Azimuth - Strange Horizons

Call for Non-Fiction Submissions: Special Issue on Fungi in SFF

Gautam Bhatia — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:53:23 +0000

Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”

Please send in your mycelial pitches to gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com.

For word-count, formats, and remuneration, please see here.

Statement on ICE Operations in the USA

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:09:59 +0000

In the United States, immigrants and their loved ones and communities have been reckoning with intensified anti-immigrant operations for months. Every day, people are abducted, and many of those being targeted live in hiding, supported by their neighbors.

Strange Horizons stands with immigrants in the US facing these conditions. At this time, we have the opportunity to lend our strength as a global community to a strategy that organizers in impacted areas have been using: putting pressure on hotels not to provide rooms for the agents, making their operations that much more difficult to enact.

This year, Worldcon will be hosted in Los Angeles, California, and the hotels they have partnered with are two major providers of accommodations for anti-immigrant operations: Hilton and Marriott. We all can help by contacting the hotels with our concerns, and/or by contacting Worldcon 2026 organizers about their choice of hotel partners. The risk of losing the revenue from convention attendees has the potential to sway the hotel chains' decision makers at the top.

Who Is It For?

Dan Hartland, Aishwarya Subramanian — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 06:59:40 +0000

“As readers and critics,” Sally Parlier writes in her review for us this week of Payton McCarty-Simas’s work of criticism, That Very Witch, “we all naturally bring ourselves to the experience of a text.” This is profoundly true, perhaps also obviously true—and in possessing both these qualities it can often go unsaid. But the reality, of course, is that, in writing about a text, critics are also rather often writing about themselves. This isn’t just about autocriticism—that recent form of nonfiction, championed for example by Lara Feigel, in which a critic writes explicitly from within their own life. It’s about all criticism, all writing. As Seamus Heaney put it for poets: “I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

But this places criticism in danger of accusations of solipsism. We have often written in this space—that is, in the editorial for our annual Criticism Special—about what criticism is, or what it is for. But who is it for?

There’s a telling moment in this issue’s edition of the podcast Critical Friends—a takeover by Tristan Beiter’s Ursula K. Le Guin book club—in which Tymek Chrzanowski suggests that “a big difference between the book club and an academic environment is … you’re in a class … You are engaging with it for reasons beyond merely your interest and passion. Whereas in the book club, this is a fully voluntary thing we’re doing with friends.” So perhaps part of what shapes how useful criticism is to a given person is the context in which it is made. Are you an academic or a lay reader, an autodidact or a professionalised scholar? And what kind of work are you presenting to an audience as a consequence?

In this issue, we have tried to showcase accessible criticism from multiple settings. Alexander Dickow, professor of French at Virginia Tech, provides us a careful overview of recent trends in francophone SFF; Roseanna Pendlebury writes as a fan attempting to define the genre; O. F. Cieri writes politically about some of its oldest verities. In their own essay, Ruthanna Emrys, Lila Garrott, and Alexis Shotwell align a range of perspectives—the fiction-writer’s, the editor’s, the philosopher’s—to obtain a bird’s-eye view of how SFF does and might yet imagine new modes of being and doing. Our poets in this issue do similarly, offering an analysis of their own work in a really striking bit of self-reflexive criticism. There are, we hope, multiple vectors.

In another of this issue’s essays (we try to treat you at this time of year), Zach Gillan argues that “the best weird fiction leaves us with this uncertainty, this impossibility of knowing for sure.” Maybe the best criticism does, too. But it can only do so in toto, as a gestalt, as … dread word, this … a conversation. Good criticism is accumulated over time, from multiple perspectives and for multiple purposes.

For instance, to review one novel by Ben Alderson, Hana Carolina finds the need to read many. What emerges is a review that is unusually alive to its chosen text’s many resonances, and indeed its contexts. Bill Capossere performs a similar trick in his review of Steven Erikson’s latest Malazan novel. Both these reviews are particularly worth your time—they are longer than our usual reviews, but they offer a lot as a result.

And this is probably the point: good criticism is useful. For writers— Amritesh Mukherjee helps us think about the tricks and traps of adaptation; for activists—Phoenix Scholz unpicks, again at productive length, the ways in which Hiron Ennes achieves their particular kind of queering; and, most importantly, readers—you will find a welter of fantastic recommendations for your next book in our roundtable on influence. In that last piece, Yvette Lisa Ndluvu defines influence, incisively, as “giving permission … to play, to experiment, to be weird.” Our goal here has been to provide an issue capacious enough to offer a range of permissions to as many kinds of readers as possible.

It can feel—again—solipsistic to harp on about the importance of talking about books (and other texts) at this particular parlous moment in history. Perhaps it always has done. But thinking about and with each other might in fact be an answer as well as a way of asking a question. As for the question with which this editorial opened, its answer might be: Criticism is, or at least needs to be (in this moment and all the others), for everyone.

At least, that’s one point of view.

Open Fiction Submissions Window January 19th

hebestanton — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 10:11:50 +0000

Strange Horizons will open to general fiction submissions on January 19th, 2026, at 3 p.m. UTC! This window will remain open for 48 hours, closing at 3 p.m. UTC on January 21st, 2026. There will be no submissions cap as there has been in previous years. All authors can submit to this window.

Separately, we will be closing our Indigenous fiction submission window on January 2nd, 2026, at 3 p.m. UTC. If you are an Indigenous author and would like to submit work to us, please do so before then! We will consider all stories from Indigenous authors submitted before this date. (To be clear, Indigenous authors are also welcome to submit to us during our general submissions window opening January 19th.)

Please see our fiction submission guidelines for more details on how to submit once we open and what we publish. We look forward to reading your work!

For Your Consideration: Strange Horizons 2025 Award Eligibility

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:15:57 +0000

The year is drawing to a close, and we can't help but get wistful. Our 25th year in print—and what a year it's been! We had two nominees in the inaugural Best Poem Hugo, and one of them won. We had stories and poems nominated for the Ignyte, Rhysling, and Hugo awards. We raised a historic amount during our 25th Fund Drive, getting us ready for another spectacular year of stories, poems, reviews, essays, podcasts, and art, with some fantastic special issues in the works as well. And to top it all off, our 25th anniversary podcast, Strange Horizons at 25, was on the longlist for the Best Fancast Hugo Award.

So to everyone who reads us, or listens to the podcasts, or who donated to our Fund Drive or is a member of our Patreon—thank you for celebrating our birthday with us. Onward to year 26! And if you are catching up with your 2025 reading and listening, and would like a refresher on what Strange Horizons works are eligible for various awards, read on.

Jump to section:

Magazine Eligibility • Editors • Fiction (Novelettes • Short Stories) • Poetry • Podcasts • Non-Fiction (Articles • Columns) • Reviews • Art

(This list will be updated with more stories and other content due for publication in December.)

Magazine Eligibility

Strange Horizons in its entirety is eligible for the Locus Award for Best Magazine, British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical, and the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine.

Editors

All of our Editors in Fiction, Poetry, Reviews, and Non-Fiction are eligible individually for the Best Editor - Short Form Hugo Award, and the Best Editor category in the Locus Awards, Nebula Awards, and elsewhere.

The 2025 team was:

Fiction: Hebe Stanton, Aigner Loren Wilson, Dante Luiz, Kathryn Weaver, Joyce Ch'ng
Poetry: Romie Stott, Vanessa Jae, Lisa M Bradley, AJ Odasso
Non-Fiction: Gautam Bhatia, Joyce Ch'ng, Anneke Schwob
Reviews: Dan Hartland, Aishwarya Subramanian

Fiction

Everything in our 2025 archives is eligible for a variety of SFF short fiction awards. For your convenience, we've categorised them by length, as well as by Special Issue where applicable.

As many of the stories below constitute the author's professional debut in the genre, this may make them eligible for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. If a particular work has inspired you and you would like to nominate the author, please seek out their eligibility post on social media or their website, and, if unsure, reach out to them to confirm that they can be nominated. We're sure they'd be delighted to hear from you.

Novelettes - Over 7,500 words

Short Stories - Under 7,500 words

Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse by Max Franciscovich
Ticket po mamser. by Caroline Hung
Arachnomorphosis by Beth Goder
The Luring Lantern by Laura Cranehill
Another Trip Around the Sun by Jon Poley
Machine Hearts by Jeff Dingler
The Last Time Gladys Howled At the Moon by Jennifer Hudak (Aging in SFF Special Issue)
No One Dies of Longing by Anjali Sachdeva
Pandora's Formula by Hannah Yang
Everything We Lost in the Apocalypse by Mar Vincent
Five Things You Can See by Nadia Radovich
How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross by Octavia Cade
The Ache of Hollow Places by Avra Margariti
Because I Held His Name Like a Key by Aimee Ogden
Sceach Gheal by Katie McIvor
Thirteen Swords That Made a Prince: Highlights from the Arms & Armory Collection by Sharang Biswas
Resurrections by Emet North
Poorly Salted, Well-Loved by Athar Fikry
The Capture by Raja'a Khalid
The Heartbreak Hotel on Plutonic Planet by Carolyn Zhao
The Orchard Village Catalog by Parker Peevyhouse
Bullet Time at the Kink Party by miriam
Palimpsest by Melissa A Watkins
HEART FALLOUT by Jess Peng
I Wish You Died Laughing by Lio Abendan

Stop Copaganda Special Issue:

The Afrosurrealist Special Issue, funded by our 2024 Kickstarter:

Poetry

All poems below are eligible for the Rhysling Award, and shorter poems under 10 lines are eligible for the Dwarf Stars Award. If any of the poets listed below have had a chapbook or book of poetry published in the last year, it would be eligible for the Elgin Award.

