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after the Middle English Complaint Against Smiths

Many merry mutants, mauling in melees,
Force me to flee their fists and their fights:
Such scraps stop my sleeping and sour my mind.
What voices like villains at vengeful volume!
Telekinetics toss tables and tangle
And our weather worker sends wind against walls.
Snikt snikt! sounds one, snarling; another sends snow
And hail at high speed upon hostile heads;
One goes bamf! and bamf! bouncing on his blue heels.
They skirmish and scrape and they spar and keep score;
They fly and they fling their friends like fastballs
And warn our winged man, “Whoa! out of the way!”
With lasers and leaping and loud metal loads,
They strike and they stretch their strong limbs of steel
And drive into dregs many droids and drones.
The Danger Room doesn’t go dark for one day!
Professor X should explain these exertions
Training his tyros at twelve and at ten.
My live-in lab allows me little latitude:
I can’t concentrate with their cannonball crashes,
Their blasts and their blams!, great blows that draw blood,
Still slam in my ears. I can’t slip back to sleep.
I can’t stand such stress. O my stars and garters!
Maybe Magneto can make them go mute.
If those callow kids won’t cool off or calm down,
I’ll move myself out of the mansion this month
And join the Avengers. Avoid the X-Men!



Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her latest books are After Callimachus and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. She’s @accommodatingly on Twitter.

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.
Friday: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White 
Issue 20 Mar 2023
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Issue 30 Jan 2023
By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Ciro Faienza
Podcast read by: Catherine Rockwood
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Podcast read by: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Issue 23 Jan 2023
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