“Heroes come in all shapes and sizes” is for me an ever-green theme, and a fun way to play on trope and expectation. When we think of heroes, the traditional images are of a kind with Superman and Wonder Woman. Larger than life, youthful, vital, powerful. The trick with these sorts of heroes is to give them the right kinds of adversaries and the right level of stakes, and their stories can still be plenty suspenseful, as we’ve seen time and time again in the MCU/DCEU era. There are plenty of ways to make superhumans look mortal. Thor is powerful to be sure, but put him up against Thanos and suddenly victory doesn’t seem assured. 

But there’s more than one way to crack an egg. Just as interesting—even moreso, sometimes—is a hero who’s just a regular person with a clever solution to a seemingly overwhelming problem. Taking someone who doesn’t look like our cookie cutter definition of a superhero—a doddering grandmother, for example—putting them up against a superhuman threat, and showing them come out on top not by strength of arm, but through guts, guile, wit, and skill… now that’s a fun trick, and it’s exactly what happens in The Culebre of San Moreno. Mix in a uniquely monstrous mythological creature, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for success.

-TJG

Read The Culebre of San Moreno

Science fiction and fantasy can deal with conflicts on a planet or galaxy-wide level, but they can also look at very small, seemingly insignificant moments and have readers just as invested. The latter is what Rick excellently did with “British Teleportation.” The story, which focuses on a conversation between a transportation worker and a woman whose husband never came through the teleporter, features a classic SF technology and places it in a mundane setting. This is always wonderful when pulled off well, as it immediately causes the reader to imagine what their life could be like with this one (not so little) change–in this case, when an unachievable technology is as common to the characters as riding the bus is to us today.

It is with the reader already being primed with the question of “What would it be like for me if this were to be real?” that the greatness of the story develops in the brief aftermath of the conversation. Page’s reaction to receiving the refund and then pondering the wastefulness of not using the technology that just led to her husband’s death so clearly speaks to an impulse many of us have. What is convenience worth? And how often are we wronged by companies only to accept the pittance they offer us in return then continue to use their services? The ending nails that theme while keeping Page’s emotions the driving force. More than just being believable, the story is so very human.

– MAD

Read British Teleportation

It may sound silly, given the medium we work in, but there is such a thing as saying too much. Especially in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, writers have a tendency to over-explain. Better to make everything as clear as possible so readers aren’t left confused or frustrated, no?
No. As with all things, storytelling is about balance. Clarity is good. Consistency and logic can strengthen your story, helping it to feel more “real.” But “info dumps” can also kill a story’s pacing, and over-explanation can take all the intrigue out of a plot. Or worse, it can be an insult to your reader’s intelligence if you insist on connecting every dot for them. One of the funnest parts of reading a story is picking up on foreshadowing clues and making that intuitive leap, only to find out later if you were right.
Sometimes the best touch is a light touch. Where the Wind Blows does exactly this, and it works perfectly. We’re not told why the wind carries people away. We’re not told where they go, or what the reason for their going is. In fact, we’re told expressly, “Don’t worry about that.” And it works because we understand that some things aren’t meant to be understood, that sometimes mystery and wonder are the point, and there’s nothing left to do but admit that we exist at the whim of vast universal forces we can’t control. And the story evokes this sense so strongly that, like the narrator, we’re not left questioning anything, but rather, we allow ourselves to be picked up and taken for a ride.
-TJG
Read Where the Wind Blows

“Surprising, yet inevitable” is one of my favorite phrases when talking about the craft of fiction writing. In just three words it perfectly, succinctly defines exactly what makes a well-executed twist ending. Here’s how it works:
A good twist is “surprising” because the audience doesn’t see it coming. That’s the easy part—you can make up any old twist and surprise a reader. The “out-of-left field” descriptor isn’t what you want to go for, though. It’s the “inevitable” bit that makes a good twist good, but it’s also where things get tricky. If the author is doing their job, clues to the ending will have been foreshadowed throughout (hopefully). The author must do so with a light touch, however, or they will lose their element of surprise. Then, after the initial shock wears off, those touches of foreshadowing will come back to the reader’s mind, giving the twist context and that all-important sense of inevitability. As surprising as it was in the moment, they could have seen it coming, if only they’d put all the pieces together in time. See how that works? 
No?
Then go re-read Jambo. The author pulls off his surprising yet inevitable twist ending with aplomb, made all the more effective because, by the end, we find ourselves cheering for the murderous robot. 
-TJG
Read Jambo 

Theme is overrated.
No, wait! Hear me out! 
I love all kinds of stories. Stories that focus on theme, that use metaphor and allegory within narrative to explore the complexity of some universal truth, are great! The right themes can add whole new depths of meaning to a conflict and richness to the reader experience… BUT I also don’t think every dark lord has to be a metaphor for the horrors of WWI. As authors, I think we often feel pressure to imbue the profound into our stories through the perfect theme, weighty and topical, shrouded in subtext, but nonetheless deeply affecting on a subconscious level. Think human trafficking, as represented through alien abduction.
Well I’m here to tell you, screw all that.
Theme in fiction is great, but don’t overthink it. A fun battle can be just a fun battle. An alien encounter can only be about meeting cool aliens. You don’t have to somehow link your overt conflict to the American military industrial complex, or the war on drugs, or the impending extinction of the bees to make your story “important” or meaningful. Don’t be the guy who insists that Daenerys Targaryen getting stuck in Slaver’s Bay is supposed to be frustrating because it’s really a metaphor for the Iraq War.
When it comes to theme, the only question I ever ask myself is, “what part of this character’s experience do I relate to?” Write about what it’s like to be human, through your own eyes and in your own words, and 10/10 times people will find it relatable, because that’s what we all are, right? Human?
Nathan’s Birdfeeder understands this perfectly. The theme is a simple one—grief—but even though the main character is processing grief while fighting an alien over bird food, we still empathize because grief is such an easily relatable human experience. The alien isn’t a metaphor, and it’s not even particularly important. The title says it all—the story is about a man’s grief over his late wife, how in keeping her memory alive through her old hobbies, he himself has stopped living his own life. The alien could just as easily be a squirrel, or a kid on a bike, anything to help Nathan realize he’s living in the past… but it’s an alien because that’s a lot more fun.
In sum, give your characters real problems you can relate to, make them deal with these problems in believable ways, and boom, the themes write themselves. 
-TJG
Read Nathan’s Birdfeeder

At Flash Point, we’ve published stories where the speculative element of the story is big, loud, and the most obvious thing in the world, and we’ve published stories where the speculative element is more subtle, nearly metaphorical. Our understanding of “speculative fiction” is pretty capacious, so we always love to see what people do with the genre in the tight confines of flash fiction. It’s difficult to build an epic fantasy story when you have a hard limit on your worldbuilding word count, and the tendency to include a lot of jargon that has to be explained  in science fiction flash can take up words that may otherwise be used for narrative or character development. All that to say, Aaron’s submission caught our eyes immediately, because rather than listing it as “Science Fiction” or “Fantasy” as many stories do, it is a “Science Fantasy.”

The story begins as a more straightforward fantasy, with appeals to the gods and supernaturally extended life, but as it continues, it seamlessly blends these two sub-genres of speculative fiction into a narrative that spans billions of years. The scope of the narrative would be impressive in any form of fiction, but in flash fiction? Yet, “Immortal” doesn’t feel like a long exploration of its world, its universe. It’s a brisk narrative. It provides the reader with enough information to always understand what is happening without ever bogging us down under the weight of the narrative scope. It’s truly an impressive accomplishment and one that blends various elements of speculative fiction in a way that we seldom see in our submission queue.
– MAD

Read Immortal

I live in Pittsburgh, PA. My mother, sister, and father all live in Johnson City, TN. Given traffic and my need to eat every now and then (more of the now, but also a good bit of the then), it becomes around a 7-7.5 hour long drive. On one occasion, I listened to the audiobook of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. If you’ve read it, you know how this anecdote will end. If not, suffice it to say that I was a weeping mess by the time Jason Isaacs finished his narration. I cried so hard, I nearly had to pull over. The speculative metaphors to represent the grief a child feels over slowly losing their dying mother heightened my emotional investment and made it an all-time classic for me. “To the Plains of Etherea” hit me in very similar ways. 

In our initial discussion of the story, Thomas asked if it was speculative enough for Flash Point SF. And it’s true that the speculative element is more in Artoth’s mind as a way to attempt to fix the unfixable. I argued that it worked because Addison uses the fantasy in a way that is integral to the narrative. As the scene progresses, the layers of fantasy slowly fade, revealing more of “reality” (though, I’m not a fan of such dichotomous “real world” and “fantasy” distinctions, and this story does a wonderful job blurring lines between a fantastical world and a mundane, and equally heart-rending one). By the penultimate paragraph, the fantasy is broken, and that is the moment the story truly breaks you. This may not be the typical kind of SFF story we publish at Flash Point SF, but it is one of the most emotional pieces of flash fiction I have ever read and the speculative metaphors Addison employs only make it more poignant.

– MAD 

Read To the Plains of Etherea

Novelty isn’t the only thing we look for (in fact we like when writers play with well-known tropes and conventions in genre!), but there is something thrilling about coming across a story that is totally unique, unlike anything we’ve ever published or even read before, and that’s saying something after 3 years and thousands of submissions. 

The Merchant With No Coin was a story unlike any we’d ever received. Folkloric fantasy is a personal favorite of the editors, but it’s hard to do right. The language has to feel old, the themes easily recognizable and universal. The characters and settings have to be general enough to be relatable, but specific enough not to feel like caricatures, cardboard stand-ins for the lesson lurking in the subtext. It’s the kind of story convention where you can hit all the right beats and still feel off. 

Merchant feels just right. It was written with such incredible stylistic fidelity that we expected to see the name Aesop in the byline. The archaic syntax of the prose immediately calls forth visions of antiquity, and thematically reads like so many classic fables where the problem gets turned on its head and becomes the solution to the conflict. Add onto that a fascinating world of fortunes told through cards and threads of fate tying people to the gods, and how could we say no?

-TJG

Read The Merchant With No Coin

When we’re wading into the sea of submissions we receive each month, with the knowledge that our budget keeps us from taking everything we want, stories that catch our attention get a huge leg up. A lot of people assume this means they should start their stories like a James Bond film–action from the first moment, only revealing the story further in. This is certainly attention grabbing, but with the word constraints of flash it is not the only (nor even the best) way to catch the eye of a weary first reader or editor. Jamie Lackey’s “Something We Can Do Ourselves” proves just that. There is no action. In fact, it’s mostly just a single conversation, but it just feels so lived in and so cozy.

