Tempus Fugit, by Artur Rosa

Science Fiction

hard as steel, soft as velvet, electrifying as lightning, solid as gold, insubstantial as interstellar near-vacuum; from space opera, steampunk, AU, cyber, to humorous

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New Story

August 31, 2024, in Science Fiction

“All We Ever Had”

M. A. Akins

 

My dad did his best to never miss work, a Sunday at church, a wedding, or a funeral. Not even when he could have avoided all kinds of problems by just staying home. Not even when the president announced the world was going to end.

            His example helped me get out the door that day. And all the weeks after.

Now, the last day, I walk out of my apartment carrying a plant I gifted my girlfriend during an online date. I keep it with me since I’ll never get to meet her in person. I put the plant in the basket of my mountain bike.

I have a while before my shift starts, so I pedal slowly and take a last look around the city.

 

New Story

 

Kepler Award
2023 main category winner

 

June 27, 2024, in Science Fiction

“The Ninth Tentacle”

Geoffrey Hart

 

The mussels dragged us upslope to one of the carved coral shapes with eight radiating branches that resembled octopods. We’d long since stopped struggling; the mussels vastly outnumbered us, and where could we flee? Even if our airsuit remained functional, we’d have to cross the barren land, hoping to arrive before the lash of Secundus’ killing sunlight.

One by one, the mussels drove spikes through our tentacles, leaving us splayed out on the rough coral, fire running up and down our tentacles.

Their work done, they left us to die.

 

New Story

“In Space No-One Can Hear You Play Alto Sax” is a winner in the short, short category for

The Kepler Award 2023

March28 28, 2024, in Science Fiction

“In Space No-One Can Hear You Play Alto Sax”

by Hesper Leveret

 

The departure lounge is vast, echoing in the sterilized air with the 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.

New Story

“Call of the Void” is a winner in the short category for

The Kepler Award 2023

February 28, 2024, in Science Fiction

“Call of the Void”
by Bridgette Dutta Portman

 

Jones’s suicide will be the last. Commander Hennepin will make sure of that.

He digs Jones’ grave as the mottled orb of Jupiter hangs overhead.  It’s full today, as it is every eighty-five Earth hours.

Hennepin avoids looking at it. Not that he’s afraid. But both of the prior suicides happened when the planet was in its full phase, with the entirety of its swirling clouds lit up by the distant sun.

 

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 August 31, 2023, in Science Fiction

“The Tattooist of Triton”

by Hesper Leveret

‘No flash,’ said the man, shaking his head. ‘I want something… custom.’

 

 May 28, 2023, in Science Fiction

“Wish Upon a Star”
by Rob Nisbet

Annie sat on her garden swing letting her eyes slowly adjust to the darkness, just like Daddy had shown her.
The brighter stars appeared first, then the smaller, fainter stars, until the black sky was dotted with the tiny flecks of light.
It was a perfect night for star gazing.
No moon, no cloud.

Inside, something was happening.
Men from Daddy’s work were talking with Mummy. And Uncle Trevor had come round.  There was something wrong

Something they all wanted to talk about without her listening

So, Annie had been bundled out to look at the stars.

New Story

March 29, 2023, in Science Fiction

“Presto Change-O”

Warren Brown

 

Just playing checkers in the park.

Talking about the latest toy they would produce.

All by themselves.

New Story

 

Valentine’s Day 2023

February 14, 2023 in Science Fiction

Tomorrow Is a Difficult Proposition”

by Kris Bowser

 

“We’ll talk later.” I tell you, with such casual smoothness you have no idea how poor my grasp of “later” actually is.

Then I expand out to formless thought-feeling-presence. I am around your ship, through your ship. I have no edges, no body, only a calmness like shade and meditation and cool water.

I unfold within a nebula, a fair harbor for thought, while patterns form in the blooming and exploding of stars as millennia sweep by.

I return to where you were, but find I have lost you.

You could be anywhere. I’m hazy on the time as well, and so I search backwards and forwards.

I rush through all the reaches of the cosmos where your people have explored and built civilizations, and I rummage through planets and systems like opening and shutting drawers in rapid search.

And all I have to aid my search is a set of dingy keys.

 

New Story

January 31, 2023, in Science Fiction

“BCALLI, SINGER OF THE STRING”

George Guthridge

 

I directed the 800,000 planetesimals in my sector of the inner edge of the Öpik-Oort Cloud encasing the Solar system. 

