Gods and Monsters Installment 19: Lonely Journeys
Reading Time: 7 minutes I drove that ancient pick-up all the way out into the Catskill Mountains. Even after that trek, that good old Ford was running strong. Still is. I rented a place out in the woods about ten miles from Greene Village, New York. It was tiny; just bed, bath, and stove, but I didn’t need more.
Life Online
Reading Time: 7 minutes In the environmentally and economically devastated not-so-distant future, best friends Pen and Lissy have fought for years simply to survive. After a lifetime of struggle, Lissy is desperate for escape, and decides uploading her mind onto a computer chip – complete with home-designed software – is her only option.
The Skies Our Home
Reading Time: 5 minutes The funeral was hard. But the thing that helped me smile through the tears was counting the times Tom had sat on top of hotter pyres and lived.
Gods and Monsters Installment 18: We Are The Stuff That Genes Are Made Of
Reading Time: 8 minutes He awoke at dawn, sore and scratched. His mouth, clothes, and limbs were covered with gore. His clothes were in tatters. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, trying to remember.
Classics: The Star
Reading Time: 15 minutes A strange star is spotted in the distant sky. Scientists watch as its near miss brings humanity to its knees.
Snoogle Hunt
Reading Time: 4 minutes “Path!” Glinda paused so abruptly the six foot necromancer slammed into her, tangling himself in the wild frizz of her white hair. Glinda waved a white diamante-studded glove at the waist-high grass. “This is hardly a path, Snark. This is a swamp!”
Gods and Monsters Installment 17: Moirai Mechanics
Reading Time: 7 minutes “Where did you get the gun, River?” Jackson asks. River looks down. His right hand is wrapped around a cold black gun.
Once in a Blue Moon
Reading Time: 2 minutes A hungry ghost, pockets full of whatever money he could collect, visits his favorite diner on Halloween
Mr. Butterfield
Reading Time: 3 minutes When a robot does something right, Dr. R says, “Look, Mr. Butterfield. A breakthrough, Mr. Butterfield. What do you think of that, Mr. Butterfield?” It goes in a box with the other good robots, then trucks come to get them. When you’re good, you go outside.
Worm King
Reading Time: 5 minutes While his father’s once-famous bait shop struggles to survive against the threat of an impending storm, Dill encounters an unexpected solution.
Gods and Monsters Installment 16: Red
Reading Time: 7 minutes Gabriel awakes to his monotone world. The white sun is reaching fingers through the twisted roots of orchids. As Gabriel looks toward the light, he sees that a flower’s throat is freckled deep crimson. On the table, a cigarette paper is dark red. Everywhere, the world is streaked, stained, and tinted.
Hell in a Handbag
Reading Time: 4 minutes The earliest account is from our foremother, Rhoda. You know her better as Red Riding Hood. That’s right, she was a real person. Back then, the handbag was still a handbasket, but more on that later.
Gods and Monsters Installment 15: The Dog Star
Reading Time: 9 minutes Sometimes, from my prison cell, when the time of year was right and the night was clear, I could see Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Many ancient cultures thought of it as a dog, or a wolf. For me, it was a beacon of hope between the bars. Just one light in the night sky, so bright it looked like a searchlight.
The Last Day
Reading Time: 3 minutes A story about a society in which a mechanism was invented to increase pleasant dreams. Old men prefer to sleep unawakened rather than live. One man tries to resist.
Her Own Bones
Reading Time: 3 minutes Gwen examined the table so she didn’t have to meet the impatient eyes of the family members. Had one of these cups of tea held the poison responsible for the corpse lying beside an overturned chair at the head of the table?
Native in Arbors
Reading Time: 4 minutes The emigrants to Planar6 have survived the voyage from Earth via conversion to semi-sentient fungal forms, a process that is reversed upon arrival. The trouble is, one of the crew prefers to stay the way they are…
Rod Serling School of Writing
Reading Time: 4 minutes A budding student sci-fi writer applies to the Rod Serling School because of the celebrity’s name attached to the school. When a salesman comes by the house to pitch the school, her father joins the conversation, with unexpected results.
