In this issue we enjoy a bowl of soup on the 87th
floor of a utopian arcology, take a ride in a car that knows where we need to
go, not just where we want to be, and spend time on an orbital ranch where the
biggest mistake is trying to be someone you’re not meant to be. In each tale,
we see the world making its way past the brink of disaster, with the promise of
something new.
 | Jared Oliver Adams The Jewel of the Waves, the Diadem of the Sky Jared Oliver Adams lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he writes, explores, and dabbles in things better left alone. He holds two degrees in music performance, a third degree in elementary education, and is utterly incapable of passing a doorway without checking to see if it leads to Narnia. Find him online at www.jaredoliveradams.com |
 | David Hankins Another Day on the Orbital Ranch
David Hankins writes from the thriving cornfields of Iowa where he lives with his wife, daughter, and two dragons disguised as cats. His writing journey began in the oral tradition of convincing his daughter to Go To Sleep with inventive stories. That usually backfired. After years of Just One More Story, David began transcribing his midnight ramblings in an attempt to keep his storylines straight. Children are ruthless in identifying mistakes in fairy tales. David writes lighthearted speculative fiction because that's what he loves to read and—this is the important bit—there's not nearly enough humor in the world. David aims to change that, one story at a time. David joined the US Army after college and, through some glitch in the bureaucracy, convinced Uncle Sam to fund his wanderlust for twenty years. He has lived in and traveled through much of Europe, central Asia, and the United States. Now that he’s retired from the Army, David devotes his time to his passions of writing, traveling with his family, and finding new ways to pay his mortgage. You can find David at https:/davidhankins.com Story Notes: “Another Day on the Orbital Ranch” was initially outlined during Scot Noel’s Webinar “Writing Solar Punk and Hope Punk” in July 2022. Scot ran us through plotting a Solar Punk story during the webinar and I volunteered for a live critique. That was so much fun, and it helped me create a new world where ranching and farming had moved into space. I loved the idea of having age-old problems despite advances in technology, so rat infestations and sewage backups played front stage in this story of resolving relational discord and dealing with emerging AI rights. |
 | Robert E. Harpold Flybys, Launch Windows, and Selfies with the Earth and Moon: The Artemis 1 Flight from the Perspective of a Member of the Trajectory-Design Team
Robert E. Harpold is an engineer working for ERC, Inc., a subcontractor for NASA, designing trajectories for the Artemis missions. In his previous jobs, he has operated a weather satellite and a space-weather spacecraft for NOAA and, for a different NASA project, has flown over Greenland and Antarctica to collect data on their elevation changes. He is married to his amazing and accomplished wife Julie and has a young and very smart daughter named Isabelle. Article Notes: This article, the draft of which was written days after the Artemis 1 flight, will hopefully give an idea of the amount of work that went into the entire Artemis 1 mission by focusing on the work of one team. It’s easy to just say that we designed the trajectories for the Artemis flights, but I think that by showing all the pieces that go into those trajectories, readers can extrapolate the magnitude of the undertaking for all the teams involved and the level of detail they all needed for their individual subsystems. I also shared some personal experiences to give the human side of what was happening. I hope readers take away how exciting it was to work on this flight and that the article gives hope for the future by showing what humans can achieve when we work together to explore and push our limits. As a side benefit, since one of DreamForge’s focuses is developing writers, I’m hoping that seeing some of the details of an engineering project like this and seeing what it’s like to work on this project will help authors add more realism when they write about similar subjects. |
 | Kai Holmwood A Bowl of Soup on the 87th Floor Kai Holmwood, a fifth-generation Californian and third-generation UC Berkeley graduate, has been a freelance nonfiction writer for over a decade. She recently completed a Master of Writing degree at the University of Canterbury. She and her husband split their time between near-antipodal homes in New Zealand and Portugal. This is her fiction debut. Story Notes: In my years of traveling, I’ve been fascinated by the meaning and language of food. Its universal power should perhaps come as no surprise; giving someone food is an act of giving them life. This quiet story began with the idea of allowing shared meals to create an unspoken language for two characters who aren't fully able (or ready) to speak for themselves. |
