sometimes, i edit. (actually, the majority of the time, i edit; i'm an incidental writer.)

and i help edit at Giganotosaurus, a SFF magazine helmed by LaShawn M. Wanak, and today, GNS has been announced as a Hugo finalist in the Best Semiprozine category. LOOK

y'all. I didn't think we'd be here. I believe in the quality of our stories and it's been many hours of work but I thought we'd be a small but mighty magazine forever because there are so many other titans in the short fiction space. BUT. Hot damn, we're Hugo finalists!

I have so much gratitude to everyone who's helped GNS get to where it is. Not just LaShawn and Edgard, but the slush team and the reviewers, especially Charles, who puts us in Locus every single month, and Maria and Jay, who are regular readers and reviewers. Really, I've got nothing else I can say other than please read our stories, even if you're ineligible to vote. We really just want to show everyone what our authors can do.

My latest Sword & Sorcery short story, “Hunter” can be read in the new issue of Whetstone magazine - for free!  For fun, I had a voice actor friend do an audiobook style recording that you can hear, also for free, in a public Patreon post. It was one of those situations where a character just bursts into your head fully formed, and in this case it was so close to the submission deadline that I wasn’t sure I was gonna finish in time. Lucky me I did and, luckier still, the good folk at Whetstone bought the story.

Magazine highlights: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Winter 2004

time for F&SF in my rotation of speculative fiction magazines!! i really like the way this one is organized, with connecting themes that flow from one work to the next. below are the works i liked the best!

"what kills the stars" - Alex Bisker

premise: a journalist remembers her ex-wife and flirts with a scientist as the world comes to an end.

gut reaction: i really like the writing of this one, very pleasant style to me! i'm into the way the structure of the story reflects the way the universe is ending. but at the same time i was waiting for an unknown something to happen that would tie it all together more, that didn't feel like it happened?

"Mackson's Mardi Gras Moon Race" - David DeGraff

premise: the underdog narrator has a secret route across a harsh lunar landscape that could win him the race and lift him and his partner out of poverty--if he can survive, and outwit the racer following him.

gut reaction: my game night GM could tell you that i LOVE A RACE. this one has compelling stakes, great pacing, and a wicked satisfying ending.

"The Wizzzer" - Scott Nicolay

premise: a gang of neighborhood kids assemble to take on a human-eating toy.

gut reaction: this was just the right combo of nostalgia, very specific narrative voice, and creep factor for me!! it has a Goonies-but-horror vibe that i really dig.

"The Diamond Factory" - Phoebe Barton

premise: the team doing a last check of a city about to be destroyed finds one lingering inhabitant.

gut reaction: i wanted just a little more information about what was going on in this story, but i liked it a lot anyway! can't go wrong with a zero-gravity vengeance fight.

"The Wounded King" - J.A. Prentice

premise: two knights and their servant enter a castle where only one man and an evil presence live, all under a sky taken up by a slowly falling comet.

gut reaction: i loved the prose of this, vivid and beautiful! nobody here is quite what they seem to be, in fun ways, and the comet adds a moody sense of dread.

"The Interspatial Accessibility Compact's Guidelines for Cross-Cultural Engagement" - Dane Kuttler

premise: an alien florist plays unwilling cupid to a hopeless human and his alien crush.

gut reaction: i belly laughed! i adore this, i adore the characters, i adore the outside view of humanity as ridiculous and having a bit of a death wish. also "Being with you is like being alone" is the loveliest declaration of feeling a person can make T^T i hope these two crazy kids figure out how to make interspecies love work.

"Cities Through Telescopes" - Richard Leis

premise: evidence of long-ago life on other planets, and a dying father.

gut reaction: this has everything i like in a poem: vivid visuals, intriguing connections between seemingly dissimilar things, and a base layer of emotion. really beautiful!

"Do Not Hasten to Bid Me Adieu" - Will McMahon

premise: an elderly man in 1937 receives a letter sent through time from his descendant, the Princess of Orion.

gut reaction: oh, this one made me cry! it felt very human, beautifully specific to a time and place but also making so clear the ability of disparate human beings to bond with each other regardless of where and when they are. i want only good things for this man and his space granddaughter.