Gods and Monsters Installment 20: The Love Song of the Mole Cricket
Reading Time: 5 minutes Mr. Jones appears to have been mauled by a wild animal. His body shows evidence of teeth marks and claw marks. The wounds are uncommon.
Willow at the Labyrinth’s Core
Reading Time: 4 minutes Trees of evil are not so easily slain.
Playing Human
Reading Time: 3 minutes What does it mean to be human? Other species may never understand, but they can have fun pretending.
Growth
Reading Time: 3 minutes He is deeply fascinated by growth. And he’s ready to sacrifice a lot for its sake…
Gods and Monsters Installment 19: Lonely Journeys
Reading Time: 7 minutes I drove that ancient pick-up all the way out into the Catskill Mountains. Even after that trek, that good old Ford was running strong. Still is. I rented a place out in the woods about ten miles from Greene Village, New York. It was tiny; just bed, bath, and stove, but I didn’t need more.
Life Online
Reading Time: 7 minutes In the environmentally and economically devastated not-so-distant future, best friends Pen and Lissy have fought for years simply to survive. After a lifetime of struggle, Lissy is desperate for escape, and decides uploading her mind onto a computer chip – complete with home-designed software – is her only option.
The Skies Our Home
Reading Time: 5 minutes The funeral was hard. But the thing that helped me smile through the tears was counting the times Tom had sat on top of hotter pyres and lived.
Metastellar shopping
All proceeds go to pay for original speculative fiction.
our latest VIDEOS
MOST POPULAR author interviews
REVIEWS
Wishes are Like Curses in The Quelling by C. L. Lauder
Reading Time: 3 minutes A great read involving factionalized parasitic aliens, a morally grey protagonist, and a harrowing rescue mission.
Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor
Reading Time: 3 minutes powers, with strong themes of coming-of-age and striving against a world whose structure seems predisposed to injustice and violence.
13 scariest stories from the first three years of MetaStellar
Reading Time: 8 minutes 13 scary short stories to put you in the Halloween spirit. Get it? Spirit?
‘Dragonfall’ is an inclusive fantasy where the dragons have feathers
Reading Time: 3 minutes Come for the dragons, stay for the queerness.
Uranians by Theodore McCombs
Reading Time: 2 minutes Uranians — an anthology including four short stories and one novella — is the perfect marriage of sci-fi and queerness.
Juniper and Thorn by Ava Reid
Reading Time: 2 minutes Troubled young lovers, an awesome-but-miserable wizard father, a setting based on a Ukrainian city amid industrialization, and a door-mat protagonist who gradually finds her strength…
The Bridge to Magic by Alex Thornbury
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Bridge to Magic is a dark YA fantasy with a feisty female lead.
Where the Lighting Goes by Jackery Salem
Reading Time: 3 minutes Salem builds something truly unique out of many familiar fantasy tropes — dwarves, dragons, amnesia, all kinds of magic — and ties it up with compelling characters and a deeply satisfying conclusion.
Writing Advice of the Week
Humanize Characters Using Dialogue, Thought, and Action
Reading Time: 8 minutes Readers look for emotional connections to the stories they read, and your characters are poised to deliver those emotional connections with staying power when developed in a robust and well-rounded way.
Reader Experience Depends on Perspective (Use it Well)
Reading Time: 7 minutes Choosing your point of view and narrative perspective was one of the first choices you made when penning your manuscript, but how can you be sure that default perspective was the right one for your story? Immerse the reader in your story world and set them on a path to build emotional connections to your characters and their circumstances.
Writing Advice of the Week: Change is Hard (but Necessary)
Reading Time: 4 minutes Knowing that sustainable change is important is one thing. Putting sustainability into practice, however, is something else entirely.
Writing Advice of the Week: Small Moments Make Big Stories
Reading Time: 9 minutes Small actions allow the reader to feel the bigness of the emotion. Plus: more than 100 all-new links to articles, podcasts and writing advice videos from around the Web!
ESSAYS
Two authors are suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT with their books. Could they win?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay’s lawsuit claims their books were used without their consent. But copyright protection doesn’t apply to ideas – they’ll need to demonstrate the likelihood of economic loss.