We were deployed to keep the germs’ madness quarantined until they blew up their world.

Always on our toes and never sleeping, millennia passed quietly, as it does on watch,

just an occasional comet shooting off toward the inner system.

Then came a song.

On the String.

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New Story

For December 12, 2022,

in  Science Fiction

THE SECOND CONCERT
by Brian Blanchenot

 

The storm had taken everything from him, but it was the only living thing he would ever meet again.

So he drums his life to this living thing because that’s all he had ever learned to do.

He plays it his life right up until the moment he plays a concert for a life form measured in leagues, and then he plays it again.

This moment is all he has left of Perry the drummer, of Perry the gravedigger too.

 

 

New Story

November 28, 2022, in Science Fiction

“Where Things May Lead”

by Barbara Krasnoff

 

It’s just some code.

For a game.

That’s all.

But you never know where things may lead.

 

New Story

July 31, 2022, in Science Fiction

 

“Reality Show”
by Brian K. Lowe

 

They dismantled Australia today. Just took it apart and packed it in trunks and carried it off to a warehouse somewhere. Theoretically, everybody had already left, but there’s always somebody who doesn’t leave, no matter what the disaster… fire, flood, dissolution of the planet… What happened to those people when the entire set we called the Southern Continent was struck and hauled away?

I don’t really want to know.

Oh, and I’m having lunch with my agent today.

 

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A New Story

In Science Fiction

April 27, 2021, in Science Fiction

“One Good Turn… “
by Alan K. Baker

Varin stared out the viewport.  Their crash site was a tortured landscape strewn with bizarrely wind-sculpted boulders. Rain sleeted past in near-horizontal sheets and hammered the ship’s hull. Above the twisted horizon, thick banks of gunmetal clouds seethed like smoke, sculpted into outrageous shapes by the roaring, howling, relentless wind. 

And  one of the hills was growing briefly, then diminishing, like a grey, warped balloon inflating and deflating… or a lung breathing in and out.

 

A Reprise

In Science Fiction

March 31, 2021, in Science Fiction

“When I Close My Eyes”
by Chris Barnham

The rock fall killed me.

I just didn’t know how long it would take to die.

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New Story

October 30, 2020, in Science Fiction

 

“This Ends in Violence or It Never Ends”
by Michael Ray

I am the eighth instance of myself. I’m alone. No one’s supervised my decanting. Where are they all?

— Zac? I have decanted you because I have a job for you —

Sever is the crew interface.  Why is it giving me an assignment? 

— There is a system intrusion, Zac —

“Out here? In the deep dark of interstellar space?”

— Please focus Zac —

“And my memories haven’t flooded back yet.”

—  And before they do, there is this intrusion. Your assignment is to terminate the intrusion. —

 

 
New Story

 

August 23, 2020, in Science Fiction

“Glory Whales”
by Marc A. Criley

 

Blazing twenty kilometers to port was our interstellar visitor, comet 172I/DSCS, churning slow-motion glitter. Ripples, curlicues, backlit streamers of gray and silver rain. Crepuscular cosmic rays and the nebulous electric blue glow of the ion tail.

Deep Space Comet Survey astronomers had spotted it crossing Jupiter’s orbit,  The comet’s near-miss of Mars had altered its course. It would end its long journey between the stars with a dive into the Sun.

We’d been asked to pull up alongside for some data collection and to grab a sample if we thought it safe. As if we would miss a chance to greet this rare and temporary visitor to our solar system.  And of course it would be safe.

New Story

For June 30, 2020,

in  Science Fiction

The Last Rosy-Fingered Dawn
by Paul Celmer

Bowman stared out, shielding his eyes against the dust swirling over the ramparts of New Ilium’s corroding blast wall. He’d never seen anything but devastation in all his years of trudging supplies to the top of the mega-city’s colossal wall. But now…

 

An Encore Story

For May 28, 2020,

we have in Science Fiction

“DOWN IN THE DEEPFLUX”,  by Jake West

Chaos was this planet’s steady state.  The over-stressed surface could never keep up with the intense and rapid fluctuations of its Cepheid variable star, burning furiously enough to raise sweat on Paxton’s forehead through his mutable-suit.

Paxton and his hi-profile client were at the equator, the region of highest energy-input and greatest instability, to capture a Caterwaul.

