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Illustration by Nor Sanavongsay

They fling us at empires
When a cosmos needs to die.

Engineered by the best AI minds
Of New Lane Xang,

In the boot-tubes we sing:

"They'll never let us in,
They'll never let us in
To holy Himapan!
Not quite monkey, not quite man!"

In the future, true havoc needs more
Than a mere dog for war.

Laotonium shell around a simian soul,
Dropping through the sky, ready to die,
Armed to the bone with three strong hearts
Tailored for express mayhem and murder of
Your pristine social orders,

We close our eyes with time enough to dream,
Six hard minutes through the hot atmosphere:
Visions of fabled Dao Vanon, our own planet,
Our own Xaesar, our own books of law and liberty.

"Ape shall never kill ape."

"No spill blood."

The joys of Ahimsa.

A distant world keeping
All of your promises made to us for 400 centuries.

This poem has been published as part of our 2013 fund drive bonus issue! Read more about Strange Horizons' funding model, or donate, here.




An award-winning Laotian American writer, Bryan Thao Worra holds a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professional member of the Horror Writer Association and the Science Fiction Poetry Association. In 2012 he was a Cultural Olympian representing Laos during the London Summer Games. His work has been featured internationally, including the Smithsonian traveling exhibit "I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story," the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Parnassus during the 2012 London Summer Games.
Lao American artist Nor Sanavongsay was born in Thailand. His family moved to the US when he was four years old. We landed in Kingport, TN. He grew up watching Transformers, Bruce Lee movies, Thundercats, and all of the great 80's cartoons. He also has a fascination with comic books and graphic novels. He began drawing at the age of six with his uncle as a mentor. He is author and illustrator of the Lao children's book Xieng Mieng: A Sticky Mess. For more information on the artist visit: http://www.nawdsign.com or http://xiengmieng.com
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
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By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
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Podcast read by: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Issue 23 Jan 2023
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