Cozy fantasy is on the rise, as evidenced by Wyngraf, Nathaniel Webb’s Bard City Blues, and many other cozy fantasy-themed kickstarters popping up. What Jamie does with this story is write Cozy Science Fiction. A married couple are moving apartments, one spouse (Nat) hates elevators but is amazing with technology, and the other (Jess) loves her wife enough that she lets her build experimental lasers and raise a flock of pigeons in their kitchen. It takes a common idea (moving), adds in a speculative element, then provides the reader a glimpse into these two characters’ lives. We know their lives existed before this (the pigeons are a prime example of that) and that they will continue after this. But the narrative action is not explosive or violent. Instead, the storytelling is endearing, funny, and cozy. It not only to grabbed our attention with its believable characters and cozy premise, but it held onto it all the way through our final round deliberations.

– MAD

Read Something We Can Do Ourselves

Creating an atmosphere in prose is difficult. It’s not just picking the right descriptive details; it’s affecting the right tone and filtering details through the POV character’s perspective so that we get a sense of how the character feels about the setting or situation they’re in. It’s a difficult balance to strike. Tread too lightly and readers won’t feel immersed in your world, but lay it on too thick and you’ll put readers off. No one wants to feel like they’re being told how to feel. We want to hear the sounds, see the sights, smell the smells, and feel the chill run down our spine all on its own, without prompting.

The author of Octavia’s Anguish apparently has an extensive background in horror filmmaking, and it’s clear from the opening lines of the story that they are a master of setting the scene, of immersing us in an atmosphere of the macabre. “Creepy carnival” doesn’t do it justice. The author takes that familiar setting and builds on it with rich detail and compelling plot. As your mind’s eye builds the picture, part of you wants to look away, but you just can’t. Layered throughout there’s a sense of wrongness that’s both thrilling and horrific that keeps you absorbed in the narrative until the very end, when you’re left feeling a little bit gross for having enjoyed yourself as much as you did. 

-TJG

Read Octavia’s Anguish 

I’ve talked about twists in these editorials before, so I won’t belabor the point of how difficult a good one to pull off is, especially in flash fiction. I do, however, want to talk about how so often the twist is the only thing people talk about, or, if not the twist, the big flashy finale. Game of Thrones has seven episodes that are pretty meh then two explosively awesome ones, and it is suddenly described as a great season overall. Endings are important, there’s no doubt about that. But when you’re reading so many submissions of great quality, the ending can’t be the only thing that works. No matter how great the twist is, if you’re not invested before the twist, then the story isn’t going to work. Put simply: The twist should add to the narrative rather than being the sole purpose of it. Let the twist recontextualize an already interesting story. Sure, the twist at the end of The Prestige is great, but the movie before then is also compelling. That’s true for “Getting Away With It” as well. Even before we discover the reason Doug drinks so heavily, we want to know if Fred is getting away with it. We all have things we don’t want people to know, things we want and expect are hidden from everyone else, so the fear Bob’s story instills in us immediately has us invested. And while the twist sold the story for us, we were already engaged in this non-human entity experiencing an all-too-human fear. “Getting Away With It” is an example of a great twist but also a great story that uses speculative fiction to reveal the humanity in us all.

– MAD

Read Getting Away With It

Do you believe in magic?

Fantasy fiction can take many different forms, but one element that needs to be present is the magical. Whether it’s wizards and dragons, or demons and occultists, or lost boys and fairy dust, fantasy is defined by writing the impossible into reality. There are many ways to do this, and as the fantasy genre has grown and become more popular we’ve seen increasingly elaborate, complex, and inventive magic systems within stories, but it doesn’t have to be complicated if you don’t want it to be. It just has to reckon with the impossible.

Magic Hour does this in a fun and understated way. The story is “magical” in the purest sense, in that the protagonist witnesses something she can’t explain, that can’t be explained, and it fills her with a sense of childlike wonder. The narrative doesn’t let itself get bogged down in mechanics either. No need to check under the hood for the internal logic of this magic system; just suspend your disbelief and go with the flow. After all, it isn’t about the magic at the end of the day—it’s about lost youth found, and the magic of changing one’s perspective on life. 

Read Magic Hour

Love in the apocalypse. That was the title of one of a drabble series I had published last year. When this story came into the Flash Point SF queue, I just thought to myself, “I wish mine had been this good.” There’s something so magnetic about stories where love blooms in places it we don’t think it should. And one of the greatest parts of Martyn’s “No Second Dates” is the potential doubt. Is this a love of convenience? Would this love exist in any other circumstance? And, ultimately, does it matter? If the person we loved or the people we have loved in our past and will love in our futures came/come into our lives at a different time, would things be different? Hopefully that time isn’t an apocalypse, but the apocalyptic setting of Martyn’s story only makes the translatability of Rihanna’s classic “We Found Love” hit the harder.

Beyond the introspective musing on love that the story pulls out of me each and every time I read it, it’s also just a great example of building a world without having to delve into the details. SF writers love the details. I remember reading George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series in college and reading an entire page that was the description of shields on a wall (my memory may be exaggerating that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t). Martyn, however, puts the focus on the character and lets the brief descriptions between their dialogue provide all the imagery we need. It uses the readers’ idea of what an apocalypse would be like then sprinkles in just enough detail that the picture becomes clear, even if most of it is reader generated. It’s a wonderful way to convey a world in a flash piece where you have to choose each word with care.

– MAD
Read No Second Dates

Parents. Everyone likely has a different relationship to that word, to what that word means. The beauty of “The Serpent’s Daughter” is how it so quickly is able to convey the complicated relationship Emily has with her mother. Yes, she’s frustrated that her mom didn’t go to the parent-teacher conference, again. Yes, she’s acting out in ways that she knows will upset her mother. But yes, she loves her. And yes, she’s willing to sacrifice when she knows her mother needs her, just as her mother has for her in the past. It’s a tale that is able to bring together these big emotions and this relationship that extends far beyond the page in just a few scenes. 

The fantastical element of the daughter-mother relationship makes the story even stronger. Emily’s mom isn’t missing things just because she’s neglectful. There is something–this family curse–that is to blame. But not entirely. Emily does not give her mother an out because of the curse, but rather she confronts her, repeatedly. And she loves her, repeatedly. It’s a great story because it takes something that is so human, so understandable, and places it in this fantasy world in a way that makes the reader examine their own relationships. Is there a reason this person was acting the way they were? Would that excuse it? And what will we do if we love them, no matter the answer?

– MAD

Read The Serpent’s Daughter

“SF is about the metaphors, rarely the science.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the best parts about writing SFF is that we as authors can make the figurative literal, and thereby examine issues in ways we simply could not in a mundane world. In A Cold Chicago Winter the author does just that. When we meet our protagonist, they are already in dire straits, feeling alone and isolated in a new, unfamiliar city, divorced from everything and everyone they left behind. The infamous Chicago cold begins to seep into their very being, and the protagonist starts to come untethered from the physical world altogether. Unable to get warm, harried by cold calls from strangers, they seem frozen with inaction, riddled by doubts about what to do and whether anyone even cares. 

“What is your family going to think, if you disappear forever?”

It’s a striking metaphor that allows us to reconceptualize the way such isolation affects us, and that’s exactly what good speculative fiction is supposed to do: examine the state of the world and help the reader gain a new understanding of it through connection over shared experience.

-TJG

Read A Cold Chicago Winter

For a 100-word story, here’s my 1-word review:

Feelz.

Everything about the storytelling art is more difficult with drabbles because you have so few words to accomplish the same goal: move the reader. That’s what it all comes down to. Change them with your words, and on that score, Companion is a masterclass. In just one hundred words, the author gives a familiar scenario (an aging pet) that is almost immediately universal and sympathetic. So many of us have been there, but there’s also a twist—this pet is some sort of android, the supposed answer to so many prayers. A pet that doesn’t age, doesn’t die. Man’s best friend can now be his (her/their) best friend for life!

Except that entropy is still winning. This pet’s model has been discontinued, its parts slowly degrading without replacements. The sense of inevitability despite progress makes it that much more emotionally devastating. Where there should be newfound hope, instead a cruel twist of capitalistic fate. 

-TJG

Read Companion 

The first of our contest winning drabbles does what so many stories try and fail to do, and it manages to do it in only 100 words. The first four paragraphs (well, four lines) convince the reader that these two figures–Vill and our narrator–are locked in mortal combat. It’s not until the fifth (the midpoint for this drabble) that we learn it is a pantomime, literally. The reveal that these two are not enemies but rather sentient puppets breaking free from their puppeteer made me immediately reread the first half. The dialogue fits for a duel to the death, but it also fits perfectly for two friends who are plotting their escape. It’s an incredibly well-written and concise twist that is somehow set up and pulled off in just forty-nine words. The next fifty-one convey drama, stakes, and flesh out the worldbuilding and the relationship between Vill and the narrator. That is an impressive feat for any story, let alone one that is half the length of this editorial. (Also, as a side note, if “Another Leg” leaves you wanting more great puppet fantasy like it did for me, I’d recommend you check out Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio on Netflix. It’s just a bit longer though.) 

– MAD

Read Another Leg

Of all the SFF subgenres, I find Hard Sci-Fi the most intriguing. That’s not to say it’s my favorite, but there’s really nothing that turns the gears of the mind quite like a story that can take a scientific concept, something heady and academic, and make it concrete, use it for drama, for tension, for surprise and delight. When done right, you’ll be thinking about the mechanics of the concept for hours afterward, stimulated by the clever application of scientific principles and wondering at further, yet-to-be-explored possibilities.

Mind reading is a classic sci-fi concept, one that’s been turned over in the word counts of thousands of stories, but instead of leaning into cliches, Absolute Truth presents a unique twist on the concept: what if mind-reading was simply mind control in disguise? It’s a remarkably clever turn that you don’t quite see coming, but makes all the sense in the world once it dawns on you. You feel compelled to read the story again with your newfound understanding, and when you do you gain an even deeper appreciation for what you can now read between the lines. Writing instructors would call this kind of revelation “surprising yet inevitable.”

I call it a great story. 

-TJG

Read Absolute Truth

We see all kinds of submissions at Flash Point SF. There are stories about memorable characters, stories featuring intriguing novum (if I can be so pretentious to use Suvin Darko’s term) and worldbuilding, stories with intense action sequences, stories that hit us on an emotional level, and many more. Often, we’ll see stories that put these elements together, but they sometimes feel as if there is one element the author is most interested in and the other(s) are almost just…there. Aeryn’s “Reporting for Duty” is a story that does these things and more, but it never feels like anything is shoehorned in. Rather, each builds on what came before, both adding to what came before and already having us invested in what’s to come.

In “Reporting for Duty,” we’re first introduced to the novum (the military is bringing back fallen soldiers [or in this case captains] as spectral entities to continue fighting), we meet the core cast (whose dialogue gives us just the right amount of worldbuilding, as this is the kind of story where things could really get bogged down in exposition about the conflict) and see the various character relationships, we then are given a quick battle sequence that gets the blood pumping, then we end on my favorite moment of the story–the emotional gut punch that only works because how well each of the earlier parts built on themselves. When I read this for the first time, I marveled at how Aeryn was able to do all that in less than 1000 words. Any of the above–the action, the novum, the characters, the emotion–may get you to our second round, but when you’re able to weave all those together, you’re going to be in serious consideration for publication.

