Speculative Flash Fiction
Salutations, greetings and howdy. You are about to launch into an adventure at AntipodeanSF, the online magazine that's devoted to the regular monthly publication of fabulous and original science-fiction, fantasy, or horror mini-stories of about 500–1000 words each, with occasional feature stories of 2000 words and beyond.
AntipodeanSF will entertain you and allow you to join the fantastic quest to get to the outer and inner reaches of the cosmos — yet won't take hours to read.
Please read all of this month's stories, and then you can listen to them again in audio a few months later on the AntiSF Radio Show...
...Nuke.
The Price of a Manospondylus Sandwich
By Wes Parish
Thirty years of planning had gone into this. Planning, begging — grants applications, without the fancy excuses — experimenting, reading and re-reading and re-re-reading of all the available literature ... assembling a team of people who, like me, were crazy about the topic. And it had come down to this — one half-grown dinosaurian replica, dead because of heart problems we had no way of knowing about before we grew it.
The Heart
By Ovidiu Bufnilă
I don't know exactly. How did it happen? Maybe it had to happen. At first it was like that, a move. When I met several people on the subway, I found out it was the same for them. That move brought us there. Yes, the morning was a strange movement in my body. I didn't much think about what it actually was. It was a sunny morning. That's what I remember. An ordinary day. There were all kinds of events all over the world. Nothing unusual. The news flowed like waves. From everywhere. Social networks were shaking.
The Author
By Chris Karageorge
Arthur examined the distinctive lines, grooves and patterns on the palms and backs of his hands. ‘A code with some environmental influences created all of those’ he thought. The faux fur throw on the armchair complemented the texture and colour palette of the suite, as well as the entire mood of the office. His first week at Con. Science Systems revealed that everything was carried out as intended, and everything had an intention. As the Chief Thought Author for AI regular meetings and check ups with his supervisor were intended as a quality control measure as well as a health and wellbeing check up.
Storm
By Tim Borella
You couldn’t have predicted it, like so many of the really big outcomes. As usual, someone was screwing with DNA — electric eels and those moles with the crazy noses who track their prey by their tiny electric fields — and splicing it into humans just to see what might happen, maybe hoping for something along the lines of the blueskin babies or the weird sex appendages that were all the rage a half-century ago.
Searcher
By Scott Steensma
The door was plain white, the same as her gown and pretty much everything else in the facility — a calming shade of ivory-with-a-hint-of-blue that Josephine imagined would come in pails labelled ‘upmarket institutional’. It was reassuringly aseptic, the sense of neverending scrubbing reinforced by the clinic’s ever present aroma, a cleaning agent that somehow smelled both prohibitively expensive and viciously antibacterial. The overall effect, quite intended, was that Josephine was in the presence of Very Serious Medicine.
Microscopic Love
By João Ventura
That biologist loved bacteria. Naraka felt an irresistible attraction for those little beings and for their incessant movement, which he observed with pleasure for hours and hours under the microscope, as well as the exponential rate with which they reproduced.
Even the fact that some of them were lethal to more complex organisms did not attenuate the intense love he felt for them. On the contrary. Especially those who were in the solution whose maturation period had just ended.
Christmas Cheer: A Short Story
By Stephanie Koorey
Marion started wearing Christmas earrings from December 1. In October every year, she ordered 31 new pairs online that guaranteed delivery within four weeks.
Marion said it added to the Christmas cheer.
A Winged Bug's Pain
By Sele Hanakusa, Translated by Toshiya Kamei
If a flurry of cherry blossom petals moves you to tears, it proves you have emotions. Even though this is my fourth spring, I’ve failed to acquire a heart. I can’t help but count fine petals one by one as they swirl down from the trees. If I see them as a hazy expanse of sky colored in a pink pencil instead, then do humans think I’ve got a heart?
My spring has shimmered grey as far back as I can remember. It all started with a winged bug’s visit.
A Morning with Grey Clouds
By Swylmar S. Ferreira, Translated by Toshiya Kamei
The day started out rather strange, and not only because I hardly slept. After all, four and a half hours sleep is hardly enough. But what the hell.
I checked out of my hotel and took a cab to the airport. I was eager to go home after a tough week at work. At the airport cafeteria, I ordered coffee and toast while waiting for my flight call.
A Farewell to the Best Friend
By Alexander Iurovetski
- Obituary -
Today, I am saying adieu to Joe Higgin Smith, our dear Hick.
“Who the heck is Hick?” you might ask me.
Well, his extraordinary story spanned over decades, full of love and hate, friendship and betrayal. Invisible to most of us, yet leading to the rise and fall of titans.
