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After The Last Man on the Moon by Alan Bean

Landing feels like getting off a trampoline,
The weightlessness fading to muscle memory
Choking in the sweet rush of ocean air

The first ones who came back, they put in quarantine
Trying to know if they were the same men who left
Or if they were branded by the moment they were elsewhere

They’re braver now, and as the microphones peel memories
Layer by layer, the moment fades, becomes a story
You tell others so they feel like they understand

The trouble is, this isn’t the world you left:
It sprawls overwhelmingly, missing the friction
between action and reaction, impact and sound

So maybe the moment didn’t disappear
Maybe you exhaled it on that first winter day
And it hung in the air and settled everywhere

Left a thin film between you and the world
Wedging itself in the nooks and crannies of the rest
of your life: like beach sand, or moondust.



Thomas White studies aerospace engineering and creative writing at Stanford University. In his spare time, he fences, reads while walking, and plays in an amateur space-themed cover band.
Current Issue
27 Mar 2023

close calls when / I’m with Thee / dressed to the nines
they took to their heels but the bird was faster.
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Reviews Editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland talk to novelist, reviewer, and Strange Horizons’ Co-ordinating Editor, Gautam Bhatia, about how reviewing and criticism of all kinds align—and do not—with fiction-writing and the genre more widely.
If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, then so is the past.
He claims that Redlow used to be a swamp and he has now brought them into the future before the future. Yes he said that.
My previous Short Fiction Treasures column was all about science fiction, so it’s only fair that the theme this time around is fantasy.
I’ve come to think of trans-inclusive worldbuilding as an activist project in itself, or at least analogous to the work of activists. When we imagine other worlds, we have to observe what rules we are creating to govern the characters, institutions, and internal logic in our stories. This means looking at gender from the top down, as a regulatory system, and from the bottom up, at the people on the margins whose bodies and lives stand in some kind of inherent opposition to the system itself.
Wednesday: And Lately, The Sun edited by Calyx Create Group 
Friday: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White 
Issue 20 Mar 2023
Issue 13 Mar 2023
Issue 6 Mar 2023
Issue 20 Feb 2023
Issue 13 Feb 2023
Issue 6 Feb 2023
Issue 30 Jan 2023
By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Ciro Faienza
Podcast read by: Catherine Rockwood
Podcast read by: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Issue 23 Jan 2023
Issue 16 Jan 2023
Issue 9 Jan 2023
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