Strange Horizons

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Strange Horizons, March 2009

By Jason Sanford ⋅ August 25, 2009

Earlier this year I immersed myself in online fiction through the annual storySouth Million Writers Award, which it’s my joy to run. The great thing about the award is it’s a fun way to keep up with online fiction trends—and the biggest trend this year was how the number of quality online short fiction venues [...]

Strange Horizons, February 2009

By Jason Sanford ⋅ April 9, 2009

Pity new writers of SF/F short stories. They come to the genre bubbling with exciting ideas and linguistic beauty, and smack right up against reality. The simple fact is that publishing short fiction in professional speculative fiction markets is not only downright hard, it’s also very much like the proverbial fart in a hurricane—no [...]

Strange Horizons, January 2009

By Jason Sanford ⋅ March 10, 2009

One of the clichés thrown at new writers is “Read the publications you submit to!” The reasoning being that each magazine’s fiction uniquely reflects the wants and desires of a particular editor. If a writer’s fiction doesn’t match what the editor already publishes, why waste everyone’s time by submitting to said editor?
As with all [...]

Strange Horizons, November 2008

By Steven H Silver ⋅ February 14, 2009

There is a long tradition in science fiction, as well as in mainstream fiction, of the underappreciated veteran returning from the wars. In “Return” in the November, 2008, Strange Horizons, Eric Vogt looks at the veteran Tima Huversaa, who has returned from a lost war to a world struggling through depression. Years after his [...]

Strange Horizons, December 2008

By Steven H Silver ⋅ February 12, 2009

The December, 2008, offerings of Strange Horizons feature three short stories, the first one in two parts.
Naomi Bloch creates an interesting world with a combination of natural humans and genetically modified humans in “The Same Old Story.” The story focuses on Zach and his parents, Sarah and David. Zach is a genetically modified [...]

Strange Horizons, October 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ December 3, 2008

What’s the ideal short story length? Such a simple question, yet one that’s impossible to answer without embracing the old cliché that “a short story should be only as long as needed to tell the story.”
According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, short stories fall into the following categories: true short stories, [...]

Strange Horizons, September 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ October 27, 2008

Science fiction writers have a dirty little secret: Sometimes we don’t like outsiders entering our imaginary worlds.
It’s not that we don’t like readers. After all, every literary genre lives only through the graces of that genre’s readers. The problem for science fiction writers, however, comes in explaining to the general public many of our genre’s [...]

Strange Horizons, August 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ September 18, 2008

One of the classic knocks the literati give against speculative fiction is that the genre exists merely as escapist reading. This silly view holds that it’s wrong to read science fiction or fantasy simply to experience a different world, while the reverse—that it’s quite all right to read a highbrow literary novel and experience a [...]

Strange Horizons, July 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ August 10, 2008

It sometimes appears that humanity is fated to eternally ask deep questions while receiving few deep answers in return. Perhaps this is because we humans are very good at posing the big questions—What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of good and evil? Is there a God?—but not so good at finding [...]

Distillations: Repeating Forms

By Jennifer Mercer ⋅ July 16, 2008

The act of repetition is one of the paradoxes of poetry. In the confined world of a poem, what is the use of redundancy? However wasteful it may seem, there are many poetry forms built around obligatory patterns of repetition. In this column, we will explore two rather different forms, the villanelle and the triolet, [...]

Strange Horizons, June 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ July 7, 2008

Online speculative fiction magazines are held to a strange standard of success. Even though the best e-zines reach far more readers than most genre print magazines, there are continual questions on the viability of these online publications. One of the most recent regurgitations on this theme came from Simon Owens, who asked on his site, [...]

Strange Horizons, May 2008

By Marshall Payne ⋅ June 9, 2008

Strange Horizons begins the month of May, 2008, with “The Gadgey” by Alan Campbell. In Scotland, two teenage boys on BMXs find a crashed spaceship. After much banter of Star Trek and E.T., the boys meet the alien they call a gadgey, who looks like the alien from the movie Predator, except in a silver [...]

Strange Horizons, April 2008

By Alex Dally MacFarlane ⋅ May 14, 2008

“In Ashes” by Helen Keeble, one of the April, 2008, Strange Horizons fiction offerings, is set in the same world as her previous Strange Horizons story, “In Stone,” a world of elemental magic that comes at a high price. Jessa and her brother, Jennet, live with their mother in a small house where Jennet is [...]

Strange Horizons, March 2008

By Alex Dally MacFarlane ⋅ April 7, 2008

“All Talk” by Will Ludwigsen, the first story for March in Strange Horizons, is a brief scene between two people who possess mind-control powers. Sitting in a café, Valerie and Colin amuse themselves by making strangers around them say inappropriate things, such as the girl who tells her mother, “Elmo strangles hookers!” After a little [...]

Strange Horizons, February 2008

By Alex Dally MacFarlane ⋅ March 5, 2008

A theme of loss seems to run through the February, 2008, stories at Strange Horizons. The first, “Tokyo Rising” by Lynne Hawkinson, matches loss with whimsy. Tokyo has been destroyed multiple times by Godzilla, Mothra, natural disasters, and more, which eventually results in the city planners considering the site cursed and moving the population [...]

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