Sci-Fi + Fantasy

In a future where water has colonized land, a team of crack scientists race to prevent a catastrophic breach in a major sea wall beyond the B-Harbor of Baltimore—but the effort will come at a cost. Vera rotates her silent-running, fuel-cell powered skiff until she’s facing B-Harbor Sector 1. She comes to a full stop. […]

She was born in the Cave, emerged from the cocoon of shattered stalactites soaked in vestigial groundwater like all daughters before her. Her first name was Kori, her second, Mama, and now finally everyone calls her Yaya, the eldest. Even after so long, a sinful child whose hunger for adventure once lured her old family […]

Ava is born at 12:00 a.m. sharp on the first day of spring, with purple crocus buds pushing through the patchy snow outside. It is a home birth, and she spends her first day on earth squalling and sleeping, nursing and acclimating to her new existence. She has a mother and a father who gaze […]

*** Two months ago *** Her daughter’s eyes searing into her own. This moment is always present for Crass. “How could you?” Take away the fine wrinkles of middle age, and Sera’s still the little girl. Crass has always wondered when she’d cross this line. No trust left in those eyes. So this is what […]

Muna is getting worse. Scales form around his scars, creep up his veins and cluster under his elbows. He won’t be able to stay on the shore with us much longer. In a matter of days, he’ll seek the sea. “Let me go.” He gasps his words, his voice rough and unfamiliar. Not the voice […]

Ten thousand years later, the gods return to their bodies. I am one of them. My consciousness encompasses a solar system. I have sensors scattered over twelve planets and hundreds of moons and moonlets. I have probes sipping at the wind of the sun’s upper atmosphere and probes at the edge of interstellar space, circling […]

Ahalya ran her fingers through the folds of the veil before taking it from her handmaid’s arm. Its deep red fabric was fine and thin between her fingers, and she whirled it around her body in a fluttering scarlet typhoon before draping it over her head. The slender, dark-haired princess looked over her shoulder at […]

CHAPTER I They come on the kind of night that Adele would have loved: wind strafing the mountain and pounding the cabin in rainy gusts. I’m in my usual spot in the darkened front room, near the windows, accompanied by my memory cube and Holox, recombining old stills and vids into a misty cone of […]

The alert cuts across my inputs: a ship exiting superluminal, just cusping the system’s heliopause. Long-range scanners confirm its identity as the Freighter. It is three minutes and forty seconds behind schedule. It is unlike it to be late. I am glad it is here. My planet can be a lonely place. An observer might […]

The spray hitting Evrier wasn’t just water. It was stinging grains of sand, limp strands of weed, pebbles rattling off the battered howdah and thudding against Maiwee’s flanks. The huge jellyfish didn’t flinch, but Evrier felt her pain, tremors running from her mind into his. Her tentacles tugged at currents that threatened to break them […]

The coldness of space clings to the alien ship. It lands where earth-moving machines disemboweled a humid Florida swamp rich with the nests of birds whose feathers were an iridescent white, whose feathers lifted into waves of lace. The birds are gone from here now. Instead, soil is piled high and flat to form the […]

The shapeless entity, formerly known as Glen, was enjoying his new mode of being – really, he was. Sure, he couldn’t interact with things as easily, now that he didn’t have a body, and that had taken some getting used to. There was no more drinking coffee or going for jogs, it was true. He […]