even began. Bodies were a ticket to starvation.
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May 7, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Shinjini Dey |R. Lazarus |James Cheng |Varsha Dinesh
When this novel begins, Jonathan Abernathy is in purgatory—an empty office, a waiting room “located in a strip mall just outside the highway”—and he is desperate. Jonathan Abernathy has defaulted on his debt: “His loans, IOUs, and bills so diverse ecologists would be within their jurisdiction to classify the collection as ‘an ecosystem.’” Death, figuratively speaking, is in attendance.
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May 7, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | James Cheng |R. Lazarus |Varsha Dinesh |Shinjini Dey
Time passes slow in the distance as liquidlopes across the surface of the plains. Your motheris dead, her long hair thins under the dirt. She holds a special love for the cat, its silken fur,lean claws and crooked smile held hard withinher sagging breast. It stalks toward you, baresthe hated face, the long body and thintail strike the air as it turns, a blowthat bends the wind.
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Apr 26, 2023 | 
strangehorizons.com | Archita Mittra |Seth Wade |Shinjini Dey |Kristy Anne Cox
Speculative fiction, like Janus—the Roman god with two faces, standing at gates and doorways, presiding over beginnings and endings—is uniquely situated to both interrogate our past (historical events, folkloric traditions, and the myths that continue to shape society), as well as peer into our future, particularly the dystopian, capitalist, neocolonial and technology-driven reality we are heading towards.
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Apr 24, 2023 | 
strangehorizons.com | Seth Wade |Shinjini Dey |Michael Imossan |Aishwarya Subramanian
Your bathtub ruptures: broken pipes spew everywhere, a garage door emerges through the tiled floor. This is an essay on the commodification and extraction of time—from bodies and space through a conceptual and historical detour, asking questions of the science(s) that inspired it and the fiction written about it. gravity can no longer hold our dead in their graves or their ghosts in our bones. they float in the air like alien ships, like doves spurting from exhaust pipes.
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Apr 24, 2023 | 
strangehorizons.com | Adri Joy |Michael Imossan |Seth Wade |Shinjini Dey
It’s always delightful when a story uses the strengths of its medium to really knock it out of the park: when a creator uses the conventions of their chosen form to really draw you into a world, to underscore the message of a story, to evoke sensations and emotions beyond those we’d usually associate with the combination of whatever sight, sound, and touch we might be using to transmit that story into our brains.
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Apr 24, 2023 | 
tinyurl.com | Shinjini Dey |Seth Wade |Michael Imossan |Aishwarya Subramanian
[Editor's Note: This article continues the conversation on extractivism in SF, that began with the Strange Horizons special issue on extractivism, in September 2022, and continued with Jenna Hanchey's essay on Tade Thompson, in the January 2023 issue.] I For a short spell, the Spanish Inquisition apprehended Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis, and his apprentice Jean Frederic Leschot for “sorcery.” The three of them were clockmakers, and had unveiled doll-like automata at the royal...
