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Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2026/1 – Spring Issue For Download

Northern hemisphere spring is here, blossoming with a caleidoscope of colours, scents… and fresh stories! Sci Phi Journal’s 2026 Q1 issue sports original solarpunk cover art by Dustin Jacobus, inspired by the arrival of the street market season and the gradual re-emergence of Belgians from winter hybernation.

Whether 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 will serve as a stimulating read for the balmy months ahead!

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Sci Phi Journal 2026Q1 Download

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2026/1

Lectori salutem.

Welcome to our first issue of 2026. The year got off to a busy start at our editorial “offices”, as Sci Phi Journal received its largest volume of short fiction submissions to date. The crew spent many a night reading, contemplating and discussing the countless thoughtful and surprising pieces – the review experience was, once again, like placing a gentle hand on the pulse of the international sci-fi community and discovering what moves our authors in this day and age.

If hundreds of creative minds from around the globe are an indication, we as humans are equal part concerned and fascinated by near-future challenges, from the rise of artificial “intelligence” and the sense of alienation brought on by ubiquitous technology, to a diverse menu of options for ending the world as we know it. Meanwhile, we also remain intrigued by the less practical: ephemeral vistas of distant worlds, cosmic time scales and philosophical musings.

The short fiction presented in this issue traverses a broad spectrum of the above SF landscape, taking us from the exploits of Greek gods and ancient miracles to the travails of insurance administration during an alien invasion and budgetary concerns within the bureaucracies of subterranean survivors. We also pick up the thread of our erstwhile series publishing the missing pieces of Romanian SF master Gheorghe Săsărman’s imaginary cities hitherto unavailable in English – we hope to complete the entire cycle in our four quarterly issues this year.

Two essays complement this tour of the literary horizon, one on sci-fi anthologies by Mina, and another on the television series Severance by Jimmy Alonso Licon. As customary since 2021, our publication is graced by original cover art from the inkwell of Belgian solarpunk artist Dustin Jacobus.

May your reading pleasure, here and elsewhere, bring joy to your neurons!

Speculatively yours,

Sci Phi co-editors and crew

Ps: We hope to encounter many of you at the 2026 EuroCon in Berlin, Germany, on 2-5 July, where you’ll be able to meet and confabulate with most of us in person, either at our various panel discussions or over a stein of Teuton ale.

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Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2025/4 – Special Sequels Edition For Download

As winter draws over the Northern hemisphere, Belgians and other humanoids retreat to their lairs to celebrate festivities, play games, read books, savour dark (t)ales and hibernate until the spring. This is a time of looking back over the past year and preparing for the new one. Thus, Sci Phi Journal’s 2025Q4 issue is a special edition dedicated to (loosely interpreted) sequels to past stories, moods and ideas that had previously appeared on our pages.

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 device, 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 AI-free, entirely human-made collection of short fiction and essays, and the above hand-crafted illustration by our resident solarpunk artist Dustin Jacobus, will serve as a stimulating companion for the winter months ahead (or summer, if you’re south of the equator).

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Sci Phi Journal 2025 Q4 Download

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** 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 ✿(◠‿◠) **

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2025/4

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

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Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2025/3 – Autumn Edition For Download