-MAD

Read Reporting for Duty

As short story authors, we’re all well-acquainted with the rejection letter. Really more than well-acquainted—in this business, there are only three things we know to be true: death, taxes, and rejection. That familiarity doesn’t make rejection any easier to handle, however. No matter how many times you open that email and see “unfortunately,” the sting is never any less.

What makes it tougher is that, for the most part, we have no idea how close we might have come to a “Yes.” There’s no way to tell whether or not an editor agonized over the decision to reject you, or if their “we’re sorry, but please try again” is just a kind formality.

Now let me cross back over to the other side of the author/editor fence and offer some New Year’s encouragement. You’ll never know how often editors are rooting for you, but I’d be willing to bet big that it’s more than you think, and our final story of the year is a perfect example of where perseverance can get you. The Hunt was not Heather’s first submission to FPSF; nor was it her second, or her third. But that did not mean she was beneath our notice; on the contrary, those first few submissions signaled that she was an author to look out for. The strength of her stories was clear and consistent. All we were waiting for was a submission that felt like just the right fit for us. 

The moral is this: if you’re submitting your best work, editors will remember you, and more often than not, they’ll root for you to send them something they can’t live without. Take advantage of that impression by continuing to send them your best, and sooner or later there will be a match.

-TJG

Read The Hunt

You may have noticed that Flash Point SF has gotten into the contest game. And holiday stories are some of Thomas’s favorite to read and write. When we went into our first annual holiday contest, we expected to see a lot of stories involving Santa, reindeer, Christmas-time in general. But E.M.’s submission stuck out to us as taking “Winter Holiday” and instead of hanging red and green lights on the house, the story turns to fairies and a midwinter celebration. Now, this isn’t to say we don’t want Christmas stories. We love those! In fact, Thomas’s first published story was a Christmas-themed flash fiction piece at Daily Science Fiction, but with so many submissions coming in, something that makes the story quickly memorable is always a plus.

Featuring a different winter celebration isn’t enough to win our contest on its own. Like I said, we love Christmas-themed stories. But E.M.’s story also pulls on so many tropes we associate with the holiday season and twists them. Preparing something to eat? There’s cookies, popcorn, and mounds of succulent meat. Delicious. Time to play some games! The stakes are doing dishes or losing your soul. Perfectly normal, right? And dancing. We all love to dance during the holidays, don’t we? We might as well do it for twelve nights. The prose is sinisterly humorous, and formatting the story as a list of tips enables the narrative to bounce around and play with a variety of holiday traditions, never lingering long enough to get stale. And perhaps best yet is the final line. Despite everything so clearly conveying that these tips are not at all safe, the last one, number thirteen, is a secret. It’s a wonderful stinger to a story that caught our attention early and never let it waver.

– MAD

Read Completely Safe and Totally Human Midwinter Holiday Tips

I am a big fan of fairy tales and folklore. There’s something about them that appeals to me on a level I can’t quite explain. And I love Disney. I probably shouldn’t as much as I do, but, hey, my brain just works that way. “Waking Beauty” reminds me of these kinds of stories, as the setting involves traveling through the woods after being told not to stray from the path, there’s a kiss that awakens a princess, and there’s a clear moral (“Hey. How about we don’t kiss sleeping women? Ever heard of consent?” Or, at least, that was my first take away). But despite all these familiar elements, the story twists them and makes something new. Part of that newness comes from the POV of the story. Being in second-person, the reader is interpellated. You are the one who is lonely, who fears death, or thinks with, well, not with your head. The story sucks you in by confronting you with the series of bad decisions the protagonist (or, in this case, you) continue to make.

But, in the moment, with our mind on the love of Disney’s fairy tales, these bad decisions may not seem so bad. Because they’re all rooted in familiar tropes. A beautiful girl seems to be magically asleep in the forest? I should help her! She likes me and thinks I would make a good husband (and, really, I haven’t been flattered in so long)? Well, that tends to work out well in Disney films! Men are coming, likely clad in clattering steel and bearing torches and swords poised to kill? My newly beloved princess seems scared and anxious of them? I’m the only one who can help her? Of course I should remove the magical item that has bound her. In so many ways, this story follows the path that we would expect–outside of the fairy tale, none of these are good decisions. But, instead, this narrative is dressed in the tropes of our Disney-fied fairy tales. And we couldn’t help but appreciate each subversion to that familiar formula.

-MAD

Read Waking Beauty

Endorsement is one of my favorite stories of the year so far. Everything about it is so well-thought out and executed, from the vivid sensory details, to the inherent conflict, to the surprising yet inevitable way the main character is changed by the events of the plot. I knew from my very first reading that we simply must buy it. 

It’s also a masterful demonstration of the idea that, with fiction, you don’t have to answer big questions with big, dramatic events. The answer can be subtle, understated, or implied, and still be powerfully resonant. Let’s distill the plot down to its most basic throughline: a woman boards a bus, watches an advertisement, then exits the bus to go to work. So simple, seemingly so mundane, but it’s the flesh on those bones that provides all the richness. Cyberpunk futurism, body horror, class conflict, and even philosophical questions around free will are all wrapped up inside this story about a woman watching what amounts to an (extremely effective subliminal) ad. No lasers firing, no space ships exploding, no aliens invading or AIs infiltrating, and yet I’m still filled with dread for what this story could mean for humanity’s future. 

How wonderfully effective.

-TJG

Read Endorsement

What makes a story scary? 

As a genre element, horror can be one of the hardest to nail down, whether you’re writing pure horror or looking to add a touch of the horrific to a dark fantasy or sci-fi tale. It doesn’t help that for most of us, the vast majority of our experience with horror is visceral, through movies and television. How can we still elicit fear when we can’t see the evil creature or hear the screams of terror, when all we have are words on a page?

This answer eluded me for a long time, until I heard one simple bit of writing advice that unlocked the whole genre for me. It was this: writing horror is all about inspiring fear, and fear, at its roots, is about a loss of control. If a protagonist is facing a dangerous foe or improbable odds, but they seem up to the task, equally matched with their adversaries and ready for whatever comes, there can be action, suspense, and thrills, but not true fear. We trust the character will come out on top. They are in control of their own destiny—all they need do is rise to the occasion.

But what happens when we take a character out of their comfort zone? Make them look powerless, lost, or confused. Push them into deep waters beyond their depth before they’re ready. Relate to the reader that sense of panic or uncertainty the protagonist feels, plant that seed of doubt that everything will be all right, that the protagonist is up to this task, and there you have the makings of something horrific. 

Blood and Glass does just that by connecting something relatively harmless—a cut finger, a drop of blood—with a hidden danger and a total loss of control. If you leave any traces of blood behind, it can be collected by an evil wizard and used to control you, body and mind. Once captured, you are powerless to resist, reduced to an instrument of evil without agency. Your only escape is death. 

Wouldn’t you start to look at the world differently, if even the smallest bit of broken glass could spell your doom?

-TJG

Read Blood and Glass

It is a challenge to tell a complete and satisfying narrative in less than 1000 words. So often, we get submissions that feel like the beginning to a longer story or a story that spends the majority of the word count laying out worldbuilding and character backstory that the narrative action ends up feeling like an afterthought. That challenge is multiplied when you write a drabble of 100 words. In drabbles, each description you include has to move the story forward or provide the reader with necessary information. 

With “Favourite Treats,” Andreas crafts a drabble that not only establishes a world and conveys narrative action, but it has a twist at the end that immediately makes you go back and read the story again. Not all drabbles need twists, but in this story, the twist was so well executed. In the first two paragraphs, you don’t expect it. Then the third paragraph creates unease. The final paragraph sells the twist as disturbing and humorous, and it ultimately recasts how you understand the set up entirely. It’s hard to pull that off in a 1000-word flash fiction piece, let alone a 100-word drabble. But if you are able to use an economy of words to create a humorously disturbing tale like this one, you’ll make it to our final round, if not all the way to publication.

– MAD

Read Favourite Treats

The SFF short story biz can be a discouraging space, especially if you participate in any of its online communities. Everywhere you look, it seems like someone is celebrating a story sale. Meanwhile, rejection after rejection piles up in your inbox. Maybe you’ve yet to make a sale at all, or it’s been a month, or a year. Most of the time you can brush the disappointment off, but the more No’s you get, the more the doubts start to creep in. Am I a good writer? Do I really have what it takes, or am I fooling myself?

The reality is that everyone gets rejected. A lot. Even the big name writers who seem to be getting every single scrap of fictional thought published are getting rejection emails just as much, if not more so. This editor personally received 76 (SEVEN-SIX!) rejections before getting that first acceptance, and let me tell you, there were many dark nights of the soul along the way. Many other writers have begun opening up about their process in recent years, and that’s great, but it bears repeating. We all face rejection, and it (more often than not) has little to do with the quality of our work. 

Case in point: TO: City of Fresno Permits Office by Josh Franklin is the author’s first story sale, but reading along, you would never guess. It’s smart, focused, unique, funny, and polished. If you’d told me the author had been published a dozen times by pro markets, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. But undoubtedly the author has faced rejection, most likely for this story as well as a dozen others. It’s a numbers game, but more than that it’s a game of tastes. One person’s trash is another’s treasure, and that is never more true than in the publishing world, so no matter what, keep submitting. 

-TJG

Read TO: City of Fresno Permits Office

So many seminal science fiction and fantasy stories end with a moment of triumph, where the hero has accomplished their goal. The next page you flip is the back cover or the credits begin to roll. But all too often, those moments of triumph obfuscate questions of what happens next. In Children of Men, Theo gets Kee to the Tomorrow, but what happens then? Are we supposed to inherently trust that things will go well or should we be suspicious, like we have been of everyone and everything else in the film? In THX 1138, THX escapes to the surface and sees the sunset, but THX has no support. There’s no one else there. How will he survive? The same question can be asked of Yona and Timmy at the end of Snowpiercer. 

In “The Post-Traumatic Scoville Diet,” Jenna asks, “What happens next for Snow White?” It’s not just a happily ever after like we are meant to assume, but, rather, Snow is dealing with trauma from her experience. Snow is continually reminded of her near-death experience, and it influences her life in profound ways that definitely upend our expectations of “happily ever after.” In taking us to the next step, Jenna fleshes out a character most people know and creates an extension of a story that felt like it wrapped up a little too neatly. We love new takes on fairy tales at Flash Point SF, and we especially love stories that make us rethink what we had previously taken for granted.

