Editorial

Lectori salutem.

As the current incarnation of Sci Phi Journal is completing the 11^th year of its ‘print’ run, we’ve looked back over the past decade and decided to diverge slightly from our usual approach in crafting our 2025 winter edition.

Over the summer, we invited authors who had published with us before to create a spiritual sequel to their previous works that appeared on our pages – whether a direct follow-up of the first story, or rather an associated reflection on the themes and ideas contained therein.

The resulting tales range from the woes of the ancient Greek pantheon to an alternate history of French North America, from an imaginary visit to a utilitarian heaven to a somnolent descent into Dante’s inferno, from a cosmic hunt for impossible objects to a theological response to Le Guin’s “Omelas”.

These are complemented by two essays, as we continue our tradition of surveying lesser-known SF language communities, this time marking the 200^th anniversary of Mór Jókai, the “father of Hungarian SF”, while also featuring a piece of speculation fiction and philosophy in memory of the work of the late Anand Vaidya, founding member of the SF & Philosophy Society and past contributor to Sci Phi Journal, who had passed away recently.

Preparing for the Northern winter months, the Sci Phi crew has been active on other fronts, too. Co-editor Ádám contributed a short story to the European Union Joint Research Centre’s first SF anthology, Future Snapshots. He also continued his string of encounters with science fiction clubs around the globe, with special thanks to MonSFFA for their generous hospitality in Montréal, Québec. Meanwhile, Mariano was hard at work on the latest edition of our sister journal, Hélice, containing critical SF essays and translations of unjustly neglected works in both Spanish and English, as well as author interviews.

With this, we welcome you to our Sequels Issue, and wish all our readers, contributors and their loved ones a happy Christmas and a safe start into the future year.

Speculatively yours,

Sci Phi co-editors and crew

~

** 2026 Fundraiser: Sci Phi Journal is volunteer-run, ad-free, AI-free, and pays human authors of niche, handcrafted fiction. We rely on donations to keep philosophical sci-fi free to read in 2026 and beyond. If every reader were to donate just a single euro/dollar once a year, we could buy more stories and commission translations. It is your generous support that got us this far. Thank you ✿(◠‿◠) **

As Belgian skies darken with rainclouds, humans in this part of the world get ready to hibernate in their scriptoriums, where stories bloom like the verdant foliage of our soggy gardens. Fittingly, Sci Phi Journal’s 2025Q3 issue features a new solarpunk cover art by Dustin Jacobus, inspired by the wet season upon us.

If you like to peruse your quarterly dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below. Otherwise head to our site to browse the stories in their online glory, complete with author bios and philosophy notes for each tale.

We sincerely hope our hand-crafted collection of short fiction and essays, this time dedicated to imaginary places both physical and spiritual, will serve as a stimulating read for the autumn (or Southern Hemisphere spring) ahead. If you like the work of our authors, illustrators and techies, please consider buying them a coffee 😉

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Lectori salutem.

Welcome to Sci Phi Journal’s autumn edition… or spring, if you happen to read this from our home planet’s southern hemisphere. It is remarkable that since the golden age of science fiction, “living in a globalised world” has gone from a futurist trope to a tired cliché. Indeed, at the time of writing this, one of our co-editors is on deployment in South Africa while our crew are spread across three continents.

Travel is by no means a novel human endeavour, but working collaboratively as a team across such distances would have been considered speculative even a generation ago. Perhaps it is fitting then that our present issue is dedicated to imaginary places – ranging from the physical to the virtual and even spiritual realms.

How would the economics of a fantasy realm cope with questing heroes unearthing a constant supply of treasure? Should sentient non-player characters slain in a game receive burial rites? Can religion act as a problem-solving algorithm programmed into children sent to colonise planets? If trees were the dominant species, would they compete for power as we do?

These and many more armchair expeditions, brought to you by our human authors and illustrated by human hands (never AI), are rounded out by two essays, one celebrating the 200th anniversary of Orplid (conceived in 1825), arguably the first instance of comprehensive secondary world subcreation in high fantasy (our mundane world being the primary wherein SF arises), and a think piece on the place of spirituality in science fiction.

We hope you enjoy reading this latest issue as much as we enjoyed shepherding it together from around the globe.

Speculatively yours,

Sci Phi co-editors and crew

~

Northen hemisphere summer brings vacation vibes, sunny days, balmy nights and a fresh breeze of stories. Sci Phi Journal’s 2025 Q2 issue features another original solarpunk cover art by Dustin Jacobus, inspired by the age-old dream of humankind’s liberation from labour, applied to the harvest season.

If you like to peruse your quarterly dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We sincerely hope our collection of tales and essays, this time loosely dedicated to the dilemmas of progress and the place of human creativity therein, will serve as a stimulating read for the months ahead!

