The Apparatus Almanac: Gizmology & Technomancy
- Anthony Panegyres is a Perth writer of novelettes and short stories. He has had stories in both premier Australian literature journals, such as Overland 204 (an Aurealis Award Finalist story), Overland 214, and Meanjin Quarterly, and also 'weird lit' homes, such as Bourbon Penn 25 (highlighted by Ellen Datlow in her Year's Best intro. and on her Recommended Reading List) and Bourbon Penn 31 (also an Aurealis Award Finalist story). A few of his other story homes include the anthologies The Best Australian Stories, The Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror Vol. 2 & 6, the award-winning Bloodlines, and At the Edge. His next new story will appear in Penumbric later this year. "The Tic-Toc Boy of Constantinople" was originally published in the anthology Kisses by Clockwork Ed. Liz Grzyb. The story was in The Recommended Reading List of The Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror Vol. 5 and was also written about in both The Conversation and The Times as one of five Australian literary works of particular relevance to national conversations about AI.
- Matt Bliss is a construction worker turned speculative fiction writer from Las Vegas, Nevada. He is the author of Ill-Gotten Things, a short story collection, and his short fiction has appeared in over forty other publications including Diabolical Plots, Metastelar, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. You can find more on Matt and links to his work at flow.page/mattbliss.
- David Stevens lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and those of his children who have not yet figured out the locks. He is the author of more than two dozen published stories, which have appeared most recently in Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Pseudopod, Vastarien Literary Journal, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Sci-Phi, and the anthology Prolescaryet (where Blur was originally published). You can find him at davidstevens.info and as @DStevens_esq on X.
- Holly Schofield travels through time at the rate of one second per second, oscillating between the alternate realities of city and country life. Her speculative fiction has appeared in many publications including Analog, Lightspeed, and Escape Pod, is used in university curricula, and has been translated into multiple languages. She hopes to save the world through science fiction and homegrown heritage tomatoes. Find her at hollyschofield.wordpress.com.
- Mike Adamson holds a Doctoral degree from Flinders University of South Australia. After early aspirations in art and writing, Mike returned to study and secured qualifications in marine biology and archaeology. Mike was a university educator from 2006 to 2018, is a passionate photographer, master-level hobbyist and a journalist for international magazines. He is now a well-known Sherlock Holmes novelist.
- L. D. Colter has farmed with draft horses and worked as a paramedic, Outward Bound instructor, athletic trainer, roller-skating waitress, and concrete dispatcher, among other curious choices. She’s an author of contemporary, epic, and dark fantasy novels, and a two-time winner of the Colorado Book Award for science fiction and fantasy. You can find a list of her published works and more at ldcolter.com or her newsletter at ldcolter.substack.com/.
- Eric Farrell lives in Long Beach, California, where he works as a beer sales rep by day, and speculative fiction author by night. His writing credits stem from a career in journalism, where he reported for a host of local and metro newspapers in the greater Los Angeles area. He posts on Twitter @stygianspace and has recent fiction in Simultaneous Times, Haven Spec, and Stupefying Stories.
- Owen Townend is a writer of short speculative fiction and poetry inspired by thought experiment and wordplay. His work is published in anthologies from Arachne Press, Comma Press, Oxford Spires Publishing, Written Off Publishing, Astrea Publishing and others. He lives in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK.
- C. J. Peterson is a writer of science articles and science fiction.
- Jude Atwood was raised on a farm in rural Illinois, USA. He works as a community college professor, teaching mass communication and media literacy classes, and now resides in Southern California with his boyfriend and his dog. His debut middle-grade novel, Maybe There Are Witches, was longlisted for the Bram Stoker Award and named a Society of Midland Authors honoree, but he is best known as the creator of internationally viral memes like "Tilda Swinton as Libraries," which was featured in Architectural Digest, Harper's Bazaar, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
- Born in Bedford, England, in 1970, Robert Bagnall's ninety-odd published stories have appeared in the annual "Best of British Science Fiction" anthologies. He was a Green Party candidate in the 2024 UK General Election. A social media recluse, he can be found at, and contacted via meschera.blogspot.com.
- Pauline Barmby is an astrophysicist who reads, writes, runs, knits, and believes that you can't have too many favorite galaxies. She lives in London, Canada and hopes to someday visit her namesake main belt asteroid, minor planet 281067. Find more of her words at galacticwords.com.
- William Kitcher's stories, plays, and comedy sketches have been published, produced, and/or broadcast in Australia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Czechia, England, Germany, Guernsey, Holland, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, the U.S., and Wales. His comic noir novel, Farewell And Goodbye, My Maltese Sleep, the second funniest novel ever written, was published in 2023 by Close To The Bone Publishing, and is available on Amazon.
- Jay McKenzie's work appears in adda, Maudlin House, The Hooghly Review, Fahmidan Journal, Fictive Dream and others. She has been recognised in prizes such as Exeter Story Prize, The Henshaw Prize, Quiet Man Dave, Edinburgh Story Award, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, Exeter Novel Prize, The Alpine Fellowship, Bath Short Story Award, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, The Bridport Prize, The Wenlock Olympian Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and recently won the Fish Short Story Prize. Her debut novel, Mim and Wiggy's Grand Adventure (Serenade, 2023), is followed by How to Lose the Lottery (Harper Fiction, 2026).
- J.S. Rogers has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pencil. She enjoys exploring horror fiction and the intricacies of the human condition. She lives on the East Coast with her kids and cats.
