The Sci Phi Journal is a volunteer-run philosophical SFF site and serves up food-for-thought of the speculative kind. Dedicated to idea-driven fiction and provocative non-fiction, SPJ covers a broad range from theological fantasy to geeky hard SF.
There are plenty of amazing print and online journals out there for âcharacter-drivenâ fiction, and we encourage you to read them.
Sci Phi Journal (SPJ) is not one of them, though.
Hence, we are not too keen on stories predominantly about the sentiments and subjective experiences of fictional people. We want hard SF that zooms out of the personal and lifts off into the structural, the systemic, the epic. We yearn for carefully crafted philosophical speculation that puzzles over the questions of the future and alternate pasts. And we have a soft spot for stories created as âartifactsâ (fictional, âin-universeâ non-fiction).
So here are SPJâs quests:
â Campbellian hard SF. Reaching back to the roots of classic sci-fi, these rigorous tales take themselves seriously and push the boundaries of our scientific imagination, scaling from the nano to the meta. The cast, if any, is functional and disposable. Itâs the sociological, technological and indeed cosmic developments that sweep the reader up in an expanding sense of wonder. (For a contemporary long-form example that received mainstream attention, see the latter two books of Cixin Liuâs Three-Body Problem trilogy.)
â Fictional non-fiction. The purest, most intimate form of world-building. A transcript of the last UN Security Council meeting before an extinction-level event. The dental bills of a cybernetic vampire. Interviews with eyewitnesses of a battle between Martians and archangels. (Epistolary fiction falls within this category, though we encourage you to interpret it more broadly, across the full spectrum of artifact fiction.) Think âWorld War Zâ, not âWalking Deadâ.
â Speculative philosophy. Extrapolating abstract ideas to examine the implications if they were to manifest. (See for instance The End of History, the Beginning of Hers in Vol. V. Issue 1. for a theological example of just what we mean.)
