Main fiction: "Stars in a Grave, Stars in a Skull"

Jeremy Szal was born in 1995 and was raised by wild dingoes, which should explain a lot. He writes epic fantasy and dark space opera of a character-driven, morally grey nature. His main series is the Common trilogy from Gollancz/Hachette, which includes Stormblood, Blindspace, and Woflskin, about a drug harvested from alien DNA that makes users permanently addicted to adrenaline and aggression. He’s the author of over fifty short stories, translated into fifteen languages, many of which appear in his short fiction collection Broken Stars. He was the editor for the Hugo-winning StarShipSofa until 2020 and has a BA in Film Studies and Creative Writing from UNSW. He carves out a living in Sydney, Australia with his family, where he loves watching weird movies, eating Japanese food, exploring cities, learning languages, cold weather and dark humour. Find him at https://jeremyszal.substack.com/  or @JeremySzal

This story first appeared in Broken Stars (2024).

Narration by: Will Stagl

Will Stagl lives in Tucson Arizona and is a proud member of the StarShipSofa team. This month you’ll likely find him tearing through some fantasy epic at a local café or waiting for the next sci-fi TV show to air.

Fact: Looking Back At Genre History by Amy H Sturgis

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This story originally appeared in Wild & Wishful, Dark & Dreaming: The Worlds of Alethea Kontis (2016).

Alethea Kontis is an actress, storm chaser, and New York Times best-selling author. She has received the Scribe Award, the Garden State Teen Book Award, and is a two-time winner of the Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award. She was twice nominated for both the Andre Norton Nebula and Dragon Award. Alethea narrates stories for multiple award-winning online magazines and does freelance work for Writing the Other. Born in Vermont, Alethea currently resides on the Space Coast of Florida where she watches K-dramas with her teddy bear, Charlie. Together they are ARMY, VVS, and Black Roses.

Narration by: Will Stagl

Will Stagl lives in Tucson Arizona and is a proud member of the StarShipSofa team. This month you’ll likely find him tearing through some fantasy epic at a local café or waiting for the next sci-fi TV show to air.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/starshipsofa.

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This story originally appeared in Punktown (2000).

Jeffrey Thomas’s books include Punktown, Deadstock, Blue War, The American, and The Unnamed Country. He has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award and John W. Campbell Award, and his stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories 2022, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #14 (editors, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction #1 (editors, Laird Barron and Michael Kelly). Thomas lives in Massachusetts.

Narration by: Christina Rau

Christina M. Rau, The Yoga Poet, leads Meditate, Move, & Create workshops for various organizations in person and online. Her collections include How We Make Amends, What We Do To Make Us Whole, and the Elgin Award-winning Liberating The Astronauts. She moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv and has served as Poet in Residence for Oceanside Library (NY) since 2020. Her poetry airs on Destinies radio show (WUSB) and appears in various literary journals like FillingStation and The Disappointed Housewife while her prose has appeared in Punk Monk Magazine and Reader’s Digest. During her downtime, she watches the Game Show Network. http://www.christinamrau.com

Fact: Looking Back At Genre History by Amy H Sturgis

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Owen Kerr has been a writer, freelance editor, and indie game designer since 1999, but don't tell his mom; she thinks he's selling feet pix on MostlyPans. His most recent projects include lore for an OSR setting, a full-bore post-apocalyptic fantasy game (Splintered Moon - PbtA), and his self-published fantasy novel, Confessions of an Outlaw Locksmith. If you liked "Cycles," check out his LinkTree for more! https://linktr.ee/chantedevening

Narration by: Owen Kerr

Owen Kerr is also a voice actor and reader.

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Rudy Vener's stories have appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, StarshipSofa, Sally Port Magazine, and The Beast Hunt Anthology Vol 1. He has won Connecticut's Tassy Walden Award for New Voices in Children's Literature, and been a finalist in the Jim Baem Memorial Short Story Award. Rudy is a retired software engineer, former online pizza marketing entrepreneur, and cheese lover. He lives with his family and two cats in North Haven, Connecticut where he is hard at work on more short stories and novels. Readers can visit him at www.rudyvener.com

This story is original to StarShipSofa.

Narration by: Anthony Babington

Some say Anthony Babington is a myth to frighten small children. Others say he is a government experiment gone horribly right. Both are correct, and both are wrong. From his secret volcano lair in Minnesota, he narrates podcasts, voice-acts, and leases his soul to corporate America. Find him on Bluesky and Mastodon as @AlephBaker.

Fact: Looking Back At Genre History by Amy H Sturgis 

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Kelsey Hutton is a Métis author from Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation, also known as Winnipeg, Canada. Kelsey was born in an even snowier city than she lives in now (“up north,” as they say in Winnipeg). She also used to live in Brazil as a kid. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Augur Magazine and others. When she’s not beading or cooking, you can find her at KelseyHutton.com, on Instagram at @KelseyHuttonAuthor, or on Twitter/X at @KelHuttonAuthor.

This story originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Jan/Feb 2024.

