Black Gate

Michael Penkas took on the lion’s share of our magazine coverage this month, with in-depth reviews of the latest issues of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Nightmare. Mike joins our current magazine reviewer, Fletcher Vredenburgh (whose beat is primarily sword & sorcery), as well as our Retro-reviewers, Rich Horton and Matthew Wuertz.

In other magazine news this month, Rich Horton presented his 2017 Hugo Nomination thoughts, recommending dozens of stories from all of the major magazines. See all the details here.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our February Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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Issue #219 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies is now available, completely free on their website. It is dated February 16, 2017 and features fiction by Grace Seybold and Jeremy Sim, an Audio Fiction Podcast by Margaret Killjoy, and a reprint by Cory Skerry.

Jason at Featured Futures was enthusiastic about the Seybold.

Jeone Serrica is climbing what seems to be a world entirely of mountainside or cliff-face when, after scaring off a giant lizard, she encounters a village of strange women. After being somewhat ambivalently welcomed and despite being told to remain in her guest quarters, our intrepid explorer sneaks a peek at the villagers’ rites. What she sees mystifies and horrifies her but, before she can even try to come to terms with it, she’s snatched by a giant bird and taken off to an even stranger realm and an encounter that requires much more from her than even facing down giant lizards…

The imagination brought to bear in conceiving this doughty protagonist and this amazing world and the entities she interacts with was extremely impressive… it was fascinating throughout and will live in the memory for quite some time.

Read Jason’s complete review here.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents for issue 219.

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The February 2017 issue of Clarkesworld, issue #125, marks an important milestone for the magazine — and for its editor and founder, Neil Clarke. Here’s Neil to explain (from his editorial, “The Next Chapter Begins“).

The day this issue is published will be my first day as a full-time editor, which isn’t to say I’ve reached the point where I’m making a full-time salary. That’s going to take time, which I finally have. The first order of business is to close the salary gap between Lisa’s job and my old one and to cover the cost of our new health plan. I’ve agreed to do some consulting and knowledge transfer sessions with my former employer, so that should help create a bit more of a buffer before our savings account has to come into play.

As for the impact all this new-found time and energy will have on Clarkesworld, give me a couple of months to work that out. I still have some backlogged tasks that need to be completed and then I can start hammering out a long-range plan. In the meantime, each new subscription, Patreon supporter, or advertiser takes a little bit of the financial pressure away, so this will be one of my immediate areas of focus.The other will probably be targeting more anthology projects, both original and new, including catching up on the remaining Clarkesworld annuals. I’ll probably take on a few more ebook clients as well.

If you are already a subscriber or supporter, thank you. You’ve made this leap possible. If you aren’t a subscriber, there’s no better time than now. I know money is tight for many of our readers and listeners, so if you can’t afford to, you can always help by amplifying the calls for new subscribers/supporters on social media or perhaps adding a review on one of the many sites that sell our digital subscriptions — you’d be really surprised by how much of an impact that sometimes makes.

And while part of me will miss my old career, I’m eager to get started on this new chapter in my life and look forward to the new opportunities it presents. Now, back to work… !

Clarkesworld is one of the finest magazines we have — and one of the best things to happen to genre short fiction in the last decade. If you care at all about the future of the field, I hope you’ll consider supporting Clarkesworld, perhaps by just buying a sample issue at Amazon or B&N.com for $2.99 or, as I did, signing up at their Patreon page. I’m very excited to see what the new era brings at Clarkesworld, and I hope you’ll join us for the ride.

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