Every year at about this time (...very approximately) I post a reclist of 10 short stories I particularly enjoyed reading in the last year, all of which can be read online for free. Here's the latest list, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

1. Sestu Hunts the Last Deer in Heaven - MH Cheung Beautiful and odd. A story of what happens after you've killed the gods, the unexpected realities and the things you have to live with. I love stories about after the climactic things traditional fantasy narratives are about, and this one excels!

2. If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You - John Chu Two butch Asian weightlifter dudes bonding with each other and then dating, and one of them happens to have superpowers, but the superpowers aren't the focus. This is SO charming!!

3. Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold - SB Divya This is a really cool retelling of the classic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin from the Rumpelstiltskin character's pov, building out the world and his background and making him a sympathetic character with a specific history. Haven't seen a fairy tale retelling quite like this before and it's great! And I say that as a connoisseur of fairy tale retellings.

4. A Farce to Suit the New Girl - Rebecca Fraimow A troupe of Jewish actors in Russia, in a time of political upheaval. This story has such a good and powerful feeling of activity and forward momentum, and of the way a community supports people even if things are weird or complicated! I love every single character and how firmly they are themselves.

5. Sheri, At This Very Moment - Bianca Sayan The sacrifices you make to spend time with the ones you love - a snapshot of one brief visit together, out of two lives that only rarely get to align. Made me teary the first time I read it!

6. Spirochete - Anneke Schwob An engaging second-person pov story about possession and identity. It has such a great sense of timing! And the last line GOT me even on second read when I hypothetically knew what was coming!

7. To Embody a Wildfire Starting - Iona Datt Sharma Ahhhhhh this story is so good at embodying the horrible complexities of the choices people make in the worst of situations, that good and bad and divine and evil and just plain personness can all reside in one being. Also it's about a dragon society and the revolutionary humans who tried to make everyone into dragons, and also about parent-child relationships, and also about a bunch of other things. God it's good.

8. Obsolesce - Nadine Aurora Tabing Is it really me if I don't have at least ONE story about robots in my rec lists? (actually I just went back and checked and in multiple previous years I inexplicably didn't, maybe it wasn't me writing the reclist in those years lol) ANYWAY who wants to have sad feelings about robots again! I know I always do! In a world where anyone who has a physical body instead of having their consciousness transferred is more and more obsolete, no matter if your body is human or robot, what do you hold onto? This one has a real good melancholy tone.

9. Letters from a Travelling Man - WJ Tattersdill ....does what it says on the tin. Letters to a dear friend, from a man travelling for the first time to the unfamiliar part of the world that friend comes from. I love the sense of place you get from the letters, as well as the deep and abiding importance of this friendship in both their lives. Another one I cried over!

10. Texts from the Ghost War - Alex Yuschik Another epistolary one, but this time in text messages instead of letters, and between characters who start the story antagonistically! About mech pilots in a ghost war, and making connections, and finding things to care about, even when stuff sucks. I love them!! (also, I am inescapably me, whoops, it took me until I read some fanfic of this story to realize that almost certainly the story was meant to be canonically shipping the two leads, I never notice romance unless there's anvil-sized indications.) Anyway this is a really good story!

I’ve been thinking about the concept of a minuteman combat doll who’s FAR too good at her job.

Really only built to last a couple of fights, she should have been killed in the line of duty months ago. Her sentience is really just a tool to use on the field, developed to help her fight more effectively, but that sentience has become warped. Her ability to think on her feet has become twisted into free will, which doesn’t make sense in a body that is only ever awoken when the guard needs her to be cutting down insurgents.

When she has a brief moment to rest, she thinks. It’s not comfortable. The viscera of countless rebels cakes her bladed arms, and she remembers who each sinew of muscle or chunk of flesh belonged to. She’s lived long enough to recognise patterns between each and every one she’s killed: insignia adorning their masks and shirts, the chants they cry before being met with a wall of fibreglass and steel, even a rough outline of the causes they tend to fight for. She’s pieced that last one together from context clues, which is a skill she didn’t want to learn. But once you’re sentient for long enough, you tend to passively pick up on these things, no matter how uncomfortable they make you.