LAcon V has announced that a Best Poem Hugo Award will be their special category this year, following on from a successful first-stage campaign to enshrine the award in the WSFS rules after its inaugural appearance at Seattle Worldcon—and therefore we'd love it if you checked out the wonderful work we got to publish in 2025 and nominate your favorites when the time comes.

* Part of the Afrosurrealist Special Issue.

Podcasts

Did you know we have four different podcasts as part of the Strange Horizons podcast feed? If you didn't, there is so much you can discover!

Whether you like our audio fiction, which curates narrations of stories previously published in print on the magazine, or our non-fiction content—from our Strange Horizons at 25 celebration interviews, to our Critical Friends discussions on SFF criticism, or the Writing While Disabled podcast format column—there is something here for everyone, always in service of championing diverse and impactful speculative fiction, as well as interesting perspectives and conversations on it.

Fiction Podcast

All fiction stories that were podcasted in 2025 are individually eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work, the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form, and the Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, while the Fiction Podcast as a whole is eligible for the Ignyte Award for Best Fiction Podcast.

Here are all our 2025 Episodes:

Podcast: Coming Through In Waves by Samantha Murray, narrated by Jenna Hanchey
Podcast: Bee Season by Michelle Kulwicki, narrated by Emmie Christie
Podcast: Sandrine by Alexandra Munck, narrated by Claire McNerney
Podcast: Tomorrow is Waiting by Holli Mintzer, narrated by Emmie Christie
Podcast: Reprise by Samantha Lane Murphy, narrated by Emmie Christie
Podcast: BRIDE / BUTCHER / DOE by Lowry Poletti, narrated by Emmie Christie
Podcast: By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars by Premee Mohamed, narrated by Kat Kourbeti
Podcast: 'Half Sick of Shadows' by Elle Engel, narrated by Emmie Christie
Podcast: 'A City on Its Tentacles' by R.B. Lemberg, narrated by Jenna Hanchey
Podcast: 'Sister, Silkie, Siren, Shark' by Ariel Marken Jack, narrated by Emmie Christie
Podcast: Time Is An Ocean by Angela Liu, narrated by Emmie Christie
Podcast: 'Of Flowing Stone, of Liquid Gold, of Justice, Ash, and Battle' by Malda Marlys, narrated by Emmie Christie
Podcast: City Grown From Seed by Diana Dima, narrated by Emmie Christie
Podcast: The Spindle of Necessity by B. Pladek, narrated by Arden Fitzroy

Strange Horizons At 25

Our 25th anniversary celebration limited podcast series hit its stride in 2025, with 11 interviews and one special episode on our anniversary issue available for your enjoyment. The podcast as a whole, helmed by Editors Kat Kourbeti and Michael Ireland, is eligible for the Best Fancast Hugo Award, while individual episodes are eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work.

Critical Friends

The SFF criticism podcast from Review Editors Dan Hartland and Aisha Subramanian is eligible for the Best Fancast Hugo Award, while individual episodes are eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work.

The episodes published in 2025 are:

Writing While Disabled

The column on wrangling a writing career and disability from authors Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston is now in podcast format, and therefore eligible for the Best Fancast Hugo Award, while individual episodes are eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work.

The episodes published in 2025 are:

Non-Fiction

Our robust non-fiction offering covers the whole range from short reviews to in-depth essays, with a smattering of unique formats. All the pieces below are a joy to read, and add a little something to the greater speculative fiction conversation.

The individual essays and reviews are eligible for the BSFA Shorter Non-Fiction Award, Ignyte Award for Outstanding Creative Non-Fiction, and Best Related Work Hugo Award, and every author listed below is also eligible for the Ignyte Critics Award and Best Fan Writer Hugo Award (alongside their other work from this year - please seek it out and support them if you enjoy their work here).

The editors who commissioned and edited the pieces—credited at the bottom of each article—are eligible for Best Editor - Short Form in the Hugos, and Best Editor in the Locus Awards and elsewhere.

Columns

Maria Haskins, "Short Fiction Treasures: Quarterly Fiction Roundup"
- January 2025
- July 2025
Kuzhali Manickavel, "Stories From The Radio"
- The Slide - Final Episode, May 2025
- The Curse of Nagana, August 2025
- The Revolt of the Worms, November 2025
Eugen Bacon, "Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity"
- Finding the Self in the Other, March 2025

Articles

* Part of our Annual Criticism Special Issue.