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Lectori salutem.

Spring is giving way to summer in the northern hemisphere, which in Belgium merely means a gradual change in the angular velocity of rain drops that incessantly pummel the roofs under which yet another issue of Sci Phi Journal was lovingly crafted for you by our enthusiastic, if slightly D-vitamin deficient crew.

Our 2025 summer edition is once again thematic, in the loosest of senses, around topics of progress and creativity as seen through the lens of contemporary SF. It is often said that science fiction is the literature of ideas; indeed, by reading into the concerns and musings of writers interested in the future, one may get a sense of the questions that preoccupy the collective mind. A map of what troubles us as a species, as it were.

This time around, our tales revolve around AI, science, extraterrestrial exploration and the price society pays for the march of technological advancements, particularly if their pace outstrips our ability to adapt. These are complemented by two essays, covering changes in both our relations with humanity’s artificial creations, and the formal conventions of the SF genre itself, harkening back to the poetry of Arthur C. Clarke.

On a related note, while our crew would have to miss the annual European SF gathering due to clashing commitments, we hope that some of our readers make it to Archipelacon, which after our fantastic sojourn in Rotterdam last year carries on the torch of the EuroCon tradition – to be followed by MetropolCon in Berlin in 2026, where Sci Phi Journal will definitely be on the programme once more!

In the meantime, whether your region of the world is gradually heading into summer holidays or a cooler season, we hope the latest issue provides some welcome inspiration for thought experiments.

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

Spring blossoms with a caleidoscope of colours, scents… and fresh stories! Sci Phi Journal’s 2025 Q1 issue sports original solarpunk cover art by Dustin Jacobus, inspired by the arrival of the verdant season and the gradual re-emergence of Belgians from winter hybernation.

If you like to peruse your quarterly dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We hope our collection of tales and essays, this time loosely dedicated to the ethical implications of societal and political challenges, will serve as a stimulating read for the balmy months ahead!

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Lectori salutem.

We live in interesting times, both in science fiction and the world at large. This must have weighed on the minds of our wonderful community of authors as well, who have inundated us with a record number of submissions.

Sci Phi Journal has a tradition of advocating for timeless rather than timely speculative fiction. We enjoy both famous and barely known classics of the genre that, while products of their day and age, gaze dispassionately into the distance and explore alterities to the extant reality of their writers.

That said, we feel that we should make the same allowance for the literature of the present to be a fruit of the here and now. Geopolitical upheavals cast a shadow over the zeitgeist of our era, much like they did in the Cold War of previous generations, and germinate through the stories that emerge as a result.

Thus, we elected to subdue our misgivings and exceptionally allow some of that creative current to seep into these pages. Let the collective mind of science fiction get it ‘out of our system’, as it were. The tales that follow range from deglobalizing the units of time to war machines unleashed by great powers in space and unstoppable forces of nature down below. Two essays, on the ethics of time travel and hypocrisy in philosophical scripture and fiction, respectively, complete this slightly more political issue than usual.

Whichever side of the many available fences you happen to sit on, we sincerely hope you enjoy our first edition of 2025!

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

Hark and behold, t’is the season for Sci Phi Journal’s 2024 Winter issue – with cover art by Belgium’s very own Dustin Jacobus, this time with a solarpunk reimagining of the timeless Levant, the birthplace of our Christmas stories.

If you like to peruse your quarterly dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We hope our mostly light-hearted end-of-year collection of tales and essays will serve as a cosy read for the festive period!

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Lectori salutem.

It is our fifth Christmas season that the current Sci Phi crew celebrates together at the helm of this tiny but indomitable literary vessel we are glad to call our home. Over the past half decade, since the previous passengers brought us out of cryo-sleep for changing the guards after their long service to the genre, our craft has been exploring the depths of cyberspace and we picked up formidable fellow travellers and long-term contributors along the way.

Speculative fiction, especially science fiction, is often focussed on the promise or dread (or both) the future may have in store for us. We hold the present world, it is said, as custodians, looking after it for our children. Thus we are pleased that through the years the number of Sci Phi babies multiplied, too, with the most recent addition being the newborn daughter of our Utopia-award finalist cover artist Dustin Jacobus. His latest handcrafted artwork gracing our title page this December is dedicated to all future readers and practitioners of our beloved literary genre. Let us hope that the creativity of our species remains an integral part of dreaming up avenues for philosophical speculation, rather than being reduced to mere consumers of ever-more personalised, artificially-generated content.

