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Strange Horizons will have three open fiction submissions throughout 2025:

  • General Submissions: April 16th at 9 a.m. UTC with a 1,000 story cap
  • Novelette Submissions: June 4th at 9 a.m. UTC with a 300 story cap*
  • Indigenous Author Submissions: November 3rd at 9 a.m. UTC with a 500 story cap

Once we reach the caps on these open submissions, we’ll close our portal while we work through the submissions. If our portal is open, we are still accepting stories, but once it is closed, please do not send us your work.

Please see our fiction submission guidelines for more details on how to submit once we open and what we publish. Since we are using a story caps, we encourage authors to submit promptly!

All submissions submitted during our last open submission period will be responded and decided on before the open submission in April. We will post more information on our novelette and indigenous author submissions at a later date.

*For our novelette submissions, we will be open to stories between 10,000 and 18,000 words.



Aigner Loren Wilson (she/her) is a queer Black writer and editor of literary speculative fiction. Along with her work with Strange Horizons, she’s been an associate editor for the horror podcast NIGHTLIGHT, a guest editor for Fireside Fiction, and a judge for the NYC Midnight contests. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone Magazine, WIRED, Lightspeed Magazine, and many more.
Current Issue
18 May 2026

Maybe we overestimated ourselves, I thought, watching the ferries hum against the wine-dark sea. Even if we floated above it, we were still bound to the ocean, engulfed in all its weight and inescapable history. To believe otherwise was a kind of hubris. But we had believed otherwise anyway, and so each of us had become something smaller, less human, suspended in a brittle net of want and memory. And then she appeared. At the wrong time, in the wrong place. My Scylla, my monstress, my deathless siren of anglerfish light. Longing, in that empty, unmoving ocean, for things that had not existed for centuries. How could anyone blame her? The only alternative was to grieve. 
My grandmother slit my father’s bones and let them fly with yeast.
the nightingale was caught in a net / and brought to a lab for further study.
Friday: The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated by Gene Png 
Issue 11 May 2026
Issue 4 May 2026
Issue 20 Apr 2026
By: Athar Fikry
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 13 Apr 2026
Issue 6 Apr 2026
Issue 30 Mar 2026
Issue 23 Mar 2026
Issue 16 Mar 2026
Issue 9 Mar 2026
By: Lio Abendan
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Strange Horizons
2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
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