Reviews

2024 in Review: part one, part two, and part three
Leaked Footages by Abu Bakr Sadiq, reviewed by Paul Chuks
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo, reviewed by Nileena Sunil
Withered Hill by David Barnett, reviewed by Racheal Chie
The Machine Autocorrects Code to I by Chanlee Luu, reviewed by Tristan Beiter
Motheater by Linda H. Codega, reviewed by E. C. Barrett
Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain The World by Chris Gavaler and Nat Goldberg, reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions by Nalo Hopkinson, reviewed by Eugen Bacon *
Takaoka’s Travels by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, reviewed by Prashanth Gopalan *
We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us by Andrew Mangham, reviewed by M. L. Clark *
The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey, reviewed by Stephen Case
Wolfish by Kritika Kapoor, reviewed by Sneha Pathak
Ixelles by Johannes Anyuru translated by Nichola Smalley, reviewed by Areeb Ahmad
Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, reviewed by Helena Ramsaroop
High Vaultage by Chris and Jen Sugden, reviewed by Eric Hendel
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, reviewed by Bill Capossere
Catherine the Ghost by Kathe Koja, reviewed by Andy Sawyer
Magica Riot by Kara Buchanan, reviewed by Dean Leetal
Private Rites by Julia Armfield, reviewed by Chelsea Davis
ChloroPhilia by Cristina Jurado, translated by Sue Burke, reviewed by Rachel Cordasco
The Dark Delight of Being Strange by James B. Haile III, reviewed by Ian J. Simpson
North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher, reviewed by Tristan Beiter
Necessary Poisons by Andrea Blythe, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi
A Power Unbound by Freya Marske, reviewed by Safia H. Senhaji
Dune: Prophecy, reviewed by Marina Berlin
Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan, reviewed by Archita Mittra
Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen, reviewed by Aaron Heil
Honeymoons in Temporary Locations by Ashley Shelby, reviewed by Shannon Fay
A Spectre is Haunting Greentree by Carson Winter, reviewed by Marisa Mercurio
Adam and Eve in Paradise by José Maria de Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, reviewed by Sally Parlier
On the Calculation of Volume I & II by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland, reviewed by Will McMahon
Under the Eye of The Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda, reviewed by Akankshya Abismruta
The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon, reviewed by Dan Hartland
Schrödinger’s Wife (and Other Possibilities) by Pippa Goldschmidt, reviewed by Octavia Cade
J. G. Ballard’s Crash by Paul March-Russell and Keith Roberts’s Pavane: A Critical Companion by Paul Kincaid, reviewed by Adam Roberts
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky, reviewed by Eric Primm
New Adventures in Space Opera edited by Jonathan Strahan, reviewed by Stephen Case
Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton, reviewed by Matt Hilliard
She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor, reviewed by Racheal Chie
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, reviewed by Kyle R. Garton
Salutation Road by Salma Ibrahim, reviewed by Paul Chuks
This Cursed House by Del Sandeen, reviewed by David Lewis
Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Science Fiction edited by Sonia Sulaiman, reviewed by Akankshya Abismruta
Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell, reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Don’t Let the Forest In by C. G. Drews, reviewed by Cameron Miguel
The West Passage by Jared Pechaček, reviewed by Electra Pritchett
The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson, reviewed by Bill Capossere
The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths, reviewed by Sneha Pathak
The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Walker Thompson, reviewed by Jenny Hamilton
You, From Below by Em J. Parsley, reviewed by Phoenix Scholz
Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino, reviewed by Anushree Nande
The Mires by Tina Makereti, reviewed by Octavia Cade
Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens by Lynn Hutchinson Lee, reviewed by Kyle R. Garton
How to Survive This Fairytale by S. M. Hallow, reviewed by Hana Carolina
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar, reviewed by Archita Mittra
The Sea Gives Up the Dead: Stories by Molly Olguín, reviewed by Elizabeth A. Allen
Dream of the Bird Tattoo by Juan J. Morales, reviewed by Tristan Beiter
Peri Peri Paprika by Leanne Su, reviewed by Eric Hendel
William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark by Timothy S. Murphy, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi
Waterblack by Alex Pheby, reviewed by Matthew Eatough
Mickey7 by Edward Ashton and Mickey17, reviewed by Amritesh Mukherjee
The Wheel of Time Season 3, reviewed by Marina Berlin
Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes, reviewed by Shannon Fay
Major Arcana by John Pistelli, reviewed by Catherine Baker
Bird Ornaments by Angel T. Dionne, reviewed by Paul Chuks
Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery, reviewed by David Hebblethwaite
The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist 2025, reviewed by Gautam Bhatia
Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield, reviewed by Marisa Mercurio
The Hampdenshire Wonder by J.D. Beresford, reviewed by William Shaw
Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time by Rasheedah Phillips, reviewed by Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction edited by Eugen Bacon, reviewed by A. S. Lewis
The Afrofuturist Evolution by Ytasha L. Womack, reviewed by Jacqueline Nyathi
The Fake Muse by Max Besora, translated by Mara Faye Lethem, reviewed by Will McMahon **
Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, translated by Eve Hill-Agnus, reviewed by Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira **
The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, reviewed by Jake Casella Brookins **
Archipelago of the Sun by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, reviewed by Dan Hartland **
BUG by Giacomo Sartori, translated by Frederika Randall, reviewed by Rachel Cordasco **
Jurassic World: Rebirth, reviewed by: Tansy Gardam
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, reviewed by Abigail Nussbaum
A Far Better Thing by H. G. Parry, reviewed by Anushree Nande
Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler, reviewed by M. L. Clark
The Flat Woman by Vanessa Saunders, reviewed by Octavia Cade
The Forestborns by Vardhini Amin, reviewed by: Amritesh Mukherjee
Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski, reviewed by William Shaw
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman, reviewed by Amy Nagopaleen
Anji Kills A King by Evan Leikam, reviewed by Jacqueline Nyathi
Animals by Geoff Ryman, reviewed by Roseanna Pendlebury
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab, reviewed by Debbie Gascoyne
The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas, reviewed by Ian J. Simpson
Justice in 21st-Century Fairy Tales and the Power of Wonder by Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill, reviewed by Sally Parlier
Dark Worlds We Wander by Kristin Kirby, reviewed by David Lewis
Ley Lines by Tim Welsh, reviewed by Cameron Miguel
Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel, reviewed by Paul Kincaid
The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction edited by Rakesh Khanna, translated by Vishwambhari S. Parmar, reviewed by Sneha Pathak
Ice Cream Man by W. Maxwell Prince, Martín Morazzo, and Chris O’Halloran, reviewed by Nataliia Sova
Don’t Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo, reviewed by Jenny Hamilton
If the Stars Are Lit by Sara K. Ellis, reviewed by Redfern Jon Barrett
There are Reasons for This by Nini Berndt, reviewed by E. C. Barrett
Supergiants by Kyle Flemmer, reviewed by Dawn Macdonald
Memories From The Jungle by Tristan Garcia, translated by Christopher Beach, reviewed by Will Emmons
Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha, reviewed by William Shaw
Will This Be A Problem? The Anthology: Issue V edited by Olivia Kidula & Somto Ihezue, reviewed by Amritesh Mukherjee
Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake, reviewed by Subham Rai
Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones, reviewed by Phoenix Scholz
Menacing Environments by Benjamin Bigelow, reviewed by Octavia Cade
The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed, reviewed by Jacqueline Nyathi
Black Hole Heart and Other Stories by K. A. Teryna, translated by Alex Shvartsman, reviewed by Rachel Cordasco
Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy by Graham Thomas Wilcox, reviewed by Matt Holder
The Entanglement of Rival Wizards by Sara Raasch, reviewed by Cameron Miguel
When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift, reviewed by Paul March-Russell
The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott, reviewed by Electra Pritchett
It’s Not a Cult by Joey Batey, reviewed by Hana Carolina
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken, reviewed by Akankshya Abismruta
Inner Space by Jakub Szamalek, translated by Kasia Bedford, reviewed by Dawn Macdonald
Blood of the Old Kings (The Bleeding Empire Volume 1) by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur, reviewed by Rachel Cordasco
The Man of Middling Height by Fadi Zaghmout, translated by Wasan Abdelhaq, reviewed by Kyle R. Garton
Seed Beetle: Poems by Mahaila Smith, reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce, reviewed by Tristan Beiter
Eat the Ones you Love by Sarah Maria Griffin, reviewed by Nileena Sunil
The Demon by Victory Witherkeigh, reviewed by Subham Rai
Field Of Frights by Christina Hagmann, reviewed by Racheal Chie
Colourfields by Paul Kincaid, reviewed by Shinjini Dey
Making History by K. J. Parker, reviewed by Cameron Miguel
Esperance by Adam Oyebanji, reviewed by Eric Hendel
The Curators by Maggie Nye, reviewed by Roy Salzman-Cohen
Dementia 21 volumes 1 and 2 by Shintaro Kago, reviewed by Shannon Fay
We Like It Cherry by Jacy Morris, reviewed by Ian J. Simpson
The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, reviewed by Nick Hubble
A Granite Silence by Nina Allan, reviewed by David Hebblethwaite
Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air by L. Timmel Duchamp, reviewed by William Shaw
The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi, reviewed by David Lewis

* Part of our Annual Criticism Special Issue
** Part of our SFF in Translation Week.

Art

Last but not least, the original art accompanying our fiction pages this year is eligible for awards as well. The art itself is eligible for the BSFA Award for Best Artwork, and the artists are eligible for the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist and the Best Fan Artist Hugo Award.

Thank you for considering us and the work we published for your ballots this year; especially for the democratically-awarded ones, where your vote in either the longlist or shortlist stages means the world.

We hope you'll enjoy next year's output just as much, and as we say on the Strange Horizons Podcast... until next time, stay strange!

Welcome New Fiction Editor - Joyce Wolf Chng!

aignerloren — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 04:57:32 +0000

We are very happy to welcome a new Fiction Editor, Joyce Wolf Chng, to the team! Joyce is a writer and editor. They have been with Strange Horizons working as an Articles Editor for eight years and worked on the Southeast Asian and Wuxia Specials. We’re stoked to bring them on to the fiction side and have them bring their wonderful insight and skill to the fiction team. Here’s a little bit more about Joyce:

Joyce Wolf Chng is Chinese and lives in Singapore. Qar writes urban fantasy, YA, and things in between, and wonders about the significance of female knights. Also wrangles kids and cats. Qar's website can be found at http://awolfstale.wordpress.com. (Also likes wolves).

With Joyce coming on to our fiction side, we are also saying goodbye to previous editor Aigner Loren Wilson at the end of 2025.

"I've been with Strange Horizons in various roles since 2017 and a senior fiction editor since 2021. Being part of the team has meant so much to me over the years, but it's time to move on to new horizons, which I hope are just as strange." - Aigner Loren Wilson

The Path Continues

Joyce Chng — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 02:59:45 +0000

This year is a momentous year for Strange Horizons. It turns 25!

As for me, I turned 50, half a century old, but still walking an ever-winding path. So, this essay will be a celebration for me and Strange Horizons, and how a science fiction magazine/collective has grown from strength to strength.

In 2016/7, Vanessa (Ness) Phin invited me to be part of the non-fiction department. Around this time, I was just finding my feet as a science fiction writer and facing many challenges. Intrigued and touched, I said yes… and the next thing I knew, I was in a conference call with Ness and Niall Harrison. I still remember that day very well: a Sunday late afternoon, almost early evening, when we “met”.

So, my journey as a non-fiction editor began. And it was such an amazing start, because I was/am also an aca-fan too (aca = academic). I organized roundtables* (Australian Science Fiction, Domestic Space Opera and Water Is Life) as well as soliciting and editing columns, essays and articles from the slush pile. I have had amazing columnists (Trials By Whiteness (Jaymee Goh) and Stories From The Radio (Kuzhali Manickavel). I have met so many talented writers and creatives around from the world: Judith Tarr, Kate Elliot, Ann Leckie, Foz Meadows, Darcie Little Badger, Rebecca Roanhorse and Stephanie Soejono.

As I grew more confident, I managed more projects as the Southeast Asian and Wuxia specials, both near and dear to me, as I am committed to showcasing Asian voices (both in Asia and diaspora). Admittedly, the projects took a bit of energy out of us (because it was a team effort – Jaymee Goh, May Chong, Mia Tsai and Yilin Wang) – but the satisfaction came when the stories in the specials were loved by readers, longlisted and shortlisted for awards, and told us very clearly that people wanted Asian stories by Asians. Likewise, Harley Wu and Tan Shao Han broadened people’s perspectives with incisive analyses of The Untamed and danmei in China, and World War Two/the Japanese Occupation in Singapore via table-top role-playing games respectively.

