When I was young I had a recurring nightmare of meeting God.

Capital G, God.

In my dream, God is a very bright light. So bright you can’t help but cower.

God-light roars. Not like Aslan or the intro to an MGM film, but like a rocket launching into space.

God-light is painful. Not like a headache, but like swallowing a grenade—the kind of pain that consumes your entire body and radiates back out into the world.

God-light demands that I admit it’s more powerful. That I’ll never have control.

And that’s when I’d wake up. In a sweat. Heart thumping.

What in the Old Testament was that?

God has been a lot of things to a lot of people, but a personification of innate control issues…?

It is this loss of control that I find most unsettling in this issue’s stories, and of course…in the broader world. In some respects, insight into the bastions of control we have in our society has only strengthened my need to be the one with my finger on the button.

When I worked as a 9-1-1 dispatcher in college, I would hear sirens while off-shift and could imagine the conversations happening—on the phone, on the radio, in the dispatch center. Even if I didn’t know what was happening at that moment, I could find out at shift change when I reported for work. For a solid month after I moved on from that job, I felt a sense of panic, an itch of unease, when I saw an ambulance or police car drive by. I just wouldn’t know.

When I worked for the U.S. federal government, I enjoyed insight into more levels of bureaucracy. Big Brother didn’t seem scary at all because I knew it was a patchwork of people. What others imagine as the power of someone like the President was diluted by layers of interpretation—managers and meetings and PowerPoint decks and mandatory training and promotion cycles, et cetera. Big Brother wasn’t efficient enough to be terrifying.

I haven’t been in that world for a full decade. I can still guess what is happening behind the scenes of course, but it now lies among the other unknowable, uncontrollable things in our lives.

FFO’s February 2025 issue is half unsettling sci-fi, half cosmic horror. Within these pages, you can find a human existing at the mercy of an alien society in Rodrigo’s Culagovski’s “BigHappyFriend Likes Humans.” You can find an organism fighting the threat of splintering into many pieces in Kiernan Livingstone’s “Schism.”

In “Conflict Resolution,” Holly Schofield gives us the ending first, then unravels the meaning of it.

Sometimes the unknown tempts us. In Beth Goder’s “Mirror-hole” a teenager can’t resist the urge to reach into her mirror. In “The Lonely Eldritch Hearts Club” by Faith Allington, a woman dates the Eldritch horrors, relying on rules to control the interactions.

All of this begins with “galactic oracle eulogy,” by our cover artist and returning FFO author Samir Sirk Morató. Samir captured the “cosmic + horrors” theme in the psychedelic colors and interpretive planet-like shapes of this issue’s cover art. Then, they take us to a dying god and its last caregiver.

God is a spaceship adrift. God is a terminal illness.

What is more terrifying—an all-powerful god or no god at all?

* * *

Ⓒ Rebecca Halsey