AntiSF & The ASFF
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Please visit the ASFF website and consider joining for up-to-date info about Australian SF cons, awards, competitions, and to receive the Foundation's newsletter, Instrumentality, and more.
AntiSF's Production Crew
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
“Nuke”, who it turns out loves editing more than writing, lives in the New South Wales North Coast holiday destination of Nambucca Heads, where he is self-employed in IT training, computer support, desktop publishing, editing, writing, and website implementation. He is also the resident tech-head, skeptic, and board member of community radio station 2NVR, where he produces a number of shows including The AntipodeanSF Radio Show.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
One of Mark’s very best forms of writing procrastination is to produce the eBook series for AntipodeanSF, which he has been doing since issue 175.
Main Menu
In The Next Issue...
Coming In Issue 274
A Quindecillion of Cain
By Dan McNeil
Best Laid Plans
By Kevin J. Phyland
Fiction to Fact Technology
By P.V. Andrews
Lucky Bastards
By Kim Rose
Mavis
By Chris Karageorge
The Boy Who Cried Woof
By Col Hellmuth
The Gods in Their Galleries (Part One)
By Rick Kennett
The Mouse
By Natalie JE Potts
The Paragon Abyss
By William Kerr
The PM's Horns
By Len Baglow
The Witch of Borsevo
By Kyosuke Higuchi - Translated by Toshiya Kamei
AntipodeanSF June 2021
ISSUE 273
Speculative Fiction
Downside-Up
ISSN 1442-0686
Online Since Feb 1998
Download AntiSF E-Book
AntiSF's Narration Team
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
He lives in country Far North Queensland, has won awards for songwriting, and has had various other writing achievements, the most recent being an honourable mention in the 2018 international Literary Taxidermy Short Story Competition.
He also has bachelor degrees in science and teaching, and has completed a couple of as-yet unpublished SF novels. He’d dearly love to spend more time writing, but will have to continue juggling for another couple of years until the kids have fully left the nest.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
She feels so lucky to be a part of the AntiSF team.
Carolyn's work spans devising, performance, theatre-in-education and a collaborative visual art practice.
She tours children's works to schools nationally with School Performance Tours, is a member of the Bathurst physical theatre ensemble Lingua Franca and one half of darkroom — a visual arts practice with videographer Sean O'Keeffe.
(Photo by Jeremy Belinfante)
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
She enjoys writing short fiction, plays for radio and stage as well as her own brand of weird poetry.
She hosts the 'Off-Beet Poetry Slam' held bi-monthly in Katoomba.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
He lives with his wife plus a menagerie of non-domesticated — native Australian animals intropical North Queensland.
His writing within the ‘real’ science fiction context of COVID-19 is intermingled by long night sky vigils — searching for pesky aliens intent on maintaining their social distance to the nth degree.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
She’s fascinated by stories that expand upon today’s technology, addressing the moral and ethical issues that might arise. Equally, she enjoys the creative freedom that writing for children allows. Right now, she’s writing a young adult novel, reworking a middle grade novel and writing adult short stories when inspiration strikes. She lives with her husband, Tim, in Yungaburra, Far North Queensland and dreams of one day taking a European gap year.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
You can read examples of Garry's fiction on his website <https://garrydean.wordpress.com>
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
She is currently working on her first novel but loves diving into short stories to bring a little lightness, intrigue or humour to the day.
Her work has appeared in Sponge Magazine and The Commuting Book.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
All this science hasn't damped his love of fantasy and science fiction. It has, however, ruined his enjoyment of rainbows, colourful flames on romantic log fires, and rings around the moon. He has previously been published in Stupefying Stories Showcase, Everyday Fiction, Escape Pod, Perihelion and also on AntipodeanSF where he is part of the narration team.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
She is the author of The Butterfly Stone and The Tiger's Eye (YA/Fantasy) White Fire (Sci-Fi) and The Good, the Bad and the Undecided (a unique collection of short stories set during the events of White Fire/Sci-Fi).
You can read more of her work on her blog <www.solothefirst.wordpress.com> Look for her on Facebook <www.facebook.com/WriterLaurieBell/> or Twitter: <@LaurienotLori>
Rambles, writing and amusing musings
Smile! laugh out loud! enjoy the following
<www.solothefirst.wordpress.com>
The AntipodeanSF Radio Show
AntiSF Radio Show
The AntipodeanSF Radio Show delivers audio from the pages of this magazine.
The weekly program features the stories from recently published issues, usually narrated by the authors themselves.
