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The six stories that represent Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine's March and April 2003 issues exhibit an unusual diversity of almost familiar worlds.

Here are 10 stories from the May and June 2003 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, including a tribute to SF great Barry M. Malzberg.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler tells a magical and humorous contemporary fable that captures the state of humanity at the cusp of a new millennium - as seen through the uniquely sensitive perspective of an empathetic extraterrestrial. An audible.com audio exclusive!

Eighteen-year-old Emma Harper knows she has a problem. Now she has to learn to live with it. Learning to eat like a normal person, though, is the least of her worries. When hostile aliens interrupt her attempt to get herself and her Marines home to Earth, she’ll have to evade capture and figure out what really matters to her. Who is she? How can she help? What can she even do a zillion light years from everything she’s ever known? Five lives hang on the answers, and she doesn’t even know where to start.

Eighteen-year-old Emma Harper misses her brother. Two years ago, the bad news - MIA - killed a piece of her heart. Her father ignoring her dreams of building spaceships and demanding she become an accountant killed another. Lost and rudderless, Emma drifts through a life she doesn't want with friends who pretend to care. When a bizarre event sends her sailing across the universe, she'll have to decide what matters most to her. Life or death, the universe doesn't care. But does Emma?

Portland has a coven problem. Sixteen-year-old Sophie Harris wishes magic could solve all her problems. It created them, after all. It made her a disappointment, a pathetic waste of space in her mom’s coven. Every time they pat her on the head for being a good little girl, they push her down a little more. She can’t protect herself or help with anything that matters, or so they tell her again and again. Armed with new friends who care more than her family ever has, Sophie plunges into a quest to prove herself worthy to a mother who can’t see her as anything but a weak child.

Most people know of the Near Death Experience (NDE), but very few have heard of the The Shared Death Experience (SDE). The SDE is similar to the NDE except that it occurs not to the person who is dying, but to a loved one who is physically well. That person could be sitting right next to their loved one, sitting across the room, or even across the globe unaware of the impending death of someone they love.

These ladies aren't waiting. Twenty best-selling and award-winning authors offer enchanting tales of women and girls forging paths through darkness and peril. Cleverness, curiosity, and determination make worthy heroines in fantastical new worlds. Featuring stories by: Elmdea Adams, Sarah Bartsch, Robyn Bennis, Lou J. Berger & Ian Berger, Jeffrey Cook & Katherine Perkins, Katie Cross, Lee French, Fulvio Gatti, Connie J. Jasperson, Frog and Esther Jones, Edward J. Knight, Robert J. McCarter, Jody Lynn Nye, Raven Oak, Dawn Vogel, Matt Youngmark, and Jeremy Zimmerman.

In the middle of the night in early April 1994, Arsene, an eight-year old Rwandan boy, flees his village as shouts and gunshots draw near. Carrying only a battered suitcase of his father's, hastily packed with a few essential items by his grandmother - who along with the rest of his family and the entire village will be massacred that night - he runs into the wilderness and wanders alone and afraid through unspeakable horrors. Some years later, Arsene is a teenager adopted by a Parisian couple....

As the heat rises on a New York summer, a suicide bomb set off in a Times Square subway station nearly claims the life of 68-year-old ex-madam Kathleen. Then a woman is brutally murdered, her body dumped on a marshy beach in Queens. The woman, Sharon, was last seen by 26-year-old Emily - a deputy press officer working at City Hall - getting into a car in front of the building where she and Kathleen both live in far Upper Manhattan.

Fifteen-year-old Esperance Darbois, the only daughter of philosophy professor François Darbois, is determined to become a woman of the stage. But becoming an actress will sully the respectability of the Darbois family, damage her marriage prospects, and harm her father’s distinguished reputation.

When three-year-old Joshua Gortler and his family were forced from their hometown in Poland during World War II, they scrambled for safety across border after border, finding refuge at last in Europe’s Displaced Persons Camps. Undocumented and unschooled, Gortler spent his adolescence learning to survive. When his family eventually relocated to the US, Gortler found himself starting over, and after teaching himself English, Gortler managed to complete high school in three years, earn an MSW, and begin what would become a distinguished career in the field of eldercare.

Agatha Webb and her cook are found dead in the early hours of the morning after a successful party, and it seems just about anyone could be the killer. Some suspect her aging husband; others think it a robbery gone too far. A few nosy villagers draw a connection between this murder and the deaths of her six children so many years prior: Was she truly a victim, a grieving mother? Or did she play some role in these deaths? The list of suspects grows when a certain wealthy townsmen is blackmailed by someone who believes he murdered Agatha Webb and her cook.

Silvariah Frandelle, the famed “Miner Girl” who escaped certain death on Mars, wants nothing more than a stable life on Earth, free from the trauma of the past. Lazarus Penn stands in her way. No device or tactic is beneath him as he fights to take possession of her and everything that belongs to her. From the courts of Guam City, the tourist haven floating in space, to the depths of the sea, to the streets of Old Seattle, he sets forces in pursuit, both human and otherwise, to regain his power over her and take possession of her as is - he believes - his right.

Originally published pseudonymously in 1893, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets follows the tragic tale of Maggie and her life in the harsh streets and tenements of the New York City Bowery district. Initially rejected by publishers for being viewed as too brutal and accurate in its descriptions of poverty and female sexuality, Stephen Crane published the work at his own expense. In Maggie's struggle to find love, acceptance, and economic security, Crane creates a portrait which mirrors the struggle of all the women of America at the end of the 19th century.

In book one of the Shooting Stars series, Catch a Falling Star, best-selling author Leah Downing introduces Lauren St. Germain, a federal investigator accused of assisting the Taliban in a homeland terrorist attack targeting her husband. Scandal, mystery, and one of Hollywood’s leading men refuse to let her fade from the public’s eye. Her relationship status? It’s complicated...and that’s not even the half of it.

Michael B. Koep’s final installment in the Newirth Mythology trilogy brings a psychologist face to face with his greatest fear: madness. On the other side of the world, a professor of mythology struggles to interpret a sudden shift in the historical timeline, the mysterious discovery of the ruins of an ancient city, and the anomalous nature of Loche’s writing.

A Child’s Personal Twilight Zone: Imagining New Possibilities highlights three stories originally published in Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan’s Stories, a speculative memoir by Elayne Zalis that explores how The Twilight Zone sparked her imagination when she was a child in Miami in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The young TV fan and the woman she becomes collaborate across space and time to reimagine their favorite episodes of the classic television series. While tapping into a shared memory bank, they retreat to a personal Twilight Zone that nurtures creativity and invention.

Commander Gray of the United Colonies Space Force died when his experimental ship crashed on Mars, but a backup of his mind survived. When Maggie discovers the wreck a century later, she becomes the target of a psychopathic rival intent on stealing the ship, and a hive of weaponized lifeforms bent on erasing the backup.

Pamela Binnings Ewen’s newest novel reveals the story of Émilienne, once the most beautiful, sought-after woman in Paris during the Belle Époque, the era of peaceful years just before World War I. As a girl, Émilienne fights her way through poverty in Montmartre, drawn to the lights of Paris below. Soon, she stars at the Folies Bergère, mistress of kings and princes, known as the most beautiful woman in Europe.