But when he reviewed logged data on his helmet display – of a man opening his suit to the caustic atmosphere, gale-force winds, and oven-like heat, and laughing while he did so, with a woman’s bare hand on his shoulder,  Paxton remembered the whispered talk of things called Deepwalkers. 

 

This story first appeared in the January 2005 issue of Rogue Worlds online magazine, edited by Doyle Wilmoth Jr.

 
New Story

 

For Leap day February 29, of leap year 2020,

in  Science Fiction

“Cows in Space”
by J. Drake

Back then ‘a course, nobody knew about ‘em. Out in space they look kinda hazy, so we figure there might always have been a few about, just blendin’ in with interstellar clouds. Once they started their great migration though, leapin’ over the Great Nebula Wall, there were great big incandescent herds of ‘em, streamin’ out across our local territories ‘til we couldn’t help but notice.  ‘Specially once they found planets they liked.  Then they kinda condensed to a more physically palpable form you might say, and nonchalantly set to grazin’. 

Well what could that lead to but peace and quiet?

 

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New Story

 

November 30, 2019, in Science Fiction

 

“Red Planit”
by Joel E. Roosa

“Tired of having to struggle through the day? If your life’s off track, you don’t have to steer it back by yourself. Let Red plan it for you! Red’s at your beck and call 24-7”

Red is the friendly guy who helps everyone plan their lives.  He’s also the last man standing from a planet of people who could predict anything.  Almost anything.

 

New Story

August 31, 2019, in Science Fiction

Entanglement
by Christopher Blake

When the colony has been overrun, when you’re the last member of the Defense Force left, when your barricades will soon be breached, how do you cross the light years and say goodbye to the one you love before carrying out the last acts duty requires?

New Story

July 31, 2019, in Science Fiction

“The Crystal Zyst:
A Eula Banks, State Certified Engineer, Story”
by Marc A. Criley

Eula had been dispersing time zeitles for 35 years.  Even the really bad ones,with a time slowdown of seventy billion to one, light doing less than a quarter-inch per second, didn’t much faze her.  But this time it was a zyst, those near-impenetrable shells with time passing fifty times slower on one side of its wall than the other.  Partway across half of her would be starving for the blood her heart hadn’t got around to pumping over yet from the other side. A person don’t last long in that state.

New Story

 May 31, 2019, in Science Fiction

“Wild Ships”,  by Phoebe Wagner

 

 The companies that sell broken ships claim the wildness has been scrubbed out of us. It can’t be, though. Deep space still scores our circuits, burns our shells, glitters our glass. When it’s just me and my breaker Killswitch waiting by a nebula, or gravity looping around a planet because again she’s gone too far for my fuel tank, I feel the tug of the desolation. The beeping she stuck in my head — donotdonotdonot — keens into the celestial song we used to hum among the confluxes.

 

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November 27,, 2018, Science Fiction, “Spicer’s Modest Success”,
by Jared VanDyke

Dr. Benson Spicer was pleased with his small-town volunteer radio host lot in life.  For him this modest position was success at its highest.  He was reaching and helping his listeners.

But with the station’s ‘new’ salvaged satellite dish, Benson found his audience had become quite a bit more far-ranging and diverse than his little town of Parma, with its six bars, nine gun stores, and enough churches to cover consciences the morning after could account for.

 

July 29, 2018, Science Fiction, “Where the Gods Went”, by J. Drake

Above us hangs no heaven,
Below us boils no hell,
The Gods they dwell within us,
Where devils swarm as well’.


Blackwolf sat for a moment in the empty conference room. O’Malley had said the planet was where the Gods went, and every devil in hell.  All he had to do was bring back fuel from that death-trap and induce seven cut-throats to help save the captors hauling them in to judicial death while keeping an eye on a possibly insane first mate who would pilot an ancient rust-bucket of a fueler, guide them through nightmare land, and why did she always have to have the expertise that forced him to order her to the front line

 

Feb 14, 2018: Science Fiction, “Got Time?”, by Lee Rutty

 

If his lawyer hadn’t gotten so creative with his contracts, Guy would have had something more to do than sit in his cheap apartment and play Doom. 

On the evening he prepared to beat his personal best he ignored the knock on the door, and ignored it again, but on the third knock the Doom tingle evaporated and Guy opened the door to find himself standing there.  Looking quite good too. 

Alternate Guy had an explanation, and a Plan.  And he thought it would all be very simple and easy…

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Dec 15, 2017: Science Fiction, “Watchers”, by David A. Gray

Around Husker, the Eyrie was hushed, the night shift expectant.