 | Somto Ihezue Like Stars Daring To Shine
Somto Ihezue(He/Him) is a Nigerian–Igbo writer. He was awarded the 2021 African Youth Network Movement Fiction Prize. A Nommo Award-nominee and a finalist for the 2022 Afritondo Prize, his works have appeared in Tordotcom: Africa Risen Anthology, Fireside Magazine, POETRY Magazine, Cossmass Infinities, Flash Fiction Online, Africa In Dialogue, OnSpec, Omenana Magazine, and others. Somto is an alumnus of Milford SF Writers ’22, Voodoonauts’22, and will be attending Clarion West’23. He is a member of SFWA, BSFA, BFS, ASFS, and CODEX. He is an associate editor with Android Press, Apex Magazine, and Cast of Wonders. He tweets @somto_Ihezue. BRIEF NOTE: There is a review of “Like Stars Daring To Shine” in Locus Magazine, and the reviewer said, “Ihezue captures a sense of imminent danger, everything hanging on a thin thread of community and inequality, while also showing that people, and the natural world, are full of surprises and resilience. The piece challenges what recovery can look like, and through the grim implications of the ravaged Earth and all its coldness, there remains some warmth to find in the story.” This review in its entirety portrays what this story means to me. |
 | Amara Mesnik Lost in Intuition
Amara Mesnik is a Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker with a love for all things science, fiction, and science fiction. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Amara has directed several short films, including the award-winning In Suspension (2020), and is now working as a video editor at BBC Studios. She enjoys worldbuilding and creating languages, and is currently writing her debut novel. Story Notes: 'Lost in Intuition' is based on a story idea my dad and I always joked about— the GPS that takes you not where you want to go, but where you need to go. He always saw it as a sort of magical realism, possibly set in the 90s when GPS technology was first becoming widespread amidst the public. But for me, it resonated more with the rise of automation and artificial intelligence that we're seeing in the present. It's no longer a fantastical thought that a computer might know more about ourselves than we do— ad targeting algorithms are building profiles of us based on everything we do online. And one of the biggest fears around the current surge of AI development is the tech going rogue. But instead of being some uniformly scary thing, what if a system like that could be helpful? What if it could help us reshape our relationships and our lives for the better? This story is also inspired by the time I spent working with the Robot Locomotion Group at MIT. I was fortunate to spend time with prominent roboticists and engage in very interesting discussions about their visions of the near future. Russ Tedrake, Professor and Director of the Center for Robotics at MIT as well as VP of Robotics Research at the Toyota Research Institute, once told me he believed autonomous vehicles would someday be ubiquitous on our streets, and the next generation's children might not even have to learn to drive. While I'm a bit less optimistic about how soon autonomous vehicles will become the norm, it's nice to imagine that in a climate- and community-positive future, a network of fully-autonomous electric vehicles would all but eliminate vehicular deaths, drunk driving, and road pollution. This story also received an honorable mention from the Sapiens Plurum 2022 Awards. |
 | Richard A Shury Petrichor
Richard A Shury studied literature at Otago University, and recently returned to New Zealand after haunting London for many years. He is looking forward to travelling again, and in his spare time gets down with many things nerdy. His story Chiaroscuro was read at Liars' League, while his short story The Vortex placed second in the Limnisa Short Story Competition 2018. His work, including the stories Gamer, The Formula, and Homecoming, has appeared in several anthologies. Call him a part-time optimist. Find him @RichardShury Story Notes: Petrichor was the result of a writing prompt, ‘Like a Welcome Summer Rain’, which I worked on during one of Gotham Writers’ Write-Ins. From that beginning the piece changed and grew, into my own small piece of hope for a future where human technology works in harmony with the natural world, and helps undo the damage which has been done to it. |
 | Ana Sun Write the Future You Want to Live In
Ana Sun (pronounced “Soon”) writes from the edge of an ancient town along the River Ouse in the south-east of England. She spent her childhood in Malaysian Borneo, and has lived on two other islands prior to moving to the UK. In another life, she might have been a musician, an anthropologist or a botanist obsessed with edible flowers.
