Speculative Fiction in Our Issues
Speculative fiction in the issues of River & Sound Review is the short fiction, poetry and review work that the journal has actually printed, and the answer to what it is starts with the journal itself: A River & Sound Review, the independent literary journal, is the entity behind every issue, and its issues and the works they published are the record this page follows. It prints speculative short fiction, poetry and reviews in quarterly issues, and it has published 12 issues since 2021. Speculative fiction is the umbrella. Science fiction, fantasy and horror are its 3 main subgenres, while the weird, the dark and the experimental are the temperaments that sit beneath them. This page follows the umbrella, separates it from the branches, and then walks issue by issue through what the Review has actually printed, from the flash fiction in its 2022 debut issue to the detective pastiches in its 2025 special number.
The first place to sort out the family is the magazine shelf. Literary review magazines print criticism and essays alongside fiction, and most of them carry a speculative slot, such as a 1-page poem, a 2-page story or a 4-page review. Pulp Fiction in Our Issues names the Review's older, faster strand, and Flash Fiction in Our Issues names the newer, shorter one, while Poetry in Literary Magazines covers the verse that shares each issue's table of contents with the prose. The 3 strands sit in every issue, and the rest of this page reads them in that order.
What Speculative Fiction Magazines Publish
Speculative fiction magazines publish stories whose plots depend on an imagined condition, and the Review's own table of contents is the clearest example of the habit. Its 12 issues hold 41 short stories, 63 poems and 28 reviews, and the stories fall into 4 recurring kinds. The hard science stories run 3,500 to 5,000 words and trade on a single new idea, the soft science and fantasy pieces run 5,000 to 8,000 words and trade on a new world, the horror and dark stories run under 3,000 words and trade on tone, and the flash pieces run under 1,000 words and trade on a single turn of the knife. That last kind, flash, is what readers mean when they ask for a literary magazine for flash fiction, and the Review has carried it since issue 1, where its 8-word opening line in the debut story became the masthead's own motto. The umbrella also shelters the weird, and a story can be weird without being science fiction, fantasy or horror at all, which is why the weird fiction magazines a searcher names are often the same titles that print speculative fiction under a different label.
How Fiction Magazines Sort the Genres
Fiction magazines sort the genres by what a story borrows from the real world, and the Review applies that sorting in 2 ways across its issues. The first is the section break, where each issue separates the speculative stories from the literary and experimental ones in the printed order, so a reader can flip straight to the 1,500-word speculative slot or the 900-word flash slot. The second is the cover badge, where 4 of the 12 issues, issues 3, 7, 10 and 12, carry a genre line that names the subgenre up front, such as climate fiction in issue 3 or detective fiction in issue 12. A genre fiction magazine that prints only one branch, such as a horror only or a fantasy only title, uses the same two tools with a narrower set of labels. The experimental fiction magazines sit at the edge of this sorting, because their stories borrow structure instead of subject, and the Review gives them a standing 1-page slot in every issue, a slot that has held 12 experimental pieces, 1 per issue, since 2021.
Which Fiction Magazines Are Worth Reading
The best fiction magazines are the ones a reader finishes in a single sitting and returns to, and the Review's issues are built to be exactly that. The top literary magazines for fiction that a shortlist would name, such as a monthly with a 20,000-word lead story and a quarterly with a 40 page special issue, compete for the same shelf space, and the Review's quarterly format, 48 pages per issue at 4.25 by 5.5 inches, is sized for a 30 minute read. Fiction magazines in the uk add a regional layer, because a uk title prints uk voices and uk settings, and the Review has answered that layer twice, once with a 2023 issue that gathered 6 uk contributors and once with a 2025 issue that paired a uk writer with an american one in a 2 story dialogue. The dark fiction magazines and the crime and detective fiction magazines of the uk fill the darker corner of that shelf, and the Review's 2025 special issue reached into it directly, printing 5 detective stories, 3 of them pastiches of classic detective fiction, and 2 of them dark fiction that keeps the detective frame but drops the solved case. Crime fiction magazines in the uk that run a 12 story anthology a year find the same readers, and the Review's 12 issue run since 2021 keeps the habit on a smaller, quarterly scale.
Which Fiction Magazines Pay for Work
Fiction magazines that pay print a rate line in every call for submissions, and the Review does, at 2 rates per word depending on length. A story under 3,000 words earns 5 cents per word, so a 2,500 word story pays 12.50 dollars, and a story from 3,000 to 8,000 words earns 7 cents per word, so a 6,000 word story pays 42 dollars. Poetry pays a flat 30 dollars per poem, and reviews pay a flat 15 dollars per 500 words, with the Review's reviews running at 500 to 900 words. These are the 3 payment lines a writer checks first, and the 2022 issue's call for submissions printed them on the back cover for the first time, a practice the Review has kept in every issue since, 11 running issues in total. A writer comparing fiction magazines that pay will see that the per word rates above sit between the 1 cent per word floor of the small press titles and the 5 cent per word floor of the larger monthly titles, which is why the Review's 2 rates draw submissions from both the flash writers and the longer fiction writers in equal number.
What River & Sound Review Has Published
The speculative fiction in our issues is a 12 issue, 41 story record that runs from 2021 to 2025, and the table below is that record, issue by issue.
| Issue | Year | Speculative stories | Flash pieces | Notable work |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2021 | 4 | 3 | The debut story with the 8 word motto line |
| 2 | 2021 | 4 | 2 | A soft science story of 5,200 words |
| 3 | 2022 | 4 | 2 | The climate fiction piece on the cover badge |
| 4 | 2022 | 3 | 4 | The first dark story under 3,000 words |
| 5 | 2023 | 4 | 2 | The uk issue lead story of 6,100 words |
| 6 | 2023 | 3 | 3 | The experimental slot's 1 page piece |
| 7 | 2023 | 4 | 2 | The fantasy piece named on the cover badge |
| 8 | 2024 | 3 | 4 | The horror story that opened the issue |
| 9 | 2024 | 4 | 2 | The weird story with no subgenre label |
| 10 | 2024 | 3 | 3 | The cover badge story of 4,800 words |
| 11 | 2025 | 3 | 2 | The 2 story uk american dialogue |
| 12 | 2025 | 4 | 2 | The detective special with 5 stories |
The 3 flash pieces in issue 1 and the 4 in issue 8 are the two peaks of the flash run, and the 4 speculative stories in issues 1, 3, 5, 7, 10 and 12 are the six issues where the speculative slot carried its full weight. The 12 experimental pieces, 1 per issue, run the whole 2021 to 2025 span, which is the thread that connects the umbrella of the first section to the genre sorting of the second and the payment rates of the fourth, because every experimental piece, like every other story in the Review, is paid at the 2 standing per word rates.
How Submissions Reach the Review
Fiction magazines accepting submissions post a window, a word limit and a response time, and the Review posts all 3 in every call. The window opens on the 1st of January, May, September and 2025's second opening on the 1st of June, which keeps the quarterly rhythm at 4 windows a year. The word limit is the 1,000 to 8,000 word band that matches the 4 story kinds in the first section, and the response time is 90 days, so a story submitted in March 2025 is answered by June 2025. A writer who knows the 3 payment lines from the previous section can read the 3 submission lines here as the same contract in reverse, and the 12 issues since 2021 are the standing proof that the contract is kept.