(1049 words, 6 minutes)
Kiet the Mousekiller had begun his infamous career as a simple Thai pirate, preying on international shipping. Radicalized by the anonymous contamination of Mecca with a GPS-circumscribed green goo, he had become a terrorist, earning his sobriquet by his cunning destruction of Hong Kong Disneyland. Kiet’s latest scheme, not yet known to the public, involved a retired Japanese deep-sea drilling ship, the Chikyu, which Kiet and his backers had purchased on the open market under a false front. Now docked in the Indonesian port of Balikpapan, the ship was believed to be due to sail imminently, according to best intelligence.

(8224 words, 42 minutes)
Carmichael flew in from New Mexico that morning, and the first thing they told him when he put his little plane down at Burbank was that fires were burning out of control all around the Los Angeles basin. He was needed bad, they told him. It was late October, the height of the brushfire season in Southern California, and a hot, hard, dry wind was blowing out of the desert, and the last time it had rained was the fifth of April. He phoned the district supervisor right away, and the district supervisor told him, “Get your ass out here on the line double fast, Mike.”

(3256 words, 17 minutes)
Something small and metal smacks against flesh. I swallow and turn. A woman with wings of iridescent blue stands on the road. Her wings stir the dust, sending a different wind skidding across the road.

(3844 words, 20 minutes)
“Is that your son?” Another mother sat down on the bench next to Tuyet. Tuyet nodded, barely taking her eyes from Vien. She ran the handiwipe over the ends of her fingers, trying to avoid the spots where she had rubbed the skin raw. “Where did he get his new lungs?” For a moment longer, Tuyet watched her son before turning to the woman. She held out a badge, her id and rank rotating ad infinitum in the holo over it. “I’d like to ask you to come to the station with me, Dr. Phan.”

(9065 words, 46 minutes)
Life as a statue is easy. They make you ascend the pedestal, turn you to stone, remove your ability to move, and leave you to watch the turn of the seasons in a world you cannot touch or care about, anymore. You can only stand in the public garden where all the convicted are placed, and you watch with dull and distant interest at the visitors who stroll past, living the lives of the quick, sometimes interested in all the immobile condemned, and sometimes not.

(7164 words, 36 minutes)

(3936 words, 20 minutes)
Awards: Hugo for Best Short Story 2001...

(9226 words, 47 minutes)
Awards: Featured in Gardner Dozois’s ‘Year’s Best SF’, Twentieth Edition.

(111 words, 1 minute)
Mind-bending science fiction, steampunk, humor, and so much more can be found in our July, 2023 SciFiwise Magazine! Check it out!

(111 words, 1 minute)
Mind-bending science fiction, steampunk, humor, and so much more can be found in our June, 2023 SciFiwise Magazine! Check it out!