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.

My belly is swollen with the love I bring to him.

I spent my first summer as an orphan watching cicadas fuck, scream, and molt.

Scalp to toenail, bioluminescent tattoos coat my body

I gnaw on a wishbone, / ignore the rustle and hiss, the flicker / of ink tongues.

you drag my bruised body / behind you like smoke.

Dune: Part II opens with the image of a fetus. It is a CGI rendition of Lady Jessica Atreides’s unborn daughter in the womb, at an undisclosed gestational age but not yet fully formed. In the book, we don’t see Alia until later, as a young child. Yet we see the fetus repeatedly throughout the movie, which is more and more developed in each visual. In the 1970s, feminist scholar Rosalind Petchesky critiqued the use of fetal visuals, such as the Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for feeding into anti-abortion narratives.[1]