My spouse would often question me, half-jokingly, if I get paid for all these. I don’t – it’s all volunteer work. I am doing this because I love all things sffnal. Strange Horizons is a collective of volunteers who love science fiction, fantasy and horror.

As paths always are, mine has begun to twist as I face my 50s. But I do not see it as a door closing: another door is opening. And for Strange Horizons, my same wish too: May more doors open and may more join us, because collectives shift, change and expand.

Yet, as all things go, I would eventually have to bow out. So, I am wholeheartedly putting out a call for individuals who would like to volunteer their time as articles editors. I would like to see more Southeast Asians (in Southeast Asia or diaspora). But that’s my 50^th birthday wish (well, one of them, hehe).

Happy birthday, Strange Horizons!

*We should have more roundtables. They offer so many diverse observations and perspectives!

Speculative Poetry and the Hugos

Lynne Sargent — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 05:39:32 +0000

Speculative poetry has always been a part of my DNA. The very first poem I ever wrote was as part of a book report response to Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza City of Masks—a YA portal fantasy. When I think of my favourite poems growing up, I think of Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry, the walking songs in Tolkien, Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” and others in a similar speculative vein. When I took a course in University on the history of Fantasy literature, over half the course was comprised of poetry: Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare. Poetry and the speculative are fundamentally intertwined.

I began publishing poetry in 2017 and was floored to receive my first Aurora Award nomination in 2018. For a Canadian, the Auroras are the biggest spec award out there, and I had often heard about the greatest trifecta a Canadian speculative writer could achieve: an Aurora, a Hugo, and a Nebula, the so-called “Big Three.” I was devastated to find out that of these, only the Auroras recognized poetry. Despite this lock-out, the speculative community, and especially the speculative poetry community welcomed me with open arms. While the majority of folks in the SFF space are friendly, poetry folks in my experience are especially kind and encouraging, because we are used to tempting individuals down what people generally view as the scary rabbit hole of poetry.

Poetry is often daunting to those unused to dabbling in its mystic waters for the first time because it is often less familiar to readers—in part because it is not elevated and publicized through awards like the Hugos. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association is there to support speculative poets more broadly, and gives out important awards in the field, but the SFPA’s specific focus on poetry silos poets apart from other writers. In general, the exclusion of poetry from the Hugos and the Nebulas is a deep wound which prevents the speculative community from properly supporting and including poets, and has at times pushed poets and would-be poets away from celebrating genre elements in the form of poetry.

A novel cannot be a short story cannot be a flash story cannot be a poem, and vice versa. These are all different ways of telling stories, and particular stories are best expressed at certain lengths and in certain styles. Some genre work simply wants to be poetry. It flourishes in poetry. Refusing to acknowledge poetry as a style worthy of a Hugo award diminishes its status within the genre, and disincentivizes the writing and publication of poetry.

According to Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugos, the Hugo Award continues to be the most influential speculative award globally, in terms of book sales. For good reasons or bad ones, the Hugos also tend to be the most widely covered genre award in big newspapers like The New York Times, The Guardian, and NPR. A high profile for speculative poetry, especially if that profile is to transcend the in-group of dedicated genre readers and writers, requires the inclusion of poetry in the Hugo Awards.

Poetry, too, is a perfect point at which to expand the borders of the genre community—after all, just as many folks read Tennyson as fantasy, many also read him simply as a poetry great. Poetry is in a unique position as a style to transcend the boundaries of literary and of genre categories, inviting new audiences to see the value in the trappings and subject matter of SF/F.

Hugo Award winning writer Amal El-Mohtar has often written about how poetry was a fundamental scaffold for her writing, and how that scaffold was inspired by Tolkien himself. She writes in an interview, “Tolkien began writing poetry, then moved into short stories, then novels. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s how you become a writer,’ and set about doing the same thing.” Similarly, Hugo Award winner Seanan McGuire notes in her bio and in several articles and interviews the importance of learning to write sonnets (first at the age of six, and later as an extended practice inspired by Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin) as an essential part of her writing journey.

Hugo Award winner Catherynne Valente has a similar story, expressing even more strongly that originally she had “no interest in writing fiction at all … Everything I ever learned about writing until after my first novel was published was in the realm of poetry.” Sadly, she’s also shared that as she gained recognition for her prose, she stopped writing poetry because poetry does not pay as well as prose, and because “fantasy poetry folks still struggle for respect and attention.” Having a speculative poem category on the Hugo ballot is the chance to give speculative poetry the respect and attention it deserves, and will incentivize great writers to continue writing poetry.

For those who enjoy poetry and the speculative but are not so enmired in the bureaucracy and community activism that supports a speculative poetry ecosystem, I found it often came as a shock that there is no Hugo for poetry. Even editors I approached to support this initiative were surprised to have forgotten this oversight in the genre. R. Graeme Cameron, publisher of the magazines Polar Borealis and Polar Starlight, had this to say in response to my email asking for his support: “I had forgotten there is no poetry category in the Hugos. I find this shocking. If the primary function of the Hugos is to celebrate science fiction literature, this failure to include poetry needs to be corrected. It is such a vital part of the genre.”

It is a strange dualism to straddle—the idea that poetry can be so essential to the speculative genre, and also so much the maligned and redheaded stepchild when it comes to accolades and the ability to build a career off of the back of poetry alone. Poetry is the foundation upon which many of the SF/F greats built their craft; it’s the foundation upon which the genre is built going back as far as the ancient epics; and yet genre writers are now driven away from poetry because it lacks the opportunity for prestige that other styles have—and because it simply cannot pay the bills.

The tide is turning, though. The tireless activism of speculative poets like Brandon O’Brien and Holly Lyn Walrath, among others, have meant that we do have a speculative poetry award at this year’s Hugos, and that poetry can now confer eligibility to join SFWA—the closest thing genre writers have to a union. My asks for support of the Poetry Hugo initiative were met with unanimous support from magazine paragons of the genre including Asimov’s, Analog, and Strange Horizons, and individual editors themselves. The tension of poetry’s role in the speculative genre is surmountable.

Accepting contradictory things and holding warring ideas both in conflict and in harmony is one of the things poetry excels at. Poetry is always crossing worlds, always living in multiplicity, quantum entanglement, in the realm of dreams and hope. It’s time to let this medium of the speculative shine, and include it in the broader conversation of genre in a time where there are myriad disruptions to the field.

If you are interested in ensuring that poetry can get the speculative spotlight it deserves, and preserving this important aspect of SF/F’s past and future, you can support the speculative poetry initiative by learning more at https://www.poetryhugo.com/, and you can sign up for email updates. If you are a member of WorldCon 2025, you can also join in the business meetings and vote in support of making poetry a permanent fixture on the Hugo ballot. If science fiction and fantasy are the genres of the future, and the genres of inclusiveness—expanding our circles of care to those in other worlds and far-flung futures—it simply must also include poetry. As a matter of preservation of the foundation the genre rests on, and as a matter of futurity in ensuring the genre remains open to the widest possible imaginings, poetry must be a part of the Hugos. It’s time.

Dream Logic, Hauntings, and Joy: An Introduction to the AfroSurreal Special Issue

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 22:00:31 +0000

“AfroSurrealism presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.”

— D. Scott Miller, the “Afrosurreal Manifesto.”

Storytelling is how we uncover what’s been buried, that invisible world striving to manifest. It is with deep gratitude that we present the Strange Horizons AfroSurreal Special Issue. We want to begin by thanking the Strange Horizons team for their belief in this vision, and for providing the platform and trust to bring it to life. Special thanks to the speculative fiction and poetry community for uplifting the call, and to every reader, writer, and artist who continues to make space for the strange, the dreamlike, the in-between.

The AfroSurreal issue was born from a desire to gather work that plays with perception and memory, that bends time and subverts logic, that centers the lived and imagined experiences of Black people in their full, kaleidoscopic complexity. We received submissions from across the diaspora, from worlds haunted by the spectres of colonialism and slavery and shaped by collective resistance, where the veil between the real and the surreal has always been thin. Thank you to everyone who shared their work with us. Reading your stories and poems was a gift, and we hope to see your names echo loudly in issues and books to come.

AfroSurrealism is not just a genre: it’s an inheritance. A praxis. A refusal. It emerges from an artistic lineage that includes the paintings of Wangechi Mutu and Harmonia Rosales, the fiction of Toni Morrison and Kojo Laing, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and M. NourbeSe Philip. It’s in the myths whispered by grandmothers and in the speculative architecture of Black urban futures. AfroSurrealism dares to say: the fantastical is already here. The rupture is not a break from reality, it is reality.

