The inspirations and origins for our stories.

It came from Tomas Marcantonio

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Tomas Marcantonio’s story “Choice” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 17 January 2020. The main concept of this story, that aborted foetuses have been given life without their mother’s knowledge, is both terrifying and harrowing. In fact, I almost abandoned the idea after early drafts. Abortion is a complicated and sensitive topic, and it needs to be treated as such. I disliked Philip K. Dick’s controversial story on the same topic, ‘The Pre-persons’, and was …

It came from Michael Sherrin

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Michael Sherrin’s story “Magic Whistleblower Tells All” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 10 January 2020. The inspirations for “Magical Whistleblower Tells All” are worn on its sleeve, from Harry Potter to Buffy to the many other secret magical world stories. I love many of these, though I’ve always found the reasoning to keep magic or monsters or technology a secret lacking. Often, I feel, the secrecy is meant to allow the suspension of disbelief, …

It came from Felicity Drake

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Felicity Drake’s story “Kozuna, the Ogre’s Child” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 3 January 2020. I’m a little embarrassed to admit how personal this story is. It’s woven together from my own experiences, people I’ve met, places I’ve been, and stories I’ve read. “Kozuna, the Ogre’s Child” is the name of a real Japanese folktale. (Grandmother’s version of the story is fairly similar to those you’ll find in collections of Japanese folklore.) The first …

It came from Phoenix Alexander

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Phoenix Alexander’s story “Notes from the Laocoön Program” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 27 December 2019. “Notes” was inspired by a summer reading astronaut’s memoirs in Southern California. I was struck by the ‘Stepford Husband’ superhumanity of the literary personae they presented – and wondered what would happened if you started to poke at the cracks. Then I imagined a spacefaring program that might look for something… different. Subscribe to our e-mail updates so …

It came from Lewis Gershom

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Lewis Gershom’s story “The Dybbuk” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 20 December 2019. Early in 2019 I was spending time with some family members and I overheard a story about a friend-of-a-friend who, through somebody’s will, inherited a bunch of old belongings. This friend-of-a-friend assumed they were to receive something of sentimental value, or any value, but it actually turned out to be, literally, a massive pile of junk in an attic. It became …

It came from Laura Duerr

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Laura Duerr’s story “What Lies in Light” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 13 December 2019. “What Lies In Light” originally began as an answer to a contest prompt, but I couldn’t let the story vanish into my hard drive after it was rejected. Shifting the setting from an Earth-based volcano to an alien planet let me play with all my favorite sci-fi world-building toys: how did StellBio reach Janus? What communication challenges would they …