Black Gate

Space & Time magazine celebrated its 50th Anniversary last year, an extraordinary landmark for a small press magazine. It was founded in 1966 by Gordon Linzner, who edited it for four decades. Hildy Silverman took over in 2007, and she has edited it for the past ten years. Honestly, I thought it had stopped publishing a couple of years ago, so I was surprised to find a copy of the Winter 2016 issue at my local Barnes & Noble last week. We’ve never covered the magazine here, but heck. It’s not too late to start.

Space and Time is one of the few remaining print genre magazines — and one of the only ones that’s not a digest. (The only others I can think of at the moment are Cemetery Dance and Locus.) The Winter 2016 issue has fiction by Peter David, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Christopher M. Cevasco, Mary Mascari, and others. The magazine is well designed and laid out, and illustrated throughout, with professional art by Martin Hanford, Alfred Klosterman, Alan Beck, Skikhar Dixit, and others.

In addition to the fiction and poetry, the magazine has highly readable nonfiction content, including an editorial by Silverman with some excellent writing advice, a film column by Daniel M. Kimmel that looks at classic SF movies (in this case the 1985 Enemy Mine), an interview with Leanna Renee Hieber, a review of The Winter Boy by Sam Tomaino, and more.

Here’s the complete contents.

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Steve Fahnestalk has been adding magazines to his review column at Amazing Stories, which I greatly appreciate. He’s an astute reader and a fine writer, and he has a talent for piquing your interest without giving away too much of the tale. Here he is on the sole novella in the January/February issue of F&SF.

In “Homecoming,” Rachel Pollack brings us her fourth, and longest, Jack Shade story in F&SF — the previous ones were published in 2012, 2013 and 2015. Jack Shade is a private investigator, occultist, and shaman; I can’t remember having read one before. When Jack gives his business card to someone and they return it with a request for help, Jack is bound to help them, through what he calls a “Guest,” but which sounds like a geas to me. A woman, Carole Acker, comes to Jack to tell him she feels as if part of her soul is missing, and she wants to hire him to help her. Because of the “Guest,” Jack is compelled to acquiesce, and begins tracing the missing part. Several times during the quest, Jack is told by those he encounters that he must stop; that he doesn’t know what he’s doing — but because of the Guest, he has to continue, and eventually brings Carole the missing part. It is then revealed that he shouldn’t have done that… the nay-sayers were right. Jack has three days to undo what he has done, or something extremely bad will happen. Pollack has created a world behind a world; in a New York that sounds just like our New York, there are shamans, night creatures and gangsters of this world and that one. Without being anything like Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series, this reminds me of that type of fiction. I enjoyed it. Rating: a solid ¤¤¤ plus.

Read Steve’s complete review of the issue (and The CW series Riverdale) here.

The cover of the January/February issue is by Charles Vess, illustrating Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s story, “Vinegar and Cinnamon.” Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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