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

Sci Phi Journal 2025Q3 Download

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2025/3

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

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Fact & Opinion

Orplid: Celebrating Two Hundred Years Of The Birth Of High Fantasy

by Mariano Martín Rodríguez

High fantasy is today one of the most widely popular genres of fiction. Its essential feature is the creation, for fictional purposes, of an integral secondary world fully distinct from the phenomenal or primary world in which we live. This creation is “integral,” that is, it is entirely the fruit of imagination, of fantasy. Consequently, although it may be inspired by our global mythic, folkloric and literary heritage, its secondary worlds are the result of a complete invention and, therefore, have their own ontological order and their own laws, which may or may not coincide with the natural laws of our material universe. Unlike other genres such as fairy tales, the creation of these internal laws of the secondary world in high fantasy is based on the intrinsic modern preference for verisimilitude in fiction. Accordingly, it is founded on a rational and scientific conception of the universe, derived from the methods, practices and discourses of contemporary Humanities. The scientific study of languages, literatures, history, myths and rites is what inspires the shape of the invented secondary worlds of high fantasy. These worlds usually look ancient and legendary, as well as pagan, because they imply a mythopoetic development congenial with the mythic tenets of paganism, rather than with the theological stance of most monotheistic religions. Tolkien fully understood this deeply pagan nature of high fantasy. This is why he eschewed both theology and its fictional expression, allegory, when conceiving and practicing his subcreations, as Robert E. Howard, Ursula K. Le Guin and other canonical writers of high fantasy also did.

But when and how exactly did high fantasy originate? We refer, of course, to its concept and practice, not to its name, which appeared relatively late. Scholars often put the origin of science fiction well before the invention of the label of science fiction proper. This is usually estimated to coincide with the mutation of mentality caused by the rapid acceleration of technological progress as a result of the industrial revolution since the first third of the 19^th century. Similarly, high fantasy predates its labeling as such. Although its development was limited before the period around 1900, when exotic and sometimes invented landscapes were favored in literature and the arts, its birth took place much earlier. It was at a site and time almost as specific as that famous Geneva evening of the summer of 1816 in which Mary Shelley presented to her friends the story that would give rise to her pioneering science-fiction novel titled Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

In the summer of 1825, two students of Theology at the German University of Tübingen named Ludwig Amandus Bauer and Eduard Mörike started a close intellectual friendship, nourished by common readings and cultural concerns. This friendship lasted their whole lives, as their letters attest. Bauer would eventually become famous in his country for a universal history in six volumes intended for a wide readership. Mörike was soon to begin a successful literary career, both in prose and in verse, which earned him great renown and a solid place among the German Romantic narrators and poets. Several of his poems even inspired composers of the musical genre called Lied, such as Hugo Wolff’s opus 46, his musical version of Mörike’s “Gesang Weylas” or ‘Weyla’s Song.’ Weyla’s voice evokes a sacred island called Orplid, but few concrete details about it are offered in this very short poem of just eight lines, which does not even tell who the eponymous person might be. It would seem that Mörike assumed that both Orplid and Weyla must had been familiar to his readers and listeners. However, the first line, which reads in the original “Du bist Orplid, mein Land” (‘you are Orplid, my country’), suggests that this is rather a personal world, and indeed so it is. Scholars who set out to elucidate the mystery of this famous little poem soon found out that Orplid was, in fact, an invention, and that neither Weyla nor Orplid had ever existed in this material world of ours. They also learnt that both featured in other longer and more detailed works by Mörike, and also by his friend Bauer. Reading those works, as well as both friends’ correspondence, shows how significant Orplid was for them. This significance was not limited to their individual lives, though: it also marked the birth of high fantasy.

In a letter from Bauer to Mörike dated in June 27, 1826, the former asked the latter on which day in the summer of 1825 they have begun discussing Orplid, Mörike’s invented land. Bauer only remembered that it must have been a few days after July 25, when together they projected and mapped the island that Mörike had called Orplid, as the first sketch of a country and a civilization that they would jointly create, or rather subcreate, if we prefer to use Tolkien’s term for the kind of literary creation consisting of envisioning fully imaginary secondary worlds for fictional purposes. Bauer’s question about the exact date of ‘Orplid’s birth’ (‘Orplids Geburt,’ as he put it) was prompted by his wish to celebrate it every year. Mörike did not remember the exact date or did not want to tell him, perhaps because he did not give it as much importance as Bauer, who might had felt that Orplid’s birth was a cultural milestone, not just a biographical one. In the same letter, however, Bauer told Mörike of a play that he had planned to write to be set on the island of Orplid, featuring as its main character a certain king Maluff, whose name is as invented as that of the island itself. In 1828 Bauer finally published a long romantic drama entitled Der heimliche Maluff (The Secretive Maluff). Shortly afterwards he wrote Orplid’s letzte Tage (The Last Days of Orplid), but he did not see it published, since he died before it appeared in 1847. By then Eduard Mörike had already published Der letzte König von Orplid (The Last King of Orplid), a shadow play included as an independent work in his novel Maler Nolten (Nolten the Painter, 1832). Mörike would later return to Orplid in his enigmatic heroic-comic narrative poem “Märchen vom sichern Mann” (The Tale of the Man of Certainty), which he published together with “Gesang Weylas” in a volume of Gedichte (Poems, 1838). However, as that story of the ‘ever certain man’ takes place in an afterlife combining Christian features, such as the devil, as well as other elements from the mythology of Orplid in a rather vague way, the poem does not contribute much to the knowledge of Orplid as a whole. Only the above-mentioned plays allow us to describe Orplid as the first full example of a high fantasy venue, as well as of a saga.