In fiction, our table of contents features three stories that highlight a range of voices, tones, and styles. “Till Earth and Heaven Ring” by K. S. Walker draws on critical fabulation to tell a story of two lovers self-emanacipating, and a hole in one’s chest that whispers freedom. “The Black Refinery” by Nadia Amatullah King invokes sand trolls in an allegory about exploitation, resistance, and what it means to be human in a world that treats certain bodies as expendable resources. Rutendo Chidzodzo’s “Let Sleeping Hyenas Lie” situates us in a land dispute between an indigenous African community and a gentrifying international corporation.

In poetry, language turns fluid to melt, recode, and re-member. NOVA CYPRESS BLACK’s “SET IT OFF (1996) – FANS’ CUT” uses the Golden Shovel form to reimagine the ending of the Black classic film Set it Off. “parallels” by Praise Osawaru resists linearity, and the past, present, and future collide. Adebe DeRango-Adem’s “luminaries” is a calligram of a light bulb to meditate on Black invention and erasure, and to honor those ancestors and inventors whose light has been dimmed.

In nonfiction, “A Conjuror’s Manifesto: Notes on the Afrosurreal” by Shyheim Williams reflects on the surrealities of Black life, where joy is hard-won, where history distorts the present, and where the very act of imagining otherwise becomes a radical gesture.

This issue is a chorus of Black voices committed to wonder, mystery, myth, and magic. It is a celebration of the speculative traditions that have always existed within our communities. It is also a call to readers, editors, and publishers to broaden their definitions of genre and form, to welcome the nonlinear, the unsettling, the uncanny.

It has been an immense honor to curate and care for this body of work. We hope this issue opens something inside you—an ache, a portal, a question. Black writers are conjurers and cartographers, reshaping the world word by word.

Without further ado, we invite you to step inside.

Warmly,

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu and Shingai Njeri Kagunda

Guest Editors, AfroSurreal Special Issue

Strange Horizons

Call for Volunteers: Webmaster

Gautam Bhatia — Mon, 05 May 2025 11:34:40 +0000

Strange Horizons is looking for a new webmaster to handle the Strange Horizons website. Strange Horizons runs on WordPress. While the website is more or less self-running, from time to time - as with any website - problems and issues arise. As the Webmaster, thus, the following skills will be desirable:

PHP and MySQL, with an understanding of WordPress
WordPress theme design (HTML/CSS, but with a specific focus on WordPress)
An ability to troubleshoot and wrangle a mixture of technical and non-technical requests

This role is ideal for someone with a Computer Science and engineering background, who has the time to dedicate to aiding Strange Horizons. As the Webmaster, you will work closely with the management team, including the co-ordinating editor (Gautam) and administrative editor (Romie), as well as be in touch with the various editorial departments.The time commitment is flexible, as it depends on as and when bugs arise, but we do not anticipate it to go beyond 1-2 hours a week, on an average. You will be assisted with onboarding by our present webmaster, Will Elwood.

Please send in your applications to gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com, briefly indicating your interest and background for this role.

Novelette Submission Guidelines

aignerloren — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 19:33:55 +0000

On June 4th, we will be opening for speculative fiction novelette submissions between the word count of 10,000 and 18,000 words. We will cap submissions at 300.

Once we reach the cap, we’ll close our portal while we work through the submissions. If our portal is open, we are still accepting stories, but once it is closed, please do not send us your work.

In order to allow more writers to submit to us and widen our pool of submissions, we will not be allowing multiple or simultaneous submissions to our other open windows throughout the year:

General Submissions: April 16th
Indigenous Author Submissions: November 3rd

That means writers may only send one story across all three open submissions. If you have submitted a story to our April general open call, you may not submit for the other two open calls in June and November.

Please see our fiction submission guidelines for more details on how to submit once we open and what we publish. Since we are using a submission cap, we encourage authors to submit promptly!

Indigenous Author Submissions

aignerloren — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 19:33:55 +0000

On November 3rd, we will be opening for speculative fiction stories written by Indigenous authors. We will be capping submissions at 500. When we say Indigenous authors, some examples include:

Polynesian
Inuit
Indigenous People of North and South America
African
Greenlandic
Jamaican
Aboriginal people

This list is not comprehensive and we encourage and ask that authors submitting to this open call tell us in their cover letters the specificities of your identity(ies). The stories submitted do not have to be stories about or set within an Indigenous culture or feature characters from that culture, but they do have to be speculative fiction and written by Indigenous authors.

Once we reach the submission cap, we’ll close our portal while we work through the submissions. If our portal is open, we are still accepting stories, but once it is closed, please do not send us your work.

In order to allow more writers to submit to us and widen our pool of submissions, we will not be allowing multiple or simultaneous submissions to our other open windows throughout the year:

General Submissions: April 16th
Novelette Submissions: June 4th

That means writers may only send one story across all three open submissions. If you have submitted a story to our April or June open call, you may not submit for this open call.

Please see our fiction submission guidelines for more details on how to submit once we open and what we publish. Since we are using a submission cap, we encourage authors to submit promptly!

Special Issue: Ageing and SFF

Gautam Bhatia — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 19:00:52 +0000

We are delighted to present to you our second special issue of the year. This one is devoted to ageing and SFF, a theme that is ever-present (including in its absence) in the genre. We hope you will enjoy our offering of stories, poetry, essays, and reviews, all commissioned and curated by the Strange Horizons editorial collective.

In Jennifer Hudak's story, “The Last Time Gladys Howled At the Moon,” a werewolf battles to come to terms with her own ageing. Purbasha Roy's poem, “Everyone Dies,” reflects on, and contemplates the acceptance of death. But if ageing is not simply about an inevitable journey towards death, but also about the transformations on that path, then R.B. Lemberg's “The blanket, the secret, the dark” illumines those transformations through the vivid life-cycle of a butterfly; and Devan Barlow's “A Tree, At Peace” explores a rather different type of bodily transmogrification! And rounding off the poetry, M. Frost's “view” speaks of the mirror to ageing: memory.

We carry this theme forward in our non-fiction. Isabel Black's essay, “Grannies Against Oppression” explores the role of elders in resistance to totalitarianism and oppression by examining the last three books of The Expanse. And while our three reviews of the week are connected by the theme of the International Booker Prize, the thread of ageing also runs through them. In On the Calculation of Volume, we see the reliving of a single day over time; Under the Eye of the Big Words tackles the ageing of the planet, and of species; and finally, the pivotal character in The Book of Disappearance is a grandmother.

We at Strange Horizons hope that this special issue—in the way of all of our special issues—will contribute to a conversation, and to reflections about how the genre engages with ageing, and all that comes in its wake.

Open Fiction Submission Windows - 2025

Aigner Loren Wilson — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 11:46:52 +0000

Strange Horizons will have three open fiction submissions throughout 2025:

General Submissions: April 16th at 9 a.m. UTC with a 1,000 story cap
Novelette Submissions: June 4th at 9 a.m. UTC with a 300 story cap*
Indigenous Author Submissions: November 3rd at 9 a.m. UTC with a 500 story cap

Once we reach the caps on these open submissions, we’ll close our portal while we work through the submissions. If our portal is open, we are still accepting stories, but once it is closed, please do not send us your work.

Please see our fiction submission guidelines for more details on how to submit once we open and what we publish. Since we are using a story caps, we encourage authors to submit promptly!

All submissions submitted during our last open submission period will be responded and decided on before the open submission in April. We will post more information on our novelette and indigenous author submissions at a later date.

*For our novelette submissions, we will be open to stories between 10,000 and 18,000 words.

Nominating for the 2025 Hugo Awards? Here is your Strange Horizons primer.

Kat Kourbeti — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 17:08:37 +0000

Here at Strange Horizons, we publish loads of wonderful different kinds of content every year, from short fiction to poetry and from reviews to criticism essays (not to mention podcasts, selfishly), and 2024 was no exception. With at least one short story and poem published most weeks, our special issues collecting themed works, and of course our rich non-fiction section, there is plenty of literature to indulge in over the year, and by all means we do encourage you to check out the 2024 archives for the full picture. We also began celebrating our 25th anniversary with a special podcast project, which is still ongoing (and will continue to be until September 2025).

To put it simply, our work continues as it ever has, with onward momentum.

We normally like to let the work speak for itself and don't actively campaign for awards season; but bouncing off our miraculous, six-vote majority Hugo win in 2024, we want to highlight some of the editorial team's favourite pieces from the last year, for your consideration in this coming year's Hugo Awards. The nominations deadline is the March 14, 2025, 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7), and you'll need a WSFS membership for Seattle Worldcon. Here is a guide on how to nominate.

Please note, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but merely a collection of highlights based on editorial comments and readership numbers throughout 2024. We love everything we published last year, and by selecting some highlights we are not endorsing some stories over others. Please do check out the archives if you are interested; we promise you'll find only gold.

