Daily Science Fiction (DSF) was a short fiction magazine edited by Jonathan Laden and Michele-Lee Barasso, that released a new speculative short story pretty much every weekday from September of 2010 through to January of 2023.
Sadly, the Daily Science Fiction website went offline sometime in late 2024, taking its decade+ of original speculative fiction with it.
But all is not lost!
If you’re an author trying to get copies of your Daily Science Fiction stories, much of the work published in the magazine has been archived by The Wayback Machine, a project of the Internet Archive.
Read on to learn for a slightly detailed descrpition of how to find things in the Wayback Machine.
If you don’t need to know the details, you can jump to the part of this post that explains how to find stories published in Daily Science Fiction using The Wayback Machine’s “URLs” functionality.
Using the Wayback Machine
If you’re not familiar with The Wayback Machine, it’s fairly simple to use.
Point your browser to https://web.archive.org/ and you’ll be greeted with the Internet Archive’s home page, pictured below.
To search for a specific website, just type in the URL where it says “Enter a URL or words related to a site’s home page.”
You’ll now see a screen with the number of pages archived, and a couple of different calendars:
Each of the bar graphs at the top of this page represents the number of web pages from your URL that was archived in each month of each listed year.
Below that, you’ll see the calendar year for a selected month, with blue and green circles over specific dates. These circles will be bigger or smaller depending on the amount of content that was harvested. Blue circles mean that content was archived on that date. Green circles means that the Wayback Machine’s archiving software encountered a redirect.
By hovering your mouse over a circle, you’ll see the number and timestamps of when pages were archived.
Just like with the circles, a green timestamp means a redirect and a blue timestamp means a direct page access.
To access the actual archived content, all you need to do is click on a timestamp. The Wayback Machine will do the rest, resulting in an archived version of the site whose URL you typed in the search bar:
At this point, you can use the archived website just like its original. However, keep in mind that some sub-pages may not have been archived. If that happens, you’ll get an error message.
You’ll notice that the bar graphs stay at the top of the page even when you start looking at archived pages. That’s a good way to jump around and see older or newer versions of the URL you typed in. (From an archival standpoint, this is a godsend! Sometimes content is missing on some dates, or has changed over time. It’s fantastic to be able to see all the options that there are.)
How to Find Daily Science Fiction Stories in the Wayback Machine
The easiest way to find a specific story in the archived Daily Science Fiction site is by using the Wayback Machine’s “URLs” function. This function lists out every single URL associated with a given website.
To save you time, here’s the Wayback Machine’s URL page for dailysciencefiction.com
Once you’re there, just search in the “Filter results by URL…” box on the right:
The format that Daily Science Fiction used for URLs involved putting both the author name and the story title, separated by hyphens.
For author names, use first–middle–last format. For titles, all you need to do is type out the title. (For more common titles, you may then have to browse a bit to find the correct story.)
For example, I typed stewart-c and the Wayback Machine was able to locate the two stories I had published in Daily Science Fiction over the years:
Or, if I wanted to read Aimee Picchi’s fantastic “Advanced Word Problems in Portal Math,” I could type in portal-math to see if it’s been saved.
Once you’re on the results page here, you can click one of the URLs listed to access the calendar page for that URL, and from there you can click the blue or green circles on the calendar and click the timestamp to see the archived page.
You can then copy the new URL from your browser to link the story from your website, save a copy of the page as a PDF, or do whatever else you needed your story for.
A word of warning: Not every page from a website is always archived, so some stories may not be accessible after all.
But with 7332 URLs archived, it looks like a lot of DSF‘s great content is still there, just waiting to be retrieved.
Support the Internet Archive!
If you make use of The Wayback Machine, please consider supporting the Internet Archive, which is a 501c3 nonprofit based in Los Angeles.
You can donate using the “Donate” page on the Internet Archive website.
Or, if you’d like to help out in other ways, consider volunteering!
With a project as big as the Internet Archive, there are lots of ways for people to help. And since the project does important work by archiving content that would otherwise be lost forever, the more people who can help, the better.
Support Great Speculative Fiction!
While Daily Science Fiction will be sorely missed, it isn’t the only speculative fiction game in town. I’ve provided a few carefully curated links that will point you in the direction of other amazing stories from new and established authors alike.
The Factory & Songs for the Shadows
Two Immersive Stories for Our Times from Ukraine and Ghana
Indie publisher Atthis Arts is running a pre-order campaign for two amazing new books, The Factory and Songs for the Shadows.
Although I haven’t yet read The Factory, I was a beta reader for Songs for the Shadows, and loved every word of it.
If you have a moment and a few spare dollars, please consider backing this important indie project!
Speculative Fiction Magazine Subscriptions
Want to stop other SFF magazines from going away? The easiest and best way is to give them money, if you can!
Author and editor Jeff Reynolds has made this even easier with his list of Speculative Fiction Magazine Subscriptions.
With searching and filtering functionality, the list is a great way to find a new favourite magazine—and then subscribe to help it stick around.