DreamForge Anvil | Issue 16
With DreamForge Anvil 16, we continue our 5th Year Celebration! In our first five years, we’ve published over 200 stories, founded a monthly writers group called DreamCasters, and built our pay rate up to professional level at $0.08/word. We think Anvil Issues 15 and 16 are two of our best ever! With our theme of The Grand Uplift, we’re delivering some of the best in positive science and fantasy fiction available today!
Our Contributors
Christopher Blake
Living Fossils
Christopher Blake is a physician by day and a writer by night. He is a dad (cat and human), by his back of the napkin calculations, approximately 32 hours a day. His short fiction has appeared in Galaxy’s Edge, Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, Stupefying Stories, and Zooscape.

STORY NOTES FOR "LIVING FOSSILS"

As I recall, the title came first.  I was reading about Coelacanths, ancient lobe-finned fish known extensively to the fossil record but thought to have gone extinct in the late Cretaceous.  Except, in the end, they weren't extinct, and were discovered off the coast of South Africa in the early 20th century.  And so I wondered, what if dragons weren't imaginary, what if they were only extinct? Or maybe not extinct, just waiting to be rediscovered? So, there be the dragons.  Now, as for the humans in the story, I drew on my work as a Palliative Care Physician, realizing that the worldbuilding gave me the opportunity to explore some of the same big questions my patients face.  Namely, how do we find meaning, purpose, and even hope in the face of death?  A pretty idiosyncratic fusion of ideas, which makes Living Fossils probably the most personal story I've written.  And that makes me all the more thankful to readers like you.  Happy reading!
Christopher Davis
A Business Trip to Natchez
Chris Davis is a Software Architect living in Georgia. When he isn't writing code or spending time with his wife and kids, he's reading all the Sci-Fi and Fantasy he can get his hands on, and trying to write a little of his own as well. His inspirations include Ted Chiang, Octavia E. Butler, and more recently, R. F. Kuang. He dreams of his work one day being narrated by R. C. Bray.
Chad Gayle
Making Music on Ganymede
Chad Gayle’s science fiction has appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Inner Worlds, and The Colored Lens. In addition to teaching English at institutions in Texas and North Carolina, Chad has worked as a computer programmer, a graphic designer, and a freelance photographer. Proud father to two humans and three felines, he’s also an avid roller skater who can be found on fair weather days skating gleefully through the streets of New York, the city he calls home.

Learn more about Chad’s publications and photography at https://chadgayle.com/.

STORY NOTES FOR "MAKING MUSIC ON GANYMEDE"

I fell in love with David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” when I was seven years old. I lived in the country then, outside of a peanut farmers town paradoxically known as Grapeland. After my parents’ divorce, I looked on that time in my life as a moment of unspoiled innocence, and it wasn’t until I became an adult that I wondered how I would’ve turned out if I hadn’t been forced to trade the piney woods of my childhood for the dirty streets of a city I’d never seen—the city of Waco, Texas. What would have happened to the teenager I became, the rail-thin, insecure geek who hated sports and loved the Talking Heads, Dungeons & Dragons, Pee-Wee Herman, and everything David Bowie had ever recorded, if I’d stayed in Grapeland, if my family had never left the woods?

“Making Music on Ganymede” is my (unabashedly) hopeful answer to that question. It’s an answer that acknowledges a harsh reality of being different and of not fitting in: that is, that wanting to make a space where you can be accepted for who and what you are forces you to deal with the very people who would dismiss you. We all need allies, in other words, and we have to be willing to give those allies a chance to side with us, even when we think they won’t.
David Hankins
To Catch a Foo Fighter
David Hankins is the award-winning author of Death and the Taxman. He writes from the thriving cornfields of Iowa where he lives with his wife, daughter, and two dragons disguised as cats. His short stories have graced the pages of Writers of the Future Volume 39, DreamForge Magazine, Unidentified Funny Objects 9, Third Flatiron Anthologies, and others. David devotes his time to his passions of writing, traveling, and finding new ways to pay his mortgage. You can find him at https://davidhankins.com

STORY NOTES FOR “TO CATCH A FOO FIGHTER”

“To Catch a Foo Fighter” is a tale that has percolated in the back of author David Hankins’s mind for decades, ever since he played with an exhibit at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle that let him move an object on the screen simply by touching a sensor and moving his eyes. Twenty years and a military career later, David decided to combine that brain-to-computer technology with a US Navy hunt for the original UFOs, and “To Catch a Foo Fighter” was born.
Luna Lambert
Illustrator for
Happy Activationday to Me
Luna Lambert is a Mexican illustrator and graphic design student.

