IFP July & August

Navigating [the gaming] world as a girl, to find the kind of game that you like (and can afford) is difficult. That’s where indie games and accessibility come in.

Hello intrepid space pilots!We're a bit behind this month on our round-up of articles from the magazine, mostly due to the influx of novella submissions we've received over the past month! Don't forget, our call for novellas ends 9/15 and we are very stoked that we'll be open for poetry books and chapbooks starting 9/15/19 - 1/1/20. In other news, we're hard at work on the audiobook for The Manticore's Vow, which by golly, we mean to get out before the end of the year.As always, we're looking for nerdy articles for the magazine. Won't you send us one?Holly Lyn Walrath Managing Editor

Popular Stories This Month

Gris (Nomada Studio, December 13, 2018) is an exquisitely-crafted platformer that plays like a poem. In this nostalgic personal essay, Archita Mittra explores her history of growing up as a girl gamer in an Indian family, and how indie games' accessibility made them the perfect gateway to a lifetime of gaming.  It's our goal to start highlighting works of excellence nominated for awards by the SFF community. Managing Editor Holly Lyn Walrath explores the 2019 Hugo Award winners in our recommended reading from Worldcon. I Am Mother is a science-fiction thriller and Netflix Original with a majority female cast that explores the relationship between AI and humans in a dystopian future. Kaylee Craig is fascinated with how the film portrays the future, and we think you will be too.This month we launched our first piece of creative nonfiction: A hybrid lyrical essay by Piper J. Daniels, author of Ladies Lazarus. In her stunning essay, Phantom Fares, the juncture of personal history, ghosts, and myths combine. In interviews, we featured three authors with new books coming out. We're very lucky to have a Q&A with R.F. Kuang, author of the epic fantasy The Dragon Republic, which is a sequel to The Poppy War, which was a Goodreads Choice Award finalist (twice over), Nebula Award finalist, Locus Award finalist, and winner of the Stabby, Crawford, and Compton Crook Awards.The ever-charming and hopeful Christian McKay Heidicker is celebrating the release of his middle-grade take on classic horror with Scary Stories for Young Foxes. Jody T. Morse interviewed Heidicker on his gaming obsession, working with an illustrator, and what kinds of stories kids need nowadays.Lastly, don't miss E.D. Walker's interview with Elizabeth Lim, author of Spin the Dawn, a sweeping YA fantasy about a young girl named Maia who poses as a boy to compete for the role of imperial tailor at court. 

Call for Essays

We’re always open to submissions for essays on pop culture, film, TV, books, and games. We’re big fans of io9, Wired, Tor.com, Electric Literature, Book Riot, and Locus Mag. We want essays on popular culture, movies, books, video games, SFF culture, conventions, and anything else geeky. We’d love to see a focus on resistance, feminism, and edgy topics. We’re always interested in hearing from underrepresented and marginalized voices. How you define that is up to you.Read the full guidelines and submit your ideas!

Call for Poetry Books

Interstellar Flight Press will be open for chapbook and full-length speculative poetry books from September 15 – January 1, 2020. We are beyond thrilled that this call will feature a guest editor, Saba Syed Razvi, who will be reading submissions that are passed up to the editors from slush readers.​We are looking for: 

• Chapbooks 15-39 pages in length

• Full-Length poetry books 40+ pages (We are unlikely to take works over 120 pages.) 

• We only publish speculative genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Supernatural, Weird, Surrealism, or any combination of the above. We like Suzette Haden Elgin's definition of speculative poetry as "about a reality that is in some way different than the existing reality." 

• Hybrids or difficult to categorize collections are welcome. This includes prose poetry, visual poetry, erasure/blackouts, found poetry, cross- and multi-genre works. 

• Collaborative manuscripts are welcome, including visual/ekphrastic works. Both collaborators must be able and willing to sign a contract for publication.  (We will make an exception for public domain works, but please cite your sources.)   

Read the full guidelines for more info and send us your stories!