I first learned of J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague because we share a love for the famed Unicorn Tapestries, a set of unicorn tapestries woven more than 500 years ago, depicting a medieval unicorn hunt. In Sidorova’s novel,…
In Jaclyn Desforges’s aptly titled short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, April 2026), we meet a wide cast of characters that include a ghost, a tarantula caretaker, a mother with five unexplained and well-behaved babies, and telepathic…
Tim Weed’s third novel, The Afterlife Project, follows Dr. Q and her team of scientists as they travel through a world devastated by climate change and illness, looking for any sign of a woman still able to reproduce, after…
The internal logic of a speculative fiction story has a strange mathematics of its own. The rules of its world deviate from the rules we follow, but are usually consistent with our expectations about how rules operate. More than…
Current Life Situation: Lucrative Work-Assignment, Stable Marriage-Union, Model Son. After daily work-duty, take Municipal Transporter to Metro-Sector T—Genome Modification Center—and receive Target Sequence Update. Then hurry home. Find Model Son (name Theo) at study-station, solving math problem concerning volume…
A Tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It pounces. —Wole Soyinka When sleep accepts one week, it becomes death. My father’s earthly cloth, as per tradition, must wait in his hut until the fourth day before he is confirmed…
When I was a young boy, my mother showed me how to tune the radio to hear the voices of the dead. The secret, she explained, lay not only in the frequency one landed on but in the precise…
This is a story that has already happened. It is also happening right now. It is never not happening. In a land that touches our own, there lived four sisters. Like all, they were both and not special for…
Deni Ellis Béchard’s speculative novel, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine, is set in a future dystopian United States divided by a civil war. The machine, a powerful AI which was designed with the goal to protect humans…
By Duncan Whitmire • Nothing is more disruptive to a reader than the emergence of the cynical voice inside their head—and nowhere is this more true than with books that traffic in magic and speculation. Some readers call it…