It is in this vein, and in keeping with the tradition of our winter issues being somewhat more light-hearted and, dare we say, festive, that our latest Christmas edition brings you a broad range of charming idea-driven tales, all wrought by human hands (and keyboards). The original fiction therein ranges from the society-altering power of celestial phenomena to the existential dilemmas of infinitely copied consciousnesses, complemented by another imaginary city of Romanian SF master Săsărman hitherto unpublished in English.

The present quarterly issue is completed by the return of our columnist Mina with an essay about children brought up in contact with, and thus “fluent in” science fiction, and a fascinating report from the world’s first academic conference dedicated to the study of Warhammer, penned by its dauntless organisers, with a view to the future of this hitherto under-researched universe. We for one are already excited to attend the second instalment of this forum, where many a stone remains as yet left unturned: philosophy among them.

In the meantime, we sincerely hope you enjoy our concluding issue of 2024!

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

With a slight delay, but here is Sci Phi Journal’s 2024 Autumn issue – with seasonal solarpunk cover art fresh from Dustin Jacobus’ exhibition at this year’s Eurocon in Rotterdam!

If you like to peruse your quarterly dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We hope our slightly darker-than-usual collection of tales and essays will serve as a refreshingly chilling read for the Halloween period!

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Lectori salutem.

Autumn gloom slowly descends across much of the Northern Hemisphere. And that strangest bunch of holidays that have long foreshadowed the literature of existential angst, the combination of Halloween, Toussaint, and All Souls are just around the corner.

As much as our winter issue tends to be touched by the spirit of Christmas and hence exhibit a lighter tone, so is this fall edition slightly beholden to a sense of unease and, at times, even dread. Anxiety, in the traditional sense, may paralyse those struck by it like a rabbit caught in the sudden headlight of an oncoming UFO. But speculative fiction has long embodied a spirit of movement – through space and time. Protagonists and ideas propelled through imaginary worlds built by authors as homes for the fantastic to inhabit. These stories are thus anything but still lives, rather they paint evolving ideascapes, vignettes of world-building with unsettling implications trickling off the page.

Besides dreaming of both positive and scary futures to come, the Sci Phi crew, too, has been intensely inhabiting the here and now of 2024 – a year which itself sounds like science fiction. The SF & fantasy communities were well served this August by the WorldCon in Glasgow, Scotland, and the subsequent EuroCon in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. For those with an active membership of the former, we encourage you to view a replay of the panel on philosophical SF featuring Sci Phi Journal available online till the end of the year. And be sure to soak up (or relive) the atmosphere of the latter in Robin Rozendal’s thorough after-action video report. Indeed, our cover illustration, once again by Belgium’s very own solarpunk artist Dustin Jacobus, was one of the works on display at the EuroCon’s art fair.

It is emblematic of the interconnectedness of mankind’s planetary civilisation that, at the time of writing, co-editor Ádám is traversing the Mato Grosso in western Brazil, having reached the geodesic centre of South America within the city of Cuiabá, undeterred by the dystopian wildfires engulfing the surrounding Cerrado, while Mariano is touring national libraries in order to prepare an anthology of contemporary Spanish high fantasy for Cátedra, a major classic publisher in the Hispanic world. His Quixotic endeavour to secure long-overdue academic recognition for this popular genre has just produced a similar history and anthology featuring 19^th-century Spanish high fantasy, demonstrating its long history dwelling in the literary corpora of languages other than English.

The present issue, too, reunites authors from all corners of the globe and takes readers on a journey from the Thirty Years’ War through Hindu cosmology to unpredictable viruses and omnicidal invasion forces. The escapade is rounded out by two essays, one on a 19^th-century anticipation of unfriendly AI and another on the legislative application of Asimov’s laws.

We sincerely hope you enjoy the ride!

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

Et voilá, Sci Phi Journal’s 2024 Summer issue – our largest edition yet, with another life-affirming solarpunk cover art by Dustin Jacobus!

If you like to peruse your seasonal dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We hope our bumper harvest of concept-driven literary curiosities and thought-provoking essays will serve as a refreshing read for the months ahead!

Enjoy the trip,

the Sci Phi crew

Lectori salutem.

As spring in the Northern Hemisphere gives way to summer, the world of science fiction is buzzing with activity – and so are the Sci Phi Journal crew!

Thanks to the continued generosity of our readers, helpers and supporters via various channels, we’re able to present you with another bumper issue featuring an increased number of original fiction, ranging from action-packed space adventures to dark musings on the ultimate questions. These are accompanied by two translations of classics hitherto unavailable in English, as well as a pair of fascinating essays on the origins and status of high fantasy, and the state of speculative fiction in a rarely explored literary corpus: Hungarian.

By the time you are reading this, we will have concluded our exhibition at the Liszt Institute in Brussels, Belgium, showcasing the solarpunk portfolio of Utopia-award finalist Dustin Jacobus, our longstanding cover artist. The success of the installation saw it moved to larger premises half-way through its run, and we thank Dustin for his marvellous engagement and entertaining guided tours.

