Image © Michal Bedkowski
Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, Sometimes, survival is the best we can hope for. In this final issue of the tumultuous year 2025, the stories that rose to the top for our editors all touched on the underlying theme of trying to survive against seemingly impossible odds. Our authors have brought you gripping tales about individuals trying to survive alone in the face of horrors from deep space, godlike entities, and fate-altering prophecies. You'll meet a desperate researcher trying to secure the survival of the human race, and a hapless young man trying to survive the absurdly tangled social dynamics of supernatural beings. With great pleasure, we invite you to enjoy these five excellent tales: "Salvage" by A.R. Werner--Being imprisoned on a starship is bad enough for one convict. Now something else is trapped on the ship with her. "A Domestic Dispute" by Alex Fayle--Faeries make great housekeepers, but if you break their strange rules, the mess might be something no one can clean up. "Jewels and Vipers" by Dafydd McKimm--There's always some truth behind a fairy tale... and there's always something hidden as well. "Genesis" by John Leahy—This pandemic is not natural. Nobody is safe from it. Will it end humanity, or is our fate to be something far stranger? "The Ballad of Black Calchas" by Townsend S. Wright--The epic saga of a pirate sorcerer-king who pits his magic and cunning against the heavens themselves. In our Editor's Corner Fiction, we have "A Full Moon Botheration" by Lesley L. Smith--a fun mashup of magick and natural philosophy set in the Regency era. Finally, we're happy to present the work of Michal Bedkowski, who provided our cover artwork for this issue, "Evil Woman." Thanks for reading, Lesley, Grayson, Candi, and the Electric Spec Team