Strange Horizons will open to general fiction submissions on October 1, 2026, at 3 p.m. UTC! This window will remain open until we hit our submission cap of 1,000 stories. Our maximum word count for this window will be 5,000 words. We offer payment of 9¢/word USD. We do not read simultaneous or multiple submissions.
Response time:
Our goal is to respond to all submissions with either a hold notice or rejection within eight 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. We promise to be respectful of your time, while also giving each story the attention it deserves.
A note on LLM submissions:
The fiction department will not accept submissions generated by LLMs such as ChatGPT or Claude. We use a comprehensive, multi-step process to evaluate submissions. No step in this process involves passing submitted stories through an AI detector that stores data in a third party database, trains on submissions, or infringes on an author’s copyright in any way. If we discover that we have mistakenly accepted or published a story that we reasonably believe to be AI-generated or AI-assisted, we will consider the author to be in breach of our rules and we will remove the story from our active queue and/or our website. Please do not waste our time with gen-AI slop. We want your authentic human-made stories.
Please see our fiction submission guidelines for more details on how to submit once we open and what we publish. We look forward to reading your work!