Ilona's World

I have recently spent some time exploring the archives of Lightspeed Magazine, which is an excellent magazine of speculative fiction and it also includes podcasted stories. I decided to share my best of list with you . (URLs added. All of this is free content.). Check these out if you still haven't. These short stories will give you a very nice outlook on contemporary speculative-fiction literature. The selection is completely arbitrary and only reflects my personal taste. I only selected stories that give the reader something different form the classic (hard) sci-fi themes, as I like my sci-fi new and fresh. These are the best 15 stories that I have found at the Lightspeed website : - Transcript of Interaction Between Astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor by Grady Hendrix A hilarious story about the sci-fi clichés about landing on alien planets and also about the extiction of humanity. It is worth listening to the audio (12:46 minutes), th...

Smaller Than Most is a short collection of flash fiction, with some very bizarre and surreal sci-fi and fantasy stories by a very talented author, Kristine Ong Muslim .  You can download the ebook from the Smashwords website .

Kazohina by Sandor Szathmari is a classic Hungarian dystopia. It is a bit similar to Huxley's Brave New World , but it was written two years earlier. Szathmari was mixing SF with satire and the main character is Gulliver who discovers a world that is very stange, sometimes quite mad, but also stangely similar to ours. You can read the novel online, in English at kevius.com.(You can also find an article about it in English in Wikipedia .)

You can read a hilarious short story, Some Day My Prince Will Go at the Daily Science Fiction website. This is a highly unusual fairy tale, which made me laugh out loud again and again. Sheila Crosby is a British author who lives in the Spanish Canary Islands. You can find links to many of her short stories and poems on her blog .

James Dorr has posted a link to another short story, While the Waters Nearer Roll in his blog. It is worth reading. (This story was published in the Oct, 2007 issue of MAGUSZINE.) He is the author of two collections by Dark Regions Press (Darker Loves; Strange Mistresses) and one novella. (The latter, The Garden, is available from Damnation Books). His stories and poetry have appeared in many magazines around the world. Visit his blog to read some more.

With A Rose Between Her Teeth is a funny short story about expats in Spain by Valerie Collins . ( Click here to download it.) This story is also included in the Writers Abroad Anthology of Expat Stories . Valerie Collins is co-author of In The Garlic, an English language guide-book to all things Spanish . Her short stories have recently appeared in two antologies and she is working on a novel.

This has been one of my most successful poems so far . It was voted Nr9 in The Preditors & Editors Readers Poll in 2005. Trial Rightful or unjust? It's the place of claims and pleas and lies. Questions reverberate on the corridors of the mind. The hall is crowded and all want to get into the court room. It's the place where I defended rapists, crooks, the man-eater and the vivisector. But who will defend me, the most terrible monster of all? A long row of corpses turn up, they were all called to testify. © Ilona Hegedus, May 2005 First Published in Whispers of Wickedness, June 2005. This poem also appeared in my (self-published) book of genre poetry,Uneartly Companion in 2005.(It's not on sale anymore.)