- J. Scott King makes his home just north of Seattle. His short fiction has appeared in The Worlds Within, Suburban Witchcraft Arts & Literature Magazine, Dark Horses Magazine, and 365tomorrows. When not telling stories, Scott studies Aikido and explores the mountains and coastlines of the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Susie, and his dog, Jack. He recently retired from a long tech career to focus exclusively on writing.
- Stephen A. Roddewig is an author from Arlington, Virginia. His latest feat of cutting back from four to two cups of coffee a day has convinced him that he is superhuman, and his membership in the Horror Writers Association hasn’t disproved that belief. When not pushing the bounds of human endurance, he has published three dozen short stories and two novels. Mostly, though, he spends his time reading incredible war fiction from William Peter Grasso while cycling in the gym and cooking like his savings depend on it. You can find more of his speculative fiction and comedy at stephenaroddewig.com.
- Don Norum prefers removing his big toenails with a pair of pliers and a nail file to having to write about himself, in third person or otherwise. You can find him on Bluesky at @dnorum.bsky.social and his website donorum.com.
- Devan Barlow is the author of the Curses & Curtains series, and the collection Foolish Hopes and Spilled Entrails: Retellings. Find her short fiction and poetry in various anthologies and magazines. She reads voraciously, and is usually hanging out with her dog. devanbarlow.com, Bluesky @devanbarlow.bsky.social.
- Stefan Markos is a retired historic site director who currently teaches history at a community college in the Midwest. He lives with his wife and two cats and has been writing speculative fiction for several years. He is a regular contributor to the up-and-coming quarterly Tales From the Crosstimbers.
- Gabriel Mara is a cultural anthropologist currently living in Colombia. His spare time is spent wandering the páramos and cloud forests, puzzling over the image beneath the object, writing stories in bad light, and wondering if the things he hears outside his apartment at night are birds or lizards. His story "Place of Four Winds" was published in The Deadlands and he has an upcoming story "The Family Plant" to appear in JayHenge Publishing's anthology Masque & Maelström.
- Inspired by a love of science fiction, Sarah Darbee is a professional engineer with a passion for writing about faraway future places and the possibilities those worlds contain. When not tackling engineering challenges or writing fictional ones, she enjoys gaming, gardening, and long dog walks.
- J. Aaron Parish is a college English instructor in Texas. He has spent more than a decade in education with prior experience in journalism and corporate communication. His academic research focuses on popular culture, including graphic novels, TV shows, movies, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the intersection of real-world politics with speculative fiction.
- Robert Runté is Senior Editor with EssentialEdits.ca and freelances at SFeditor.ca. A former professor, he has won three Aurora Awards for his literary criticism and currently reviews for the Ottawa Review of Books. His own fiction has been published over 120 times.
- Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer with over three hundred stories published in fifteen countries, in seven languages. He has published several science fiction novels including two trilogies, six monster books, a dark military fantasy and a thriller. His short fiction is collected in Thin Air (2023), Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
- Mike Murphy has had over 150 audio plays produced, won The Columbine Award and twelve Moondance awards, and written two short films, Dark Chocolate and Hotline. His TV pilot script "Milly Foster, Macabre Investigator" was a quarter-finalist in the 2025 Filmmatic Horror Screenplay Awards (Season 9). His screenplay Die Laughing was a semi-finalist in 2020’s Unique Voices Competition. His TV pilot script "The Bullying Squad" was a quarter-finalist in 2021's Emerging Writers Genre Screenplay Competition. Mike’s blog: audioauthor.blogspot.com.
- Tom Howard is a fantasy and science fiction short story writer living in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA. He's always wanted to do a time loop story and a flash piece seemed a perfect opportunity.
- J. David Liss received an MFA from Brooklyn College. Trained in writing and inclined to politics, he became a speechwriter. Liss has worked in government, corporate, academic, and healthcare centers. He lectures on healthcare policy and politics in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. Liss has published 27 short stories, including in Caustic Frolic, Lit Nerds, Lake Effect, Blood and Thunder, October Hill, Inscape, and others. A digital comic book based on his story The Camel's Question was published by Calliope Interactive in March 2025.
- In her early teens, Susanne's father supplied her with science fiction novels, and her mother gave her a mechanical typewriter on which she bashed out her first stories. It should not surprise that she grew up to be a writer of speculative fiction. Having been dubbed the "wandering dictionary" by her English teacher, she decided to study the language and switched to English for both reading and writing. Susanne is an unashamed and unapologetic geek of many stripes, a lover of words and all things fantastic, and an anglophile who now happily resides in the UK.
- Ever fascinated by the role storytelling plays in sense-making, Soramimi Hanarejima writes fanciful fiction in hopes of encountering insight and delight. Some of the results can be found in Soramimi’s neuropunk story collection, Literary Devices for Coping.
- Robert Dawson teaches mathematics at a Nova Scotian university. His stories have appeared in Nature Futures, Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Tesseracts, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He is an alumnus of the Sage Hill and Viable Paradise writing workshops. He believes that the world needs more bicycles.
- Mike Morgan was born in London, but not in any of the interesting parts. He moved to Japan at the age of 30 and lived there for many years. Nowadays, he's based in Iowa, and enjoys family life with his wife and two young children. If you like his writing, be sure to check out his website, PerpetualStateofMildPanic.wordpress.com. You can also find him on Bluesky where he posts silly stuff about sci-fi as: \bluesky{culttvmike}.
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