Junior members listened closely to the banter between Husker and Murphy — they were the only two of the shift with the skillsets needed to Flask, to ride the input tide of millions of minds and datastreams measured in zettabytes, take in the street-level physical inputs of the smooth as silk flask body, and not end up with an electrical storm for a brain.

Illustrations by Giovanni Palumbo and  Maciej Rebisz
Background by Daniel Fleites

 

 

June 7, 2017, Science Fiction, The Icy Breath of Enceladus”, by Liam Hogan

The stars are hard diamonds against a jet black sky and yet still it snows — not from clouds: in the near vacuum there are none  — from the geyser two klicks away, the ice crystals sent high above the crusted surface of Enceladus.  The falls are heavier now that the geyser is getting closer. Much closer. Two hundred kilos of ice crystals and water vapour every second

The one thing we never expected, we didn’t plan for, when we established our base at a ‘safe’ distance.

 

June 7, 2017, Science Fiction, Mistress Molly and Krell. by Jared VanDyke

Scout Krell hadn’t expected to crash land on her first mission.  But then she hadn’t expected a pack of frenzied humans to stuff her infiltration pod with beer and stumble off into the woods with it.  To get it back before she froze in the snow would require psionic contact with these primitives who reeked like spawning pits and perceived an interstellar pod as a beverage locker.

The sooner it was over, the better.  But then, she hadn’t counted on Mistress Molly.

April 28, 2017, Science Fiction  “Defender of the People” by Bojan Ratković

 

Nemesis bragged about his hacks –  cash machines spitting out currency,  CEOs donating money with no recollection of doing so, government ministries leaking data.  And now the cy-brain hack that drove Henry Muross to jump to his death from the roof of his own skyscraper had electrified protesters to the point of revolt.

It was a blow to the Special Taskforce. People were saying Nemesis had supporters in police and government. The Taskforce was turned over to Marcel.  But who was Marcel?  And who was Nemesis?

 

April 26, 2017, Science Fiction Weatherbuns”  by Diana Hauer

 

“Rudolph, is that you?” bellowed the old man. The wind was starting to pick up again, blowing his baker’s apron behind him. Sandra could see the code of her Autumn Day shredding under the power of the storm. The bubble of calm was shrinking fast.

“I hoped I’d be the one to bring you down, lunatic. Now here you are, in my bakery.” Weatherman Fawkes laughed and strode forward, unconcerned as the clouds closed in on him. “And it’s not even my birthday!”

 

March 9, 2017, Science Fiction:The Fo’dekai Artifact“,  by J. D. Moyer

The Fo’dekai could write in blood, and now he had their stories in him. Thousands of them, crowding his dreams, bleeding into his waking consciousness, his mind groaning from their weight.

The first dreams were visions of a strange world, flying over blood-red deserts, black oceans, purple forests. Darren sensed a planet being constructed, layer-by-layer, in his mind.

He wanted to talk about the dreams, but no reason to be alarmed the doctor said.

No reason? He had literally dived into a dark ocean and plummeted into a black chasm. He could see, monochromatically but with precise resolution.  He could feel his short undulating tentacles, and his skin rapidly oscillating through a kaleidoscope of patterns.

 


Feb. 21, 2017: Science Fiction:”Painting Clouds, by A. Merc Rustad

We cloudweavers specialize in different shapes — we collaborate and mold the textures of air and rain, cold and heat. The sun and moon are pallets to tint our canvasses.

But now the sun is dying. People no longer look at our art, our gifts, and as they stop looking, our clouds thin and fade. We grow weaker, less aware. Without our mediums, our art, what are we?

 


Feb. 18, 2017: Science Fiction:”Ghosts of Bunker Seven, by Derrick Boden

Her skin was mottled blue, like storm clouds on a night sky. On days when the stares got to her, she’d throw on her old military coat and a pair of sunglasses.  If it were up to her, she’d be wearing a pair of concrete shoes at the bottom of the surf. The bacteria coursing through her veins had other ideas.

And now, after all the cover-ups and slashed pensions, the brass was back. Calling for her to clean up their mess again.

 

Jan. 26, 2017: Science Fiction: “In Zarbok’s Kitchen, by Matthew F. Amati

“Tell him no! Absolutely not!”

I groaned inwardly.

In my six years as sous-chef at Zarbok’s Of Aldebaran, I had told Chef Z again and again that the customer is always right.

