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Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li is a queer and neurodivergent 1.5-generation Chinese-Canadian immigrant writer, musician, and interdisciplinary artist. Her fiction/poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Uncanny, F&SF, Heartlines Spec, The Massachusetts Review, The New Quarterly, The Humber Literary Review, QWERTY, and The Fiddlehead, among others. The author of Someday I Promise, I'll Love You (845 Press) and a Banff Centre alumnus in poetry, she is the writer and director of three short films—including an award-winning video poem—that have premiered internationally in festivals. She was Longlisted for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize, Shortlisted for the Vancouver City Poems Contest, a Finalist for The Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest, a 2024 ScreenCraft TV Pilot Script Competition Semifinalist, and the winner in the short story category of the CWC Sustaining Shared Futures Writing Award. She was nominated by Heartlines Spec for Year's Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Two, and was most recently an editor for Augur. She has recently graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of British Columbia, and will be looking for a home for her debut experimental novel. She can be found sprinting from spiders and drinking bubble tea @vivianlicreates on Instagram, Bluesky, and Mastodon.


Current Issue
20 Jan 2025

Strange Horizons
Surveillance technology looms large in our lives, sold to us as tools for safety, justice, and convenience. Yet the reality is far more sinister.
Vans and campers, sizeable mobile cabins and some that were barely more than tents. Each one a home, a storefront, and a statement of identity, from the colorful translucent windows and domes that harvested sunlight to the stickers and graffiti that attested to places travelled.
“Don’t ask me how, but I found out this big account on queer Threads is some kind of super Watcher.” Charlii spins her laptop around so the others can see. “They call them Keepers, and they watch the people that the state’s apparatus has tagged as terrorists. Not just the ones the FBI created. The big fish. And people like us, I guess.”
It's 9 a.m., she still hasn't eaten her portion of tofu eggs with seaweed, and Amaia wants the day to be over.
Nadjea always knew her last night in the Clave would get wild: they’re the only sector of the city where drink and drug and dance are unrestricted, and since one of the main Clavist tenets is the pursuit of corporeal joy in all its forms, they’ve more or less refined partying to an art.
surviving / while black / is our superpower / we lift broken down / cars / over our heads / and that’s just a tuesday
After a few deft movements, she tossed the cube back to James, perfectly solved. “We’re going to break into the Seattle Police Department’s database. And you’re going to help me do it.”
there are things that are toxic to a bo(d)y
By: Michelle Kulwicki
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Michelle Kulwicki's 'Bee Season' read by Emmie Christie.
Issue 13 Jan 2025
Issue 6 Jan 2025
By: Samantha Murray
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 23 Dec 2024
Issue 16 Dec 2024
Issue 9 Dec 2024
Issue 2 Dec 2024
By: E.M. Linden
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 25 Nov 2024
Issue 18 Nov 2024
By: Susannah Rand
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
Issue 11 Nov 2024
Issue 4 Nov 2024
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