Publishers aren’t going to replace writers with AI. Startups are already doing it.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Startups are popping up that use new AI tools to bypass traditional publishing and distribution systems entirely.
Life: modern physics can’t explain it – but our new theory, which says time is fundamental, might
Reading Time: 5 minutes Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.
3 AI tools I use regularly that aren’t ChatGPT or Midjourney
Reading Time: 4 minutes I use Otter AI, Canva, and Notion nearly every day, and here is why other writers should, too.
NEWS
Top ten online sci-fi magazines
Reading Time: 6 minutes We look up the traffic numbers for 33 of today’s most popular sci-fi, fantasy and horror magazines. MetaStellar is in second place.
Leonardo AI best new alternative to Midjourney — and free
Reading Time: 8 minutes Leonardo AI offers 150 free images a day. They’re not quite as good-looking at Midjourney, but within throwing distance.
Adobe’s Firefly will be a Midjourney killer for book cover art
Reading Time: 4 minutes Adobe Firefly’s images are almost as good as Midjourney, the interface is infinitely better, and artists will get paid for their training data. The beta is open now, and it’s looking extremely promising.
WGA backtracks on anti-AI stance, as long as writers get credit
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Writers Guild of America, which represents screenwriters, is backing off on its anti-AI stance, Variety reported today.
Google falling farther behind in AI race
Reading Time: 5 minutes Edge, Opera and Brave all now have AI built in. Google’s Chrome is not even in the race yet.
Adobe, Nvidia announce ethical AI image generation
Reading Time: 4 minutes Adobe and Nvidia both announced AI image generators today — Firefly and Picasso, respectively — that do not use artists’ work for training data without their permission. Both companies also promise to pay artists for work generated in their signature styles, as does Getty Images.
Study: Writing occupation will be most affected by AI
Reading Time: 3 minutes According to research released today, the more high-level and creative your job, the more likely it will be to be disrupted by AI. Top of the list? Writers and authors — with up to 100 percent of their jobs likely to be affected.
GPT 4, Claude, and Alpaca all went live this week and yes, we need to worry
Reading Time: 8 minutes It was a big week for AI news these past few days. GPT 4 was released on Tuesday, Midjourney 5 was released on Wednesday, and Alpaca — a $600 clone of ChatGPT — was released on Monday. Yes, you can now have your own large language model for less than the cost of new phone […]
ON WRITING
Dall-E 3 looks great, but lacks respect for artist rights
Reading Time: 3 minutes OpenAI announced its newest AI image generation tool yesterday, Dall-E 3. The images look fantastic, and it can do things that no other AI image generator can do. But it lacks a little bit in terms of respect for creator rights.
Claude Pro is here — and writers should sign up
Reading Time: 2 minutes This morning, Anthropic announced the paid version of Claude, the best alternative to ChatGPT currently on the market. Writers need to sign up.
Adobe Express offers free AI art and is out of beta
Reading Time: 3 minutes Adobe Express is now publicly available, with free AI image generation. Plus, since it’s Adobe, the AI is trained only on fully-licensed art, and artists and compensated.
Scalzi, other spec fic authors head for the X-it
Reading Time: 3 minutes Authors are leaving Twitter — rebranded today as just “X” — for other platforms. Many are landing on Threads.
Sci-fi author uses AI to promote new book about AI
Reading Time: 2 minutes Best-selling Brazilian author PJ Caldas used AI technology to release a book trailer for his first novel in English.
How to create a good author profile photo
Reading Time: 6 minutes Some free and easy ways to create good-looking author headshots and profile pics.
Can Claude AI fix your grammar mistakes? No, it can’t, but there’s an AI that will.
Reading Time: 11 minutes Claude AI, the hot new chatbot for book authors, works well as a grammar tutor, but is bad at fixing mistakes in your text. However, I did find one AI-powered tool that caught every error I threw at it.
10 ways Claude AI can help you self-edit your book — for free
Reading Time: 16 minutes Claude AI is the single best editor I’ve tried so far. And it can do a whole book at a time. For free.