Size / / /

In the past, it's been our practice to run reprinted stories without editorial comment. But we're trying something new this year: we're going to run several reprints, each chosen and introduced by a guest curator.

But we're kicking off the year's reprints with a non-guest curator. Ever since we published our Author Focus issue on Joan Aiken back in 2001, I've wanted to reprint my favorite Aiken story, and this year seemed like a good opportunity to do so.

In that Author Focus issue, I wrote a review of some of Aiken's short fiction, in which I talked some about my history with her work. As I wrote at the time:

The first Aiken story that I ever encountered, probably in Children's Digest or Child Life sometime in the late '70s, was [. . .] a lovely fairy tale titled "The Third Wish." It appears in [Aiken's collection] Not What You Expected; it wasn't until I saw it in this book a few years ago that I realized that the story (which had stuck in my memory all those years) was by Aiken.

Reading "The Third Wish" now, with a more experienced feminist eye, I'm not entirely thrilled with one aspect of the story's gender politics. But I think that's partly because it was written in the 1950s. And despite any flaws, it remains my favorite three-wishes story ever.

And so I'm delighted to be able to present to you Joan Aiken's "The Third Wish."




Jed Hartman is a former Strange Horizons fiction editor.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
Issue 18 Mar 2024
Strange Horizons
Issue 11 Mar 2024
Issue 4 Mar 2024
Issue 26 Feb 2024
Issue 19 Feb 2024
Issue 12 Feb 2024
Issue 5 Feb 2024
Issue 29 Jan 2024
Issue 15 Jan 2024
Issue 8 Jan 2024
Load More
%d bloggers like this: