Against Apocalypse
This approach to storytelling has its origins in what Michael Chabon has called the “utopian world” of the Bay Area and other metro regions along the Pacific coast. California was…
Hazmat by Katherine Brook
The fatberg didn’t ooze. It was a solid, unmoving mass. Every day they broke away chunks like breezeblocks. This one was a monster, the biggest yet. It was almost the…
The Weird Visa
As plague epidemics ravage the cities of the near future, a border-hopping medic gets tagged as a potential terror threat {read}
Green By Jen Knox
Joseph’s only deviation from regulation minimalism is an illicit second bicycle… until he meets Alyssa, a dumpster-diving, live-streaming, crowd-funded wanderer. Award-winning author Jen Knox hails from Ohio, and her work…
An Old New World
When Princess Leia enters Jabba the Hutt’s lair in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, she greets him with “Yá’át’ééh, yá’át’ééh,” a Navajo greeting, and her iconic double-bun hairstyle imitates…
“Miss Snowfall” by Sofia Samatar
In Fallow, a group of people, like the Amish, or perhaps more precisely the Mennonites, build a new Noah’s arc, leave the Earth (which has been poisoned), and drift through…
Drabbleclassics 29 – Primary Pollinator (191)
This week for Drabbleclassics Bart Epstein brings your Primary Pollinator, by Nicole Kimberling. When Dr. Lopez came for me, I was plunging the geo lab toilet. She carried a red…
The sci-fi of another language
The meaning of science fiction stories are often tough to pin down. Do they depict the future or the present? Are they personal or political? Imaginative or reality-based? Also, is…
Flowertongue
Ames knew men who, rather than break their own trail in a hunt, followed another hunter and took that man’s discoveries as his own.
The Future of Work: The Farm, by Charlie Jane Anders
Once, The Daily Argus had fact-checkers, copy editors, legal advisers. Those people are gone now, and in their place there’s the Farm.