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Free, award-winning speculative fiction.
Subscribe to your puny planet’s finest weird funny stories. Because your brainhole is hungry.
(And maybe win a Squid t-shirt.)
Need some weird, funny stories in your life? You’re in the right place. Based in Austin, Texas, Space Squid is a free, award-winning hybrid publication featuring eclectic science fiction short stories, bizarro, errata, culture jamming, puzzles, poetry, and whatever else works. Tales that linger in your head. Bizarre short fiction that makes you smile and question your place in the universe. For over a decade, we’ve known it when we’ve seen it and we know you will too.
We’ve been fortunate to publish funny stories from Nicky Drayden (The Prey of Gods, Temper), Kelly Luce (Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail), Bruce Sterling (Mirrorshades, Islands in the Net, Heavy Weather), Chris Roberson (Clockwork Storybook, Superman, iZombie), Jay Lake (John W. Campbell Award winner), Jennifer Pelland (Nebula nominee), Tony Millionaire (Maakies), Caroline M. Yoachim, William Shakespeare, and lots of other ridiculously talented people. We’re not sure why they tolerate us.
Hilarious and awesome… can’t recommend enough.
– Norm Sherman, founder of the Drabblecast
It’s true that we caused a bit of a ruckus when we published a special edition in clay. WIRED blogged about us twice and one of the tablets ended up being inducted into Texas A&M’s science fiction collection at Cushing Library, where it rests in climate-controlled comfort spitting distance from the collected papers of John Donne and George R.R. Martin. For more funny anecdotes and testimonials, please see our About Us page.
Our current weird funny story is highlighted HERE
After all this hype, you might be ready for a story or two. Who are we to stop you? The proof’s in the pudding! Sometimes we publish several flash pieces together as a set; sometimes it’s a web comic and a bizarre poem. If you hunger for more, we recommend you read our Selected E-Stories, which are some of our favorites from the past decade (!) of strange funny tales that we’ve had the honor of flogging.
- Root Command and Much More
Sin Algalossa Tarmendel Fánirë (Ahezza), a visiting professor at ACFL: First Landing’s Campus of Almadén Alchemical College, clasps her head and growls. The table beneath her fingers cracks and starts to sprout leaves. The handful of students in her course “Advanced Theory of Elemental Magic for Non-Mages” knows better and hurriedly disappears. When the professor gets like this, the only thing that saves their necks is that she specializes in wood shaping and not in, say, fireballs.
Don’t forget: Space Squid is now an ephemeral publication. That means that (with the exception of the Selected E-Stories) work will disappear from the front page whenever a new weird, funny story is published. This is to encourage you, our intrepid reader, to enjoy new work immediately when it appears. This is a publication, dammit, not a library! So carpe that diem and read before the latest story expires.
The flash you’ll read in Space Squid is rowdy.
– Prof. Michael Allen Chaney, “Top 10 Literary Magazines for Surreal Flash Fiction”
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If you want to be notified whenever new stories appear, we recommend you subscribe to our humble email list. Our email goes out about ten times a year. According to promotion and publicity experts, this is well below the recommended threshold, but it’s also a reflection of the respect and reverence we have for our delightful readers.
