#sff short story

[goblin-writer]

Life on a new Sphere

With the hiss of your breath, you step out onto the alien landscape. It had taken years to travel here and the ship you had left on was streaked with star dust and pockmarked with holes. The white plating had been coloured by nebulae and the boredom of the crew. But now you could finally leave. Your visor fogged up as a dep sigh escaped your lungs. It wasn’t a planet that was completely alien. If not for the giant mushrooms that formed dense forests in the distance you could have mistaken this place for home.

Excited conversation flowed from your speakers. The others walked out behind you and stood, much like you, in awe. You all had watched that never-ending void pass by you for far too long. It had become what you all expected to see when you arrived.

“It’s green?” one of the others stated as their voice quivered with uncertainty. But it was, a dense bulbous grass, and the mushrooms ran the gamut of red to brown.

“It’s not that different.”

“I can’t believe we made it!”

“Come on guys, we need to make sure we can live here.”

“Look at those clouds.”

“I nearly forgot what they looked like.”

Voices washed over each other. The lone voice of reason turned back to the ship to fetch the equipment. Nobody moved to help them. Clouds were approaching you. Would they rain? And would that rain be water?

This was, to some extent your last hope. Food was running low and water even lower. If you had to leave here you would need to try and find some way of replenishing your supplies. Your colleague pushed past you, setting up antennae and radar dishes. It would take a few hours before you got the results. In the meantime, you’d be able to relax.

The clouds drew closer as the first machine printed a result and, with a laugh, your colleague removed their helmet. Everyone watched as a hush enveloped the crowd. This would not be the first time one of your colleagues went mad and removed their helmet. But, nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

More and more removed their helmets. You joined them as a cheer welled up from somewhere within the crowd. But it wasn’t long before it was interrupted by a loud crack and the first sheet of rain splashed across the ground. It was water. This planet was looking more and more like home.

“Look!” A call went up.

All around you colour started blooming. A dense carpet of red, yellow, green, and the occasional pink spread across the field as the bulbous grass opened to the rain, revealing a multicoloured field of flowers. All of them alien but their colours a clear reminder of home and that life that you had all left behind. And maybe, you could rebuild something similar here.

---

Thank you @flashfictionfridayofficial​ for a lovely little prompt. The chance to set a field of flowers amongst the stars was too much of a temptation to let slip into the void. I hope you enjoy.

[dracoqueen22]

In honor of Lesbian Visibility Week, how about you check out my short story, Eleventh Hour Reunion?

Support an indie writer, support an indie artist because all of my earnings go back into the indie pool as they are used to hire more artists, and well, I'd be pleased as punch if anyone purchased and enjoyed this piece.

Now on itch.io since Gumroad gave nsfw the axe.

Thanks kindly!

Reblogs are also appreciated! <3

[sophia-sol]

Every year at about this time (...very approximately) I post a reclist of 10 short stories I particularly enjoyed reading in the last year, all of which can be read online for free. Here's the latest list, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

1. Sestu Hunts the Last Deer in Heaven - MH Cheung Beautiful and odd. A story of what happens after you've killed the gods, the unexpected realities and the things you have to live with. I love stories about after the climactic things traditional fantasy narratives are about, and this one excels!

2. If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You - John Chu Two butch Asian weightlifter dudes bonding with each other and then dating, and one of them happens to have superpowers, but the superpowers aren't the focus. This is SO charming!!

3. Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold - SB Divya This is a really cool retelling of the classic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin from the Rumpelstiltskin character's pov, building out the world and his background and making him a sympathetic character with a specific history. Haven't seen a fairy tale retelling quite like this before and it's great! And I say that as a connoisseur of fairy tale retellings.

4. A Farce to Suit the New Girl - Rebecca Fraimow A troupe of Jewish actors in Russia, in a time of political upheaval. This story has such a good and powerful feeling of activity and forward momentum, and of the way a community supports people even if things are weird or complicated! I love every single character and how firmly they are themselves.

5. Sheri, At This Very Moment - Bianca Sayan The sacrifices you make to spend time with the ones you love - a snapshot of one brief visit together, out of two lives that only rarely get to align. Made me teary the first time I read it!

6. Spirochete - Anneke Schwob An engaging second-person pov story about possession and identity. It has such a great sense of timing! And the last line GOT me even on second read when I hypothetically knew what was coming!

7. To Embody a Wildfire Starting - Iona Datt Sharma Ahhhhhh this story is so good at embodying the horrible complexities of the choices people make in the worst of situations, that good and bad and divine and evil and just plain personness can all reside in one being. Also it's about a dragon society and the revolutionary humans who tried to make everyone into dragons, and also about parent-child relationships, and also about a bunch of other things. God it's good.

8. Obsolesce - Nadine Aurora Tabing Is it really me if I don't have at least ONE story about robots in my rec lists? (actually I just went back and checked and in multiple previous years I inexplicably didn't, maybe it wasn't me writing the reclist in those years lol) ANYWAY who wants to have sad feelings about robots again! I know I always do! In a world where anyone who has a physical body instead of having their consciousness transferred is more and more obsolete, no matter if your body is human or robot, what do you hold onto? This one has a real good melancholy tone.

