by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in The Lorelei Signal, January 2011
Most genies offer three. Where do they get them? The Harvester is an old woman, who wears a four-leafed clover in her locket and a garland of dandelions on her hair. The locket was a gift from a suitor, many years before, bought at the Crossroads Station bazaar. The dandelions have to be supplied fresh, daily. So, she keeps a greenhouse in the aft of her ship. The Harvester tells her genie customers that the wishes she harvests come from the overripe gold flowers gone to fluffy white seed. This, of course, is not true, but the genies love it. Continue reading “Harvesting Wishes”
When a reader opens a book and starts reading, they’re hoping to get lost in the story, dive in so deep that the words stop being words and start being an entirely new world surrounding them, drawing them in. Of course, you can always close the book and come back home. Sure, it may be 3am, and you’ll be really tired the next day. Still, the real world is waiting for you outside of the story. 
We’re down to the last three days of our twelve-day launch. We’ll be ending on a note of space opera, but before we depart back to the stars, here are two more stories grounded down here on Earth.
There’s a thin line between science-fiction and simply fiction, and that line moves every time we develop new technologies. Technologies that seemed futuristic fifty years ago — or sometimes ten years ago — are commonplace today. The inclusion of a super-powerful, pocket computer with GPS and video communication no longer means a story is science-fiction; it just means the character has a phone. 