She specializes in drawing and creating objects like fanzines where she portrays images inspired by her dreams, nature and the everyday.

Since she was little se has been interested in representing her ideas visually and she’s had the opportunity to participate in many painting, drawing, linocut an silkscreen printing courses.

In 2022 she illustrated the book Misterio de escamas, published by Editora de Gobierno de Veracruz. You can see her work on Instagram at @pintame.la.luna.
Wulf Moon
Wulf Moon's SUPER SECRETS: Internal Character Arc: Descending Into the Dark Side
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!
Santiago Márquez Ramos
Happy Activationday to Me
Santiago is a mental health therapist working with Latinx immigrants in New York City. Originally from Mexico, he’s passionate about weaving culture, mental health, queerness, and social justice into all his stories; as well as Spanish, his native language. He’s been published in Litro Magazine USA, Occulum Journal, and Latin@Literatures, and won second place in Flash Fiction Magazine’s 2023 contest. He’s been rejected by many other magazines, but sometimes nicely. He is a graduate of Taos Toolbox 2023, where he won George R. R. Martin’s 2023 Terran Prize.

STORY NOTES FOR “HAPPY ACTIVATION DAY TO ME”

I tend to write very sad stories. As a therapist, I hear stories about trauma and darkness every single day. I write fiction to process, because stories help us make sense of our world and emotions, and give them purpose. My stories are a reflection of the sadness that I help people process, but end up being very grim themselves. Yet, as a therapist, I also hear stories of resiliency and friendship and the beauty of human connection, and get to celebrate people’s stories of courage and strength. Happy Activationday to Me is my way to celebrate the people who show up and are there for you. It is a story about friendship and hope, from the perspective of a witty AI assistant who really just wants to be loved and acknowledged, like we all deserve to be.
Esteban Raposo
Tomo and Humanity
Esteban Raposo is a Chilean-American author living in Lake Arrowhead, California. His beautiful wife, a talented illustrator, has been the solar wind propelling his interstellar journey into authorship. This will be his first official published work and hopes to publish many more.

STORY NOTES FOR “TOMO AND HUMANITY”

I knew Tomo the moment I began to write him because he is me - caught between two worlds and never feeling like quite enough for either.

Over the years, I’ve learned that not everyone is going to accept me as I am and that’s okay. In the end, the only human thing to do is to show empathy for others. Everyone, even those full of anger and hate, deserve to be heard. We all experience pain in this life, and sometimes, we just need someone to extend a hand and say it’s going to be okay.
Robert Silverberg
The Songs of Summer
In a career that goes back to 1954, Robert Silverberg has published hundreds of science fiction stories and more than a hundred novels. He has won five Nebula and five Hugo Awards and in 2004 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Robert Silverberg is a recipient of the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts (2003). His best-known books include Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside and A Time of Changes.

STORY NOTES FOR “THE SONGS OF SUMMER”

This is yet another of the stories I wrote in June of 1955.

As a Columbia undergraduate in 1954 I had read with some awe—staying up through the night and finishing it at dawn—Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The use not merely of multiple point of view but of multiple narrator seemed to me a startling and awesome technical device; and with the rashness of youth I tried it myself in “The Songs of Summer.” Having already achieved—so it seemed to me—some mastery of the conventional single-viewpoint short story, I was now ready, at the age of twenty, to begin experimenting with more ambitious fictional forms. (And also with some themes, like that of the group mind, that I would use again and again in later years.)

“The Songs of Summer” was another product of June, 1955. The first dozen editors to whom my agent sent it were unimpressed—or, at any rate, didn’t care to print it. Whenever they felt like publishing this sort of experimentation, they had Theodore Sturgeon or James Blish to write it for them. But after it had been circulating for about a year, during which time I became well known to the New York editors and was starting to bring them the stories they had rejected the year before and have them buy them the second time around, it found a home with Robert Lowndes’ magazine Science Fiction Stories in the spring of 1956. My records indicate that I was paid 3/4 of a cent a word for it—$48.00. By then my name was becoming a familiar one on the contents pages of the s-f magazines, and I suppose Lowndes thought he could take the risk. (In fact, he ran it as the lead story in his September, 1956 issue—though it was Clifford D. Simak who got his name on the cover.) I didn’t send a copy to Faulkner to see what he thought of it.

DreamForge Staff
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.
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.
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.
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/