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In a deciduous maze,
little Lego wakes up
after a millennium
of cowardice.

His timid, minifigure self, constructed to be a toy,
annealed mixture of
bias and xenophobia,
escaped to the dreamland
in a storm, an evolution swept his nation
Malus Domestica.

Wild plastic blossoms
have flourished. Promiscuous
pomes have divided and conquered
every interlocking spaces. Strayed
in a retrograde amnesia, his memory
is coming back as bits and pieces.

"The Genesis is over,
You have no more chances."
With an apple falling on his head
he hears Iðunn's giggle
and turns wide awake

and runs through the barricade
of pedicels and vines, swings his
short arms and forky hands. His spiritus,
combusting, nervous,
antsy respiration kindles
the white LEDs under his feet, when he comes close
to his old home, an antique city built inside
Citrus Sinensis.
At the end of the road
a wide world opens in front of him:

light, pollens, hexagons
anti-gravitating in the air.
Miss Halictida,
are dancing with satin skirts
in the halo of carpenter bees.
"A rule of creative destruction,
he can never learn to embrace."

Sitting by his honey kylix
Osmia Lignaria, The Wise Bee of Alveus,
greatest skald of the Eusocial, sarcastically
depicts in his fiction, 1734,
during the industrial revolution,

and the Pollinator Protest.
"With the conservative belief
he is back to hibernation, in despondence
for another thousand years."




Liu Chengyu came from China nine years ago and is currently living in San Diego. He loves poetry and doing research on proteins. You are welcome to read his previous works in Strange Horizons, Aphelion, Grievous Angel, Silver Blade, and Abyss & Apex.
Current Issue
16 Mar 2026

The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate.
If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them.
A ruffling of branches as they resettle for the night. We dare not ask why they are here.
Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity 
As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 
Friday: When Among Crows and To Clutch a Razor by Veronica Roth 
Issue 9 Mar 2026
By: Lio Abendan
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
Issue 2 Mar 2026
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Issue 23 Feb 2026
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Issue 2 Feb 2026
By: Natasha King
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 26 Jan 2026
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