This statement might surprise those who believe that high fantasy is, above all, a cultural product originating in the Anglophone world that writers in other languages would imitate rather than develop in an original way. This idea could be sustained, if at all, for the period after the launch by Lin Carter in 1969 of the marketing label of (high) fantasy through his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. However, a multilingual and comparative look at Western literatures reveals that this label is comparatively recent. It was fully unknown to the greatest modern classics of high fantasy such as Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien, whose high fantasy works were labelled as such by critics and booksellers long after they had been written. Similarly, quite a few writers from continental Europe and Latin America independently produced similar fictions to those by Howard and Tolkien both in their time and long before them. If everyone seems satisfied with the later, maybe anachronistic, labelling as fantasy of Howard’s Hyborian stories and of Tolkien’s Middle-earth novels, there is no reason why we should not also label retrospectively as high fantasy the non-Anglophone works preceding them and presenting the same essential literary features. This is especially the case of Bauer and Mörike’s Orplid, a subcreation not unlike those of Howard and Tolkien, as we shall now see.

Der heimliche Maluff narrates the complicated and at times confusing intrigues of Maluff—the king of one of Orplid’s nations, the so-called schmetten (a further invented name)—against Ulmon, the ruler of a city also called Orplid. This city, located in the center of a lake, is the seat of the most powerful kingdom in the whole island, as well as the location of its main temple, where the different gods of Orplid are worshipped by its whole population. Orplid is located somewhere in the South Seas, between Australia and South America. The racial and ethnic background of its inhabitants is not mentioned. We can know only for certain that they are not to be counted among any known populations from our primary world, Polynesian or otherwise. The idea of their existence far from any contact with any foreigners could have been inspired, however, by Rapa Nui islanders from before their contact with European explorers, since all in Orplid believed they are the only human beings in the world.

In addition to these two kingdoms in conflict, there existed in Orplid a republic of free fishermen and a tribe of plundering nomads, the hynnus. Maluff had tried to enter the city of Orplid and seize it by surprise, but had been prevented from doing so by the supernatural rising of the cliffs that surrounded it, which turned Orplid into an inexpugnable fortress thanks to its supernaturally heightened natural walls. However, after having managed to spread discontent among the inhabitants of the island against the government of Ulmon, Maluff ends up defeating and killing the rival king in a pitched battle, after which the victor abdicates his acquired throne to his son and heir Quiddro. That turns out to be the reason why he had secretly undertaken his shrewd political maneuvering, while everybody believed that his motives were related instead to his unquenchable thirst for power.

