About Us

Founded in Philadelphia in 2012, Phobos is a weird fiction magazine inspired by the old pulps. We call ourselves "weird" as tribute but we publish all sorts of speculative fiction; if it's on-theme, exciting, tightly written and has elements of the fantastic, we're interested. We publish an issue every few years in both print and ebook/kindle, and each one is organized around a theme. So far we've published:

Zugzwang, a term from chess for a situation where every move is bad but you still have to move,

Emergence, stories of hive minds and strange things coming together,

Troublemake, short fictions about triple-crossers, biters of the hands that feed, and people who just don't like being told what to do, and

Deep Black Sea, adventure tales of the ocean and the horrors within it.

Now, for our fifth issue, in honor of the American semiquincentennial, we're looking for stories about the mythic heart of America, past, present or future, and however you conceive of it. Creeping dread preferred to graphic violence but there's a time and place for everything.

Orwell's Six Rules for Writing is a great explanation of what kind of writing we usually publish.