– MAD

Read The Post-Traumatic Scoville Diet

One of the hardest parts of writing SF flash fiction is telling a complete story while also immersing the reader into a new world. Often stories focus so much on the worldbuilding, they let the narrative and the characters suffer; other stories are brimming with compelling characters and exciting narratives, but they feel adrift, detached from a lived-in world. With “Reborn,” Eric is able to accomplish all of the above with aplomb. The first line grabs you with the narrative hook, but it also lays out a number of nova that signal the kind of world this story is set in. While we could be in a futuristic world with zombies (that’s an intriguing idea, actually—anyone game to submitting something like that?), the casual mentions of technology immediately ping us to the fact that the narrator’s dead mother isn’t a zombie. She’s something different. And if she’s not a zombie, how is she sitting there? As the first scene progresses, the story naturally weaves additional descriptions of this cyberpunk world with the narrator’s conflict. And each additional scene continues expanding the world while simultaneously furthering the plot. I often read stories where the beginning of the story sets a scene, and after that, there’s mostly action and dialogue. Here, Eric adds new layers to the world with each narrative development. Perhaps most impressively, “Reborn” leaves you wanting more of this world while also providing a completely satisfying and emotional conclusion. It’s hard to juggle character, narrative, and worldbuilding, but the stories that do are the ones that make it to our final round. 

– MAD

Read Reborn

Almost every story has a theme. Even if the author doesn’t realize what it is, there’s always some motivation, some spark of inspiration or insight, that compels them to put pen to paper (figuratively these days, for the most part). Then again, maybe the author has a clear grasp on their theme, and all that’s left is to craft the right story to give this theme voice. 

Easier said than done. Fiction readers don’t want a five paragraph essay with a thesis statement, supporting arguments, and a conclusion. We as readers want something entertaining as well as edifying. We want a story with dramatic tension, a plot we can get carried away by, prose that sings on the page as if each line were a staff. It’s not enough that the story stands for something. It has to stand for itself first.

How you do that is up to you, but with The Trail to Youth’s Fountain, the author has performed a wonderful magic trick, wherein every line of their story, unbeknownst to the reader, supports their theme in both plot and tone. “Youth” isn’t a certain age or number, it’s having hopes and dreams, enjoying yourself, getting lost in the moment, being silly and carefree and following your heart. Each step along the trail bids us do just that in some new way, without saying so in so many words, and by the time the theme is finally explicated, we the reader have already realized the truth of it in ourselves. 

-TJG

Read The Trail to Youth’s Fountain

When it comes to writing flash, a lot of people think they need to make their stories full of action. They try to stuff as much exciting content into 1000 words as possible, but, as is too often the case, those stories end up lacking character (in multiple senses) and come across as a piece of something larger. (Though that’s not to say we don’t want exciting, adventure stories! We just want to care about the characters in those adventurous flashes.) Instead of providing an action-packed narrative, with “The Day They Switched the Machine On,” Simon focuses on a Q&A and a science presentation. This means the majority of the piece is set in one room and is mostly dialogue. Through the dialogue and the internal thoughts of Amelia, however, we learn so much about Amelia, Max, and Petersen. In less than 1000 words, we understand the relationship between Max and Amelia and between Amelia and Petersen. The premise draws us in but the characters and how they relate keep us engaged. The stories that make it to our final round of consideration provide characters we remember.

Additionally, stories that surprise us by doing exactly what we expect them (then brush aside because we trust our POV character) also make it to our final round. And Simon weds a character-driven, dialogue-heavy flash with a surprising ending in a way that, when we read it, we knew we had to publish. When Amelia dismisses Petersen as someone who knows a little about science, but we too brush him and his concerns aside. Then Max chimes in and starts to say that it’s an interesting question (and you should always trust a guy named Max, right?). Then, in the penultimate paragraphs, Amelia starts to question her own convictions. Then she hits the button and hordes of insectoid killbots pour through a portal. It’s a conclusion that makes complete sense and while also being one you don’t see coming until it’s there. Even if you think the portal is going to open, who is going to guess insectoid killbots? 

– MAD

Read The Day They Switched the Machine On

We here at Flash Point Science Fiction don’t do too well with horror… but that doesn’t mean we can’t handle a spin-tingling thrill, now and then. Call it dark fantasy, call it horror lite, but when the scare doesn’t go too over the top, then we’re open to the right kind of fright.

That’s exactly what Frog Hunting was for us. There are so many things it does well in setting up and paying off the scare, but let’s look at a few I found particularly effective. 

The implicit promise—opening lines are always important, but the first three sentences do an expert job of setting expectations. 1. There’s a challenge: the narrator can have a frog, but only if he can catch it. 2. There’s a time limit: he has until sunset. 3. There’s a threat: we don’t know what, but something out there is going to make frog hunting after dark dangerous. If you’re trying to establish tension, you won’t do much better than these opening lines.

The language—the ways our author uses deliberate choices in diction and syntax to build tension and elicit fear are too numerous to count, but one example stands out in particular because it comes right out of Stephen King’s playbook. As the king (pun intended) of terror said himself, to make it scary, sometimes you only need to add one word: too. “It was dark,” is simple description; “It was too dark” tells us something is wrong. 

The pay off—the key in this story, and in many successful horror stories, is a power shift, a loss of control. Our narrator goes from being the powerful aggressor, snatching up tiny frogs, to suddenly being snatched up himself. Plus, remember it’s too dark, so the narrator can’t see, he can only feel something grab hold of him. This is textbook scene progression, taking the narrator from a position of strength at the beginning to one of weakness by the end, but it’s also viscerally gripping and spooky. Alone, night-blind, and overpowered, what else is there to do but drop the frog and run home to mom?

-TJG

Read Frog Hunting

Stories told primarily through dialogue are hard to pull off well. It can be easy to lose track of who is speaking because, all too often, the characters end up sounding the same. This isn’t the case with “The Natural State.” While the radio transcript makes it clear who is speaking at any time, each character’s voice is so distinct, the transcript style wouldn’t be necessary if not for the sound effects key to the narrative’s progression. The first time reading this, I could immediately imagine the characters and their voices. Douglas does a phenomenal job of using stock characters we’re all familiar with–either through reading speculative fiction or just existing in a pre-Spotify/Apple Music/Audible world and having to listen to radio while driving (do people still do that?)–then using those to create memorable characters with unique voices. 

While the characters are distinct, the story is also very funny. Not necessarily because of any single line (though I’ll come back to that), but because the situation escalates and escalates until it is solved by the most unlikely proposition, but one that somehow feels like it makes perfect sense: Our caller gets six tickets instead of two. The humor is simultaneously specific and general, which is very difficult to pull off. When Monstro says “So you’ve been to the Arkansas Music Pavilion before,” I laugh. Same with “Steve Miller Band fans, man. They’re the worst.” Not because I’ve been to the Arkansas Music Pavilion or because I have something against the Steve Miller Band or their fans (though “The Joker” is now stuck in my head, and I wouldn’t mind having something else in there), but because it’s specific to the story yet applicable to so many other situations. I immediately think of music pavilions in the place I live and the band fandoms I’ve been exposed to or been a part of. Monstro’s lines color those memories. Humor, like dialogue-heavy stories, can be hit and miss for story submissions, but when you’re able to craft both distinct character voices and humor that fits in the story while also interpellating the reader into recalling their own experiences, you’ve got a winner on your hands.

-MAD

Read The Natural State

Sometimes you encounter a story and you think you know exactly how it is going to go. You learn the setting, you meet the main character, you get a glimpse of the conflict, and you think, Yep, I know where this is going. Then, there’s a pivot. Not a pivot that feels out of place with the rest of the story (something we too often see with submissions), but a pivot that feels like a perfectly natural extension of the narrative–just one that you didn’t expect. After you finish, you immediately read it again to see how the author got from point A to point C when you were so sure that it was going to spend its time dealing with point B.

That was my experience reading “Sun Amongst Smoke.” I assumed Mira’s escape from the drones and the subsequent fallout would take up the majority of the story (and so did our artist, who originally planned to feature that sequence in his artwork for the piece), but, instead, Alfred provides Mira with an unexpected choice. One that doesn’t involve the police drones but a small plant. It’s an example of flash fiction at its finest: A story that so clearly paints the past and future but the present still surprises us while telling a full, satisfying narrative.

-MAD

Read Sun Amongst Smoke

“There is nothing new under the sun” is a phrase that often springs to mind when reading fiction submissions. There are so many great storytellers out there writing and submitting great fiction, only to see “unfortunately…” in the response, and it’s fair for them to ask why. They’re doing everything right, aren’t they?

Yes, but unfortunately it is often not enough to simply turn in a story well-told. It also must be well-thought-out. It must be unique. There may be nothing new under the sun, but what editors want most are authors who can shine a fresh light on old sights, thereby making them new. 

On its surface, For Viporis is a straightforward story about a dragon who kills some livestock, eats them, and then dies in a battle with a rival dragon. This is well-trod ground, but thankfully the author goes beyond the surface (or should I say “beneath”) to bring the focus away from external events. Instead, we’re treated to a novel milieu, the dragon’s interior, where an entire ecosystem of magical, immunological creatures work in concert to help the dragon breathe fire, digest its food, and even stitch its wounds mid-battle. I’ve read a million stories about dragons, but I never thought I’d read this one, and that’s what makes For Viporis so captivating. Don’t tell the same old story; dig deeper (pun intended).

-TJG

Read For Viporis

There are many ways one might identify a good story, but for me, in the end, it always comes down to just one question: did I get lost in the forest?

Most of us have likely heard the expression, “They couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” I think this phrase embodies a problem many experienced writers struggle with, both in their own writing and in the writing of others. So often when crafting stories (or talking or thinking about them) we the author focus on the trees, not the forest. Do these plot beats flow logically? Is the prose concrete, immediate, and precise? Does the story evoke the theme I’ve intended for it? Are characters growing and changing, yet still acting within their nature? Have I used the word ‘frisson’ too many times?

We ask these questions for good reason, because we want all the various pieces of writing craft to come together and form a pleasing whole, but the more we hone our critical eye, the harder it becomes to close it. Being able to expertly identify the trees is well and good, but what happens when your expertise keeps you from seeing the forest at all? It can be hard to take off the writer’s cap, put on the reader’s, and just enjoy a story.

Unless that story is really great. I have no technical breakdown for Right Person, Wrong Time. Not that it doesn’t do many things right on a technical level, because it does, but thinking back to the first time I read it, all I can recall is how I felt. I got lost in the tale, rooting for the protagonist, riding the waves of the plot with her without looking forward or scanning back, and by the end, my writer’s cap was still nowhere in sight. My only thought was, how charming. 

-TJG

Read Right Person, Wrong Time

Everyone loves a good paradox. Much like an optical illusion fascinates the eye, readers love to try to wrap their brain around something which fundamentally resists understanding. The “infinite” apartment complex in The Seven-Hundred and Fifty-Eighth Floor is just that, but this story isn’t just a thought experiment. No, in order to take a story from merely intriguing to compelling and satisfying, the reader needs more. They need conflict.

And so, the elevators go out. This would be an inconvenience for anyone in any multi-level apartment complex, but when you’re nearly 1000 floors up? The intrigue inherent in the premise melds with the plot turn to create the perfect tale of woman vs. environment, and the sense of futility derived from our main character’s attempt to reach the bottom only heightens the tension. Then, right at the end, we’re given a glimmer of hope—are those street lamps? Is she finally approaching the bottom?