Narration by: Christina M. Rau

Christina M. Rau, The Yoga Poet, leads Meditate, Move, & Create workshops for various organizations in person and online. Her collections include How We Make Amends, What We Do To Make Us Whole, and the Elgin Award-winning Liberating The Astronauts. She moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv and has served as Poet in Residence for Oceanside Library (NY) since 2020. Her poetry airs on Destinies radio show (WUSB) and appears in various literary journals like fillingStation and The Disappointed Housewife while her prose has appeared in Punk Monk Magazine and Reader’s Digest. During her downtime, she watches the Game Show Network. http://www.christinamrau.com

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/starshipsofa.

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Jay Caselberg is an Australian author and poet whose work has appeared around the world and been translated into several languages. He currently resides in Germany and can be found at Caselberg.net.

This story originally appeared in Borderlands (Australia), January 2006.

Narrated by Randal L. Schwartz

Randal L. Schwartz is best well known for his seminal books on the Perl programming language that helped make the world wide web possible and popular. He produced a weekly audio and video podcast on open source software, but has given that up after 13 years to get those five hours per week back again. Between the podcast, and bouncing all over the world teaching programming and speaking at conferences, he’s no stranger to the limelight. He enjoys pulling out his gear to record yet another narration, and likens it to “getting to read bedtime stories to the kids I never had”, and looks forward to future assignments

Fact: Looking Back At Genre History by Amy H Sturgis

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K. A. Teryna is an award-winning author and illustrator. She was born in two places at once, one of which is beyond the Arctic Circle. Her fiction has been translated from Russian into six languages. English translations of her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Reactor, Apex, F&SF, Podcastle, and elsewhere. Her English-language short story collection Black Hole Heart and Other Stories has been published by Fairwood Press. As of late, Chekhov the Cat has become K.A. Teryna's co-author. He's in charge of keeping her warm and firmly in her seat. K.A. Teryna's website is www.k-a-teryna.blogspot.com.

The English language translation of "The Errata" by Alex Shvartsman originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March/April 2023.

Narration by: Tahereh Safavi

Tahereh Safavi is an improv kid and your biggest fan. She runs the Ubergroup, a 501(c)3 nonprofit providing low-cost fine arts education for adults. The Ubergroup offers university-level coursework, support, and networking for all writing-related art formats (including but not limited to: commercial and literary novels, stage and screen plays, short fiction, comics, nonfiction and academic, podcasts and webseries, picture books, poetry, IP writing, and some writing-adjacent arts such as acting and illustration) at a pace suitable for adults with full-time jobs and families. Alumni of the Ubergroup enjoy access to table reads for spec scripts, peer development of unsold work, and help editing projects under contract to meet agent/editor/producer requirements. The Ubergroup accepts writers in the English language from around the globe. Check out theubergroup.org for more.

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M

The author of eight novels and two short story collections, Richard Dansky is widely regarded as a leading expert on video game narrative and writing. He has written for franchises including The Division, Assassins Creed, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, and many others, and was also a key contributor to White Wolf’s classic World of Darkness horror RPG setting. His upcoming projects include the novel Nightmare Logic from Falstaff Dread, the graphic novel Bridgewater from Delcourt, and the nonfiction book The Video Game Writer’s Guide To Surviving an Industry That Hates You.

This story is original to StarShipSofa

Narration by: Kevin Craybould

Kevin Craybould is a newly emerging writer and actor with a background in tech. His upcoming techno thriller Who is Sarah Smith is due out from Ever After Books in 2027. Find him at Metaphors are Lies (kcraybould.substack.com). He also reviews for Bookstack (newbooks.substack.co ). He is a proud alumni of the Ubergroup, an educational non-profit that provides college-level writing courses for working adults, and recommends anyone who wants to learn to write check them out: theubergroup.org

Fact: Looking Back At Genre History by Amy H Sturgis

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Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University – Long Beach. His books include The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook (Madness Heart Press, 2024), Cryptopolis & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2024), Dead Monkey Rum (Planet Bizarro Press, 2023), Operation Mindfuck (OR Books, 2022), Widow of the Amputation & Other Weird Crimes (Eraserhead Press, 2021), Bela Lugosi’s Dead (Crossroad Press, 2021), Until the Last Dog Dies (Night Shade/Skyhorse, 2017), Chameleo (OR Books, 2015), and Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014). A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he's written for numerous publications, among them The Believer, The Evergreen Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mailer Review, Rosebud, Salon.com, and TOR.com. In 2024 he was nominated for the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Award for his nonfiction work investigating extremist rightwing movements such as QAnon and Christian Nationalism. Forthcoming from Headpress is his nonfiction cinema book, Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos, which covers one hundred years of film history. His website is Cryptoscatology.com.

This story originally appeared in Flurb #7, 2009.

Narrated by: Doni Nicoll-Duir

Doni Nicoll-Duir (nickel-dar) is originally from the Western Slope of Colorado. He has lived in and out of Arizona his whole life and now finds himself settling down in Tucson, AZ. Doni works in the renewable energy sector as a design engineer and permitting specialist. When Doni isn’t working on saving the planet, one rooftop at a time, or trying to keep up with his teenage daughter, he can be found cooking, hiking or playing board games with his friends at one of the local breweries.

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