The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Y. X. Acs’s story “The Abjection Engine” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 30 June 2017. This story was originally written as a response to a call for submissions put out by Weird Tales. My intention was to write a weird, hard science fiction story, appropriate, I thought, since the theme issue was going to be focused on Nikola Tesla. This led me into a love affair with his work that has yet to end. …
Filip Wiltgren’s story “One Divided by Eternity” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 23 June 2017. There’s a small theater company in the town where I live, specializing in plays for kids and teens. I attended one of their openings, a fantasy play about a group of teenagers and their daydreams. Before the play, cast members walked around asking people “what would your best ending be?” Just like that, I heard Chilli’s voice in my …
Molly Etta’s story “The Illuminator Leaves” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 16 June 2017. This story has a couple of different points of origin: The first one goes quite a ways back. I was a sophomore in college, getting interested in medieval texts and manuscript culture, and I thought I’d like to write something about a mute illuminator, who could only communicate through images. I imagined her as a kind of Scheherazade figure who …
Christopher Cervelloni’s story “Trucks in Reverse” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 9 June 2017. “Trucks in Reverse” started with a simple question: Can bad people in one context be great people in another? I have always loved speculative fiction and found it to be the right place to explore this question. Through many drafts, I stayed focused on the idea that people sometimes must do bad things to protect and care for the ones …
Michelle Ann King’s story “Light Winds With a Chance of Velociraptors” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 2 June 2017. Like Harry, I also once read a piece about the ‘what happens is what you believe’ theory, and decided it could create a different, and interesting kind of apocalypse. I love end-of-the-world stories, but so often the characters who fix it are soldiers, scientists and superheroes — and they’re almost always young, fit and gorgeous. …
Jason Baltazar’s story “The Questioning Bell” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 26 May 2017. Most of my stories start with an image, in this case a boy looking down onto a narrow, abandoned city street. It seemed so lonely. I started to explore the idea– who was this, what kept them at the window, why were the streets empty? I’d recently read about the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in 1793, and so the …
