Size / / /

Listen to the podcast:

 

Black water. / Bubbling salt
from awful vents / as the octopi wait
for the sign from above. / Suckered arms
curl, ecstatic, / in endless sand.
Beaks click-clack / in cloaked faces;
bright skins shine / with the shimmer of speech.
Light is coming.
            Cast your eyes up
to the deep, sisters! / Down from on high
comes the ship–the seed /–shining like death,
watching with eyes / too wondrous to see,
yet blind to our awe / and our wonder.




Ada Hoffmann is the author of The Outside and Monsters in My Mind. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov's, and Uncanny. She is a computer scientist, a classically trained soprano, and an autistic self-advocate. You can find her online at http://ada-hoffmann.com/ or on Twitter at @xasymptote.
Current Issue
13 Apr 2026

...fury tongued, we lash the breeze with our foxing song
From my broken streets and crumbling towers; Sterilized my self-haunted hospitals
Every single time, the Skiin™ gave me a rash. I scratched. I scratched so deeply that I clawed through the aug and into my own skin and then I tore out chunks of that too.
Friday: Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn 
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By: Lio Abendan
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
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