Uncanny Magazine

We’re living in a story-time. Call it secondary or digital orality; even literate people mostly don’t read books, and comment sections operate more like spoken language than print media. The theorist Anna Kornbluh calls...

By the early days of the twenty-first century, advocates of book bans had managed, however accidentally, to elevate their hobby to the level of near-religion, and with it created a class of concepts that could only be...

When the surgeon showed me my pearl, the pearl that was to be mine, I thought it was a joke. The dragon pearl was a pinkish, milky drop the size of my pinkie nail, made of some jelly-like substance somewhere between...

Emily Y. Teng is a speculative writer based in Seattle, Washington. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, the award-winning anthology The Book of Witches, and the award-winning anthology Death in the Mouth...

In the myth those chosen for life were herded into an ark by Utnapishtim right before the flood. In hindsight, I think they got that right. Because the difference between salvation and death can be a few meters of wood...

Tremendous news, Space Unicorns! Uncanny Magazine is thrilled to announce that Submissions Editor Kirsty Thomas will be the new Uncanny Magazine Assistant Publisher! Kirsty has been with Uncanny Magazine since July...

Nobody dances the way he does, and he knows it, and everyone can tell. The beat is something ancient and otherworldly, or that’s what it feels like; it wakes something inside him, half-remembered, half-submerged like...

Ken Liu is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series, as well as the short story collections The...

The Sigil of Assurance You take a bit of wax and drip it over the em dash fresh out of the printer, working it over, building it up until it’s a little caterpillar crawling on the page, nestled between two words...

The man has to run. Has to. He will die if he doesn’t. Others will die if he doesn’t. Possibly thousands of other people. He needs to run. And yet he collapses on the ground, screaming in pain, barely able to hear over...

I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know how to read. My earliest memory is from around 1975 or so, and I am sitting with my grandmother in the farmhouse I loved. Together, we are reading a book called...

Content note: mentions of suicide   June finds the dragonfly the summer after Miko dies. Has died, June’s mother might say, shadow tremoring in the doorway to June’s room. Has been dead for months, Junebug. But not...

Uncanny Magazine would like to thank the following people for supporting us during our Year 12 Kickstarter. This magazine would not be possible without their support.   A. T. Greenblatt, A.C. Wise, Aaron Crowe...

She carries jasmine in her hair, the empire in her hands. Even now she folds up her youth, until the magnolias stop bleeding in the imperial gardens. Death follows in its place, a loyal hound. When famine comes...

you love the sun; when the great thrust of this machine whines like cicadas in the dumb heat of summer, its broad flanks groaning their automatic propulsion, you feel again that delicate sift of yellow on your skin. you...