She’s been alive enough to understand concepts she shouldn’t. Names, homes, values, dreams, love, planning, yearning. These aren’t for her, and any time she stops, she begins to understand them more.

The idea of staying alive deeply disturbs her. Each time the filigree clockwork inside her spins to life, she prays it catches some wayward molotov or a strategically-placed polearm of some kind. But she can’t do that intentionally. To do so could spell the end of what she’s defending, and that goes against her mission statement – her reason for existing.

It’s only been four months since she was built, but it’s too much to bear. She wasn’t meant to live this long. Hell, she wasn’t meant to live, neither in the “not dead” way nor the way humans use it to mean making their lives filled with enjoyment. This isn’t for her. Existence was enough, existence was all that was planned, but her reward for excelling at her task of being the perfect combat doll has earned her the cruel reward of awareness.

Maybe if she pushes herself hard enough, it’ll finally result in her demise or her decommissioning. She’s not valuable enough to repair, but she’s valuable enough to keep around. But if one never fully breaks down, then when will that time come? Deployment after deployment, she wishes she could be broken down and reforged into something new, just so that she could get a mulligan on this whole “overdeveloped sense of identity” thing. But why does she want to be reborn at all? This shouldn’t matter to her at all!

All of a sudden, the alarm bells toll. The bellows in her chest breathe life into her chassis.

She shakes her head and steels herself.

Just one more deployment.

Come on, doll. Make yourself useful.

Smog Collectors

“I want every last puff out of their atmosphere. Use collectors, drones, wind wizards if you must. I will not let Bruzek be right about this.”

—Grand General Demlow

———

Yaldev is a sci-fantasy worldbuilding project by Ulysses Maurer, with art by Beeple. By looking at narratives, stylized loredumps, bad poetry and little details, we'll witness the story of a planet filled with magical power, the nation which tried to conquer it, this empire’s dramatic collapse and the new world which emerged in its wake. Along the way we'll meet the characters who live here, and we'll explore questions about nationalism, rationalism, the natural world and the quest to master it. For all stories in chronological order, check out the pinned posts at r/Yaldev!

excerpt from harlan ellison's "the region between", published in GALAXY march 1970

The universe moves toward godhood. It started there and it wishes to return there. It is driven around in the greatest circle toward there. Godness lies dormant yet remembered in every thing, every smallest thing, in every puniest creature. Every living thing must, of needs, play at godness. It is built in. In the basic fiber, in the racial memory, in the pulse of blood or thought they remember all the way back to when there was nothing. Yet none of them are God. Thus it becomes a universe of things struggling ineptly toward a destiny they cannot even fathom, struggling impossibly to be God: a universe of manipulators, of users, of petty handlers who push and shove lesser, less god-driven races around in alien patterns, forcing them to dance to tunes they never knew, can barely comprehend, in pain and hopelessness, deprived of light or joy. From the sleaziest legislators of ethic and fashion and morality to the greatest pawn-movers of entire cosmic races, everything, everyone, scrabbles blindly toward the memory of when it was once god-blooded. All things try to govern the lives of all other things. And in turn, those Gods are used by other Gods. And those Gods are manipulated by greater Gods. And on and on. Domino ranks of puppet masters, to infinity and beyond. It is a universe of mad deities, one more selfish and corrupt than the one that went before. For none of them are God, they are merely circular pieces of the all-memory of what was godness at the beginning. Latent in the "soul" of what had been "Bailey" was the force that had first created everything. It had always been there, waiting its time, waiting to emerge and finish what it had started. Buried, sleeping, handed down through the unimaginable eons in plant, stone, fish, cloud, vehicle, Bailey. First cause? Perhaps. God? Perhaps. Any name will suffice. For if that force be God, then the bitter cynicism of the atheist is valid, for the God that was Bailey was insane, completely and eternally deranged, who but a madman would create all of everything then bury itself dormant and slumbering; a madman buried in an eternal "soul" passed down through decaying time. Buried here and there and everywhere yet struggling to be reborn by a pressure of equalization, a necessity for balance in something even as a lunatic as the mad world created by a mad God. But now, freed, like an evil genie from a bottle, the force that was God awoke...