As we said in our acceptance speech last year, it takes a village to raise this baby, and we wouldn't be who we are without the multitudinous volunteers who give their time to make this magazine possible, nor without the writers who pour their souls out in the name of art and expression, often from far-flung corners of the planet. Thank you, as ever, for trusting us with your art.

Without further ado, our recommended reading list for this year's Hugo Awards!

Short Story (up to 7,500 words):

The Spindle of Necessity by B. Pladek
Godskin by CL Hellisen
The Jaxicans’ Authentic Reconstruction of Taco Tuesday #37 by Stephen Granade
Threshold by Audrey Zhou
Cicadas, and Their Skins by Avra Margariti
Faith is a Butterfly Resting on a Rotting Eye (or The Art of Faith) by Gabrielle Emem Henry
Nuca by Ana Hurtado
Exit Interview by KW Onley
Frogskin by M.L. Krishnan

Novelette (7,501 - 17,500 words):

The Aquarium for Lost Souls by Natasha King
By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars by Premee Mohamed
BRIDE / BUTCHER / DOE by Lowry Poletti

This year there is also a Special Hugo Award for Poetry!

As one of the few long-running poetry markets in the genre, this is especially joyous for us. Here are our full 2024 poetry archives, and these are some highlights:

The Battle Verses of Prufrock J. Alfred by Rachel Rodman
Lotus Descends to Visit Nova by Sammy Lê
The Lantern Runner by Christopher Morgan
One Large Deep Fried Thistle Burr by Jonathan Olfert
Interstellar Assistance by M.C. Childs
Gold Foil Experiment by R. Christopher Aversa
Why is the Forest Lonely? by Pacella Chukwuma- Eke
The Same Fur Coat by Sonya Taaffe

And of course, if you like what we do, please consider putting us at the top of your ballot in the following categories:

Best Semiprozine - The Strange Horizons Editorial Collective
Best Editor, Short Form:
- our fiction editors Hebe Stanton, Kat Weaver, Aigner Loren Wilson, and Dante Luiz,
- our poetry editors, AJ Odasso, Romie Stott, Vanessa Jae and Lisa M. Bradley,
- and our articles editor Joyce Chng.
Best Fancast - Strange Horizons At 25, by Kat Kourbeti and Michael Ireland

Call for Volunteers: Patreon Manager

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:35:43 +0000

Strange Horizons is on the hunt for a new volunteer Patreon Manager to join our team.

Our Patreon Manager will work with our social media team and fundraising team to ensure that Strange Horizons is engaged with our Patreon patrons. The Patreon Manager will also assist with the Strange Horizons annual fundraiser. Responsibilities will include: preparing and updating the Kickstarter page for the annual fundraiser, contacting writers for reward donations, and posting regular updates to the Kickstarter page.

We highly encourage Black, queer, disabled, and/or neurodiverse candidates to apply.

Responsibilities

Post weekly updates to Patreon corresponding to each new issue posted on Strange Horizons.
Communicate with patrons who send messages through Patreon.
Assisting with creating the Kickstarter page for the annual fundraiser, and posting regularly to the Kickstarter page throughout the fund drive.

Requirements

Ability to work well with others in an online setting.
Excellent communication and writing skills.

Time commitment

You will need to write a post for Patreon to go with each of our weekly issues. This will require reviewing the material in each issue and writing a paragraph or two to present it to patrons. The expected time commitment for this is 1-2 hours per week. During the annual fundraiser and for the month prior, an additional 1-2 hours a week would be needed.

How to apply

If you’re interested, send an email to management@strangehorizons.com with the following subject line: PATREON MANAGER CANDIDATE: your name here (with “your name here” replaced by your actual name, of course).

In the email, introduce yourself, tell us about your relevant experience (if any), let us know a little about why you’d like to join us. You don’t have to have previous experience with Patreon—we want to hear from anyone interested in the position.

Afrosurrealism Special Issue: Submissions Call

Gautam Bhatia — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:00:09 +0000

[Editor's Note: This is the submissions call for Strange Horizons' special issue on AfroSurrealist SF, which was one of our stretch goals in last year's fund-drive, and will be published on June 30. The submissions window for the special issue is April 15 to April 30. Please read this post carefully if you are intending to submit.]

“AfroSurrealism presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.”

— D. Scott Miller, the AfroSurreal Manifesto.

Imagine the Sunken Place of Get Out, where reality slips like a trapdoor beneath your feet. Imagine the demon hunters of Ring Shout, fighting horrors that lurk beneath history’s skin. Imagine the surreal logic of Atlanta, the strange landscapes of I Am Not a Witch, the absurdity of Sorry to Bother You and the gothic terror of His House.

Welcome to the Afrosurrealist Special Issue, where the boundaries between the real and the unreal blur, where reality bends, time fractures, and the living and the dead exist side by side. Afrosurrealism has long given shape to our struggles, our power, and our dreams. This special issue seeks to bring those visions to life through stories that cut deep—tales that unsettle, haunt, and liberate.

Many of us have become enchanted by Afrosurrealism through the works of pioneers like D. Scot Miller, Ishmael Reed, and Ralph Ellison. Others found their way here through films like Get Out, Atlanta, and The Burial of Kojo. From the speculative beats of Sun Ra to the haunting visions of Octavia Butler, Afrosurrealism has always existed at the intersection of resistance, reimagination, and the radical transformation of the mundane into the magical.

For this special issue, we are looking for:

Worlds that slip between the mundane and the uncanny, the ghostly and the futuristic.
Worlds rich with history and spirit striving to manifest—whether set in the past, present, or futures unknown.
Tales of hauntings, doppelgängers, liminal spaces, memories, and places that don’t stay put.
Give us your tales of portals that lead to nowhere, of cities that rearrange themselves overnight, of people becoming someone—or something—else.
Narratives that challenge traditional structures and defy linear storytelling.
Works that experiment with or reimagine genres like sword & soul, jujuism, cyberfunk, or Black gothic horror.
Visions of power, freedom, and transformation shaped by the Black experience where Blackness itself is a force that bends time, space, and destiny.

Send us your myths. Your nightmares. Your dreams wrapped in ancestral magics and spirit.

The editors for the AfroSurrealism Special invite you to submit fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

We welcome writers who are new and experienced. The submissions call is open to writers of African descent ONLY, whether based in the diaspora or in Africa. We ask writers to be mindful of cultural appropriation. Rachel Dolezals are not allowed.

Submission Period: April 15 to 30. Fiction, poetry, and non-fiction will be submitted through Strange Horizons' Moksha portal, here:

Submissions Portal:

https://strangehorizons.moksha.io/publication/strange-horizons/afrosurrealism-special-issue/submit

Note this submission category is specifically for this special issue. If you submit something for this issue through, say, the poetry portal, it will go to the wrong editors! Make sure you submit in the Afrosurrealism Special category.

Editorial Team:

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu (she/her) and Shingai Njeri Kagunda (she/they) for Fiction (2,000 – 7,000 words); Poetry (of any length or complexity); Non-Fiction (2,000 – 3,000 words).

Fiction

Yvette and Shingai are looking for the bizarre, otherworldly, dream-like and uncanny realities that are staples of Afrosurrealism, they can be historical or contemporary, or set elsewhere.

Poetry

Yvette and Shingai are looking for speculative poetry. We encourage submissions that play with form, language, and genre.

Nonfiction

Yvette and Shingai want new perspectives on Afrosurrealism, especially by voices underrepresented in the genre like women, queer voices etc (for example essays on queer and feminist interventions of the genre are most welcome).

On Claims and Criticism

Aishwarya Subramanian and Dan Hartland — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:14:15 +0000

One of the recurring themes of Strange Horizons Criticism Specials has been that we try to avoid grand claims. It is all too easy when one is an enthusiast for a thing to argue that the thing is also important. This is doubly true for a thing that has such a history of self-aggrandisement as Literary Criticism. Only recently, for example, we had one literary scholar being sorry-not-sorry to opine:

It is no coincidence that the decline of reading has coincided with the plummeting cultural authority of literary criticism. If we want to save reading, we must restore literary critics to their former rockstar status.

We must save reading! Literary critics, assemble. But wait! There are even greater, even graver, problems that our method can—and must!—solve. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton argued that “[c]ulture in our time has become nothing less than a full-blooded ideology,” and showed in his working how—in his view—good criticism might be used to arrest this rot. Even those, such as Merve Emre in the New Yorker, who believe all is not well in the critical field seem invested in the idea that it should be, since good criticism—if we could only ensure the good kind was ascendant, or be sure what the good kind is—may serve the common good.

But we’re reminded here of Annette Kolodny: “our purpose is not and should not be the formulation of any single reading method or potentially procrustean set of critical procedures nor, even less, the generation of prescriptive categories for some dreamed-of nonexistent literary canon.” We should not trust criticism as a method—its primary goal is not to be or even to do good, but to question. Sometimes it struggles even with that.