Alas, in keeping with the promise of the premise, there is no bottom, as there is no top. Those are only stars below.

-TJG

Read The Seven-Hundred and Fifty-Eighth Floor 

Anyone who’s ever told a joke (which is to say, everyone ever) knows that it’s much harder to get a laugh than you think. What seems hilarious in your head often loses its clarity somewhere between brain and mouth, and then you’re standing there with your hands in your pockets and a silly, unreciprocated grin on your face, feeling foolish. 

This goes doubly for writing humor. Crafting a good set-up and delivering the punchline at just the right moment are learned skills. So is writing good situational humor, and that’s just what We’ll Keep It on File has done. It’s all about expectations, you see. The story unfolds as a scenario all too familiar to most—a job interview. There’s plenty of tension inherent there, and for good reason. The stakes are high and no one likes being judged, and this time it’s all of humanity, with all our many, many shortcomings, being evaluated. The risk of falling short of the interviewer’s expectations is apparent, and the author does a great job building that tension further through the interviewer’s pointed questions and disapproving tone. But then the “punchline” hits us—humanity is OVER-qualified. We’ve still been denied entry to the Galactic Federation, but not for being a mess of a species; no, we’re actually too mature and committed to progress, and that would make the other member species feel inadequate. Such a ridiculous logic is nothing if not funny because of how well it subverts our expectations.

-TJG

Read We’ll Keep It on File

There are many things I look for as an editor when evaluating a submission, but one of the most crucial, which often moves stories with a promising start into the DECLINE category, is a lack of effective tension building. Your story can have sparkling prose, a sympathetic main character, unique and fascinating worldbuilding, but if it can’t push me to the edge of my seat, if it can’t compel me to read the next line and the next with a growing sense of dread or anticipation in my gut, then it may not have what it takes. 

This doesn’t automatically mean big action set pieces or stunning revelations, however. Effective tension can be quiet. It can grow slowly as a vague, uneasy feeling, or quickly as an unstoppable sense of doom. It can even be a single, lingering doubt—can the protagonist pull this off? The tension employed in And Fill Me from the Crown to the Toe is a more subtle variation, but it’s built perfectly for the purposes of this particular plot. Our narrator is set up as a voyeur, observing but not interacting, and their observations are vaguely predatory, just enough to set off alarm bells in the reader’s head. Then we learn of the curse, and the revelation of what may happen only heightens the sense of tension, because the danger is dismissed, despite what we the readers know must be true. And yet there’s nothing we can do about it—the show must go on. Every chance given to the character in danger builds our fear and frustration more. By the time the ritual occurs and the curse is fulfilled, we’re filled with a sense of tragic fate, and the tension is released. It’s not a happy ending, but that was never promised in the first place; only a thrilling ride. 

-TJG

Read And Fill Me from the Crown to the Toe

Tropes get a bad rap. So often we hear them spoken as a dirty word. They are regarded as something to avoid, on the grounds that they are “unoriginal” or trite, or otherwise low-hanging fruit for the lazy plotter. 

This can all be true, I suppose, if the author goes about their use of tropes in a lazy way, but what many fail to mention in their critiques is this: tropes are tropes for a reason. They involve situations and characterizations that are immediately recognizable and often universal, and since good writing is all about making a relatable connection with the reader, a good trope, used well, can be an invaluable tool. 

Pen-pals has done just that by taking a classic horror trope (a ghost writing threatening messages on the mirror in blood) and thoughtfully pairing it with a narrative tone that undercuts our expectations of horror, replacing it with humor and irony. If the author had played the trope straight, we as readers may well have lost interest because we knew, or at least could make an informed guess, where the story was headed. But by “inverting” the trope, they’ve signaled that this story will not be what we expect, and there’s no better way to spark the reader’s curiosity than by surprising them. 

-TJG

Read Pen-pals

Post-apocalyptic stories are so often bleak, filled with speculative horrors of what humanity will devolve into when our continued existence is all we have left to lose. “Mixed Signals” begins by showing Sam and Colton trying to get supplies from an unnamed woman, and, from the get go, Aeryn already paints hope into this bleak world. While the ominous threat of Cappers exists, this unnamed woman is willing to brave their dangers to supply the resistance. And our two protagonists have found more than comradery as they’ve traveled and worked together in the resistance–they have found love. 

What stuck out to me the most in this story is the decision Sam and Colton make at the end. They exist in a world where supplies are limited and they have been relying on the kindness of a woman who has never even told them her name in order to survive. Yet, upon seeing an infant, there is no debate. They will take this child with them, they will keep her safe and provided for like her mother kept them, and, when she’s old enough to ask, they will tell her about her mother. The decision alone displays the goodness of both of these characters, but the fact that neither of them ever suggest an alternative is what really gets to the ethos of hope and possibility that suffuses “Mixed Signals.” 

– MAD

Read Mixed Signals

If you’ve seen ScreenRant’s “Pitch Meeting” series, you may know that a common trend in cinema is that villains are so often evil for evil’s sake. They lack motivation and seemingly only exist so the protagonist can have someone to foil. This isn’t always the case, of course. Some of the best villains, regardless of the media, are those that, when they’re given their moment, are nearly able to persuade the hero (and even the audience) to their point of view. The protagonist then has to question what they thought was true and decide how they plan to move forward. Sometimes I’m extremely frustrated with the protagonist for the path they chose; other times I’m jubilant and feel a deep satisfaction.

In “The Queen,” Teresa flips the typical script by crafting a great villain who is also our protagonist. Rather than having the story follow the person from the village who confronts the eponymous queen, the reader is with the queen the entire time. We hear her reasoning (she has to preserve the health and safety of the fairies and elves under her protection) and how she appealed to the villagers many times (even providing them with an alternative). We know the queen, even with her justifications, has done terrible things and murdered nearly the entire population of *at least* one village. We even hear her be fairly blasé about it. But when the potential hero’s swordpoint is at the queen’s breast and her only reaction is to proffer the villager a cup of tea, you can’t help but think: what would I do? And that moment, not one of frustration or satisication for what the villager chooses, but an immediate interpellation of the reader, makes “The Queen” all the more satisfying to read again and again. Particularly as your answer may change from day to day, moment to moment.

– MAD

Read The Queen

At the end of 2021, I was reading a lot of Ted Chiang. This story grabbed me as being a piece with the deterministic themes in Chiang’s works involving time, particularly “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.” We have published a number of stories that involve time travel at Flash Point SF, but this was the first where rather than the time travel being used to change an event, it was the cause. The narrator could not prevent Max’s injury through time traveling because the narrator’s attempt was the reason the injury happened to begin with. This kind of determinism elides the paradox inherent in so many time travel stories, where a person travels back to the past to change something, which will then change the future to the point that the person will never have a reason to travel back in the first place (for a great example of this, see the Futurama episode “Decision 3012.”) This isn’t the case in “Time Accounted For.” Instead, the true tragedy is the knowledge that the younger version of the narrator will work for years to prevent something that he will inevitably cause. 

– MAD

Read Time Accounted For

Everyone’s heard the writing maxim “show, don’t tell,” but like all advice, what works well for someone, or some project, might not be as helpful for others. Case in point: The Daily Communion. With this story the opposite is true. 

There are two basic ways to narrate fiction: by summarizing action, or by dramatizing it. These distinctions are fairly self-explanatory, but it’s worth noting that dramatic narration is usually what people point to when they think of compelling prose, because it’s where the story feels most immediate, where the characters act in real time, where they converse and move and think and feel. 

The Daily Communion, by contrast, is written mostly in summary. You could argue that the narration isn’t even describing “actual” events (I mean, no work of fiction is, but that’s beside the point); instead, the story amounts to one big, hypothetical “for instance” of how the acolytes of Viaremora typically behave. There is no “drama.” And yet it works. But why?

For me, it comes down to a few things. First and foremost, it never hurts to be funny, and this story is hilarious, if in an understated fashion. Second, and if I said it once I’ve said it a million times, make your story relatable. Here, The Daily Communion picks the lowest of the hanging fruit–who among us doesn’t have visceral, perhaps rageful, memories of being stuck in crawling, senseless traffic? I can put myself there in an instant, can’t you? And third, and we’re gonna tie it all together here… sometimes people just love a good explanation. “Show don’t tell” is fine, and drama can be fun, but give me a good conspiracy theory, even a ridiculous one, and I’m hooked. You’re telling me there’s a reason for all the senseless traffic we wade through every morning? That it’s not just the banality of life, or random events of entropy unfolding in the most annoying way possible, but a deliberate act of emotional sabotage designed to feed a wanton god? There’s a reason conspiracy theories like the Illuminati, lizard people, ancient aliens, and so much more persist despite all evidence to the contrary, and it’s because making the mundane and relatable into something spectacular and compelling is one of the best ways there is for catching a reader’s attention. 

-TJG

Read The Daily Communion

So much of Sci-fi and Fantasy is looking forward. How would this or that technology change the world? How would this event or that person or this encounter affect our future? Forecasting what’s to come has always been a celebrated part of the genre, but every once in a while, it can be just as fun to look back instead.

Secret Histories do just that, but in order to craft a believable narrative in this subgenre, you have to be willing and able to write in the margins of the textbook, in between the lines of the established “truth.” And to do this, Secret Histories must feel plausible. Could a special forces unit of werewolves have really wreaked havoc behind enemy lines in World War II? Maybe, but their impact would have to be slight, their mission covert, or else we’d have heard about them, right? The author of Storm Wolves understands this perfectly. If the Storm Wolves were out there winning the war single-handedly, storming the beaches, halting the German advance, killing Hitler in a theater full of Nazi brass (I’m looking at you, Tarantino), then the story loses its plausibility, and becomes something else altogether–Alternate History. Alternate Histories are fun too, but they’re a different thing, and like most sci-fi they are more forward-looking; they still ask how a certain thing might change the future, they’re simply looking at the future from some point in the past. 

If you’re wanting to write your own Secret History, don’t ask “how does this change the future?” Instead ask, “what have the stories of the past left unsaid?” It’s the intrigue implicit in this question which drives a good Secret History.

-TJG

Read Storm Wolves

A relatable theme is often what takes a story from good to great, but finding that something that resonates with the reader is easier said than done. It’s not as simple as identifying a universal truism (tis better to have loved and lost, yada yada) and then typing out the right keywords; you have to make the reader believe that the struggle is real. Readers can smell disingenuous sentiment from a mile away, so in order for a theme to become relatable, several elements have to align. It’s not enough to simply present your character with an obstacle. Their motivation for overcoming it must be sincere and grounded in their characterization. They must grapple earnestly with that obstacle, and whether or not they succeed, the stakes and the cost should be apparent. What did they give up in order to succeed? What did they lose through failure? Can we see the weight of those compromises in the actions and thoughts of the character moving forward?