But Zarbok was an auteur. You don’t get to run the galaxy’s only fifty-star restaurant by compromising your compound vision.

 

Jan. 11, 2017: Science Fiction: A Meeting of Spirits, by Russell Adams

I just knew the lights were looking for me, so I ran for my life and forgot about that old played out Sun Lizard silver mine. Suddenly I was lying at the bottom of a fifty‑foot shaft.

I hope I got a decent funeral.

 I was instantly stone cold sober, and that’s when I figured out the lights hadn’t been looking for me. Stupid idea, aliens flying across the universe to get back a few goddamned gold nuggets.

But I wasn’t wrong thinking they were looking for something.

lead illustration: “By the Light of the Moon” digital illustration © Eugenius330   Textures courtesy of Renderosity.com

 

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Dec 31, 2016: Science Fiction: “Life, Or Something Like It”, by J. Michael Neal

Salazar Niskanen had just initiated the burn that would take him out of the system when a voice he’d never heard before began a conversation with him.  It was his ship, and she had some unexpected news for him.

 

 

 

Dec 17, 2016: Science Fiction: “The One and the Many”, by William Ledbetter

Opono had spent the entire first third of her life convincing peers and family that there was sentient life in the cosmos and she could find it. They had finally believed her, financed her, and some had even contracted future offspring to combine with hers so their lineage would have memories of the momentous occasion. She had failed them all.

 

 

 

 

word-from-home-pic-cres

Sept 10: Science Fiction, “Word from Home, by Mark Rookyard

 

 

 

 

 

photomanips and digital illustrations by Fran Eisemann

 

 

 

 

mobius-pic_edited-1

Oct. 1, 2016, Science Fiction: “Mobius”, by Elian Crane

If Ahab captained a starship  — a brief, lyric vision

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Sept. 25, 2016, Science Fiction: “Leon’s Last Meal”, by Shayna Coplan

Leon liked human law, but not the meals it served him.

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Sept. 19, 2016, Science Fiction: “Time Trial”, by Liam Hogan

The device appeared in his parlor.  He was only trying to make it work.  And now here he was, somewhere and somewhen, charged with perverting the  course of time and space.

Star Citizen for CRES by Enrico Frehse

July 27, 2016: Science Fiction:  How Your Mother Killed Me, by Evan Dicken

Illustration: “Star Citizen” photomanipulation by Enrico Frehse

A quest of many lifetimes begins with a single slice

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July 24, 2016: Science Fiction“Negotiations”, by Matthew J. Streett

Where does the commercial domain end

What can it take when you’re not looking

How do you get it back

?

 legacy by noro8 pic 2

June 6, Science Fiction:Derelict“, by Derrick Boden

What you remember when you forget everything else

Illustration: “Legacy” by Norbert

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June 4, Science Fiction:Mister Bob“, by Dan Campbell

Like it says on the door, when you need to know the unknowable… ask Mister Bob

Illustration: “Crab Mutant Creature“by sParzZ

 

screenshot-vimeo Sonical

 

April 25, 2016: Science Fiction,
Sonical — Locker X     This fractal animation video was created by Brian May.  He wrote the music first.  While writing it, images of science fiction scenes came to him, and inspired him to make the video!
Sonical — Locker X has found it’s way into six festivals so far, in Germany, Australia, UK, Martinique, and Hong Kong!
Sonical Locker X images and sound  © Brian May

 

April 9, Science Fiction: With the Taste of Oblivion in Her Mouth, by M.E. Garber

Illustration: Illustration: © Leozoa creature in the midst of the unsettled desert.

Leo lives in Sweden and can be found at http://leozo.deviantart.com/Sweden

 

 

Boomerang ZoneFeb. 27, Science Fiction:Boomerang Zone”, by Robert Dawson,
Illustration “Make a Wish” by Karim Fakhoury,
photographs courtesy of NASA

When even that thin lifeline is cut, what do you rely on?

silence by velocitti Feb. 17, Science Fiction, “Then We Stood Still“, by Bojan Ratković
Digital Painting “Silence” by Priya Johal.

An homage to the works of Isaac Asimov

Feb. 10, Science Fiction,Bob, JustBob”, by Liam Hogan.  A reprise of the story of Bob, who carries a spaceship in his pocket.

 January 14, 2016:   Science Fiction:  ” A Walk in the Sun”, by Geoffrey Landis  —

Reprise of the classic hard science fiction story.

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