The Architects judged Earth, and found its people guilty, before anyone ever knew they were watching. When they made themselves known, they did so entirely. Around the world, at 13:17 Greenwich Mean Time, phones and laptops flickered to life, and TVs changed channels. Where there were no screens to be had, other things served as […]

The technical term is “generation ship cascade failure.” Cryogenic collapse. Millennium drive breakdown. Failed ship-in-a-bottle revolution against the corpostate hegemony. I call all the outcomes whalefalls, though. Because that’s what they are: the carcasses of something that used to be alive, floating slowly down through the black. I guess that makes me one of those […]

I clutch a flaky sausage roll and a miniature bottle of prosecco as I sit on the Northern Line train, waiting for my appetite to return. It’s hard to eat, though less hard to drink, after witnessing a public burning. The smell of smoke clings to my nostrils, tinged with something fouler. The unique, searing […]

The first of Irene’s memories I eat is the night she learned I had been murdered. It was karaoke night—not the official one for the cruise ship passengers, but an illicit one Irene organized for a few of the other crew. They weren’t supposed to be in the botanical garden, but it was still two […]

Nostalgia died a quiet death, wrapped in cellophane and power cords. The future had killed it. The ghosts of yesteryear’s fragrances no longer haunted, no longer hung and clung to the passersby. Instead, those ghosts lay shriveled like salted slugs in the perfectly modulated light of streetlamps and roadside LEDs. And I, a robot programmed […]

The walls were beige and you could see where the rust took hold. A tiny dead robot floated past Amir, feelers drooping. It was the same color as the walls and shaped like a grasshopper. Amir made a grab for it but a hidden maintenance duct sucked it up and it vanished with a soft, […]

A paintbrush, still dipped in Prussian blue, dissolved into a stream of code. Tara peeked at the 0s and 1s snaking up her wired arms, dimly illuminating the very human veins underneath. Her eyes shut. Starry Night. Violently controlled waves, tamed only by the canvas, cupped in its palms—gold, amber, and rusted orange wheels, stuck […]

Won’t Hurt, I Know You don’t look Sweetbaby in the eye when he pushes out from under the tree throw. We know that now. Instead, the ears, or what’s left of them, are a better place to settle your gaze. They’re close enough to the face that you can tell which way he’s looking and […]

The uniform’s design was out of date by the time Essen made orbit over Drasti Prime—but then, so was Essen, so she kept it as is, fiddling in sequence with the pocket flaps and interface protector while the autofeed caught her up on twenty-three years of Partnership intel: personal, professional, interplanetary, and puerile. The inner […]

The Snow Woman was away, far away. The winds that blew round the frozen world would take “days” to bear her to where Kitsune sheltered, even though both lay beneath the blue light of Ryujin, which the Chinese call Hǎiwángxīng and the white folks call Neptune. The atmosphere was too thin to loft anything denser […]

Theme While the main theme of Quispe’s Rondo for Cello and Orchestra hugs the shoreline of Romanticism, the episodes between refrains climb the Andes to harvest the folk music of the composer’s youth, returning richer for each excursion. Chasca Huapaya loses herself in the performance. Her bow glides, skitters, bounces, grinds. She uses the body […]

In the woods, on the edge of the ravine, we found the corpse of a car. It was so close to the cliff edge, a determined push would have sent it tumbling down to the river. We climbed in and sat inside the rusting shell, on the sun-bleached fabric and perishing foam of the seats. […]

A lifetime of sailing and Sefa had never got used to the thrill of it, to the wide blue spill of horizon, and how it held in the world. He’d stood in storms and calm weather and every stage in between, stood against salt railings and on decks so heaving he could barely keep his […]

Everyone was on time, but the sub-son was late. No one had expected this from the sub-son because he had always been the most responsible, the most thoughtful, and the most present. The sub-son walked with the weight of the family on his shoulders, never hunching, never crumbling. The sub-son had always been there, despite […]

“Bursa,” Seafaring says, their hindwing brushing the bedding, their long abdomen sinking the mattress near Bursa’s feet. “Wake up, please.” Bursa peers through one cracked eyelid and the remains of a dream about hollow spaces. His nictitating membrane diffuses the long-suffered intruder into stars. Above them both, his royal chamber vaults into a ceiling so […]

1 This is real, or real enough. It’s not memory, not dream. I’ve achieved the lucid clarity of the present moment, which I used to take for granted. Now it’s a gift. Around me, what passes for reality is a flimsy scaffold. I can see through everything. That’s good, because I must find the others, […]

To keep time, you must first invent it. 1. Flicker—A piacere Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal and who he stands still withal. —William Shakespeare, As You Like It, III.ii. In the cloud forests of Paek Sigma II, […]

You don’t know me, but my name’s Al. I’ve been reading your books, especially those that feature Cal Harrison. They, in turn, have had me thinking seriously about writing one of my own, though I am not at all certain at this point what I might write about. I can’t quite say what it was, […]

The intact remnants of Tess’ pressure suit sat alone at the bar, slumped before an untouched pint of beer. No one around the Waystation blamed Hae’cera for what they did after the reactor blew. According to the logs recovered after the accident, the blast killed Tess instantly while only damaging the alien’s shell. In their […]

Sometimes piracy is easy. The generation ship invited us aboard in the first sentence of their message. No threats needed. The ship was gigantic, at least two centuries old. That and the utter naivete told me a lot. “What does that mean, consigliere Katla?” Einar, the captain, growled. “Trap?” He was standing dead center on […]

It was on the day of the last wake that the Murchú exploded. Mickey clasped her hands to her chest as she felt the dull concussion of detonating hydrogen and oxygen tanks rattle through her kidneys and bowels before exiting through her sternum. She looked down at the front of her blouse, past the two […]

This is Chapter Thirty or so in a whole ongoing saga that I don’t have time to get into right now. I’m jumping in at the point when my Machiavellian twin brother Charles decided to take over Mars, and I decided to help. My big failing is I never figure these things out until I’m […]

You’re five and your teacher tells you fear weighs exactly ten pounds. You come home and you ask Mum and Dad if it’s true, and you don’t stop asking why after they confirm it is. You don’t stop ’til they tell you about the Slight. By age nine it becomes embarrassing to still believe the […]

Ioris had learned one rule early in his pupal stage: never call the cops. The Akate take care of their own. However bad the trouble is, bringing in the greengloves will only make things worse. Apparently that rule didn’t apply here on the frontier. Ioris had brought a problem to Dr. Miew’s attention, and instead […]

They call it the pinnacle of architectural innovation. An affordable housing revolution. They call it Plexus, and it built this neighborhood in seven days. It starts as a colloid, a nanoparticle superfluid, a pale blue sludge that erupts from the nozzles of a hundred carbon fiber tubes on a cold Wednesday morning in late February. […]

It was the cockroach from the crack in the bathroom wall, tapping a defiant dance on my haptic suit, that made me pull up Sociable, to post a comment to my Constituency Administrator. I’d killed the damned thing yesterday, watched it kick its hairy legs in the air. Yet somehow, life asserts itself, and accepts […]

Raza stepped downstage, using the warmth of the lights on his synthetic skin to find his spot. Waiting in the wings, he had tuned his embod unit’s still unfamiliar receptors for this moment. Turned up touch until light and shadow were tactile pools of warmth and cool. Turned down sound as Eric exited, stage left, […]