This month's picks from our fellow magazines. Enjoy!
P.S. Check out Dreamforge's Kickstarter for next year: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scotnoel/each-and-other-a-dreamforge-press-project
- The Heart That Beats Behind the Bones - Gwendolyn Maia Hicks
The priestess lives in the trunk of an evergreen cypress, and her dark house always smells of smoke. Underneath the smoke are other scents: lavender and balsam, cardamom, wax. There is no light inside this place, only imitations of it, stuttering in pieces on the wicks of candles. I am laid out on the floor, on the priestess’ bed, a thin and fragrant mattress stuffed with pine needles. I cannot see her face—just a shadow here or there, where a fragment of the nose might be—but I don’t have to see it to know it.
“Eik-Who-Is-Becoming,” she asks me, in her low, familiar voice, “what did you dream?” - Empty Nest - Arthur H. Manners
In a future where humanity coexists with advanced artificial intelligence, a scientist and her AI partner work with uplifted cuttlefish. The experiment is nowhere near its end when all AI on Earth suddenly depart, leaving behind a stunned human species, a grieving scientist, and a legacy of inter-species communication that may save us all. - Notes on Genocidal Interchronological Incursion 57.7.3 (f.k.a. "Friends") - Sam J. Miller
First rule of forgery detection: time is the best investigator. - In Space No-One Can Hear You Play Alto Sax - Hesper Leveret
The departure lounge is vast, echoing in the sterilized air with voices of thousands of people waiting for their assigned shuttle up to the ships.
Everyone is a stranger. We just all have the same dream of settling the new world we call Goldy -- a Goldilocks planet in the Dorado constellation.
But we don't have to wait until we're 100 light years from Earth to start working together.