A thousand years later, according to Bauer’s Orplid’s letzte Tage, the tables have turned. Another king of the Ulmon dynasty of Orplid has defeated the schmetten and imprisoned their king, but his imperialist ambition has not yet been satisfied. After learning that the sea has brought to the island some pieces of driftwood inscribed with characters unknown in Orplid, he decides to assemble a great expedition to explore and conquer the territories now believed to exist beyond the island’s shores. Wam-a-Sur, one of the priests of Orplid’s supreme sun god Sur ascends the mountain seat of this deity to tell him about Ulmon’s plans. Sur then informs him that he will not tolerate Ulmon’s colonial plans. Instead, Orplid will be wholly destroyed by a huge storm. As a punishment, only King Ulmon himself will survive for a thousand years. According to Mörike’s Der letzte König von Orplid, towards the end of that period, long after the fall of Orplid’s civilization by divine decree, a ship arrives on the island carrying lower and middle class unarmed Europeans, thus showing that their intent is not militaristic. After they settle among the empty ruins of the city of Orplid, they learn of the survival of Ulmon, who walks the island like a lonely ghost with the fairy called Thereile, his unrequited lover, at his heels. Ulmon, who only wants to find eternal rest, flees from Thereile and finally disappears into the waters of a lake. Orplid perishes for good together with him. We can only hazard a guess at how the knowledge about the ancient history of Orplid was acquired. Later European settlers and scholars might have found and deciphered its documents, since Orplid’s kingdoms seemed to be highly literate. In fact, they had far more in common with ancient pagan cultures from Europe and Asia than with contemporary Oceanian islanders. Orplid even resembled one of the Hyborian nations in Howard’s Conan stories…

However, Mörike’s Orplid drama cannot be considered a fully-fledged example of high fantasy. Customs and characters from the primary world coexist there with the legendary King Ulmon and with beings taken from European folklore such as fairies and giants. The importance in the work of these latter beings suggests that Mörike’s Orplid was still indebted to the Kunstmärchen or literary fairy tale genre, preventing him from advancing along the path of scientific plausibility that, on the other hand, Ludwig Bauer followed in his two Orplid dramas. Both of them entirely lack fairy-tale features. Even the intervention of Orplid’s gods as characters in Orplid’s letzte Tage does not preclude that plausibility, since they are an integral and constitutive part of that secondary world, unlike those beings from European folklore featuring, somewhat incongruously, in Der letzte König von Orplid, although Mörike himself felt that an explanation was warranted. Before reproducing the text of his drama in his novel Maler Nolten, an embedded explanatory foreword states that the subordinate world of elves, fairies and elves was not excluded (die untergeordnete Welt von Elfen, Feen und Kobolden war nicht ausgeschlossen) from Orplid. These beings are not mentioned at all, however, by Bauer in his own foreword to Der heimliche Maluff, where he told his prospective readers a similar story about the invention of Orplid, but with significant differences from Mörike’s later report with regard to his literary and personal approach. While Möricke would suggest that Orplid was a sort of poetic pastime and he even downgraded its originality by pointing to Homeric deities as forerunners to his own invented ones, Bauer emphasized everything that made the island and its civilization a consistent and credible fictional new (sub)creation. Moreover, he rendered it all the more believable by sistematically establishing its geography, politics, religion and history.

In any case, the explanations offered by both authors about Orplid demonstrate that they had first devised it as a complete fictional world even before writing any specific works set there, in a way similar to how Tolkien had conceived his Middle-earth, with its geography, myths, languages, customs, civilizations, geopolitics, chronology and history before using all that pre-existing material in The Lord of the Rings. Unlike Tolkien, however, Bauer did not tell the myths of the island, but only described its pantheon. This was then a great innovation. Well before Lord Dunsany concocted the myths of The Gods of Pegāna (1905), Bauer implied that Orplid had its own system of gods by mentioning in the foreword to Der heimliche Maluff their names, all of them invented, as well as describing their function in the mythical cosmos of Orplid and some of the rites practiced by its inhabitants to honor them. Bauer also put on the stage the gods themselves in Orplid’s letzte Tage, where their intervention may recall how beings endowed with divine or semi-divine powers shape the fate of humans in the Tolkienian universe of Arda and Middle-earth. All of this was revolutionary, since these gods were imagined for purely fictional purposes, unlike William Blake’s private and mostly symbolic pantheon.

