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Tuesday, they broke the light.
The next three days they tried to fix it.
Staples, paperclips, hairpins, glue;
Nothing would hold it together.
Finally, they settled on writing a thesis
Promoting the better side of constant
Dark, finagled the peer review,
Hoped to secure a grant before
The true effects of the disaster
Were widely known. Quickly
People were publicly serving
Cups of broken light at corner
Photon bars. With the secured grant money
They secretly bought into the most
Wildly popular photon bars, cursed
Themselves in the open, and privately
Watched the value of their shares grow.
One filed a patent on a new, more
Stylish, light service delivery cup.



Ken’s four collections of flash fiction and four of speculative poetry are available from most web booksellers. He was an information warrior for thirty-three years, and now supports full time his wife’s powerlifting. Recent work has appeared in Analog, Café Irreal, Rune Bear, and Tiny Molecules. His website is www.kpoyner.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.
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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