Table of contents
Welcome to the first issue of the Future Science Fiction Digest, brought to you by the Future Affairs Administration and UFO Publishing. Our shared vision is to showcase great science fiction stories from across the globe. In this issue alone we’ve got fiction from China, the Ukraine, Nigeria, and Italy, as well as the United States....
Popular culture failed to prepare me for first contact. Countless starships bristling with canon and rail gun turrets did not fill the skies. The aliens didn’t flood our television and radio bands with messages of conquest or world peace or miracle cures....
Podcast of “
The Rule of Three” by Lawrence M. Schoen
Narrated by Wulf Moon
Music track sampled from “Wrapped in Dreams” by Frankum and Frankumjay,
used under a Creative Commons license....
“What are we doing here?”
That was the question I asked my late wife, Onyinye, the evening she flew us to the surface for our honeymoon.
Being an evolved, she earned much more than I did and had promised me a grand post-wedding vacation....
“I assume we’re talking about the boy from The Emperor?”
“That’s right. Dennis Dontzov, according to his documents. Obviously, he never had any documents, it’s only now that . . .”
“I understand.”
“He is now thirteen years old. He was conceived and born during the expedition....
On the evening of April 19, 2012, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko walked into The Harvard Coop for a presentation of their novel, The Scar, that had been recently published by Tor. The audience was perhaps a tenth the size they had gathered back home—not entirely unexpected for a husband-and-wife writing team virtually unknown in the States—but, if anything, more enthusiastic....
The company keeps a tight leash on us whenever possible. This party is no exception. They shuttle us to a big hotel, escort us to the ballroom, and shut the doors. Guards with impressive shoulders and amber glasses stand in front of each exit....
Here’s a fun fact: viruses leave pieces of themselves behind. Every once in a while, bits of the DNA code they inject into captured cells to transform them into virus factories stick around after the virus itself is fought off, and sometimes that abandoned code proves beneficial to the organism it’s left in....
I’m a fraud.
That said, you know half of what you need to know about me. I’ll tell you the rest now, and it’ll be the truth. I’m an honest fraud.
Damkina came up with the idea.
We’d known each other as kids, me and Damkina, we grew up in the same House....
Owner 14 rests his wavering hand, covered with paper-thin skin, on my own and looks up at me with jaundiced eyes. “Turn the heat up, will you, Pal?”
Once—thirty-five years ago, back before he turned eighty-five—he complained of the rooms never being cool enough....
Originally from the island of Puerto Rico, Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are amongst the most experienced writers working in genre television. Both have scribed, executive produced and served as showrunners for some of the most acclaimed genre TV series, such as: Lost, Firefly, Grimm, SeaQuest, Vampire Diaries, Terra Nova, Agent Carter, Helix, The Tick and many more....
His name was Zephaniah, but everyone just called him Zeph.
He stood six feet two inches tall, was perfectly proportioned, could read small print from one hundred feet away, had lifted four hundred pounds in his time and could probably lift more if asked, retained just about everything he learned or read, and was fluent in eleven human and fourteen computer languages....
1
Snow.
My memories of planet Wordfall are full of snow.
Those little people of Wordfall, with their broad and open arms, stood silently in the vast expanse of snowy earth like spirits who had just appeared out of thin air....