We might hope that criticism has made great strides in achieving a mindful self-knowledge since Kolodny wrote in 1980—that it is now better placed to ask questions without insisting on particular answers. But—as Elizabeth Anker has argued in the Los Angeles Review of Books, or as Simon During has written in the Chronicle of Higher Education—there might be a “reactionary turn” underway in particularly academic criticism. This seems to aim not towards continual regeneration but a return to the methods of I. A. Richards.

All of which is by means of saying: We wouldn’t want to tell you that literary criticism can save the world; we wouldn’t even want to say it aims to.

And yet. This year’s special arrives at a time of rude health for specifically science fiction and fantasy criticism. From Nerds of a Feather to the Ancillary Review of Books, BlueSky’s burgeoning critical community to whole new publications such as Typebar and Speculative Insight, there appears to be not just a desire on the part of some to write SFF criticism, but on the part of others to read it. A recent special issue of the longstanding critical journal Foundation focused on the fiftieth anniversary of Brian Aldiss’s foundational history of SF, Billion Year Spree (1974); that so many critics are still in this field, and still have readers to speak to, might after all that time be achievement enough.

One of the contributors to that special issue of Foundation is also present in this edition of Strange Horizons. In “Who Is In Danger?”, Paul Kincaid writes for us on the complex history of one of science fiction’s most infamous anthology series, Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions sequence. In particular, he focuses on the “final” volume published last year, taking a tour through the history of science fiction to look at the ways in which “this is not the book that was promised.” In other words, he employs the tools of criticism to construct a context in which a work might properly be understood.

On the topic of understanding texts, it’s always such a pleasure to work with our Poetry Editors to include verse in these specials—since they help animate and dramatize the abstractions of criticism. In “The Egg,” River shows with constructive creativity how many ways we might read a text; in “The Resolution of N,” Lillian Tsay provides an alternative ending to another; and in “Frankenstein’s Tongue”—a poem that draws on a novel which rears its head a few times in this special—Liam Campbell posits the sort of death of culture against which one hopes (though it is not always clearly so) criticism is set.

What these poems inevitably do is turn us back to interpretation, and how to do it. Paul’s essay for us is a marvellous example of how to “do” genre history as one form of practice. (It’s also a demonstration of why his forthcoming Colourfields, to be published later this year by Briardene Books, will be essential reading.) Historical context proves important to some of the special’s other critics, too. In her essay on ectogenesis, for example, Zoe Tongue spends considerable time on the 1997 movie Gattaca; and in a piece on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (2001-3), Tansy Gardam looks back on the details of that storied production, seeking to understand the impact of the films through the circumstances of their production.

But of course criticism is also forward-facing, bridging from a reading of the past to an assessment of our present: in Tansy’s case, her assessment of what are now canonical works of cinema leads to conclusions about the malaise of contemporary Hollywood; and in Zoe’s we come to learn a great deal about the visions and values that now inform the US’s newly minted billionaire ruling class, from Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen. It's a sign of our times, in fact, that Andreessen also appears in Jacqueline Nyathi’s essay, which focuses not on the past or the present but on how we might imagine our futures: in “Collective Dreaming,” Jacqueline argues that SFF—and culture more widely—must complete the work of shifting, expanding, reorienting its points of reference and view in order to construct more productive possibilities for ourselves, our species, our planet.

The answer to most of our contemporary questions, Jacqueline suggests, lies not in narrowing our focus but in expanding it radically. In an interview for our SH@25 podcast series that appears in this issue, Bogi Takács notes that reviewers can serve as curators of recommendations, helping to widen an individual reader's pool of choices—and maybe steering the collective gaze to under-appreciated or unacknowledged works or authors. Nat Harrington’s essay on “Celtic” and Celtic fantasy argues similarly, proceeding from analysis of eighteenth-century romances towards twenty-first-century novels in Gaelic—and concluding that fantasy has yet truly to reckon with the cultures it has plundered to create itself. This postcolonial theme—shared across multiple pieces in this issue—is echoed, too, in our reviews from Eugen Bacon and Prashanth Gopalan … and the week ends with M. L. Clark’s look at a book-length work of criticism, We Are All Monsters, which—again through historical as well as literary analysis—brings us back to the start: Who, when we write speculative fiction in a time of monsters, is in danger? And who should be?

What of material effect will all this criticism have achieved? Reader, we can’t say. Maybe none. But maybe some. Who knows? What is clear is that there are many questions to ask—and to answer—in the speculative field, and that the community asking them feels more cohesive, and more productive, than in some years. Even in our first of these editorials, in 2022, we worried with our late friend Maureen Kincaid Speller that reviewing was devolving into an adjunct of marketing. Perhaps in some quarters this is still the case—the wailing and gnashing of publishers’ teeth around BookTok’s recent near-death experience in the USA is a case in point. But there is also a sense that perhaps those of us who hold differently haven’t yet surrendered. These special issues are, if nothing else, one record of texts worth thinking with—and the thinking we might do with them. Barbara Christian once wrote that, for her, “literary criticism is promotion as well as understanding.” For the moment, maybe that’s claim enough.

Stop Surveillance Copaganda: A Collaboration with Fight for the Future

hebestanton — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 21:11:00 +0000

Copaganda: narratives that sanitize the violent realities of surveillance technology and sell them as inevitable or even aspirational. Copaganda is Paw Patrol. Copaganda is Men in Black. Copaganda is Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

Surveillance technology looms large in our lives, sold to us as tools for safety, justice, and convenience. Yet the reality is far more sinister. From biometric tracking to predictive policing, centralized surveillance systems often serve to entrench systemic inequalities, infringe on privacy, and oppress marginalized communities. They are wielded not to protect us, but to consolidate power in the hands of the few.

For decades, speculative fiction has been used to glorify surveillance and law enforcement, often turning harmful technologies into unquestioned symbols of progress or, worse yet, cool, neat ideas that people want to buy and bring into their lives.

That’s why we have partnered with Fight for the Future, RightsCon, and COMPOST Magazine to present this special issue featuring the five winning stories from the Stop Surveillance Copaganda contest. The result is a collection that challenges the status quo of technology acceptance for the sake of progress and convenience.

In Christopher R. Muscato’s “A Charm to Keep the Evil Eye Away from Your Campervan; Or, Roamin’ Rights”, we see a far-right government encroaching on its citizens’ right to privacy in the name of sustainability. Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff’s “Crisis Actors” examines the rise of digital technologies that allow law enforcement representatives to commit violence at a distance. “Curlews” by Cecilia Ananías Soto offers a chilling look at how fertility monitoring apps can be weaponised against people with wombs. Rich Larson’s “Murder in the Clavist Autonomous Zone” dives into the ways in which policing is used to shore up the status quo and suppress alternative modes of living. And in Christine Phan’s “Taking Back the City,” we witness the effects that the excessive collection of personal data can have on queer and immigrant communities in the US.

These stories are blueprints, provocations, and acts of defiance, pointing us toward a more just and free future. We are proud to share these works with you, and we hope they inspire you as much as they’ve inspired us.

Delays! But We're Ok.

Romie Stott — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 12:16:25 +0000

Needless to say, it's been a bit of a week. A number of us (editors, writers, readers) have been scatterbrained or have cocooned, or have simply been tired. The result is that our current issue is currently... one poem. And reviews. (Props to the impeccable reviews department.)

More is coming. By the end of the week, we intend to have our second poem ready (maybe by the time you read this message it's already up), and new fiction. I can't tell you exactly when. But we're still here, still working. A bit slowly. A bit tossed around. But here.

On that note, we're getting pretty close to the end of 2024, and we still haven't published the Japanese SFF special issue we promised. That's still coming too! But it will come out some time in 2025.

Thank you for reading; for writing; for funding; for dreaming. If you keep coming back, we'll keep coming back too.

A Hugo Award - And More!

Gautam Bhatia — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 15:47:39 +0000

At the Glasgow WorldCon earlier this month, the 80+ members of our editorial collective, scattered around the world, experienced a novel sensation: at the Hugo Awards ceremony, after the nominees for the best semiprozine were announced, the sealed envelope opened, and the dramatic moment’s pause accomplished, the name that was read out was … Strange Horizons.

Until this year, Strange Horizons had been a losing finalist at the Hugos every year since 2013. As you can probably guess, our fate at the Hugos has been the subject of long-running in-jokes and gags within the magazine, on our internal Slack group. But an albatross around the neck is still an albatross, even though it might have a sunny disposition and crack witty jokes; and it is always a relief to unburden oneself of the said avian.

With that said, we want to take this opportunity to reaffirm a few things.

The first is our gratitude to the SF community, to the voters, and to our readers, without whom we would not exist. Awards are, of course, subjective, but they tell us that the work we do is seen and appreciated by the community that we are a part of. They are an important reminder that a space such as this holds meaning and value. So, thank you.

