Author : James Machell Having sampled manna, which fell from Heaven and was enjoyed by Moses in the desert, picked dates from a batch given to the Prophet Mohammed, Derek Lockerby, restaurant critic, was determined to taste the wine, transformed after the wedding at ...

Author : Joseph Lyons “Good morning Mr…Ogden. I’m nurse Shaw, I’ll be your mod operator today. What can I do for you?” “I’m here for my girlfriend.” “Ok, perhaps I can interest you in the sensitivity package.” “No, no, no, no thank you. She says I'm sensitive ...

Author : J.D. Rice The last camel died at dawn. Doctor Peterson and the other survivors worked quickly to salvage what meat they could from the corpse, then pressed on into the desert. Unending waves of sand rose and fell ahead of them, ripples of heat pulsing from the ...

Author : Joseph Lyons “Hi, I’m Evan.” I introduce myself to the first lady to sit opposite me. “Clarissa.” We shake, left handed so she can purposefully check my bio-clock. She's nice enough to make polite small talk for the duration. Shame she has no interest I think as ...

Author : Kate Runnels Issa steered the wasp closer to the distant speck in the sky. A flash of light off metal had sparked her attention. It was an Airship, but whose? Dodoma City hadn’t had a good haul in months. They wouldn’t tangle with a Royalty cruiser. But if it ...

Author : Melannie Jay I ran a thumb over the milky flesh of my inner forearm, marvelling at what Mark had done to me. What used to be a knotted mess of puckered flesh had been made smooth again, without even a silver sliver to indicate what had happened three months ago in ...

Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer That’s a Keilvogel up there. I recognise the contrail: a centre line triple the size of the flankers. This world has such a glorious sky. I’ve never really taken the time to appreciate it, but as I’m lying in a swamp of blood and oil that ...

Author : James Hunter Joe Miller stood silent in his dressing room. He was set to take the biggest stage of his life, yet he felt no nerves, no butterflies, he felt dead to the world. Joe “Knuckles” Miller had wanted to be a pro fighter his entire life. He had done well ...

Author : Matthieu C. R. Cartron Funny that they called her a mother, for she had neither sons nor daughters. Ancient but lively, she was as old as all of those who had been created alongside her. Every day she would look around, slowly, to watch her neighbors, hoping that ...

Author : Mark Adel I felt the urge to write speculative fiction. But I couldn’t. So I swallowed a nil pill. Still I couldn’t. So I swallowed another nil pill. Then I couldn’t remember my name. But when my fingertips touched the keyboard I realized I was sitting in the ...

Author : Vanessa Kittle Max stood looking out of his window into the night. He lived on the 50th floor of the Palmer building in New York. The rule was the higher the better, and while he was nowhere near the top, he was still far up enough to get above most of the smog. He ...

Author : Linda Breneman “I can control a computer with my mind—from inside a dream,” New Scientist, February 2017. At first I was content to fly like a bird and have brief tea parties with my dead mother. Later I took to diving off buildings and bridges. Like the patron ...

Author : Joachim Heijndermans They won't stop staring at me. I've been stuck here for forty-two hours. I haven't slept in all that time. I don't know if I can keep it up. Normal procedure is to set the beacon on board the ship off, then find shelter and food and stay put ...

Author : Morrow Brady Live again, said the cruise brochure. It should have said lie again. The lift vessel arrived carrying my personal pod cabin and minutes later, PrinceStellar, an orbiting trans-galactic cruise ship was in view and my mid-life crisis journey had ...

Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer Every anniversary of the counterstrike, they show that cursed video. You know the one: snow on the ground, ashes in the air, a lone woman in a ragged battlesuit moving cautiously across an open field. She’s gripping a Mantis 14 like the ...

Author : Jose Corpas At ringside, where you could hear the loose boards under the canvas rattle like an old boardwalk, about twenty fans took their seats. They were joined by friends and relatives of the boxers, decked out in those digital t-shirts the universities tried to ...

Author : Henry Peter Gribbin As a national security advisor to top level government officials for the past decade, I have been privy to information which would have scared the daylights out of any ordinary person. The way I coped with all the near disasters, political ...

Author : James SW Paris They came from outside the solar system, in a ship the size of Mars. We thought it was something natural, then it performed a braking maneuver around Uranus, and the planet’s twenty-seven moons slid out of its way, returning to their normal orbits ...