Strange Horizons is a speculative fiction magazine, available free online, published every Monday. We began in September 2000, which makes this our 27th consecutive year in existence. In the last year, Strange Horizons and our translation-focused sibling magazine, Samovar, have published nearly a million words of speculative fiction, poetry, essays, round tables, interviews, and reviews.

Since our inception, we have been entirely funded by voluntary contributions, both from readers and the volunteer labor of our editors. We pay all authors and artists fair market rates for their work, and want to continue doing so in the coming years.

Because we support speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all sorts of crossed genres between them—as an open, global tradition. In the last few years, we have published specials on Mexican SFF, Palestinian SFF, Southeast Asian speculative poetry, trans and nonbinary writing and experience, interactive fiction, as well as pieces on race, resistance, and disability, and more.

Because we have a record of finding and supporting exciting new voices in SFF: writers who published with Strange Horizons in their early career include Nnedi Okorafor ("The Palm Tree Bandit," from 2000), Yoon Ha Lee ("When Soft the Water Fell," from 2003), Bogi Takács ("Torah And Secular Learning," from 2012), E. Catherine Tobler ("Body, Remember," from 2006), Bo Bolander ("Tornado's Siren," from 2012), and G. V. Anderson ("Das Steingeschöpf", from 2016).

Because we're a multiple Hugo-shortlisted magazine (for thirteen consecutive years!), and Hugo winners in 2024! We've also published stories and art that have been shortlisted for or won Hugo, Nebula, Locus, British Science Fiction, Ditmar, Otherwise, Theodore Sturgeon, Rhysling, and World Fantasy Awards. Our editors have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award (as recently as 2022), and the magazine won the British Fantasy Award for best periodical in 2021. Because multiple award-winning writers in recent years have written stories, poems, and articles for us, including Rebecca Roanhorse, N. K. Jemisin, Mary Robinette Kowal, Nghi Vo, Nino Cipri, A.T. Greenblatt, Aliette de Bodard, Naomi Kritzer, and Sarah Pinsker.

Because in 2020, we were honored with FIYAHCON's inaugural Igynte Community Award for Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre, a duty we continue to take seriously.

Most recently, we are finalists in the British Fantasy Award for 2026, and poetry and essays from the magazine are finalists in the 2026 Ignyte Awards. 

And because we need you: we're entirely volunteer-run and rely on donations from generous readers to continue paying contributors, running our website, and putting together special issues without depending on advertisers or corporate interests.

This year, the Strange Horizons fund-drive is structured a little differently. A few years ago, we raised our story pay-rates to 10c/word, which is above the professional rates stipulated by the SWFA (8c/word). Maintaining our story pay rates at 10c/word require us to raise at least a total of $30,000 in this fund-drive. 

We would be thrilled and delighted for that to happen, but in the event that it does not, we are beginning with a base goal of $22,000, which will allow us to maintain our current, weekly output at the professional rates of 8c/word. 

At $22,000 we will continue at Strange Horizons' current output, at 8c/word for stories (other pay-rates remain unchanged) for the year 2027.

At $25,000, we will be able to pay our authors 9c/word for the year 2027. 

At $30,000, we will be able to pay our authors 10c/word for the year 2027.

Anything beyond $30,000 will be used to commission additional artwork, and curate regional special issues (which, under our present funding circumstances, are on temporary hiatus). 

Tweet about the fund drive! Tell everyone you know what you love about Strange Horizons and why we're worth supporting. (We're on Bluesky too!)

Our rewards do not come with shipping fees attached. For physical rewards - such as book bundles - at the end of the fund-drive, we get in touch with our backers for their address details, following which the specific reward's sponsor mails the backer the reward (for example, a signed book). 

We aim to have our physical rewards sent out by the end of the calendar year. On occasion, fulfilment may spill over into the first quarter of the succeeding year, but in any event, we aim to complete this process before the commencement of next year's fund-drive.