0. Editor’s Note

First Light Of A Crooked Sun — August Linn

Machine Learning — Tan Jing Min

Grape, Backwards — ash chua

And They All Lived: Remembering the Happy Smiley Writers Group — Ng Yi-Sheng

Searching for One’s Roots 2.0 — Shawn Seah

Island — Stephany Zoo

Falling into a black hole — Ann Grá

Monsoon Season — Zavier Seow

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 2
— Vivekanandan Sharan

When They Burned the Butterfly: An Interview with Wen-yi — Megan Chee

Strange New Worlds — Brandon David Servos

Falling into a black hole

Ann Grá

Ann Grá is a science fiction fan and writer, three times finalist for the Hugo Awards as a fanzine co-editor of Journey Planet. Ann loves cinema and promotes Irish films worldwide, and currently resides in Thailand. You can find Ann at anngry.com and @anngraigh on Instagram and X.

The abyss gluttonously devouring

a thick tome of Brodsky’s poems

without even skimming the sacred words,

without realising all that it’s worth.

Next goes a crowd of candles scented

with autumnal spices and rotten leaves—

decay distilled into fragrant smoke,

decay of her homeland on Earth;

then her logarithmic ruler going rogue,

all numbers jumbled, disarrayed;

a disintegrating framed family photo

follows next in the desolate parade;

life artifacts disappear one by one

whooshing past the finite line

like apparitions through time.

No heavy sighs. What’s done is done.

Left bare by herself in a spacesuit

with a reflex reaching out for survival.

Circling and closing on the horizon,

wishing for a triumphant return,

the harsh finality is hard to process,

a whole personal eternity to churn.

Coming back to the beginning…

What could have been done

for this fatal journey to recoil?

And if time were broken, could it

have brought this starship back home?

And if so—could it transport value,

a souvenir of wondrous discovery

for hopes of rebuilding the dome

of forgiveness and nature recovery?

Like a moth, all those days

she lived in the past one by one

in a steady unwavering line,

nearing the total absence of light.

Now—if now is a passable term—

in an extended moment before the fall

she’s perceiving the past as perfect

and the present as semi-continuous

while nothing in the future is certain.

Mindbogglingly but finally somehow

the tenses got tamed, sorted and clear,

ironically, in the space where time

has stopped its existence.

Approaching the rim of the realm

where light and dark together reign

she says goodbyes and—

transcending into a contradictory plane—

she watches a mercurial line carving

the viewport with intricate lace

as if innocent rain was possible still

in the dark vastness of space.