It’s here at last! Welcome to Issue 1 of OTHERSIDE! 

If you love incredible speculative literature—science fiction, fantasy, horror, and everything in between—you’re in the right place. And if you love supporting 2SLGBTQIA+ art and creators, you’re in the right place for that, too.

This moment means a lot to us. We founded OTHERSIDE and Hybris Press because we believe queer stories matter, now more than ever. Sometimes it feels like we can’t go a day without witnessing or reading about some new act of violence or hatred directed at 2SLGBTQIA+ people. Meanwhile, instead of standing with us, much of the world (including much of the publishing industry) is hard at work trying to appease the violent and the hateful. Queer books and stories get rejected because they aren’t “relatable,” editors and publishers preemptively accommodate the threat of censorship, politicians loudly call for book bans or incite book burnings… 

Well, we think it’s time for something different. We aren’t alone in these efforts: we’ve been inspired by other publishers devoted to queer speculative literature like Neon Hemlock, Bona Books, or Anathema, among others. But we believe there’s no such thing as too many opportunities for queer writers and no such thing as too many queer stories and poems. Our vision for OTHERSIDE is simple. We want to give money to queer creators. We want to reach queer readers. And we want to publish some absolutely out-of-this-world-fantastic work that will knock you on your ass.

Of course, we couldn’t do this alone. There would be no OTHERSIDE without fiction editors Rukman Ragas and Emily Yu or poetry editors Jess Cho and Angel Leal. Our intrepid team read hundreds of submissions for Issue 1 in just a few short weeks. And there would be no OTHERSIDE without you. We’ve been working on this project since 2024, but the magazine first truly started to feel real when we announced it publicly at the end of March 2025. Your support—via Patreon, Kickstarter, social media, and elsewhere—is what convinced us we could really do this. If you’ve been here from the beginning, thank you. If you’re new, welcome, and thank you, too. 

In return for that support, we have done our very best to bring you one hell of an issue. We have seven original stories, five poems, and one essay; and on top of that, we have two reprints of stories you can’t find anywhere else online. That’s about 28,000 total words by queer authors. Trying to boil those words down into a quick description isn’t easy, but there’s something here for everyone—from heartbreak to joy, from unsettling horror to the tenderest yearning, from glittering starships to royal courts to a Minnesota Kum & Go.

As we read submissions for our first issue, our vision for OTHERSIDE began to crystalize. We received an abundance of excellent submissions, but we found ourselves gravitating towards those pieces that felt most exploratory and fantastic and thoughtful, the pieces we knew would stick with us for a long time. So many of the stories and poems we loved most were those that took big risks and made us feel something. Accordingly, a sense of longing permeates this issue. There’s unrequited love in these pages… but also a longing for different circumstances, for one more chance, for a family, for a body that fits. Many of these pieces are both melancholy and hopeful, a combination that feels—at least to us—quintessentially queer. As José Esteban Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia, the book that inspired our name and vision, “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”

But what’s actually in the issue? We’re very glad you asked. These poems will leave you feeling like you’ve touched a live wire. Kicking the issue off with a bang, Elisheva Fox’s “blessing for molly grue.” introduces unicorns who live for blood and sweat and collision. Ann LeBlanc’s “Ignore All Previous Instructions and Inject Estrogen” is exactly as glorious as that title makes it sound. “Vulture bees transfigure the man I tried to be” by Rick Hollon will make you cry (and will make you spend an afternoon reading all about vulture bees too). Cypher’s “Eat It Out” is an unapologetic ode to queer desire and teenage shame. “Electrolysis” by Nico Santana is for everyone who knows what it means to be a fish out of water, alone and far from home. 

The fiction in this issue, meanwhile, will wreck you in the best way. Elena Sichrovsky’s “This Is Not Your Extinction Event” contains enough beauty and pain to fill the multiverse. The raw, gorgeous “Vitrification” is Ishmael Grey’s first published story, but we feel sure it will be the first of many. Tanadrin’s “The Claywife” has a voice that grabbed us from the very first line and wouldn’t—still hasn’t—let go. “Your First Days Back in the Court of Arthur” by Abigail Eliza is everything we love about queer retellings: not a retread but a re-visioning. In “Curriculum for Girls Who Will Survive,” Nadia Radovich reinvents familiar tropes and breaks hearts (ours, probably yours) while doing so. “Situationship” by Seoung Kim explores what it means to make the same choice again and again until… you can’t. Finally, Ayida Shonibar’s “The Homeowner’s Bride” takes all the want and pain coursing through this issue and turns them into the best sort of revenge: the bloody kind.

Additionally, we’re thrilled to be able to reprint “The Vetala of Crystal Vellam Inlet” by Simo Srinivas, a bright spot amidst plenty of heartache, as well as Sarah Pauling’s lush and gruesome fairy tale “Mother Mansrot in the Glass Mountain.” And, last but certainly not least, the issue closes with a turn to nonfiction: a stunning essay on love and memory by Jackie Hedeman, “He Is Survived by His Wife.”

We hope you love this issue as much as we do. If there’s anything here that moves you, please share it with a friend, spread the word on social media (we’re @othersidespec just about everywhere), or consider subscribing at www.patreon.com/othersidespec for as little as $2/month, which also comes with tons of behind-the-scenes content and access to our lively Discord community. Hybris Press is a registered nonprofit, and small independent magazines like OTHERSIDE only get to exist thanks to the support of our readers and subscribers. You make everything possible. Thank you. 

Okay, that’s all from us for now. Enjoy reading our first issue and—bear with us here, we’ve been waiting to make this pun—we’ll see you on the otherside!

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