One More Sunrise takes on a theme that I think many of us are all too familiar with these days. I like to think of themes as questions the story asks both the character and the reader, and for me the question here is, “What’s to be done in the face of despair?” As in real life, the world of the story faces a pandemic, though this version is much more severe, and it’s left our character stranded on the moon with no way home and no hope of rescue. It’s a nightmarish situation, and one that an empathetic reader will be immediately gripped by. “What would I do in that situation?” is always a question you want your reader to ask, because it means you’ve hooked them, but (importantly, I think) the character doesn’t answer that question in the way we expect. We can see the narrator grappling with the despair, but their answer to the central thematic question isn’t to capitulate; rather, they reach for silver linings, displaying resilience and mental fortitude in the face of overwhelming circumstance. It’s an important message, deftly crafted into the plot in such a way that the reader has, hopefully, learned something about themselves through their own interaction with the story. 

-TJG

Read One More Sunrise

2021 was a difficult year for many people. 2020 was too. And it looks like 2022 will be as well. With all the difficulties and uncertainty in the world, this story really stood out for the moments of hope amidst the misery. This is a post-apocalyptic world in the vein of Children of Men. Not to that extent yet–as the lab is set to deliver its third child of the day–but it does seem to be moving in that direction. And Cameron makes the wise choice to not really explain why certain things have happened. There are brief gestures to the lowering sperm count in men and mentions that women do not want to risk pregnancy “for a multitude of reasons,” but it doesn’t go much beyond that. We know that the world has become a place that most people do not want to bring children into, even when there is the ability to do so through Dylan’s business. And that’s all we really need to know. The reader fills in the rest as we are given a tight, focused look at Dylan, preparing to ship/fly a child to her waiting parent(s).

It is Dylan’s interaction with the baby and the final moments of the story that made us decide this would be a perfect story for the end of 2021. Dylan’s business is failing and he’s lost some of the moments he most looked forward to, where he could see a nearly unprecedented view of the world from the mechanized stork’s camera. Yet, when he sees this infant, he is compelled to interact with her until she smiles, to bring joy to her, to himself, and to the reader who has just been confronted with the realities of this future. Then Cameron offers hope. We’re told many people don’t want to bring children into the world as it currently is, but this child will be able to have “her own opinions, her own opportunities to change things, her own future and squandered or realized potential.” And she’ll have her parent(s), for whom the delivery of this baby, Cameron spells out, could be the delivery of hope and meaning. As the baby coos in wonder as the stork carries her away, I couldn’t help but feel warm and think that there may be a deliverance of hope. At least eventually. That hope could be a child, a new job, a treatment, a message of love and caring from one close to us, or whatever the mechanized stork may carry.

– MAD

Read Spring or Winter’s Respite

The epistolary form can be hard to pull off. When presented through the guise of a letter or journal, the necessities of exposition and plot can feel unnatural if they aren’t handled with care and a soft touch. Would someone writing an entry in their personal diary really go to the trouble of explaining setting and character backstories, or would they just write, “Jan was mean to me again today,” foregoing superfluous details?

A Little Good Magic navigates this medium perfectly, though it does help that the main character, Lisa, is writing to Santa (who can see you when you’re sleeping, don’t forget). This allows her to touch lightly upon her ever-changing circumstances without weighing the prose down with repeated exposition. It requires a lot of faith in the reader, who is mostly left to put two and two together by themselves, but it keeps the story concise and immediate.  

-TJG

Read A Little Good Magic

What makes You Are Not a Player Character such an enjoyable read is how relatable it is, though I do wonder if that relatability will be felt universally. This feels like a distinctly Millennial story to me, as I was immediately caught up by memories of playing RPG video games like Skyrim, The Witcher, Runescape, and more. It’s a strange thing to observe the NPCs (non-player characters) of games such as those. Their routines revolve like clockwork, and as your hero galivants around the map, it becomes all too easy to use and abuse those NPCs to your benefit. The morality of your actions never come into play because the point is moot; no one lives behind the blank stares, the scripted responses. They’re bits of code which only exist to serve you, to facilitate the completion of whatever quest you happen to be on.

But what if someone did live within that code? In asking that question, You Are Not a Player Character instantly becomes a haunting exploration into the nature of free will and consequence. What kinds of things would we allow ourselves to do, if we truly thought no one was watching? It’s an idea that almost feels too big for a single flash piece, but the author plays it perfectly, asking the question, then letting us decide how to feel and what to think.

-TJG

Read You Are Not a Player Character

Make the strange familiar(!!!)

I feel like I write a lot about the importance of making your story relatable, but that’s because it is important. Crafting a relatable idea, circumstance, or character is the quickest and surest way to engage with your reader, and Demon Summoning Circle Starter Kit does just that in a really fun way. Everyone knows what it’s like to read hysterical Amazon reviews or irate YouTube comments, but by taking something strange and fantastical—a demon summoning circle—and making light of it in this familiar context, the story marries the interesting with the mundane and makes it relatable. Just the idea of customer reviews for a demon summoning circle is patently ridiculous, and it’s that juxtaposition that gives the story its humor.

-TJG

Read Demon Summoning Circle Starter Kit

I’m not being trite when I say this story is magical in the best way. For any story utilizing magic, we ask the readers to believe in something unbelievable, and to that end, it helps if we give our magic rules. A thing defined is a thing understood. Good stories then give depth to the magic as the plot progresses by showing how it’s applied firsthand within the boundaries we’ve set. 

Great stories take their magic one step further, not by breaking the rules, but by bending them, giving them nuance, showing how unexpected things can still happen within these boundaries, and that’s exactly what A Voice in the Winter has done. Through its magic it creates an engaging world with a unique dilemma, then hits us with a surprising, but absolutely fitting, twist to create that satisfying ending.

-TJG

Read A Voice in the Winter

Writing flash fiction that stands on its own is difficult, and the fewer words you use, the harder it is to tell a complete story. It raises the difficulty even more when you attempt to subvert expectations within flash, yet Katherine was able to tell a complete story with a surprise punch at the end in a Drabble-length piece. The setting is one familiar to most readers, evoking witch-hunts and, for this US American, the Salem Witch Trials. Rather than a fantasy, however, this is science fiction. As always, these men accusing a woman of witchcraft are wrong. This time, though, the men are the ones to suffer, as the woman they are burning has a metallic form under her simulacra of flesh. And when the coating burns off, noxious gas is released that kills the men and leaves our narrator unharmed.

The reason the ending is such a surprise comes from our genre expectations. The narrator describes the ordeal as interesting, which is not a word most in this situation would use. Then the men’s pricks draw no blood, which is another sign that something isn’t right. The narrator even warns them that she doesn’t burn like they do–separating herself from them. But the reveal that the narrator is metallic rather than magical plays on the audience’s expectations. It is a “twist” that is perfectly telegraphed and, upon reread, is clear as day. The brevity of the piece only makes the ending’s punch hit harder.

– MAD

Read I Don’t Burn Like You

While I am not a galactic emperor, I connected to Gorgalax’s plight in many ways. My second year as a PhD student, I was teaching at three colleges, taking four graduate seminars a semester, trying to publish articles, and working on my comprehensive exams. Plus editing Flash Point SF, getting married, and overindulging in junk food. It felt like there was so much going on and I was constantly working. Then, seemingly at once, I finished my coursework, I started only teaching for two schools, I passed my comps and had my prospectus approved, my articles drafts were submitted or published, Flash Point closed submissions, and I got married. I had time on my hands. And I had no idea what to do with myself. I, like Gorgalax, was consumed by boredom and found myself feeling increasingly depressed. After working so hard for so long to achieve a goal, I felt like I lacked a purpose. I felt adrift, like I was wasting time when I could have been doing other things (Note to readers: Relaxation is important. Don’t be like me.)

Unlike the sad paragraph I just wrote, Douglas’s story is very funny. Chris, Thomas, and I all noted how we laughed out loud following Gorgalax’s attempt at a knitting circle. But I include that description because there’s something extremely relatable in Gorgalax’s story. Even this ultra-powerful space emperor could feel adrift and struggle when the only thing they have left to accomplish is to relax and be finished with their task. Gorgalax jumps at the first chance he gets to return to the work he feels he’s best at after many failed attempts at hobbies. Hopefully others can find something that makes us happy and gives us purpose, or even accept that when a task is finished, we should take time to celebrate and bask in that moment. We check that last box, then we start a new list, just as I imagine Gorgalax will do as he takes down the newest rebellion.

– MAD

Read The Unchecked Box

If you asked me to define satire, I would probably struggle. It’s not humor, precisely, though good satire often uses humor effectively. And yet, it also doesn’t have to be serious–in fact, sometimes the more ridiculous the scenario, the better the message is conveyed. It’s not a sermon either; all satire functions to make a point, but with good satire the point is felt, not heard. No grand soliloquies with a character bluntly stating, “this is an example of a bad thing, and here is why it’s bad.” Instead, it’s demonstrated through the events of the scene, and the honest reactions of the characters to an untenable condition. Good satire presents us with a problem, then makes us stand face-to-face with those most affected. We can’t help but empathize, and through that empathy we learn a lesson. 

Again, satire is hard to define. In the end, it’s like porn–I know it when I see it. 

The idea of tearing down statues, and of questioning their legitimacy as pieces of enduring history, has been the subject of heated debate in America for a while now, but The Memorial tackles it with real cleverness. Through the statue of Baaolruith the First, we’re suddenly forced to wonder what other controversial statues might say if they could talk, and whether they’re really representing objective history, or simply the point of view of the individual they depict. Furthermore, how might that point of view run in contrast to the values we seek to uphold? It’s a question worthy of deep consideration, and we’re all the more willing to consider it because at no point do we feel talked down to, lectured or scolded. That’s the magic of satire. 

-TJG

Read The Memorial 

How much does a good premise matter when writing a story? Jim Butcher would argue not at all. Famously, the DRESDEN FILES author bet a fan that ideas didn’t matter, execution did, and to prove it he asked the fan for two lame ideas which he would then turn into a workable story. The fan suggested “Pokemon” and “The Lost Roman legion.” Jim took those prompts and ended up writing a best-selling, six-novel fantasy series called THE CODEX ALERA. 

…That said, a strong premise never hurts, and in Ward F we find an incredible sci-fi concept fulfilled by strong writing. The best SF stories, for me, are those that make me think as well as feel, and Ward F does that in spades. From the moment you become aware of the conflict’s true nature, the entire story becomes new. It’s the kind of twist that compels you to go back and read from the beginning, challenging you to apply what you’ve learned to the words. It’s brain-bending fun in the best way. 

-TJG

Read Ward F

Time travel is a classic speculative fiction technology, being featured in works that pre-date Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. With the idea being so prominent in SF writing, there are a lot of opinions about what make a “good” or a “bad” time travel story. To me, Teresa’s story is excellent in how it ties the idea of time travel to confronting grief. When I was reading it, the bit where the narrator says that meeting a past version of yourself can lead to an “accidental annihilation of the current self, a self-immolation like the lit end of a cigarette pressed to the exact place you inhabited in the fabric of space and time” then follows that with “But this was my very reason for returning” really grabbed me. This story really feels like it’s about finding a way to deal with grief. Or perhaps a more accurate but crasser way of phrasing this: to use grief. In this story, grief led the narrator to build a time machine, meticulously test it, then use it to correct a wrong for which she blamed herself. 

