Frank Baird Hughes
Writer
Greetings from Philadelphia. Here from my perch between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, I write social science fiction and other speculative stories. Much of my work draws on ethnography and anthropological theory. I'm also an educator and have taught college and middle school students. My writing incorporates the joys and stressors of that work.Get in touch!
Work
published in 2026
"Artifacts of the Library on Shih Shen"
Manawaker Studio's Flash Fiction Podcast
February 2026
The Library, Sebastopol; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The young librarians queued on the mezzanine, waiting to have their heads shaved. Matthias, a shelver of the 12th rank, directed a cluster of newly shorn acolytes to a room where key texts from the Library would be inscribed thrice onto their cerebral cortices. Although the Library was sacrosanct, the machine spirit of the Library, its genius loci, wanted a particular collection traded north before fighting made the exchange impossible.
The pigeons must have been new and ranging far afield because they tried to rest atop one of Ben’s western towers. Scarcely had the flock touched claw to steel than Ben set off a fusillade of thunderclaps from a battery of acoustic riot-control cannons. Raising squawks and a cloud of bird dust, the pigeons fled in search of quieter roosts.Rust was an indignity of age, but bird shit was preventable.
published in 2025 and earlier
"The Space Between Bodies"
Neon Dystopia
September 4, 2025
"Mount Desert Island, Maine." Jervis McEntee. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The way I imagined it, a thousand years would pass, and we’d all be dust, but the biots would learn to build uterine tanks, birth each other, live in our cities, maybe thrive in the world we’d broiled and bombed.I was relieved when they told me biots couldn’t reproduce without a lot of outside help.“They’re not so bad,” I’d said. “Not their fault we made them that way.”
"The Oneiromantic Sheep"
Radon Journal
June 2025
"Sheep." Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The flock and their shepherds were halfway to the Christmas-feast when the coyotl trotted out of the late afternoon haze and onto the old motorway. Low and slinky, they fanned out around the lead rams and Samuel, who was standing point of balance to push the flock forward. He called back to warn Min, his apprentice and granddaughter.
"The Path to the Cornmill"
The Colored Lens
Spring 2025
Adlaid Dunlop was at chores when the soldiers came. That time of morning was the pigs, feeding them and cleaning the pens. With her arms and nose straining at a couple of overripe slop pails, she turned her head toward the road for a sniff of fresh air and espied the greycoats marching into her mountain village of Fifty Lashings, gunmetal swaying at their shoulders.
"The Library Across the Universe Who Loved a Man"
Manawaker Studio's Flash Fiction Podcast
November 2024
The Library, Sebastopol; Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
You created me. You selected the plot of land that would house my mind on undug, terraformed Shih Shen. You drew sketches of my citadel walls and of my halls. You handed these to teams of engineers, scientists, and architects, but you were my prime mover.
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