The Mother

Ryan said he’d been seeing “blue” in his bedroom at night.

“Blue what?” I asked.

Light.

“Where?”

Everywhere.

The moment you set foot on Hades IV, you’re lost. The part of your brain that knows where you are in space—which way is left or right or up or down—gets all scrambled. Take just ten steps across the bruised purple soil from the shuttle ramp and good luck finding your way back. Not even our fancy tech can figure it out. The scientists tried.

The hum of the generation ship Vikram Sarabhai was a constant, deep-boned heartbeat. After forty years aboard, Dr. Nasima Choudhury barely noticed the vibration. In her small workshop adjacent to the Mass-Lite Drive control room, the only sound she heard was the gentle hiss of her kettle. It was the one place where the ship’s sterile, recycled air was cut with the spicy, earthy scent of home.

The Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project paired eight faculty-members at Dartmouth College with eight veteran speculative fiction authors. Through design activities, panels, symposia and a mountain lodge retreat, they collaboratively imagined worlds that interrogate the future humanity is heading towards. These stories can be found in the anthology, Android in the Archives: Research, Creative Collaboration and our […]

Ingredients: one part fury.

First, take the finest, softest leather and bleach it purest white. This is the skin-shroud, and you need to fool the cowardly officials who oversee the sacrifice as well as the dragon itself. What better than lamb-white, innocent flesh untouched by greedy hands?

One morning, everyone in the world—everyone except you—woke from where they had lain sleeping to find ineffaceable stains of blood at their wrists and ankles, with weeping wounds in their sides.

This took a bit of play with time on the part of the motive, but time was the first thing the motive breathed out. It will be the last thing the motive breathes in, some other distant dawn. The word “play” is an approximation. Play can be exultant. Play can be perverse.