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I am tired of patience. Not everyone makes
it to the future. Not everyone makes it
to the store and back, to the front porch.

On the day I introduce Afro-Futurism
to my science fiction students,
we watch transfixed as Janelle Monáe
moonwalks on a glittered stage.

What did Sun Ra say
about a planet for Black people,
about a planet just for Black people?

Fill the ocean with melted ice
until you can’t taste the salt.
Water spreads, makes more distance
between one place and everywhere else.
Poison the air until it becomes unbreathable.

I wanted my Black students
to boldly go where no one has gone before,
but when the ships leave for Alpha Centauri,
it’s just the newest wave of white flight.



Despite being from Louisiana, Arden Eli Hill has never wrestled an alligator, only a kangaroo. Arden holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA from Hollins University. Arden has published in Willow Springs, Western Humanities Review, Kaleidoscope, Breath and Shadow, the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology First Person Queer, its sequel, Second Person Queer, and most recently Hip Mama. In case you are still thinking about the kangaroo, Arden won.
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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