The ending line of this story–that the narrator let go–raises questions as to what she’s letting go of. Is it her life (the clearest option) or is it her grief and guilt now that, through her own destruction, has been rectified in a new timeline? The scenes at the bar feel so lived in and true (at least from my own experience of crying over broken hearts to my friends and sister) and the wreck so devastating, that you can really understand the narrator’s grief-fuelled construction of her own demise. Yet, despite this doom and gloom assessment so far, the story doesn’t end merely with our narrator fading out of existence. It ends with a memory. A memory of a rabbit, one suffused with warmth and life, experiencing a new timeline. This memory provides a ray of hope that our narrator’s efforts are worth it. That her grief led to creating something great.

– MAD

Read One Last Trip 

There’s almost something alchemical to a good title. I’ve read dozens upon dozens of books, articles, and blog posts about the craft of fiction writing, but never once have I seen anyone try their hand at a “How To” for good story titles. The best seem to act as a sort of refrain for the piece they represent, highlighting some theme or event within the larger text in such a way that the title itself feels richer and more meaningful the further into the story one goes.

But how to come up with such a title? Beats me.

One thing I have noticed, however, is that titles stand out to me all the more as stories get shorter. With so few words to tell the tale, every single one counts, title included. It’s not just a name–it’s in conversation with the piece, lending context, framing. By Any Other is the perfect example of this, the story’s theme distilled down to three words. It’s not even a complete sentence(!), but it’s such a recognizable phrase that we all know how to finish the thought for the author, especially after we’ve read the story and understand its why. 

-TJG

Read By Any Other

“Surprising yet inevitable.” Maybe you’ve heard this phrase thrown around before in narrative circles, but in case you haven’t, it’s nothing more than an attempt to sum up what makes a good twist ending. The “surprising” should be self-evident—it’s not a twist if it doesn’t surprise—but the important bit, for my money, is that “yet inevitable” on the back end. Good twists are so hard to pull off because they’re a verbal slight of hand. Show your hand too much, and your twist becomes predictable, but you need to show something, or you run the risk of making your reader feel confused or worse, foolish. Once the initial shock of the twist has worn off, there should always be moments in the text that the reader can call back to and say, “Ah, the clue was right here the whole time! I should have known!”

The Set-Up is a masterclass in twist endings. All the hints are right there in the text, but the narration doesn’t call them out; instead, it uses them as supporting evidence for an equally probable (and more preferable) alternative scenario, which will only unravel at the appointed hour, when the revelation of truth will be at its most devastating. 

You should always count on the narrator to give you the facts—just don’t expect the narrator to tell you the truth about them. They don’t call them “unreliable” for nothing. 

-TJG

Read The Set-Up

This story is a study in dramatic irony. As the reader, we recognize fairly early on that the narrator isn’t in Heaven at all, but the other place, and it’s that awareness that lends the piece its humor. This dramatic irony is executed well throughout, but there’s one paragraph in particular, I think, around which the story’s humor turns.

“Second, there’s the heat…” 

If you didn’t pick up on the joke right from the start, this paragraph is a dead giveaway. Hell is hot, Heaven’s not, but even though it rather obviously lets the reader in on the joke, it still works for a couple reasons. First, it’s an implied twist rather than an overt one. The reader is now aware of the irony of the narrator’s words, while the narrator remains oblivious. Second, it comes early enough that the reader is now in on the joke for most of the story, making the reading experience that much more enjoyable. Twists don’t have to come at the end. That’s where we usually find them, and when done right they serve to shine new light back upon what we’ve just read, but in this case it actually works better coming earlier. The author isn’t trying to blow anyone’s mind; he wants to give you a reason to keep reading what would otherwise be a pretty scathing Yelp review of Heaven. 

-TJG

I openly admit that I didn’t pick up on the twist as early as Thomas did. For me, the “Second, there’s the heat” paragraph (and really that sentence) was when the lightbulb went off. Up until then, my main thought was “If we accept this, my mother will be furious with me.” Even before my realization, however, I was impressed with the witty prose and drawn into the piece. Afterwards, I found the dramatic irony both funny and exceptionally well executed. It pulls directly from the reader’s expectations and builds to the point where Karl switches from winking at the reader to nudging them in the ribs with “Hell, I’d settle for a middle-management type…”

I agree with Thomas that one of the strongest aspects of Karl’s story is that the twist comes early enough that rather than shining a new light on the story you’ve just read, you get to enjoy the bulk of the piece aware of the twist while the narrator is oblivious. I, personally, felt quite intelligent and doffed my tweed jacket and elbow patches upon figuring it out at the start of the third paragraph, seeing there was over half of the story to go. It doesn’t hurt that the story is funny regardless of if you catch on from the get go or you don’t realize until the narrator admits that they didn’t not give into their baser instincts while still alive.

-MAD

Read Heaven Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be

With Amanita, it’s all about the sensory details. The idea of a psychedelic, pseudo-magical mushroom trip isn’t enough; the author combines sight, touch, taste, and smell in concrete ways that draw the reader in and make the experience feel real and concrete in our minds. 

This story also does well to cultivate a sense of danger. “There was a fine line between poisoned to death and poisoned to dream” is such a strong sentence because it serves multiple ends, letting us know what the mushrooms are for, as well as alerting us to their risks. This gives the story a baseline tension that Amanita maintains throughout as she works against the clock to draw her charges out of their dreams before she herself succumbs to the mushrooms’ poison.

-TJG 

Read Amanita

I’ve written elsewhere about how time travel is a classic speculative fiction device, one that we have seen often in film, television, novels, etc. This story, however, really surprised me in the best way possible. One reason was the stipulation of the time travel: you get three hours. One implication of this is that after the job is done, you still have time in whatever timeline you are in before you come back to the present to see if everything has changed. And that period of time after was the most surprising aspect of this story. When I first read this, I assumed the job our narrator was sent to do would take up most of the narrative. The expectation is set as an older agent travels twenty-nine years into the past along with a silenced .22 pistol that this will be an action-packed thriller in the vein of Looper. But it ends up being so much more than that. 

The scenes with the narrator and her father drip with emotion, and it is clear even before the narrator says it explicitly that she lost her father sometime between 1992 and 2021. The reunion is heart wrenching for the narrator and for the reader. It’s also something I feel many stories would relegate to a brief interlude between action. This piece reminds me of how Vince Gilligan said Breaking Bad was about the moments in between, where we see characters taking care of the things that most films and series skip over. This story is largely about the moment in between the assassination and the return to the future. It’s about a daughter getting to connect with her deceased father and telling him one last time that she loves him. And it’s all the better for focusing on the emotion over the action.

– MAD

Read Giving Up the Ghost

Frame tales are tricky. Too often the frame itself feels like a gimmick, a means to an end. The author wants to tell a story a certain way, but they can’t find a natural opening, or they want to ease the reader into the action, introduce the characters and give the real story context so we fully appreciate what’s going on when we finally get to the good stuff. And thus, a frame is born.

What makes Never-ending Dawn so clever is that the tale-within-the-tale does this in return for the frame, giving it depth and stakes we didn’t realize were present at the story’s beginning. This is how a good frame tale works, by making the frame count for more than just set up. In fact, the frame is where the heart of this story actually resides, in Ella’s present, where she still carries with her the consequences of her past choices, as well as the weight of more hard choices to come. 

-TJG

Read Never-ending Dawn

There are two things I think whenever I read this story. The first is that I can’t help but hear it narrated in Sam Elliott’s deep drawl, which is probably pretty idiosyncratic to me and not at all what Addison intended. But maybe! The second is that I’m amazed with how Addison weaves together the description of the taxidermy process and the narrator’s lost love, especially in the second half where the two feel inseparable. The taxidermy portions provide such detailed description of this space chicken that even without knowledge of what goes into taxidermy, it feels real. And the love that’s expressed throughout is both tragic and visceral. You can feel the pain and the warmth through the prose. When the narrator describes the fear that held them back–a single-sentence paragraph in the middle of longer, more clinical descriptions–it feels like the love, the pain, and the regret is bursting out, unable to be contained. Elsewhere, the passages on love fit seamlessly into the end of taxidermy-focused paragraphs, indicating how the narrator’s love for this person infuses everything they do.

I particularly enjoy how the ending functions in the narrative. It both explains what we have read before, giving the reader a greater appreciation and understanding of the story on a reread, and completes the arc of the narrator. The narrator has expressed fear, regret and longing, but the end is where the narrator takes a stand and makes a definitive statement. It’s no longer that the narrator imagines catching their love as they fall from the sky or reflecting on how they should have done more. Instead, it ends with a promise of growth, reuniting, and, of course, of love.

– MAD

Read Alien Taxidermy and Love Have Four Things in Common

Often in submitted flash pieces, we see that authors choose between focusing on developing the narrative or the worldbuilding–either giving us a compelling story with interesting characters or a world that is fleshed out and immersive. It is rare that we get both, but Laura, in this story, provides an incredibly well-described world, with visuals that leap off the page, as well as a narrative that provides a beginning, middle, and end. From the gown Gwen wears as she assists the magician on stage, to Gwen’s race through Venice, to the depiction of the fae at the portal, every moment of the story is drawn with vivid prose that paints the backdrop to a story of women retaliating against and escaping a rapist.

In the notes on the illustration, Laura told Kevin that as the story was set in the 1880s-90s, the inspiration for the outfits could come from something like The Prestige. As The Prestige was/still is one of my favorite films, I immediately drew this connection while reading, which only heightened my enjoyment of it. But while Christopher Nolan uses science to fuel his fantasy in The Prestige, Laura fully embraces the magical elements, combining a magician of the period with fae folk. While real magic brings the fae into the world and real magic allows Gwen to escape it, the narrative is grounded through the realization and actions of Gwen, the only non-magical character in the narrative.

– MAD

Read From Iron Freed

If you’ve come to the editorials looking for hints and tips about what we as editors want, I’ll start this with one: I have a major soft spot for stories that involve music. Thomas does too. Music is something that is often referred to as “universal” (I’m pretty sure there was a Harvard study in 2019 that gained attention in the popular press that called music a “universal language,” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said it back in the 1800s as well). Cultures from around the world have independently developed their own instruments, styles, and traditions involving music. Yet, much like the beauty pageant Miss Universe, this concept of “universal” is contained to our planet. Speculative Fiction, then, allows us to take this universal language and see it play out across the universe. Who would have thought there was Jazz (or I guess more accurately “Jizz”) on Tatooine? And music is central to stories by SF authors like Kingsley Amis and J.G. Ballard. 