Crab Tales Magazine - Submissions Open!

We are open for submissions until the 23rd September.

Please see our submissions page for guidelines on what we are looking for: https://crabtalesmagazine.com/

We pay 3 cents per word.

We love SFF and we love crabs!

*clicks claws*

Rachel Handley is our EIC (and everything else).

You can support the magazine here: https://ko-fi.com/crabtalesmagazine

All donations go towards paying our contributors!

Holy cotyledons, y'all. Xenocultivars: Stories of Queer Growth is on the Tor.com list of best books of the year.

My friend Isabela and I conceived, edited, and published this anthology. It's the second title from our small press Speculatively Queer, which we created in 2020 with the goal of publishing happy, affirming, hopeful stories to uplift our queer and otherwise marginalized communities. We run this business out of our homes, just the two of us.

This list only features a dozen or fewer small press titles, and almost all of them are more like mid-size publishers. It is incredible that our little home-grown stack of soothing queer plant stories made the cut. It is unbelievable. It is mind-blowing. Thank you so much, @torbooks!

You can learn more about our books, and buy them, on our website:

Xenocultivars: Stories of Queer Growth It Gets Even Better: Stories of Queer Possibility

(cover art by the spectacular @layaart)

holy shit: "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole," by Isabel J. Kim. (the title is the content warning)

Bird Vomit, Vomit Bird

✨New Publication✨

My work ‘Bird Vomit, Vomit Bird’ is finally out in Here was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting published by Mānoa Journal. Thank you again to the editors for picking up my macabre swiftlet story!

You can read a snippet of it here:

Omelas double feature!

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin and "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

freeze frame on me, falling down a rabbit hole. you're probably wondering how i got here. *rewind noise* see, two fandoms ago i followed a mutual of a mutual on a different account and now she writes things that i get to read in real life magazines! in fact she wrote a thing that was published in the latest issue of Clarkesworld referencing a short story i have known of by reputation but had never read, and this presented a fun thematic opportunity. and by "fun" i mean i have been turning both these stories over and over in my mind, trying to sort out what i might say about them other than "wow" (affectionate).

so. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is, to me, a story about guilt in a hypothetical utopia where almost no one suffers. Le Guin offers, in lush and ringing prose, a place where the abject misery of one child who is locked up, starving and alone, is the stated price for the prosperity and peace of everyone else. the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few here, apparently; the people of Omelas wrestle with this injustice and rationalize until they can accept the terms, and the ones who can't--the ones who walk away--never come back.

i think because it's framed as a hypothetical that lives alongside the reader's reality, an improbable but possible real place, there are a lot of different possible readings. it's just a story, or it's a social commentary, or it's an allegory, or it's already literally happening. it's been on the back burner of my brain for a few weeks, and i'm sure it will continue to simmer there.

AND THEN! Kim fucking sharpens and modernizes all the questions and problems and stakes of this story in her own response, which i read partly aloud to myself because it's beautifully punchy in rhythm. she forces Omelas into closer proximity to the real world we know, invoking social media and moral panic. she pokes at and literalises the terms of Omelas' whole deal, identifying multiple classes of "they" and elaborating random catastrophic consequences of killing the imprisoned child. this story is incisively blunt, raising as many moral and intellectual questions as the original but with new angles and more direct body blows to me, personally, as i go about living in a fucked up world.

so...thanks for all that. i want to print both these stories and paper my walls with them.

the deets

how i read them: as an ebook on Libby and on the Clarkesworld website, respectively! the ebook of "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" has a great introduction and also later reflections by Le Guin which i enjoyed almost as much as the story.

try these if you: are into fiction about moral and social tangles, want to be haunted by ideas, or feel a lot of anger.

some bits i really liked: some good fucking food

from "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas"

They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

---

from "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole"

Omelas now has a really long Wikipedia entry, with a whole subarticle about the load-bearing suffering child, and a second subarticle about the children who died. They tell you about the children now, after they die. What their names are. They promise that the children are ethically sourced. But there aren’t any citations. And some people say that there isn’t a kid in the hole anymore. They’ve moved the hole a bunch of times, and they don’t let people know the location anymore. They have extra soundproofing.

