“There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago.”

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Issue 2013.27

Flash fiction

• ‘The Light Princess’, Ephiny Gale - art by Ivan de Monbrison

Short stories

• ‘Monsters’, Amelie Daigle - art by Teresa Tunaley
• ‘Shadow Boy and the Little Match Girl’, C.A. Hawksmoor - art by Cécile Matthey
• ‘Final Passage’, Addison Clift - art by Carmen Moran
• ‘A Fear of Falling Under’, A.J. Fitzwater - art by Robin E. Kaplan

Novelettes

• ‘The Water Thief’, Jack Waddell - art by Fluffgar

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The wait is over.

Since we last spoke, the We See a Different Frontier anthology of postcolonial speculative fiction has hit the shelves. Featuring stories by Ernest Hogan, Sandra McDonald, Sunny Moraine, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Sofia Samatar, Lavie Tidhar, and many others, co-edited by the wonderful Fabio Fernandes, this anthology was crowd-funded (in other words we sold a couple of hundred copies before we started, which paid for maybe 80% of the up-front costs), and supported by many cool and generous people along the way. I'm biased, but I think it's brilliant. More to the point, I think it's an incredibly important anthology of stories from the colonial and colonized perspective, and it deserves to be read. (If you don't believe me, see some of the reviews listed on the press page for more objective reactions.)

Enough of the sales pitch.

This issue of The Future Fire features six short stories by some of the finest small press authors working today: from the deceptive and creepy colonial parable, the quietly haunting identity loss, the rolicking dark-fantasy eco-adventure, the quirky queer fairy tale, the semi-roboticized apocalyptic environmental tragedy, to the fevered and hallucinatory space-opera. There are no easy stories in here; there never are. The shit we have to deal with in this world is not addressed by patience, by being quietly civilized and hoping to earn respect. It's addressed by kicking it in the fucking teeth and shouting your demands into its bleeding mouth.

Reading for this issue reminded me why we started this magazine all those years ago: for the excitement, the unexpected, that sudden flush of recognition that Yes! This story is going in! These stories all felt so very beautiful and very damn useful, which is what we've always been looking for.

Djibril al-Ayad, September 2013

Comment on the stories in this issue on the TFF Press blog.