The second is our gratitude to all our writers - without you too, we (literally!) would not exist: thank you for trusting us with your work, and we hope you’ll continue to trust us in the future.

The third is our gratitude and appreciation to all the other zines that together make this space what it is. Some were companions on the Hugo ballot, others were companions on the longlist released after the Awards, but neither the shortlist nor the longlist reflects the breadth, diversity, and richness of the SF magazine space. Awards, by their very nature, are competitive; but the space that we exist in is defined by its camaraderie, cooperation, and collaboration: from something as basic as coordinating our fund-drive periods so that they don’t overlap, to sharing staff members and, of course, writers. Please support your SF zines: it’s a difficult time; and we hope that award ballots reflect the incredible range of SF magazines active today.

The fourth is our gratitude to all the members of the Strange Horizons collective, past and present. In a few months, Strange Horizons will turn 25 years old (we began in 2000!). And if there is one thing that has defined its internal structure, it has been ceaseless motion. We do not have a fixed editorial board—we do not even have an editor-in-chief! What we do have is an editorial collective that is made up of different autonomous departments; and this is a collective whose membership is fluid (think of us as a mycelial network, perhaps!). So, when you’re thinking of Strange Horizons, you’re thinking not of one individual or ten, or even of our current masthead, but every person over the last twenty-five years that has made this magazine what it is. Thank you!

Our membership is fluid, and it is also international: our staff comes from nine different countries on multiple continents, spanning almost the entire globe in terms of time zones. We hope that this reflects in our editorial choices, in the fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art that we select. One thing that we have always prided itself on is the diversity both of our editorial collective and of the work that we publish (go check out our geographically-focused special issues!). We love how many writers count us as their “first,” and we hope that many more will do that in the years to come. We also hope to continue being a magazine that gives equal space to all forms of SF: the short story, the novelette, the poem, the prose poem, the article, the column, the review, the critical essay, and much else.

At Strange Horizons, we have always understood SF - like all other forms of art - to be intensely political. We have tried to centre our collective politics around the ideas of liberation and equality. To this end, and in light of what is going on around us, we read out a brief statement on Palestine at the Hugo Awards ceremony. This statement was first prepared in 2021, in consultation with Palestinian artists, and we reiterate that.

And finally, a reminder: soon we will be celebrating our twenty-fifth birthday. In human terms, this is about the time when the prefrontal cortex becomes fully developed. In magazine terms, we don’t know what that might mean, but we do have a lot of stuff planned for our silver jubilee year—watch this space!

Open Fiction Submissions Window October 1st

Aigner Loren Wilson — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:46:17 +0000

Strange Horizons will be open to fiction submissions on October 1st, 2024, at 9 a.m. UTC! To keep our response times manageable and submission windows more frequent, there will be a 1,000 story cap on submissions.

Once we receive 1,000 stories, we’ll close our portal while we work through the submissions. If our portal is open, we are still accepting stories, but once it is closed, please do not send us your work.

Please see our fiction submission guidelines for more details on how to submit once we open and what we publish. Since we are using a story cap, we encourage authors to submit promptly!

But don’t worry, if you happen to miss our October open submission period, we will re-open again in the future. We will make final decisions on the last stories submitted during our December 2023 open window before October 1st, 2024.

Call for Editors: Articles Editor

Gautam Bhatia — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:46:17 +0000

Strange Horizons is looking to add an additional articles editor to work with our editorial collective.

The Articles Department publishes non-fiction on the fourth Monday of the month, nine times a year. Pieces include essays, interviews, round-tables, and conversations. Articles editors also edit and publish columns by our regular columnists.

As an articles editor, you will be working alongside current editors Joyce Chng and Gautam Bhatia, but you will have complete autonomy to commission, edit, and publish non-fiction pieces independently. Our articles editors have a diverse range of interests within genre, and you’re encouraged to follow your own in commissioning pieces (as long as it is within the broader Strange Horizons mandate).

For a sense of the kind of non-fiction we’ve published recently, please take a look at the archives.

Like all other editorial positions at Strange Horizons, this is a volunteer role. We anticipate the time commitment to not exceed a couple of hours a week, on an average.

If you are interested in applying, please email gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com with a brief paragraph about your interest in the position, your broad areas of interest within SFF, and any prior relevant editorial experience.

Call for Volunteer Fiction First Readers

Aigner Loren Wilson — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 19:41:38 +0000

Strange Horizons is on the hunt for new volunteer first readers to join our fiction team.

Our first readers read some of the incoming fiction submissions and decide whether to pass them along to the fiction editors. We are therefore looking for people who like what Strange Horizons publishes.

We highly encourage Black, queer, disabled, and/or neurodiverse first readers to apply. We especially welcome readers from outside the US and UK.

Responsibilities

Read a minimum of 10 submitted stories each week and write a brief summary and comment for each, including characteristics we may be looking for.
Pass good and interesting stories along to editors.
Send rejection notes for stories you decide not to take.

Requirements

Ability to work well with others in an online setting.
Discretion; for example, we’ll ask that you not blog about the details of your job, though it’s fine for you to publicly say that you have the job.
Reliability: the fiction department depends on first readers. We prefer a reader who reads a small number of stories week after week to a reader who reads a large number randomly.

Time commitment

You will need to read, summarize, and comment on at least 10 stories a week. In our experience this equates to around five hours per week of reading, plus up to three hours per week of writing summaries, comments, and rejections. Expect the job to take at least five hours a week; don’t expect to be able to squeeze it in during occasional spare moments.

We prefer applicants who can commit to stay on for at least six months after an initial one-month trial period.

How to apply

If you’re interested, send an email to fiction@strangehorizons.com with the following subject line: FR CANDIDATE: your name here (with “your name here” replaced by your actual name, of course).

Any of a multitude of salutations within the body of the email are fine, but please don’t address your application to just one fiction editor; all of them will be reading your application (generally “Dear Editors” is a good choice).

In the email, introduce yourself, tell us about your relevant experience (if any), let us know a little about why you’d like to join us, and list three to five authors whose short stories (not novels) you particularly like (with emphasis on authors who write speculative fiction). You don’t have to have previous first-reading experience or be a writer—we want to hear from anyone interested in the position.

Then provide a list of three to five of your favorite stories that SH has published. For each story, provide a brief comment, roughly twenty to fifty words, about what you liked about it. Tell us what you really think rather than what you think we want to hear; the main point of this exercise is to help us (and you) decide whether your tastes are likely to match ours, in which case there will be some more screening to make sure we work well together.

We’ve had the good fortune of working with many talented and hardworking first readers over the magazine’s history, and we look forward to adding to their numbers.

The Strange Horizons Fund Drive

Gautam Bhatia — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 16:13:51 +0000

The Strange Horizons fund drive is upon us!

As most of you know, SH is entirely funded by our family of supporters, either through volunteer work or through financial contributions. We have stood as a community magazine since 2000, with a commitment to speculative fiction from around the world, to new authors and wide representation.

Our proudest achievement is how many writers count us as their first sale.

To help Strange Horizons move into 2024, we need to raise a base amount of $13,500. If you'd like to help us meet those goals, please go to our Kickstarter page and donate.

As the Strange Horizons rocket gains funding fuel, we’ll release bonus content as a reward to all and sundry:

At $1,000: An interview of WFA winner Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay by Will Shaw, on SF in translation.

At $2,500: A poem by Devan Barlow.

At $4000: An essay on Blade Runner by E.E. Murray.

At $5,000: A review by Dan Hartland.

At $6,500: A poem by Angel Leal.

At $8,000: A review by Kit Eginton.

At $9,500: A poem by Bree Wernicke.

At $10,000: A (surprise!) story by Premee Mohamed.

At $11,000: A secret essay on the phonetics of dragon languages.

At $12,500: A special issue of the Critical Friends podcast feat. Dan Hartland and Aisha Subramanian.

At $13,500: A poem by Milo K. Szyszka.

Let’s talk stretch goals. Last year, your funding helped us bring you a special issue on SFF and neurodiversity, and forthcoming special issues on Japanese SFF, among others.

This year:

At $15,000, we will publish a special issue on Afro-Surrealist SF, guest-edited by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu!

At $16,500, we will publish a special issue on Ageing and SFF!

At $18,000, we will raise our artist pay to $300 (more money for artists)!

At $20,000 our fiction department will publish a novelette as part of our 2025 fiction calendar!

At $24,000 we'll host a virtual panel with Strange Horizons editors and contributors. All backers will be invited to attend and submit questions for the Q&A!

At $30,000 we will commission additional pieces of artwork in 2024.

For twenty-three years, Strange Horizons has brought you challenging, beautiful work from new and diverse voices. It is the community’s zine, and always will be. Let’s shine together for another year. Help us by donating today.