Fiction

The Botanist of Sky City Celeste by Lyndsey Croal
Stepping off the elevator platform, I can’t help but stop to take in the view of the city. Around us, artificial trees stretch up so far, their canopies almost reach to the top of the glass dome

A Certain Reverence by L.R. Lam
We left Earth today.
My ma drove me up to Sutherland Spaceport herself, and I left Edinburgh behind.

Gay Hunter (extract) by James Leslie Mitchell (known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon)
She looked round the room and its sham antique oak, all solemn lines of fiddley curlicues. A great sloped mirror showed herself. Being still very young, she looked at that self with attention, but not too much. The room was deserted but for the waiter bringing the soup. Then she . . .

Fish on Friday by Neil Williamson
Hello, Ms MacArthur? Hi, there. This is a courtesy call from ASDaTESCo. My name is—

O Sole Mio by Katie McIvor
What kind of ice cream van, Beth asked herself, comes round in the middle of winter?

The Alien Invasion by Ely Percy
Ah wis abducted by aliens wance. Never tolt anywan but. It wis nearly forty year ago an ah knew whit folk wid say. The wans in ma class wid be aw, Did yi aye? Zat when yi had yir first anal probe? Zat why yir a fuckin space cadet?

That Goddamn Hat by Andrew Wilson
Jonah’s father was a Sioux medicine man with a fearsome reputation, but his momma was the one who really jinxed him. She was supposed to have been a witch-woman who came West from the Appalachians, but there were some who said that she’d holed up in those mountains after she . . .

The Intrigue Of The Battered Box by Michael Cobley
They finally found his body in a muddy abandoned brick tunnel siding a mile west of Great Waverley Terminus

The Honey Trap by Ruth EJ Booth
“What the hell is that?”
The apple looked awful. A piebald runt in red and yellow-green, with a sandpaper roughness around its bear-stub stalk.

Secret Ingredients by Callum McSorley
I’m a line cook. This is how I became a spy:
I come from a binary solar system. We don’t have what other beings might call day and night.

Theia by Gwyneth Findlay
I was born the same way you were: amid violent collisions in a hot plane of swirling gas, the accretions of our dead elders coming together to form new life.

#NoBadVibes by Katy Lennon
(video: Debbie Cannon reads the story)
Hey what’s up you guys, it’s Pixie! And I’m back with a follow-up video that I never thought I’d make! [LAUGH]

The Barber of Mars Base 1 by Greg Michaelson
The meteorites had punched five perfectly round holes through the treble wall of the auxiliary pod, our home for the last three weeks. Macintyre had died more or less instantly.

The Shadow Ministers by Ken MacLeod
Jen was Defence. No way was she going to get stuck with caring stuff: Environment, Education, Health… Girls always got these. Jen was having none of it.

A Cure for Homesickness by Anne Charnock
She retraces her walking commute through the platform’s labyrinth. A dose of daylight might help, she thinks, but there’s no chance of that. At the end of her fifteen-hour shift at 2700 hours she’ll catch the last sunrays out on the viewing deck.

The Chrysalis by Laura Scotland
Edith drifted in and out of sleep. She was curled up on the old leather sofa, enjoying the warm, delicate weight of the baby on her chest.

Pussycat, Pussycat by C J Henderson
My new lover has a cat, which, he says, hates everyone but him. I am warned not to go near her—she bites and scratches. I just smile…

The Worshipful Company of Milliners by T. L. Huchu
Every writer wears a hat. Most people may not see it, but it’s there, a kind of halo which can be seen if you look from just the right angle.

Lowland Clearances by Pippa Goldschmidt
Pull up a chair, my child, I want to tell you the story of how we happen to be living here, and where we come from. For we are one of the proud families of the inner city, and one of the oldest. Not many people around these parts can . . .

Space by John Buchan
Leithen told me this story one evening in early September as we sat beside the pony track which gropes its way from Glenvalin up the Correi na Sidhe.

SENTIENT AGGRESSIVE URBAN-LITTORAL LIFEFORM by T.H. Dray
Security starlings flit and chatter in electronic bursts, warning each other of me. As well they might. They know my designation, know I am stronger than them, for I am a SEAGULL

Oh Baby Teeth Johnny With Your Radiant Grin, Let’s Unroll on Moonlight and Gin by Cat Hellisen
It doesn’t matter how this begins.
I’ve had three glasses of what passes for gin in Eight to the Bar, and something that the bartender called rum but tasted like motor oil and gunpowder.

The Last Call of the Deep by Lyndsey Croal
(with reading by the author).
The waves crest and fall as she travels endlessly in the deep. Existing through the generations, she calls out to relatives and friends. Back and forth as the currents guide, she gathers stories from continents and cultures, and they latch in her mind like . . .

Targets by Eric Brown
The waves crest and fall as she travels endlessly in the deep. Existing through the generations, she calls out to relatives and friends. Back and forth as the currents guide, she gathers stories from continents and cultures, and they latch in her mind like the barnacles on her skin. Tides . . .

The Cuddle Stop by Laura Watts
Arrivals was a nightmare, queuing for decontamination. But there was such a warmth to the wooden panels lining the walls. I had to lean in to smell them: printed. In between that thought and the long inhale, I imagined the ‘ponics needed to grow pine, bamboo, thick enough to create . . .