Listen to the latest episode now:
The AntipodeanSF Radio Show is also broadcast on community radio, 2NVR, 105.9FM every Saturday evening at 8:30pm.
You can find every broadcast episode online here: http://antisf.libsyn.com
Most Read Stories
SF Quote
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The Contributors
A very few words about myself: impossible.
A bit longer:
Alexander Iurovetski lives in Melbourne, Australia.
He had gone with the wind of freedom from the former Soviet camp to the former British colony.
Alex codes and debugs for the sake of living, and bugs living for the sake of writing.
Occasionally, he helps his wonderful wife to raise their two sweet and mischievous boys.
Scott is a Melbourne based librarian, writer and son of a cat fancier.
He has written non-fiction for The Age, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and other magazines and dailies, but it's writing and reading Science Fiction that really fires his imagination.
He tweets at <https://twitter.com/scottsteensma?lang=en>, and if you're on Goodreads he would love to chat SF with you at <https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/36819318-scott>.
Steph Koorey really wants to get out more, and exercise a lot more, but as it is, she is a home-body Canberra-based academic, and writes occasional fiction, non-fiction and science fiction.
She published her first SF in the High School yearbook, and was mesmerised around the same time by discovering the work of Kurt Vonnegut.
Many decades later, she is reading David Mitchell (not the comedian) and John Birmingham, and is trying to learn from them, including by shamelessly following them on Twitter.
Sele Hanakusa is a Japanese writer from Chiba.
In 1999, she received an honorable mention in the Cobalt Short Story Prize for New Writers.
In 2020, her story won an honorable mention in the first Kaguya SF Contest.
Swylmar S. Ferreira lives in Brasília, Brazil's capital city.
He is a passionate reader of fantastic literature and an apprentice in the art of writing.
Writers he admires include Philip K. Dick, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King.
He blogs at Fantasticontos, escritos e literários.
João Ventura writes short fiction, which has appeared in several websites (AntipodeanSF and Bewildering Stories among them), and also in printed form: Somnium, in Brazil; Dragão Quântico, Hyperdrivezine, Phantastes (Portuguese fanzines); Universe Pathways (in both the English and the Greek versions).
He had short stories in several Portuguese and Brazilian antologies: A Sombra sobre Lisboa (2006), VaporPunk (2010), Antologia de Ficção Científica Fantasporto (2012), Lisboa no ano 2000 (2013), Lisboa Oculta - Guia Turístico (2018), O resto é paisagem (2018), Almanaque SteamPunk (2019), Winepunk (2019), Regiana Magna (2020).
In 2018, a collection of his short stories (in Portuguese) came to light, with the title Tudo Isto Existe.
He likes reading, writing (surprise!), has a blog and is a university professor (now retired).
He is married, with two children and he lives in Lisbon.
Those who read Portuguese can have a glance at some of his stuff in Das palavras o espaço.
Chris Karageorge is a lover, brother, son, neighbour and a keen observer of all things in sight.
He reads, writes and cooks in his spare time and dreams of coffee darker than a moonless night.
He is from Melbourne, Victoria and can be found walking his pug Monty during the weekends.
Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas.
His translations have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and World Literature Today.
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
He lives in country Far North Queensland, has won awards for songwriting, and has had various other writing achievements, the most recent being an honourable mention in the 2018 international Literary Taxidermy Short Story Competition.
He also has bachelor degrees in science and teaching, and has completed a couple of as-yet unpublished SF novels. He’d dearly love to spend more time writing, but will have to continue juggling for another couple of years until the kids have fully left the nest.
Ovidiu Bufnilă was born and lives in Romania. He has headed up Waved Philosophy since 1977.
Ovidiu Bufnilă binds everything so beautiful that the universe seems to be born of a wave that has shattered.
His novel Jazzonia was awarded as the best Romanian SF Novel.
He received the award for the best Romanian SF Story, Mandhala, 2002, and was also awarded for excellence in Romanian SF and the Sigma Award for the best Romanian SF Novel, Moreaugarin’s Crusade.
He received the annual Clouds Magazine Award (USA).
Wesley Parish is an SF fan from early childhood. Born in PNG, he enjoys reading about humans in strange cultures and circumstances; his favourite SF authors include Ursula Le Guin, Fritz Lieber, Phillip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard and Frank Herbert. He lives in Christchurch, NZ, is an unemployed Java and C programmer, and has recently decided to become a mad ukuleleist, flautist and trombonist, and would love to revert to being the mad fiddler and pedal steel guitarist.. "Where oh where has my little pedal steel got to ... ?"