Over the course of the summer, we’ll be criss-crossing Europe to commune with the fandom that serves as the lifeblood of the speculative genre, as well as ancillary disciplines important for thinking about the future in creative but informed ways.

Co-editor Ádám kicked off June as keynote speaker at the gala dinner of INESC Brussels Hub’s 2024 AI Summer School, where he brought perspectives from the science fiction community to leading researchers and innovators in the field of artificial intelligence.

Following local gatherings from Hungary and Spain to Belgium, Italy and Romania, our co-editors and crew will then decamp to Rotterdam, Netherlands, for the annual highlight of European SF life: the 2024 EuroCon, with our editorial team joining several panels and hosting a meet-up of tabletop board gaming enthusiasts (the crew’s second hobby, as long-term readers will have likely guessed).

Casting the net ever wider, we will also attend the largest SF jamboree on the planet: the 2024 WorldCon in Glasgow, Scotland, where we’ll organise thematic discussions on the intersection of philosophy and SF, and hope to catch up with our overseas network – meeting some of you face-to-face for the first time!

So if you plan to attend any of those events, do not hesitate to simply drop us a message via email or social media, and our team would be delighted to meet up with fellow authors and readers over coffee, beer or other beverages conductive to sharing speculative thought experiments.

Until then, we hope you enjoy the latest issue and wish you Godspeed!

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

Here it is, Sci Phi Journal’s 2024 Spring issue, marking the magazine’s 10th Anniversary!

If you like to peruse your seasonal dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We hope our mélange of concept-driven literary curiosities and thought-provoking essays will serve as a refreshing read for the months ahead!

Enjoy the trip,

the Sci Phi crew

Lectori salutem.

Welcome to our 2024 Spring edition – marking the 10^th anniversary of Sci Phi Journal!

Thanks to the generosity of our readers, we have been able to slightly increase the number of original stories, this time ranging from beautiful metaphysical journeys to alternate history scenarios on both large and small scales, along with the customary dose of light-hearted fancies, as well as two translations of classical SF tales (from Romanian and Spanish) hitherto unavailable in English.

The current issue is made complete by two essays, one on ideological diversity in speculative fiction by our trusty columnist, Tangent Online’s SF critic Mina, and a second by an illustrious trio of scholars introducing the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society, which held its inaugural meeting in 2023 (and with whom we will host a joint panel at the 2024 EuroCon in Rotterdam, Netherlands).

Somewhat surprisingly even to ourselves, some of our most-read pieces are essays on and around SF subjects, such as Joseph Heath’s “Why The Culture Wins”, an appreciation of Iain M. Banks, which has thus far been visited by a quarter of a million people – among them a certain Mr. Musk who, by tweeting about it, inadvertently crashed our website… (We are pleased to report that we had since upgraded to a server more befitting the requirements of the 21^st century.)

By the time you are reading this, we will have festively opened an exhibition at the Liszt Institute in Brussels, Belgium, showcasing the solarpunk portfolio of Utopia-award finalist Dustin Jacobus, our longstanding cover artist, including previously unpublished visions of sustainable urban futures. If you happen to find yourself in the vicinity this spring, we encourage you to drop by for a free visit.

The world of 2014, when Sci Phi Journal first saw the light of day (in Australia, what more), was markedly different from our current realities. The field of speculative fiction had since then been buffeted by the COVID pandemic triggering a global wave of locked down authors and readers (and at least one attempt at a hybrid EuroCon), the return of warfare on European soil (and the subsequent suspension of Russia from the European SF Society), ideological polarisation in Anglophone literature, and political interference from outside the SF realm (award procedures at last year’s WorldCon in China being the latest example). We can only guess what challenges may lie ahead, chief among them the rise of AI and the effects it will have on human creativity.

Nevertheless, we dare to look into the future with an inquisitive spirit that has been our beacon since the current editorial team took the helm five years ago. Here’s to another decade of intriguing speculative philosophy in all its forms, welcoming its broad spectrum of views and voices from around the globe. (As long as they’re not over 2000 words, that is…)

Godspeed!

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

Dear friends of speculative philosophy,

if you happen to pass through good old Belgium between March and May 2024, come visit the brand new exhibition of our Utopia-award finalist cover artist Dustin Jacobus, at the Liszt Institute in downtown Brussels. Even better if you join us on 19 March for the opening-night reception, or 16 April for a special tour of the exhibition with Dustin. Both these events are free (just register via the link below), or drop in to see the works at the Institute any day between 10am and 3pm (free entry). Hope to see many of you there!

https://culture.hu/en/brussels/events/sci-phi-journal