We’re delighted to learn that Emma Burnett’s story 25 Peppercorns has won the British Science Fiction Association’s award for Best Short Story, 2025!
We were very proud to be offered this story. The writing is lovely, the message is moving, and it champions the best possible responses to trauma and pain at a most appropriate time in world history. For it to be acknowledged this way is no less than Emma deserves.
This is Emma Burnett's third contribution to our pages, each more weighty than the one before. Here she tackles timely and challenging subject matter: how the suffering our forbearers endured goes on to affect those who follow them, forging links in a chain that seems inevitably to bind us to more pain in the future. Here's to breaking that chain. Editorial note: although Mythaxis doesn't use trigger warnings, readers may appreciate knowing that this story makes reference to the legacy of historical attrocities including the Holocaust.
'What is this thing you humans call X?' A question structure as old as Star Trek itself, if not even older. Not to continue harping on about how great spec-fic is, but is there a better way to explore emotions than through someone who, supposedly, has none? Emma Burnett adds more bittersweet evidence to the pile.
With no-one but myself to blame, I sometimes feel like fantasy of the classic style (magical races, epic adventures, character classes, that sort of thing) appears too rarely in Mythaxis. Emma Burnett to the rescue, then, whose sideways take on such quests sprinkles in the odd technological anachronism and sly observation to give the whole escapade a fun, contemporary air right to the end. Or maybe, beginning?
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