Bauer was also a pioneer when it comes to conceiving the mundane dimension of Orplid. His foreword to his first Orplid drama fully informed about its geography and related geopolitics, of its landscape and how it had defined the position of each polity (a republic of fishermen, the royal city and seat of the centrally located and hegemonic kingdom of Orplid, the rival kingdom whose sovereign is Maluff, etc.), as well as their military, cultural and political relationships. In this way, Bauer strived to give the impression of a global historical reality of which the staged conspiracies and fights are simply an episode. All this contributes to providing Orplid with a plausibility familiar to contemporary readers. This even extends to Bauer’s hypothesis about the real existence of Orplid, as if the positive knowledge of the island had somehow come to Mörike and this had shared some of its documentary evidence with his friend and Bauer had just presented it to the readers of his first drama.

Bauer also tells there about Mörike having drawn a map of Orplid, a map that is unfortunately now lost. Fantastic cartography was not new, since it already appeared, for example, in the famous Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, where the author also invented the names, manners and institutions of his fantastic isles. However, Mörike and Bauer’s Orplid is not an island like those visited by Gulliver and other imaginary voyagers, whose fictional travelogues Tolkien excluded from high fantasy in his 1957 speech on fairy-stories, because “such report many marvels, but they are marvels to be seen in this mortal world in some region of our own time and space; distance alone conceals them.” In this regard, while Mörike’s Der letzte König von Orplid is still linked to the well-established genre of the ‘imaginary voyage,’ Bauer’s two dramas began a new genre, due to the wholeness and full independence of their secondary world from any intrusion of the primary one, including by contemporary travelers such as Gulliver. He actually specified in his foreword that Orplid existed as a civilization vor Zeiten, that is, formerly or once, literally “before time,” thus fictionally transporting us to a bygone age. This is similar, among others, to Howard’s Hyborian civilization, since it is located on Earth though in a distant time; crucially this is a closed time, as Mörike also claimed about Orplid when he applied to it the adjective abgeschlossen in the original text. Following the destruction of Orplid’s civilization with its inhabitants, nothing survived but the unfortunate King Ulmon, and only for a limited, though lengthy period of a thousand years. After Ulmon’s disappearance, Orplid fully becomes a legendary land. Its ruins remain mute until they are revealed by Mörike’s and Bauer’s mythopoetic imagination as a thing of a past that could only be explored through fiction.

Orplid was conceived as such, without any other discernible purpose and it has thus the whole set of features that we are used to recognize in high fantasy for the very first time. Atlantis has made many believe in the possibility of ancient, bygone imaginary civilizations, but Plato did not separate his secondary fictional world of Atlantis from the past of the primary world: Atlanteans had allegedly fought the very real Athenians and had been defeated by them, while both nations worshipped the known Greek gods, instead of any invented ones as the Orplid nations had. Furthermore, the inhabitants of the island imagined by Mörike and Bauer did not even know that there were human societies other than their own and, after they had come to suspect that others could exist, they were simply wiped off by their gods. Therefore, Bauer at least underlined in clear terms that Orplid was not, and could not be, related to our positive, primary world, unlike the secondary worlds of both the imaginary voyage popular during the Ancient Regime and later portal fantasies such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. If we add to that the extensive use by Mörike, and especially Bauer, of the scientific method and discourses of contemporary Humanities in order to confer materiality and rational plausibility to their creation, we can have now a clear picture of how those genial friends invented high fantasy when they started discussing Orplid a bright summer day exactly two hundred years ago.

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Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2025/2 – Summer Issue For Download

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

Sci Phi Journal 2025Q2 Download

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2025/2

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

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Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2025/1 – Spring Issue For Download

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

Sci Phi Journal 2025Q1 Download

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2025/1

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

~

Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2024/4 – Winter Issue For Download

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

Sci-Phi-Journal 2024Q4 Download

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2024/4

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

~

Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2024/3 – Autumn Issue For Download

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

Sci-Phi-Journal-2024Q3 Download

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2024/3

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

~

Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2024/2 – Bumper Summer Issue For Download

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

Sci-Phi-Journal-2024Q2 Download

Mariano Martin Rodriguez

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