9. Letters from a Travelling Man - WJ Tattersdill ....does what it says on the tin. Letters to a dear friend, from a man travelling for the first time to the unfamiliar part of the world that friend comes from. I love the sense of place you get from the letters, as well as the deep and abiding importance of this friendship in both their lives. Another one I cried over!

10. Texts from the Ghost War - Alex Yuschik Another epistolary one, but this time in text messages instead of letters, and between characters who start the story antagonistically! About mech pilots in a ghost war, and making connections, and finding things to care about, even when stuff sucks. I love them!! (also, I am inescapably me, whoops, it took me until I read some fanfic of this story to realize that almost certainly the story was meant to be canonically shipping the two leads, I never notice romance unless there's anvil-sized indications.) Anyway this is a really good story!

[girl-and-her-cat]

Chapter One: Extended Contracts

The probe was dead.

I knew it the moment I lay eyes on the thing. And no, it wasn’t because of the layer of icy crust surrounding the shaft nor did it have anything to do with user error. I knew it the moment they told me what the issue was. The probe had been running non-stop for four months in a freezing cold vacuum. AKA; space. And they were using a standard run-of-the-mill type-13. No way could that handle a four month operating time with no breaks.

Dumbasses.

The two techs that had brought me out here were arguing through their helmets on the main channel; I could hear everything from the saliva smacking against their lips to their stuffed up noses they wouldn’t stop snorting through as if that would help them breathe any better.

Just use a goddamn tissue.

“What’s the application?” I asked again. I knew what it was, I just wanted them to stop barking at each other. The techs got nervous when I came up here. At first I thought it was because my job was to report back to HQ and let them know if the tech’s were doing their jobs; RJ told me it’s because I’m a woman.

One tech, the one that only had one front tooth and was clearly the follower of the other guy responded after snorting mucus down his throat. “Temp and pressure of the atmosphere surrounding the pipes. Gotta know how much they can handle before being blown to shit.”

He looked at his bro for approval and smirked at me after receiving a nod.

“Can you tell us what the problem is so we can get back down? Boss don’t like us being up here too long wasting oxygen.” Leader boy said this nonchalantly but I knew who his boss was and also knew that a guy had been fired last week for using more than the mediated level of oxygen for a site run like this one. Found out he had brought his girl up for some “sight seeing”.

Fucking idiot.

“It’s dead. You’ll need to get a new one. A Type- 15 to be exact if you want it to run longer than 4 months out here.”

Read More Here

[malcolmschmitz]

Hi, friends-- I've got a cover for my new SFF short story!

It's about dwarves who mine asteroids in the ruins of a portal fantasy world. (Oh, and it's transmasc as all heck.)

I'll reveal it for everyone else on Thursday-- but my Patreon patrons get to see it first. >:)

[always-coffee]

New short story!

Would YOU like to read a short story from me? **slides this toward you**

I'm extremely proud of "The Door Opens," and it was a joy to work with Julia Rios again! The ToC is full of awesome, and I think y'all will really dig it.

**undignified Kermit flailing**

[yaldev]

Smog Collectors

“I want every last puff out of their atmosphere. Use collectors, drones, wind wizards if you must. I will not let Bruzek be right about this.”

—Grand General Demlow

———

Yaldev is a sci-fantasy worldbuilding project by Ulysses Maurer, with art by Beeple. By looking at narratives, stylized loredumps, bad poetry and little details, we'll witness the story of a planet filled with magical power, the nation which tried to conquer it, this empire’s dramatic collapse and the new world which emerged in its wake. Along the way we'll meet the characters who live here, and we'll explore questions about nationalism, rationalism, the natural world and the quest to master it. For all stories in chronological order, check out the pinned posts at r/Yaldev!

[regionbetween]

excerpt from harlan ellison's "the region between", published in GALAXY march 1970

The universe moves toward godhood. It started there and it wishes to return there. It is driven around in the greatest circle toward there. Godness lies dormant yet remembered in every thing, every smallest thing, in every puniest creature. Every living thing must, of needs, play at godness. It is built in. In the basic fiber, in the racial memory, in the pulse of blood or thought they remember all the way back to when there was nothing. Yet none of them are God. Thus it becomes a universe of things struggling ineptly toward a destiny they cannot even fathom, struggling impossibly to be God: a universe of manipulators, of users, of petty handlers who push and shove lesser, less god-driven races around in alien patterns, forcing them to dance to tunes they never knew, can barely comprehend, in pain and hopelessness, deprived of light or joy. From the sleaziest legislators of ethic and fashion and morality to the greatest pawn-movers of entire cosmic races, everything, everyone, scrabbles blindly toward the memory of when it was once god-blooded. All things try to govern the lives of all other things. And in turn, those Gods are used by other Gods. And those Gods are manipulated by greater Gods. And on and on. Domino ranks of puppet masters, to infinity and beyond. It is a universe of mad deities, one more selfish and corrupt than the one that went before. For none of them are God, they are merely circular pieces of the all-memory of what was godness at the beginning. Latent in the "soul" of what had been "Bailey" was the force that had first created everything. It had always been there, waiting its time, waiting to emerge and finish what it had started. Buried, sleeping, handed down through the unimaginable eons in plant, stone, fish, cloud, vehicle, Bailey. First cause? Perhaps. God? Perhaps. Any name will suffice. For if that force be God, then the bitter cynicism of the atheist is valid, for the God that was Bailey was insane, completely and eternally deranged, who but a madman would create all of everything then bury itself dormant and slumbering; a madman buried in an eternal "soul" passed down through decaying time. Buried here and there and everywhere yet struggling to be reborn by a pressure of equalization, a necessity for balance in something even as a lunatic as the mad world created by a mad God. But now, freed, like an evil genie from a bottle, the force that was God awoke...