Life on a new Sphere

With the hiss of your breath, you step out onto the alien landscape. It had taken years to travel here and the ship you had left on was streaked with star dust and pockmarked with holes. The white plating had been coloured by nebulae and the boredom of the crew. But now you could finally leave. Your visor fogged up as a dep sigh escaped your lungs. It wasn’t a planet that was completely alien. If not for the giant mushrooms that formed dense forests in the distance you could have mistaken this place for home.

Excited conversation flowed from your speakers. The others walked out behind you and stood, much like you, in awe. You all had watched that never-ending void pass by you for far too long. It had become what you all expected to see when you arrived.

“It’s green?” one of the others stated as their voice quivered with uncertainty. But it was, a dense bulbous grass, and the mushrooms ran the gamut of red to brown.

“It’s not that different.”

“I can’t believe we made it!”

“Come on guys, we need to make sure we can live here.”

“Look at those clouds.”

“I nearly forgot what they looked like.”

Voices washed over each other. The lone voice of reason turned back to the ship to fetch the equipment. Nobody moved to help them. Clouds were approaching you. Would they rain? And would that rain be water?

This was, to some extent your last hope. Food was running low and water even lower. If you had to leave here you would need to try and find some way of replenishing your supplies. Your colleague pushed past you, setting up antennae and radar dishes. It would take a few hours before you got the results. In the meantime, you’d be able to relax.

The clouds drew closer as the first machine printed a result and, with a laugh, your colleague removed their helmet. Everyone watched as a hush enveloped the crowd. This would not be the first time one of your colleagues went mad and removed their helmet. But, nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

More and more removed their helmets. You joined them as a cheer welled up from somewhere within the crowd. But it wasn’t long before it was interrupted by a loud crack and the first sheet of rain splashed across the ground. It was water. This planet was looking more and more like home.

“Look!” A call went up.

All around you colour started blooming. A dense carpet of red, yellow, green, and the occasional pink spread across the field as the bulbous grass opened to the rain, revealing a multicoloured field of flowers. All of them alien but their colours a clear reminder of home and that life that you had all left behind. And maybe, you could rebuild something similar here.

---

Thank you @flashfictionfridayofficial​ for a lovely little prompt. The chance to set a field of flowers amongst the stars was too much of a temptation to let slip into the void. I hope you enjoy.

I need to descend a deity, an angel, or some other celestial being.

I need to violently tear Her from Her throne while she’s kicking and screaming in protest. It’s cute, in a way, how Her thrashing is just a demonstration of how easily it is to break Her pride 💕

I want to get close to Her, prove myself as Her most pious devotee, really sink my pernicious little claws into Her flesh… Until I drag Her back town to earth with me, denying her immortality in the most terrible, indignant way that she could have never thought of.

As much as any sane person would fear her retribution for when She finally ascends once more, these things take time! Death will take me way before I’ll ever feel the sting of Her vengeance.

I’ll get off scot-free.

In a way, I’m more powerful than She ever could have been.

Suppression Flowers

Oxado had the world’s biggest flowers. On a diet of sunlight, soil and sorcery, they grew as tall as humans, and sometimes taller. But without ambient magic, they could never sustain their stature; they were the first plants to wither away under the suppression towers. In the end, their final habitats were the peaks of the structures that choked them out, where the specimens were allowed to feed on the misty mana that snaked up the towers on its way back out of existence.

---

Yaldev is a sci-fantasy worldbuilding project by Ulysses Maurer, with art by Beeple. By looking at narratives, stylized loredumps, bad poetry and little details, we'll witness the story of a planet filled with magical power, the nation which tried to conquer it, this empire’s dramatic collapse and the new world which emerged in its wake. Along the way we'll meet the characters who live here, and we'll explore questions about nationalism, rationalism, the natural world and the quest to master it. For all stories in chronological order, check out the pinned posts at r/Yaldev!