Size / / /

Do not pet the dinosaurs,

Or try to feed them popcorn.

They're used to ferns and ginkgos, not

Gelatinized angiosperms.

If baby theropods warble,

It means they like your yellow dress.

Keep your arms inside at all times.

This is not a diorama.

Should that ankylosaur charge,

Poof—automatically we'll

Jump a few million years ahead

To catch the earliest birds.

Let's camp on that hill tonight,

Under younger stars. Instead

Of Orion, which won't gel till

Next eon, we'll look for Bronto.

I'll go slow, to give you a chance

For some majestic pictures. But

Where or when was that turn to see

The nesting pterodactyl pair?

Oh, forgive me. I'm distracted.

It's all because of my husband.

Fifty-six tours ago, he left

The trail to chase a dragonfly

As big as our cat. "Wonderful!"

He shouted, and disappeared

Through a strand of fiddlehead ferns.

I have not seen him since.




Ken Liu is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he is the author of The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (The Grace of Kings (2015), The Wall of Storms (2016), and a forthcoming third volume) and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016), a collection. In addition to his original fiction, Ken also translated numerous works from Chinese to English, including The Three-Body Problem (2014), by Liu Cixin, and “Folding Beijing,” by Hao Jingfang, both Hugo winners.
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
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
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