Topics & Series

Anything from green skinned little people with five fingers to the truly alien.

Genetic engineering, synthetic biology, the body remade — what happens when the science is the wetware.

Multiples of one, with all the philosophical and personal trouble that brings.

End-of-world stories: the last people, the long collapse, the day after.

New colonies. Alternate Earths. Parallel universes. All is fair game.

Engineering small enough to vanish — assemblers, smart dust, machine swarms.

Hard-edged other-worlds: real colonies, alien biospheres, planets and the lives lived on them.

As humans, we like to play god. From the golems of Jewish lore to Isaac Asimov's Univac to Robot B-9 in Lost in Space we've created machines in the image of our minds or bodies — often both. Artificial intelligence and its implications keep many of our top minds up all night.

One of the most daunting aspects of making science fictional aspirations real is the vast distances — and nearly insurmountable obstacles — between interesting space objects. Thank goodness for the fertile imaginations of sf writers, who can conquer all.

Not just comic book superheroes live here. But when they do, it's amazing what can be accomplished with superhero legends in the hands of a capable writer.

Many have opined that this topic belongs properly to fantasy, but following convention, we too classify it as science fiction.

Of all the science fictional tropes this may be the one we are slamming into headlong at the most blistering pace.

You won't see traditional fairy tales here, at least unaltered. But fairy tales do provide a great common language upon which to build a story or twist the old out of recognition.

Fairies and elves, unicorns and dwarves. It's important to note that here there be dragons — most of them, anyway.

Wizards, spells, the conjuring of impossible things from impossibly little material.

Fantasy and medieval Europe are so intertwined in the popular imagination that a story need only feel medieval sometimes to evoke the proper reactions to belong in the category.

Welcome to today. But wait, it's different.

All sorts of monsters live here, from vampires and werewolves to selkies and the ever-popular zombies.

Mystical colony worlds, portal worlds from modern normalcy, Piers Anthony style parallel worlds ruled by magic. All fit under this rubric.

Fortunetellers, precogs, future knowers. In science fiction, time travelers mostly go back. In fantasy, they see forward.

Souls, angels, devils, God and gods. Certain tales are best understood through the lens of religion.

Past is prologue. There are so many spots in history where a small change would evidently create a very different outcome. Historians call them counterfactuals and extrapolate how society might have differed. Science fiction writers populate that different world with characters and tell a story.

A rare genre in Daily Science Fiction, but sometimes we all just need a good scare.

Stories that make us laugh. The hardest genre to write well, perhaps.

Reality with one corner gently lifted, where the impossible is treated as ordinary.

There is some fiction that incorporates aspects of fantasy and science fiction but doesn't have that indescribable flavor that would make it clearly slipstream. Wizards on space ships, robots riding magic carpets, AIs on a quest to find unicorns.

We can't define exactly the region that slipstream occupies between magic realism and sf/fantasy, but there is a certain feel.

The Dear Jezzy series of paranormal love advice columns takes place in Sarina Dorie's Wrath of the Tooth Fairy world.

Epistolary flash fiction series by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley.

Caroline M. Yoachim's series of food-based fairy tales.

A series of stories shared each Wednesday by four award-worthy writers. All but the first tale are flash. (Possibly 26 in all — but the four wouldn't put it past themselves to invent an alien alphabet and keep writing.)

A science fiction flash series by Nicky Drayden.

Inspired in part by the Alphabet Quartet, four powerful authors examine a dozen important concepts in mathematics through short short fiction pieces.

A series of fairy tales, not quite as you remember your mother telling them. Written by Melissa Mead, one of DSF's most popular writers.