Bullet Points captures the complexity, tragedy, and hope of warfare and violence in human and nonhuman society, with reprints and original stories every three months. The January 2025 issue (Volume 8) presents stories with post-apocalyptic settings:Stories:Lena Ng, "The Night We Saw the Stars": A mother, haunted by an alien invasion, brings hope to her child.Alexander Hay, "_XPLOD_": Simmonds might actually be responsible for the destruction of reality. Actually.

Conflict is EternalWe have always fought. War is the furnace that forges new technologies and pushes humanity ever onward. We are the children of a battle that began with fists and sticks, and ended on the brink of atomic Armageddon. Beyond here lies another war, infinite in scope and scale.But who will fight the wars of tomorrow? Join Elizabeth Bear, Indrapramit Das, Aliette de Bodard, Garth Nix

New threats surface in the aftermath of WWIII—this time, in the remote waters of the Arctic.Arctic Sea is the next thrilling entry in David Poyer's critically-acclaimed future war series. In the aftermath of a world war with China, Admiral Dan Lenson is assigned to set up a US Navy base on the rugged North Slope of Alaska, in response to Russian seabed claims that reach nearly to the US coast. Yet the current administration seems oddly reluctant to confron...

Mission: Sabotage a Planet, Survival Not Guaranteed . . .Kenneth Chinran was a disaffected youth who joined the military and was recruited for an elite deep cover unit, surviving training and exercises so tough that several of the recruits did not survive. At the peak of his career, he was sent by his star nation to infiltrate a fascistic, militaristic planet--Earth.He lived in deep cover for years, marrying and having a daughter. Then the Earth forces attacked his home sys...

Kenneth Chinran commanded the elite unit assigned to take out an entire planet in a terrible war. Millions died; billions more perished in the aftermath. One doesn't send a sociopath on such a mission. A sociopath might not stop. Chinran did stop—but in the process nearly lost his sanity and his soul.But one of Chinran's men was a sociopath going in. Now he's a trained sociopath with the knowledge and firepower to take out entire tactical teams, evaporate security cordons and chang...

Reed Walsh has been building snowy runways on The Ice, as locals call Antarctica, for the last three years. After four months of darkness, two events are about to occur: the first sunrise in four months, and Winfly. The first resupply flight after a long dark winter promises fresh food and new faces.Air National Guard pilot Kathy Lee Forester hails from a small town under Montana's Big Sky. When she lands her huge Winfly jet at McMurdo Station, she...

It's 2150AD. Mike Takahashi's vacation starts with a bone saw.Waking up on a slab with a black-market surgeon ready to carve him up wasn't on Mike's itinerary. Someone is harvesting Metatech operatives for spare parts—and he's next.Stripped of his gear, cut off from corporate backup, and trapped in a top-secret research facility, Mike has one job: get out alive. But Amsterdam has bigger pro...

Time is a motherf@#er.The rules that govern time machines are strict. Penalties for violations are severe and unpredictable. Ask decorated war hero John Banks how he knows.History will record that the end of human civilization occurs six years from now, that a demonic virus will claim six billion lives, and that one John Arthur Banks died two weeks ago in a California wildfire. Forensics confirmed it. The Governor of California and the Joint Chiefs...

All human history shows that not all humans are men. Some are mules, and some are wolves...and there are always a few rats. Like Slippery Jim diGriz.

When the office door opened suddenly I knew the game was up. It had been a money-maker—but it was all over. As the cop walked in I sat back in the chair and put on a happy grin. He had the same somber expression and heavy foot that they all have—and the same lack of humor. I almost knew to the word what he was going to say before he uttered a syllable. "James Bolivar diGriz I arrest you on the charge—" I was waiting for the word charge, I thought it made a nice touch that way. As he said i...

From the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh to Norse prophecies of Ragnarok to the Revelations of Saint John to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and any number of fictional zombie Armageddons and the dystopic world of The Hunger Games, we have always wondered what will happen after the world as we know it ends. No matter what the doomsday scenario—cataclysmic climate change, political chaos, societal collapse, nuclear war, pestilence, or so many other dreaded variations—we inevitably believe that even ...

A science fiction short story, where an ambassador from the federation of Planets is gathering data so as to establish the most effective trading method with the natives, but suddenly finds himself in deep trouble.