Guidelines at a Glance

We want:

Speculative fiction, broadly defined.
Up to 5,000 words.
Submitted here, via our Moksha submissions system—no email or postal submissions.
No simultaneous or multiple submissions; no re-submissions.
Please send only RTF, DOC or DOCX files.
Please do not include your name, address, phone number, email address, or any other personal information in your submission document.
Use standard manuscript format (removing your name and contact info).
In your cover letter, please include your name, pronouns (optional), email address, the title of your story, the word count, and your bio (50 words or less).
We buy first English rights, including non-exclusive audio rights, for 6 months. (This is not a guarantee your story will be included in the podcast.)
Special note on translations: We currently only publish translations if they are by the original author of the story. Our quarterly sister magazine Samovar specializes in translations: we encourage you to submit all translations there. Samovar and Strange Horizons have independent submissions queues and different editors, and submissions to either magazine are only read for that magazine.

We don't want:

Any stories that are wholly or partially generated or edited by AI/LLMs, including but not limited to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. Basic non-generative spelling and grammar checkers are fine.

We offer:

Payment of 9¢/word USD, within 60 days of contract.

If you have any questions, write to fiction@strangehorizons.com with the word QUERY: at the beginning of your subject line.

Everything else on this page is intended to clarify, explain, or provide insight into the above guidelines. If you've submitted to us before or feel confident that your story meets our guidelines, feel free to skip the rest of this page. If you're uncertain on any point, you'll find more detailed discussion below.

What We Publish

We want good speculative fiction. If your story doesn't have a speculative element, or strong speculative-fiction sensibilities, it's probably not for us.

Some particular things we love, or are interested in:

Fiction from or about diverse perspectives and traditionally under-represented groups, settings, and cultures, written from a non-exoticizing and well-researched position.
Unusual yet readable styles and inventive structures and narratives.
Stories that address political issues in complex and nuanced ways, resisting oversimplification.

Things which are fine:

Profanity is fine. Use whatever words are appropriate for your story.
Violence in a story should be justified; no excessive gore.
Sex is fine if it is thematically appropriate and adds value to the story.
We welcome submissions from anywhere in the world. British or American English are both fine.
We welcome all subgenres and forms of speculative fiction.

Things we won't consider:

No stories above 5,000 words.
No simultaneous submissions; no multiple submissions.
No unsolicited reprints or re-submissions.
No partial or incomplete stories. Please don't send us part of a story and ask us to request the rest of it if we're interested.
No stories or cover letters translated, written, or edited using LLMs/AI.
No email or paper submissions.
No stories that normalize or glorify sexual assault; no stories that include sexual assault of a child.
Poetry or nonfiction; we're the wrong department for those.

Pay rates and lengths:

For this call, we will consider stories up to 5,000 words. We determine story length by taking the word-processor wordcount and rounding up to the next highest 100 words.

We pay 9¢/word (USD), with a minimum payment of $60. SFWA officially considers us a professional market. We pay by check or PayPal, according to the author's preference.

We buy first-printing world exclusive English-language rights (including non-exclusive audio rights) for six (6) months. After that period, you are free to republish the story elsewhere. We hope you'll allow us to leave the story in our archives indefinitely after it's rotated off the main table of contents, but you have the right to remove your story from the archives at any time after one (1) year.

How to submit:

Check the top of this page to see if we're open to submissions, and if we're open, upload a file using our Moksha submission portal.

Please ensure that your personal information (name, email, etc.) is not included in your story document.

In your cover letter, please include your story title, word count, name, email, and a brief bio (approximately 50 words or less), including any past publications or writing experience. It's okay if you are unpublished! If you've got life experience relevant to your story (e.g. your story takes place on a submarine, and you served on a submarine), please do mention that. Cover letters shouldn't include plot synopses or pitches.

Response time and response status:

We send an autoresponder message in response to every submission we receive. If you haven't received an autoresponse within 24 hours after submitting, please query immediately. Missing an autoresponse usually means we have an incorrect email address for you, and won't be able to contact you when we make a decision on your fiction. Please query if you're concerned your submission has gone astray.

Our goal is to respond to all submissions with either a hold notice or rejection within eight (8) weeks. We hope to send acceptances or rejections within one month of hold notices. This is ambitious, and we might fall behind schedule. Please be patient with us as we refine our systems. Query if you've had no response within 12 weeks. We promise to be respectful of your time, while also giving each story the attention it deserves.

How to contact us:

To contact us for any reason, write to fiction@strangehorizons.com with the word QUERY: at the beginning of your subject line. Add a few words to the subject line to indicate what you're querying about.

Strange and interesting miscellany:

None of this is required reading, but if you're curious about how we do things, you may find the following of interest:

Stories we see too often: This list was made by the previous editing team, and has since been reposted and referenced by various people who've found it useful. Though there is some good advice here, we offer it as a curio rather than as a prescription.