Marvelous May 2025 Issue Live!

The marvelous May 2025 issue of Electric Spec is live!
Thank you, authors! Thank you to our artist!
Thank you to the whole Electric Spec team!

Thank you, readers!
We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we did.

From Author Hill

We're excited to feature "Screaming Rain" by David Wesley Hill in our marvelous May 2025 issue of Electric Spec. David was kind enough to send us some comments.

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Ever since I was a kid, I've been intrigued--and creeped out--by the idea of alien possession. Colin Wilson's tour de force, The Mind Parasites, scared the hell out of me, as did Heinlein's classic, The Puppet Masters. The very idea of some foreign entity feeding on your brain and thoughts was viscerally disturbing, and I mulled over adding my own fiction to the canon for many, many years, until something finally gelled in my head, and “Screaming Rain” came together into a story.

For my NOMADs, I owe inspiration to Cordwainer Smith's, “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” in which human space traffic is menaced by creatures born of the dust between the stars, which attack becalmed interstellar vessels, only to be fought off by augmented feline gunners. In “Screaming Rain” I wanted to flesh out such aliens with scientific plausibility--and to posit that their impact on humanity, rather than being malicious, might simply be a byproduct of their intrinsic strangeness, a strangeness engendering both madness and transcendence . . . the usual outcomes of any encounter with the celestial.

I also wanted to take a stab at emulating Wilson's remarkable literary feat of writing a thirty-page fight scene entirely in the head of his protagonist. Of course, “Screaming Rain” as a whole doesn't weigh in at thirty pages, but most of the story does take place in Bernie's mind. Equally, I wanted to write a story based on the trinity of classical drama: unity of action, time, and place--think of Fritz Leiber's, The Big Time--and so “Screaming Rain” is told in a rush of action, in a single location (OK, barring the introductory Po' Boy scene, mea culpa), over a span of fifteen or twenty minutes. Only you, Electric Spec readers, can decide whether I succeeded in these endeavors.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Star Wars and The Matrix, but I have a bone to pick with any fiction that depends on a savior with mystical or meta-human powers. I want my hero to be an everyman--an ordinary human who succeeds because of their wits and intelligence, not because they are anointed by the force, and whose solutions are within the reach of any reader of sufficient determination. Keep this in mind if our solar system ever enters a Big Cloud.

Finally, as to my choice of a protagonist, Bernie, well, here's some background. I am Jewish, but secular. I go to shul only on the High Holy Days, if then, and I regularly eat pork (bacon!), and I positively love oysters, especially soaked in buttermilk and dredged in flour and deep-fried until crispy. In none of my forty or so published stories have I ever given my protagonist a religion, mainly because belief was never a consideration of the plot or integral to the character, but while sketching out “Screaming Rain,” various threads came together--oysters, the name Bernie, his fascination with transcendence, his moral quandary--which made me understand Bernie was Jewish. It also made me think of my late poker buddy, Bernie Passeltiner, whose catchphrase while pondering whether to raise or to fold was “Bernie, baby, bubala.” May you rest in peace, dear friend.

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Interesting! Thanks, David! Be sure to check out "Screaming Rain" and the rest of the stories May 31!

From Author Wilson

We're excited to feature "The Inbetween" by Noah Evan Wilson in our marvelous May 2025 issue of Electric Spec. Noah was kind enough to send us some comments.

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“Other figures split in two or three or ten. At times, it was only their limbs or facial expressions that split. Intuitively, Jane understood that she was witnessing all the possibilities of the moment before it became. She heard the ambulance siren from miles away and felt a city of heads turning, wondering what happened, swallowing pangs of their own mortality: cause and effect erupting outwardly—inwardly— endlessly, then coagulating into a single moment like a scab.”

“The Inbetween” is a peculiar story, unlike any other I’ve written. For one, it begins with the climax: reality as we know it briefly bursts apart on a subway platform in lower Manhattan. A woman running late to pick up her son from school witnesses the event, but unlike the others on the platform that day, she remembers. The experience reverberates throughout her life, healing relationships and old wounds in mysterious ways. What emerges is a shadow narrative that gestures to science, mysticism, and a fictional mythology of beings who, through conscious observation, hold our material reality together.

I wrote this story after reading an account of the double-split experiment, which demonstrates a principle of physics known as the observer effect. In short, the experiment showed that on the quantum level, light acts as a particle when observed by humans (or machines), and as a wave when it isn’t. This story asks: What are the implications of such an effect on our macro, material world? On our relationships? Our minds? It is the seed of what I hope to be a larger literary project. This is to say, there are many more Inbetween stories to tell. I am grateful to Electric Spec for giving it this first one a home, and to all who read it.

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Interesting! Thanks, Noah! Be sure to check out "The Inbetween" and the rest of the stories May 31!

From Author Love

We're excited to feature "The Wise Guy" by Pamela Love in our marvelous May 2025 issue of Electric Spec. Pamela was kind enough to send us some comments.

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“The Wise Guy” was lots of fun to write. I enjoyed creating the contrast of the wisecracking detective’s unspoken thoughts compared with the kowtowing speech he must use with his client and the suspects. Noir detectives can get mouthy with the people around them, but Paris doesn’t have that privilege. I always read anything I write aloud, and it was particularly fun with these characters.

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Interesting! Thanks, Pamela! Be sure to check out "The Wise Guy" and the rest of the stories May 31!

From Author San Juan

We're excited to feature "14 Seconds" by Eric San Juan in our marvelous May 2025 issue of Electric Spec. Eric was kind enough to send us some comments.

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There's nothing like a crisis to get you thinking about anything other than the problems before you. Even the most insignificant issues - say, the garbage bag splitting open while carrying it to the bin - can trigger thoughts of all the other small indignities we suffer each day. The broken shoelace; the spilled coffee; the lack of coffee. The bigger the crisis, the bigger the previous ills brought to mind.

Perhaps it's an emotional immune response, with past problems serving as a kind of inoculation against the frustration that comes with new obstacles.

If only things actually worked like that. Instead, in such moments we too often find ourselves regretting things we can't change and surveying a past that is, at least in this universe, immutable.

Maybe that's why the cliche of seeing your life flash before your eyes is one that resonates. Because when confronted with that moment - your last moment - what better way to escape than by retreating to the tapestry of your life, warts and all?

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Interesting! Thanks, Eric! Be sure to check out "14 Seonds" and the rest of the stories May 31!

May 2025 TOC Preview!

We are working hard behind the scenes on the marvelous May 2025 issue of Electric Spec! We're excited about the stories we'll be presenting. Without further ado, here's a preview of our Table of Contents:

• The Inbetween by Noah Evan Wilson
• Screaming Rain by David Wesley Hill
• 14 Seconds by Eric San Juan
• The Wise Guy by Pamela Love
• The Sword and the Scabbard, or Which Do You Prefer? by Evelyn Pae

Starting next week, some of the authors will tell us about their stories...
Stay tuned!