Strange Horizons is Turning 25

Joshua Kidd is a writer and a data nerd. He attended the Viable Paradise Writers' Workshop in 2016 and has published stories in Daily Science Fiction and the Anthology Skies of Wonder, Skies of Danger. In his spare time, he enjoys cycling, tabletop RPGs, and taming the magical beast saccharomyces cerevisiae. At different points, he has called nearly every corner of the US home, having lived in Boston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. He currently lives in Philadelphia. He tweets occasionally at @joshcurtiskidd.

2025 is a big year for us at Strange Horizons. We're celebrating our 25th anniversary and we'd like to invite all of you to join us! First, we would like to invite anyone who hasn't already to visit us at strangehorizons.com. Strange Horizons is a speculative fiction magazine, available free online and published every Monday. We have a record of finding and supporting exciting new voices in SFF, including Nnedi Okorafor, Yoon Ha Lee, Bogi Takács, E. Catherine Tobler, Bo Bolander, and G. V. Anderson. We have published special issues on Mexican SFF, Palestinian SFF, Southeast Asian speculative poetry, trans and nonbinary writing and experiences, interactive fiction, as well as pieces on race, resistance, disability, and more. We've published stories and art that have been shortlisted for or won Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Otherwise, Theodore Sturgeon, Rhysling, and World Fantasy Awards. Multiple award-winning writers have written stories, poems, and articles for us, including Rebecca Roanhorse, N. K. Jemisin, Mary Robinette Kowal, Nghi Vo, Nino Cipri, A.T. Greenblatt, Aliette de Bodard, Naomi Kritzer, and Sarah Pinsker. We've been short-listed for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine for thirteen years in a row and last year, for the first time, we won! This year, we're running a special SH@25 podcast series that includes interviews with Arkady Martine, Brandon O'Brien, John Scalzi, and Charlie Jane Anders, among others.

Second, we would like to invite everyone to join us for our fundraiser that launched on June 8. Since our inception, we have been entirely funded by voluntary contributions, both from readers and the volunteer labor of our editors. Everyone on our masthead volunteers their time. The donations that we get from readers pay for the cost of running the magazine and pay our contributors for their content. We pay all authors and artists fair market rates for their work. Our fundraiser helps us continue doing that. It's also a celebration of everything that we do at Strange Horizons. For each funding drive, we put together a special issue of Strange Horizons and, as we reach certain funding milestones, we unlock a new piece in the issue. One of our Fund Drive pieces from last year, "By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars" by Premee Mohamed, was nominated for a Hugo. Our fund drive issue for 2025 has 13 pieces and we invite you to enjoy each new piece as the funding drive progresses. 

Beyond these milestones, we have stretch goals too. Reaching these funds projects that we wouldn't normally get a chance to do. This year, we're hoping to fund a special issue on fungi in SFF, another on SFF and the working class, and a couple other items. For anyone who can make a donation, we'll have plenty of rewards to choose from. These will include digital issues of Strange Horizons, the opportunity to be a patron of one of our pieces, and signed books by many authors including Amal El-Mohtar, Ai Jiang, and Carmen Maria Machado. If you can't donate, we'd appreciate any signal boost that you can provide. Post about us on social media. Tell your friends. It all helps!

Last, we would like to invite you to check out our Patron page. Anyone who follows us there will get weekly notifications when our new issues are posted. Patrons who support us at higher levels can get even more content, including monthly ebooks or a piece of Strange Horizons swag. Our annual fundraiser is a big boost for us, but our Patreon patrons help keep strange horizons going in a sustainable way. And again, if you can't help by becoming a patron, it always helps if you tell your friends about us!

Thank you so much for celebrating our 25th anniversary in whatever way works best for you. This is a year of celebration for us. We're celebrating everything that the magazine has done over the past 25 years and we're celebrating all of you as well. We're celebrating everyone who has contributed to the magazine over the years. We're celebrating everyone who has ever read a piece in the magazine. We're celebrating everyone who has ever given as a part of one of our fund drives. Strange Horizons would not be here without you and we are truly grateful for all of you. We do hope you join us in the celebration!

Strange Horizons is a weekly magazine of and about speculative fiction. They publish fiction, poetry, reviews, essays, interviews, roundtable discussions, and art.

Strange Horizons' definition of speculative fiction includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, and all other flavors of fantastika. Work published in Strange Horizons has been shortlisted for or won Hugo, Nebula, Rhysling, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree Jr., and World Fantasy Awards.

Speculative fiction has a vibrant and radical tradition of stories that can make us think, can critique society, and can show us how it could be otherwise, for better or worse. Strange Horizons aims to be part of that tradition, and to update it: in the twenty-first century, speculative fiction must be a global, inclusive literature. They want to showcase work that challenges us and delights us, by new and established writers from diverse backgrounds and with diverse concerns.