With the universality of music, it makes sense that first contact could be handled well by those with great skill in this universal language, which is exactly what Matt does in this piece. As fourteen coiffed and gowned matronly musicians meet fourteen classic Roswell Greys, there is no strife. Both groups seek to learn about one another and share their own cultures. While many stories are coy with their themes, Matt has the theme spoken loudly and clearly by Lady Racine, and ends the story with the start of the chorus to the song “A Bird in a Gilded Cage.”

– MAD

Read The Glitter and the Grey

Opening lines can make or break a story. Fail to captivate a reader in those first few moments and they might quit on you before they ever get to “the good part.”

The author of Pink Marble understood the assignment. There’s nothing fancy or complicated about “The Queen had turned to stone,” but therein lies its power. The line is direct and concise, telling you exactly what’s happened (ostensibly), and yet there’s a compelling question inherent to the sentence: HOW did the Queen turn to stone? A good mystery, perhaps more than any other literary device, will keep readers turning the page.

This story’s style is also a winner. It calls to mind the opening passages of a classic fairy tale, and the narrative tone is laced with a subtle dramatic irony that can only be fully appreciated once the story is finished and the twist revealed. Pink Marble was one of our most popular stories for all of 2021 and it’s not hard to see why. 

-TJG

Read Pink Marble

Speculative fiction is an ideal cultural technology for imagining futures that could be. In this story, C.T. does a wonderful job succinctly painting a version of our future. Einstein was wrong (how about that). World War IV wasn’t fought with sticks and stones, because World War III never happened. Instead, it was more like a war of many worlds. This story does an excellent job of smuggling much larger worldbuilding ideas into a fairly contained story about one woman’s mental turmoil as she accomplished her work assignment. Of course, Pallas is about to collapse a star, so a bit of existential doubt would seem reasonable. But the way other characters react is notable. Xenozoologists have checked out the system nine lightyears away as if it’s a typical task, she has a manager who told her to relax and compares the collapse to dominos, and while her coworkers watch her intently, there is no pomp and circumstance. The storyworld C.T. crafts is one in which collapsing a star, while a big deal for Pallas as an individual, seems somewhat mundane. Even the ending conveys this, where Pallas completes the job, but all that happens is a display notice that the deployment was successful. No big bang, no celebration, just more waiting to see if anything actually happened. This future is fleshed out through details small and large and turns what we would consider grandiose into humdrum for these characters. 

Due to this take on the future, the most affecting part of the story is when Pallas imagines going home and seeing her sons. Similar to the end-of-day dinner conversations many of us have, when Pallas thinks about how she’ll respond to a question about how her day was, she’ll merely answer fine. Because that’s what it will be. Throughout the entire piece, C.T. creates a world that is so lived in that the typical wonder of speculative fiction is confined to the thoughts of one person, while the rest of the world (or even rest of the universe) continues as if collapsing a star just happens.

– MAD

Read DEPLOY

This story grabbed me from the very beginning, and not just because it had a great opening line. Rather, Karter included a footnote on the title. A footnote in French. This combined with the opening line about it not being easy to sail on a box of Kleenex perfectly sets the tone for this story. But then the story surprises you with a deeply emotional core. The narrator and the rest of the crew choose their survival over their captain, resulting in a mutiny that may or may not have been necessary for their final arrival in the paradise that is the great desert of linens. The debated regret in the final paragraphs and the Moon’s potential wry smile in the epilogue provide a wonderfully emotional ending that somehow completely fits with the tone Karter establishes in the opening lines.

I feel I have to mention the art direction meeting for the story’s illustration as well. Another thing that I love about this piece is that Karter crafts an immersive world while also leaving a lot of the imagery completely up to the reader’s imagination. Our artist, Kevin, had a clear vision of what the sailors should look like–one that completely ran against what Chris, Thomas, and I thought. We debated how specific Kevin should get with the art, and we ended up deciding to focus on the ship rather than the sailors–letting the reader come to their conclusion of what these sailors with their lost shedhair pasta and soapscum snacks would look like. 

– MAD

Read The Wreck of the Douceur Suprême

The humor in this was what immediately grabbed me and the class critique was what kept me invested for the long haul. The writing perfectly captures the tone of a pre-flight message, only instead of telling passengers to keep their trays in an upright position, the announcement lets them know that DwarfStar passengers should remain calm if they wake up and find themselves paralyzed. Then offers no further information.

This aspect of three tiers of passengers works in a delightfully dark comic critique. While NovaStar passengers are told they have access to gyms, bars, pools, and even theaters, the MainSequence passengers are told “room is inevitably limited on an interplanetary spaceship.” Then the DwarfStar passengers are told to get in orderly lines for their anesthesia. What is imposed as a restriction on one group of people is gleefully given to others. Yet in this construction of the narrative, the information is freely given and spelled out to all passengers, who presumably accept the divisions as part of the flight. This metaphor extends to their menu options and even for their safety in the event of a cataclysmic event. NovaStar passengers will likely be unaware anything has happened due to the ability of their escape pods to maintain their comfort while it is recommended DwarfStar passengers say their final farewells before departing, just in case. Then the message ends with a cheery sign off. It’s a frustratingly hilarious and biting critique that is a great read.

– MAD

Read Welcome Aboard

The audio log formatting of this story really drew me into it, as it made me feel like I was hunkered over a radio, trying to make out what ended up (presumably) being the final words of the narrator. Somehow, Tim is able to create an audioscape in very few words. The interruptions to the intelligibility of the audio log both enable the pace and tension to remain high throughout and to draw Kraken Mare’s namesake in the reader’s mind without having to spend any words doing so. The roars, the partial artefacting, and the narrator’s confusion over the weather are all so evocative that I felt myself reaching for audio tuning dials to clear static while reading.

In addition to the soundscape, Tim also paints a devastating ending as the narrator learns first-hand that Kraken Mare, and more specifically the Throat of the Kraken, is more than just a name. The actual narrative in this piece is a short one, but even through the brief time we are with the narrator, there is a sense of who this character is. This makes the final paragraph, in which the narrator’s request that someone tell their family, their friend, their someone that they love them is cut off, so crushing. Like the narrator, we assume that landing in Kraken Mare instead of Ligeia is the end for our unfortunate narrator. 

– MAD

Read Kraken Mare

In some stories, authors throw in a surprise twist that no one sees coming (cue the reddit threads with people saying they knew it from the first chapter if not the first page). With Chrissie’s story, you know that there’s going to be a twist. That knowledge, however, doesn’t diminish the enjoyment at all. In fact, it heightens it, because you are waiting, wondering what is going to happen and how it will flip the story on its head. You know the twist is coming because Sirene can’t win, or at least, we don’t want her to. We see this powerful witch–one who has admitted to animal slaughter and her plan to murder a young woman–attempting to take advantage of this poor girl, so we’re waiting to see if 1) Sirene will have a change of heart (which seems unlikely based on the opening paragraph) or 2) Lira will come out on top. It ends up being the second option in what can only be described as an intervention of destiny, and it works so well because even if the reader expected something to happen, Sirene is so confident throughout that her surprise at her own demise is doubly satisfying.

The story also gets at the idea that even if you follow the instructions to a tee, things may still not work out. It is possible that before embarking on her quest for immortality that Sirene was a good person, but the opening lets us know that she has “corrupted [her] own soul beyond recognition” as she’s committed horrible acts. She has done all that has been prescribed by the Ritual of Otune, then Lira, who has done none of it, reaps the rewards. Sometimes things work out for good people. Sometimes, as hard as we try, things just don’t seem to go our way. So let’s think about Sirene the next time we’re told to slaughter a few young animals as part of a recipe for immortality. 

– MAD

Read Chosen

Finding the right narrative voice for a piece can be incredibly difficult. I’m sure we’ve all read or written stories where the idea was great, but the perspective or the narrator just didn’t quite fit. Sometimes, the best narrator matches the tone exactly. Other times, like with Holly’s story, it’s the conflict between the tone and the plot that makes a story sing. In ELRY-423, we have a child-like narrator I once characterized to Thomas as a Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls. ELRY-423 often interrupts the prose with sounds of adulation and joy as ELRY-423 experiences tingles while planting. The plot, however, culminates with ELRY-423 deciding the way to save the forest and get more tingles is to “[break] off the pink half-shell antennas that those particular humans had on the sides of their heads” and/or “put seedlings into those humans’ various openings and access panels.” In essence, to kill all humans (or at least the company bosses. Then their successors. Then their successors…).

This piece is also a great example of a standalone flash piece that hints to a future but doesn’t demand it. A lot of the stories we receive and ultimately reject feel like chapters of a larger story. Holly’s story definitely points to a future story–one where ELRY-423 unites the three hundred tree-planting drones to kill humans–but that aspect isn’t necessary to make this piece feel like a complete story. Within its 650 words, we meet the character, are introduced to a world and conflict, and see a complete arc: ELRY-423 starts like any drone but by the end, ELRY-423 is ready to start a revolution against the company. While future stories with ELRY-423 are possible, there is a sense of completeness at the end of this one that makes it a great example of flash-with-future-promise rather than a scene from a larger piece.

– MAD

Read Machine Learning

Voice—It’s Just not Ragnarök without the Naglfar has it nailed, but what do I mean by that? For me, it means that without a word of physical description or action, the author has used diction, idiom, speech patterns, humor, and a variety of other tools to paint the perfect picture of the speaker. He didn’t even need two-way dialogue; one side of the conversation is enough for the reader to get an idea of exactly who’s speaking.

Now yes, because of Marvel, Loki is a household name in popular culture these days, but even before the name-drop, the reader has already formed a picture of someone charming and forward, a salesman with a winsome smile and a never-take-no attitude. In my head it’s all too easy to see him standing there in that locker room, probably in nothing but a towel (having come straight from the sauna), one foot up on the bench as he’s making his pitch. And doesn’t Loki slot perfectly into that characterization? That’s the power of a strong voice.

-TJG

Read It’s Just not Ragnarök without the Naglfar

There’s so much that works well about Brick–the narration’s sense of dramatic irony, the try-fail cycles which the main character goes through while building up to his final triumph–but what really drew me to this piece was its theme. 

Theme is a tricky thing to pull off. When done well, it can evoke and enlighten, but there’s a delicate balance between poignant and preachy. Often, authors lean too overtly on the “point” of the story, and the reader comes away feeling like they’ve been lectured to. 

Instead, Brick lets the plot illustrate its theme in a beautiful and subtle way. It should be apparent that our main character, Brick, has special needs, whether it be autism or something else. “There’s something missing from you, son,” Brick’s mom says to him, but despite this, Brick’s autism isn’t presented as a handicap; rather, his uniqueness is what makes him great. Long before Brick builds the device which allows him to fly like a superhero, he displays superhuman intelligence through a variety of experiments, and that’s cool to see.

Fun fact: The current World’s Strongest Man, Tom Stoltman of Scotland, has autism. Those who learn and think differently aren’t necessarily disadvantaged; they can do great things, just like Brick.

-TJG

Read Brick