Podcasts

When you look out from the garage doors of the corrugated steel warehouse where the Fort Springwell Community College soccer team made their heroic stand against the forces of darkness, the view at first seems . . . idyllic. A rocky shoreline, uncommon for Florida. Periodically the beam of a lighthouse sweeps across our field of view. Everything looks normal, except on its course across the little cove, the beam lights up magical sigils that form a barrier from the lighthouse point to the other side of the cove.

Science Fiction

Memeostasis

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

“They farm starlight.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, they’re going to farm starlight. For now they’re running fusion rigs. But that’s not their long-term plan.”

“No one in the sunforsaken Oort has a long-term plan. Other than slow suicide. You know what they told me, when I was first coming out here? ‘There are warmer ways to die.’ That’s in the bloody Kuiper.”

Fantasy

The Best of Intentions

by Mari Ness

She assures them, again and again, that she acted under the best—the very best—of intentions. Oh, yes, she can be a bit dramatic at times—she won’t deny that. And she was hurt—very hurt—by that mess with the invitations. She won’t deny that, either.

But surely—surely—no one can think that she would respond by hurting an innocent child?

Science Fiction

Ghost in the Tank

by M.R. Robinson

The first time you killed me, I cried like a baby.

Stupid, stupid, to cry over something make-believe—stupid and ugly and pathetic, too, when already the only thing I wanted in the world was for you to find me pretty. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t expected it to hurt so bad, dying in the sim. I hadn’t expected it to hurt at all.

Fantasy

The Last Season of Your Life

by Christopher Barzak

On a wooded hillside outside Pittsburgh, where the rivers braid together and the bridges flash yellow in the sun, there stands an old private school no one ever remembers enrolling in. Ivy grips its cracked bricks. Moss blurs the leaded windows. To almost anyone looking, it appears abandoned. Unless they are the newly dead. If that is the case, it is more of an inevitability.

Science Fiction

The Test of Time

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Jacey Watkins’s fingers were shaking as she stared at the five remaining questions on her Advanced Temporal Disruption Midterm. She was already exhausted from responding to ten “short” essay questions. Now she hit the “long” essay questions and as she read them, her heart sank. She hadn’t expected the damn midterm be so hard.

Fantasy

Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord

by Ada Hoffmann

1. I’m sorry, my lord.

2. I miss the sound of your voice, deep enough to shake the mountain fortress’s stones. I miss feeling it rumble in the soles of my feet. I miss the glow of your eyes while you paced the Chamber of Mysteries, lava burning in the pools below and the pointed arc of your throne at your back.

Science Fiction

The Stars Look Away From This Vessel

by dave ring

Draw a rectangular shape. Put a cylinder around it. Add a few small rectangles to any lines, such that they straddle them. At least one on the rectangle, and another on the cylinder. These are airlocks. The engine should look like a lighter stacked on top of a pack of cigarettes; don’t take too long drawing it, but make sure you color it in red, and then draw over it with a black marker.

Fantasy

The Aerialist

by Yoon Ha Lee

The typewriter proved, at first glance, to be a poor investment for a daring aerial escape. Kallista had been drawn to the typewriter from the moment she viewed it languishing in a Museum of Curioddities, a pun that 3% of Pennon City’s citizens might appreciate, if one rounded to the nearest human. The jury was out as to whether the placard’s sententious overview of Strange Olde Anti-Fae Percussive Instruments was someone’s idea of trolling or, equally likely, an exercise in mellifluous snake oil.

Science Fiction

The Star Where We Meet

by Sam W. Pisciotta

The most surprising thing about my journey (well, the first most surprising thing) is that the dream I experienced while traveling lasted a thousand years, a single dream stretching all the way to the Iota star in the Gemini constellation. I dreamt of Bindi, my childhood dog, a heeler and pointer mix who used to follow me everywhere; now it seems, she’s even followed me to this distant star.