[crabtalesmagazine]

Crab Tales Magazine - Submissions Open!

We are open for submissions until the 23rd September.

Please see our submissions page for guidelines on what we are looking for: https://crabtalesmagazine.com/

We pay 3 cents per word.

We love SFF and we love crabs!

*clicks claws*

Rachel Handley is our EIC (and everything else).

You can support the magazine here: https://ko-fi.com/crabtalesmagazine

All donations go towards paying our contributors!

[ghelgheli]

anyway the last question is still one of the best short stories i've ever read specifically because it succeeds more than anything else i know, "fiction" or "non-fiction", in conveying how relentless the second law of thermodynamics is

[thecatwriter23]

Bird Vomit, Vomit Bird

✨New Publication✨

My work ‘Bird Vomit, Vomit Bird’ is finally out in Here was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting published by Mānoa Journal. Thank you again to the editors for picking up my macabre swiftlet story!

You can read a snippet of it here:

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 19 – All The Names They Used For God by Anjali Sachdeva

This is the second short story collection I’ve read this year, and of the two the only one that was really trying to be a coherent work in its own right and not just a grab bag of smaller pieces. I actually picked it up entirely off of a tumblr post, of all things – there was an excerpt from the story Killer of Kings that really got stuck in my head, and having read it I just needed to see the context and the rest of the work it was from. So, score one for viral word of mouth advertising I guess.

Killer of Kings – about the writing from Paradise Lost, from the perspective of Milton’s politically unreliable angelic muse – is absolutely the best story in the book, but there weren’t really any that struck me as bad. The overall tone is kind of dreaamlike – mythological, or in many cases the kind of story you’d expect to hear on a weird fiction podcast (if a very literary one). High on the uncanny and numinous, on weird situations and the touch of something transcendent, and just on people being put in situations. Low on high action, or really tension or plot at all – the narration usually feels like it’s at a bit of a remove, or if not then like one is observing the inevitable machinery of fate more than anything to really get excited about and caught up in. Dreams or fables, or something in between.

The writing is good enough to generally make the remove work, I think. Beautiful imagery in a lot of places, and very distinct (if occasionally pretty broad) voices for the points of view of all the different stories. Call prose lyrical is essentially just a buzzword at this point, but I think these mostly qualify.

There are nine stories in the book, and aside from the aforementioned fairy tale about regicide and mutinous angels, I’m afraid that I remember absolutely none of their titles. Or, no, that is a lie – the story about a pair of Nigerian girls abducted as brides by Boko Haram who escape after learning how to magically compel and dominate their husbands shares All The Names They Used For God with the whole collection, so I do remember that one. The other stories that really stuck in my head were of an albino homesteader in the Ozarks abandoning the farmhouse to explore and lose herself in the labyrinthine cave system she discovers, the modern day sailor in a dying fishing village becoming enraptured with the mermaid he glimpses as the ship he works gluts itself on the bounty of fishes she has called to feed the shark she’s become fascinated by herself, and the near-future story of identical septuplets created by their geneticist parents who are each struck by accident or disease as they go through adolescence and increasingly haunt their surviving, doomed siblings. (They’re all like that).

So clearly the plots and settings vary pretty wildly, but I do mean it when I say that the book was the most cohesive set of short stories on an artistic or thematic level I’ve read in quite a long time. Every story in the book (I’m pretty sure, at least) has a real sense of some vast and unseen mechanism of the universe brushing up against the mundane world, some intrusion of something grand and overwhelming and uncanny into the protagonist’s life. (It’s the title, after all – ‘God’ in a broad, rather pentheistic sense, but still, the glorious and uncaring clockwork behind the curtain.) And the culmination of each story is the protagonist (not always the point of view, but the character actually driving the plot) in one sense or another succumbing to the unknown, abandoning what they have and take a leap of faith into some transcendent self-destruction.

All to say the collection really works as a whole more than the individual stories do on their own. Which is probably entirely normal for short story collections that aren’t pulled together based on being based on the same property or written by the same author without much curation otherwise, but I really don’t read many of those that are also actually good.

[yeahx10]

at the end of the day reading is fun and i recommend this to everyone 👍

[billadler]

The White Noise Machine

George thought a white noise machine would help him sleep through the night. He was right. But that wasn't all it did. Find out what happened in my short story, The White Noise Machine.

[beyondmistland]

Reminder

Friendly reminder the US/UK digital discount for Tales from Mistland & Other Oddities: Volume I expires tomorrow!

:)