The Virgin of Santos de la Tierra
Reading Time: 6 minutes When a Virgin is seen in a small Mexican town it’s a miracle – the town is blessed… or is it?
Sci-fi
The Private Man
Reading Time: 4 minutes They knew each other very well, as much as the Law would allow. Their children were beautiful, curious, and kind. To know where they were now, or what their mother looked like, could lose him everything.
Hands Down
Reading Time: 2 minutes How will a child react to his father’s unsettling business decisions?
Two Old Friends in the Garden
Reading Time: 5 minutes An old man’s dedication to his garden goes beyond the grave.
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.
In Him, We Know Freedom
Reading Time: 5 minutes While burning barrels light the state capital’s torn paint and hunger pains ravage his stomach, a man looks into a mirror, seeing what he could become and reliving what he had to do to survive.
The Thief of Pendír: Book 3 of The Book of Dreams series
Reading Time: 10 minutes Ro No Na, the thief, breaks into a gangster’s pleasure palace in Pendír, Bijoon, and ends up being chased by gangsters, revolutionaries, clones, and Agent Wood and the Z’Dhia, in the third volume of The Book of Dreams series.
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Humans and Androids as Societal Partners
Reading Time: 8 minutes Do we need new rules for a society where androids are becoming more and more lifelike?
In My Home
Reading Time: 10 minutes A prisoner with no knowledge of their own identity is kept in solitary confinement, visited daily by human projections designed to prevent mental deterioration. When the opportunity for escape is presented, a dormant instinct resurfaces in the prisoner, and the need to fulfill this drive supplants the desire for freedom.
Here Comes the Sun
Reading Time: 4 minutes June joined the Memory Keeper team to help her family forge a path to abundance. When it became harder to meet quota, June learned that she was trapped in a business that viewed her as another commodity. And sometimes, the consequences of faith in an idea are greater than we can imagine.
Not Alone in the Universe
Reading Time: 3 minutes Some expected the aliens to solve the problems of humanity, while others were afraid of genocide or enslavement. But it all turned out differently.
Terra Forma
Reading Time: 11 minutes Mirabyi has been tapped to join the moon colony to explore the possibility of converting the dusty surface to life sustaining soil. Her experiments have unexpected results and maybe not the good kind.
I Will Paint the Night
Reading Time: 26 minutes Can Allii come to grips with the pain her family has inflicted on a nation and heal a land wounded by centuries of injustice, hate, and fear. (And find the killer of her beloved stepmother).
The Wreck of the Lorelei
Reading Time: 21 minutes Trapped in an experiment in faster-than-light space travel, the captain of the ship searches for what went wrong.
Freedreamers
Reading Time: 18 minutes In the future, our dreams are mass entertainment … or a weapon of mass destruction.
Patient Diplomacy
Reading Time: 4 minutes A first contact story about the idea that before anything else, perhaps they have to test for biological compatibility.
Confederate Cavalry on a Plane
Reading Time: 15 minutes A physics professor and his student on a plane argue about the possibility of infinite alternate universes, while being robbed blind by a bratty kid. The professor bets the student that even the most unlikely event possible must happen, leading to three very confused Confederate Cavalry charging down the aisle.
Talent & Culture
Reading Time: 4 minutes A distant relation is bequeathed to someone whose tenuous employment on the outskirts of humanity makes him a less than ideal custodian.
Timestealer
Reading Time: 6 minutes Timestealing is an art. And a business. And a service. A good timestealer can predict what the next best-seller will be – most of the time.
The Visitation
Reading Time: 8 minutes A secret government organization is fighting an unknown, but strange enemy.
What You Will Find at a Memory Auction
Reading Time: 4 minutes A young man can no longer afford to keep all his memories. How will he decide which ones to keep? And he’s running out of time.
Robin’s Last Song
Reading Time: 21 minutes After her technological tool failed to warn the world of the sudden loss of birds on the planet, a self-exiled blind elder who has Aspergers and suffers from dysphonia, finds new hope in the field of soundscape ecology.
What We Hold On To
Reading Time: 13 minutes A mother and her young daughter fight to survive in a world ravaged by an ongoing world war between megacorporations.
Clowns In The Woods
Reading Time: 31 minutes An anxious young man gets more than he bargained for when he accompanies his fiance’s family on a hunting trip.
Compost
Reading Time: 4 minutes A mother, desperate to feed her young son, takes a risk that doesn’t pay off.
Silent at the Mouth
Reading Time: 4 minutes After an elective medical procedure, a “Blank” remains a living being, completely anonymized and freed from any visible identity. If one showed up in your life refusing to leave, would you remember who they once were and what they’d meant to you?
SEALAB IV
Reading Time: 11 minutes 2,000 feet below the surface, are they the observers? Or the observed?
Skins
Reading Time: 11 minutes A remote cabin in the southwest desert is the scene of an alien invasion, but it’s not what you think. Maybe the ghost hunters have it wrong.
Fractures Like Windows and Time
Reading Time: 8 minutes Parenting is hard enough without help from the multiverse.
A Sliver of Pi
Reading Time: 2 minutes Maybe the meaning of life won’t be found among the digits of pi, but life can still depend on them.
Neighbors
Reading Time: 4 minutes Being neighborly isn’t always easy. Morgred has to hold her tongue while her daughter makes other plans.
Hive
Reading Time: 12 minutes In the aftermath of the Hives invasion of earth, the society of the old world was shattered, and in response to the possibility of the aliens return, the authoritative Collective took hold of the sphere. Alexander King, a loyal soldier of the Collective, discovers that the Hive’s presence is stronger than commonly believed, and that its secrets may be far too powerful for any military effort.
A Medieval Tale
Reading Time: 14 minutes A monk in a medieval priory faces the sudden appearance of aliens that seem strangely familiar, only to learn he was once one of them.
Past Due
Reading Time: 4 minutes In a world where holograms allow us to hang on even past death, a young man needs to make a hard choice.
Flowers for Humanity
Reading Time: 4 minutes A haunting tale of the Fundamental Equation of life in this Universe, and its accidental misapplication by the hidden god of the ancients.
The Ways We Played the Game
Reading Time: 6 minutes A LitRPG jam in Singapore, with a code that really works for those that want to try it.
Fingal’s Cave
Reading Time: 17 minutes A rogue scientist’s intrepid search for life becomes a metaphoric and existential journey of the heart that explores how we connect and communicate—with one another and the universe—a journey intimately connected with water.
Follow Me
Reading Time: 21 minutes When Influencer Jan Pham downloads an app from the dark web that promises fame, fortune, and – most importantly – more followers, she gets more than she bargained for.
Ashes
Reading Time: 17 minutes Thirty years after the Burn, Jackson, an aging ex-soldier, is just trying to survive. A moral person in a world where morality isn’t a particularly good survival trait, Jackson has to choose between his self-interest and doing what’s right.
Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly by Toge Productions
Reading Time: 2 minutes Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly is the sequel to the critically acclaimed Coffee Talk by Toge Productions. In this game, you serve drinks to magical patrons which impact the outcomes of the stories they tell you.
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Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Reflects On Past And The AI Future Of Writing
Reading Time: 3 minutes Dr. Robert J. Sawyer, author of twenty-five novels, including Hominids and the WWW trilogy, won the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award at the L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future Gala this past Friday. This was the day before his 63rd birthday. “Clearly, you’re done achieving when you hit that magic
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Pantsed
Reading Time: 10 minutes Katia hopes to have a pleasant time with Ben, but when it turns out he hasn’t heard a thing she’s told him about herself, she decides to put her programming skills to good use.