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 | Shanna Yetman Three Postcards from Another Earth
Shanna Yetman is an environmental writer and Latina living in Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in Cheap Pop, Sky Island Journal, MoonPark Review, the Daily Drunk, Reflex Fiction, New Millennium Writings, Jellyfish Review, Connotation Press, and the Writing Disorder, among other publications. She’s currently an editor for Flash Fiction Magazine. When she’s not writing, she’s running for local office and ensuring her two kids see as much of the natural world as they can before they beg her for screen time. Visit her website writershannayetman.weebly.com. Story Notes for “Three Postcards from Another Earth” We all know what it means to live in the Anthropocene---this great geological age defined by chicken bones, plastic, and mankind’s ever-present influence on our planet. Now, we (as humans) have created a hybrid-environment (part natural, part whatever else we’ve put into the world.) And, as our environmental problems get bigger, we’ve begun to think about how we can alter the environment in our favor. Sun dimming is the idea that we can spray sulfite particles in the atmosphere to combat climate change. Think: Volcanoes. So for a long time now, I’ve wondered what it would be like to live in a world that’s just experienced this man-made phenomenon. This is my first science fiction publication. |
 | Wulf Moon Wulf Moon's SUPER SECRETS: Magic Sword
Wulf Moon learned oral storytelling as a child when he lived with his Chippewa grandmother. He begged stories from her every night and usually got his wish—fireside tales that fired his imagination. If Moon had a time machine, those are the days he would go back to. Since he doesn’t have a time machine, he writes. Moon wrote his first science fiction story at fifteen. It won the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and became his first professional sale in Science World. He has won over forty writing awards, and thirty in public speaking. His stories have appeared in Writers of the Future Vol. 35, Best of Deep Magic 2, Galaxy's Edge, Best of Third Flatiron, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2. Moon is a professional voice-over actor and has done work for magazines and bestselling authors Jeff Wheeler, Mike Resnick, and Will McIntosh. Wulf Moon's award-winning SUPER SECRETS Writing Resource and Workshops have been attributed by many aspiring writers as the secret to their success in obtaining first professional sales and winning major contests. You can discover Moon's books on writing by visiting his website. Want in on the Secrets? JOIN THE WULF PACK at www.thesupersecrets.com! |
 | Jane Noel
Illustration, Design, Layout
Jane is the Founder of Chroma Marketing Essentials, a digital marketing agency located in Jeannette PA. She holds a degree in Visual Communications from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and more years of experience than she cares to count.
Before founding CME, Jane worked as an Artist, Art Lead, Art Director, and Project Manager for the computer game developer DreamForge Intertainment, where she worked on a number of early computer games, including Roger Zelazny’s Chronomaster.
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 | Scot Noel
Editor, Editorial Selections, Essays, and more.
Scot Noel is a content writer for websites, blogs, social media, e-newsletters, and the like. Speculative fiction has always been his obsession, resulting in a Writers of the Future 2nd place win in 1990, a 7-year career in computer game development, and a handful of published stories, ranging from far future and zombie fiction to the tale of a fairy sheriff fighting an evil dragon. He serves as the editor and publisher of DreamForge Magazine and DreamForge Anvil.
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 | Henry Gasko
Editorial Assistant
Henry Gasko was born in a displaced persons camp in Yugoslavia after World War Two. He was raised on a vegetable farm in Canada, and emigrated to Australia more than forty years ago. He has recently retired from a career in data analysis and medical research.
Henry has had stories published in the anthologies "Dreamworks", “Alternate Apocalypse”, “On Time”, in Australia's
Aurealis
magazine, and in the
SciPhi Journal
. He is a two-time semi-finalist in The Writers of the Future and he won first prize in Positive Writer's "Why I Write" essay contest. He also won the 2018 Sapiens Plurum short story competition, and came third in the 2020 competition.
When he is not writing, he enjoys cycling, kayaking, swimming and playing bridge.
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 | Catherine Weaver
Editorial Assistant
Catherine Weaver is a writer, editor and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area, where her family has lived for four generations.
She is the author of two Middle Grade fantasy novels, one bilingual English/Japanese picture book, and many short stories.
For the past ten years, she has been a freelance proofreader and editor, and has helped dozens of self-published authors of all genres bring their work into the world.
She has spent over forty years volunteering with her church in literacy and education programs in her community.
Her books are on Amazon and Goodreads and her website is:
https://catherineweaverauthor.com/ |