Excerpt from the Novel “Borne”

The following is an excerpt from the 2017 novel Borne by Jeff Vandermeer. In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. Rachel ekes out an existence in the shelter of a run-down sanctuary she shares with her partner, Wick, who deals his own homegrown psychoactive biotech. One day, […]

The City

I. The Detective The rabbit was dead. Was white. Was dead. Was six feet long. Supine. A trace of red against its mouth. A pocket watch half buried in the sand. Rubbery and indistinct, a blackish waistcoat curled across its midriff. While above us the mountain rose like a threat or a throat, unexpected. I could smell the death in […]

Exhibit H

Torn Pages Discovered in the Vest Pocket of an Unidentified Tourist (note the rust-red discoloration in the lower left corner) AN EXCERPT FROM HOEGBOTTON’S COMPREHENSIVE TRAVEL GUIDE TO THE SOUTHERN CITY OF AMBERGRIS Chapter 77: An In-depth Explanation For the City’s Apparent Lack of Sanitation Workers (And Why Tourists Should Not Be Afraid) Upon the […]

The Age of Blight: An Interview with Kristine Ong Muslim

This week we’re featuring two stories — “Day of the Builders” and “Beautiful Curse” — from Kristine Ong Muslim’s haunting 2016 collection, Age of Blight from Unnamed Press. Muslim resides in the rural southern Philippines where she has written a total of seven books of fiction and poetry. She was co-editor this summer with Nalo Hopkinson of Lightspeed Magazine’s special issue, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science […]

Translating Strange Science Fiction: An Interview with Marian and James Womack

Marian Womack is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop (2014), and of the Creative Writing Master’s at the University of Cambridge (2016). She was born in Andalusia and writes in English and Spanish. Her fiction in English can be read in Apex, SuperSonic Mag, Weird Fiction Review, and the anthologies Spanish Women of Wonder and […]

Khalida Asghar’s “The Wagon” and Fiction in Urdu

Today we are pleased to bring you Khalida Asghar’s “The Wagon,” originally published in Urdu in 1963 and translated into English by Muhammad Umar Memon. Although the story has appeared in printed textbooks and anthologies before, it has not previously appeared online. The tale can entertain several interpretations, from the uncanny to the more science-fictional […]

Celebrating Alfred Kubin’s 1908 Novel “The Other Side”

This week on Weirdfictionreview.com, we’re revisiting our coverage of Alfred Kubin, and his masterpiece The Other Side (1908), about a strange city and the dream-like events that occur there. I talked more about my enthusiasm for this novel on NPR’s To The Best of Our Knowledge this past weekend. The Dedalus edition of The Other Side was […]

101 Weird Writers Preview: Alfred Kubin: The Tortured Triumph of "The Other Side"

Starting in January, Weirdfictionreview.com will begin its “101 Weird Writers” series, based on the contents of The Weird compendium. This piece on Kubin, whose “The Other Side” is excerpted at the beginning of The Weird, is a prologue to that series. Tomorrow, WFR will post another piece on Kubin by Paul Charles Smith. — Jeff VanderMeer (The city of Pearl, […]