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The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

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The Strange (Saga Press, March 21, 2023). Cover uncredited

I wish I could take credit for the headline of The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit for Nathan Ballingrud’s terrific novel, but according to the author, Karen Jay Fowler came up with it. I hope she won’t mine me stealing it because it is as spot on as any description I could come up with.

The more prosaic version is that The Strange is a Western riff on Ray Bradbury’s vision of Mars, but without the canals. A Mars in an alternate 1930s timeline when interplanetary space travel first began during the Civil War, an oblique reference (among a slew of oblique references to classic SF tropes and personages) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter, an ex-Confederate Barsoom warlord. Just as Bradbury had no interest in explaining how humans could actually exist on Mars sans space suits in a sort of off-world version of 1950s Illinois, or Burroughs how you can get astrally projected from an Arizona cave to Mars, Ballingrud just wants you to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.

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A Kick-ass Female Perspective on Comics That’s Disturbingly Close to Real-Life: The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

A Kick-ass Female Perspective on Comics That’s Disturbingly Close to Real-Life: The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

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the-refrigerator-monologues-smallThe Wonder Woman movie has received considerable buzz for depicting an interesting lead female character who actually has a personality, is not dependent on some guy to come to her rescue and truly is the star attraction; it even has a female director. It’s enough to make you forgive the silly and at this point yawn inducing CGI pyrotechnics between good and evil ending that is apparently sacrosanct in these sort of flicks. Look, I enjoyed the movie, but for all its merits it’s still a sad commentary of our times that Wonder Woman is considered somehow ground breaking. Problem is, compared to the latest crop of superhero movies (maybe even movies in general) the bar isn’t set very high.

You want some real kick-ass female perspective on the comic book world that’s disturbingly close to real-life? Check out The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente. This is a series of short stories set in shared alternate comic book universe (with characters such as Grimdark and Kid Mercury and Doctor Nocturne evoking various Marvel and DC Comics personages) linked by a sort of AA session in which deceased women (with one exception who for her own reasons hangs out among the unliving) take turns explaining how they ended up in Deadtown, i.e., thanks to some male superhero or supervillian exploit.

The title of the collection is a take-off of The Vagina Monologues — the Eve Ensler play about sex and body image told from the perspectives of a variety of women representing different ethnic, sexual and class identities — and comic book writer Gail Simone’s observation that comic book women are typically hypersexualized for a male audience and often end up “refrigerated” — killed, disabled, or otherwise rendered marginalized or powerless in order to advance a male character’s storyline. Indeed, in “Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane” the title character literally ends up in a refrigerator. (And, by the way, is just one of many great comic book kind of names that Valente invents for her cast of characters. Also by the way, it’s worth noting that in Wonder Woman a male character dies to advance our heroine’s story — perhaps an intentional inversion of the refrigerator motif?)

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Wired: The Fiction Issue

Wired: The Fiction Issue

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Wired The Fiction Issue-smallI used to read Wired magazine back in the days when it was actually cool to have an email address (you had to be in academia or some tech savvy business). This was in the dark ages before web browsers and the Internet wasn’t just a place to buy stuff, host porn, post cute cat videos and spread fake news. The only people who used Apple computers were in advertising and not everyone had a cellphone; the ones who did liked to showoff by appending their email with “Sent from my Blackberry” — remember Blackberry?

It was when I was just getting into cyberpunk, which was the magazine’s patron saint of sorts. Bruce Sterling was on Wired‘s inaugural cover and William Gibson (see below) was featured on the fourth issue (1.4 in Wired parlance). Wired was for the cultural technoliterati, the folks “wired in” (hence the title in the days well before Wi-Fi) to how computer technology was going to change the world. And, boy, did it ever.

It was also hard to read, because graphic designers thought they were making some sort of statement using odd and multiple fonts along with disorienting colors and just stuff that gave you a headache to look at but had the appearance of cutting-edge style. Fortunately, someone finally realized that jettisoning the visual clutter made it possible for people to actually read the articles instead of just being bedazzled to gaze at them. Though certain tics remain even today, like sticking a 0 in front of double digit page numbers — pagination doesn’t actually being until page 21, or as Wired likes it, 021 — in a vertical position that isn’t easy to see and mostly only on the left hand even pages. C’mon.

Somewhere about the time when the Internet stopped being an interesting forum of discussion and innovation and turned into a wasteland of constant connection and commerce, I let my subscription lapse. But this past January, Wired published its first ever all-fiction “sci-fi issue.” Despite the unfortunate terminology (which has connotations of bad adventure flicks in futuristic settings, although perhaps the disdain is just insider snobbery — do people nowadays still care and argue about such things?), I thought I’d check out the issue’s idea to, according to editor Scott Dadich, “Think about what is possible, what is plausible, what is terrifying, what is hopeful.”

Lot of plausible here with not much hopeful. Which might be terrifying were it not so close to actual experience (both psychological and technological) that today is, alas, more mundane than profound.

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Amazing Stuff Where There’s a Will

Amazing Stuff Where There’s a Will

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Amazing Stories August 2012Here’s some Amazing news. Just think what the Golden Agers who wrote for this magazine back in the 1940s might wonder about an online pulp magazine?

Actually, one of them, Ray Bradbury, considered the Internet a “waste of time.” I guess his problem was he never spent any time on the Internet.

We don’t have any of Shakespeare’s plays that he wrote in his actual hand, but we do have the plays as transcribed by members of his acting troupe. These days, it wouldn’t be profitable to have an Amazing Stories magazine if it weren’t for the Internet. Even Uncle Ray would be down with that, wouldn’t you think?

Apex Magazine 49Speaking of the Bard and online magazines, I had two “minor” fields of study for my English M.A. (if you must know, or care, the major field was Rhetoric), which were science fiction and Shakespeare.

When I say that, some people think there’s a discipline called “Science Fiction and Shakespeare” and maybe there should be, as certainly the Elizabethan fantasist has inspired many a modern one.

Case in point is the latest edition of Apex Magazine, which is a Shakespeare-themed issue featuring the work of Kate Elliott, Kat Howard, Sarah Monette, Merrie Haskell and Patricia Wrede.

Apex Magazine #44

Apex Magazine #44

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Apex Magazine 44-smallEugie Foster portrays a god of vengeance in “Trixie and the Pandas of Dread,” Lettie Prell writes about “The Performance Artist” and Tansy Rayner Roberts provides something of a romance in “The Patrician.”

Sarah Kuhn’s column explores the phenomenon of well-known genre figureheads making ill-conceived statements about women genre participants and fans, Maggie Slater interviews Eugie Foster, and editor Lynne M. Thomas’s regular “Blood on the Vellum” column rounds out the 44th edition of this e-magazine.

The issue is available for download from:

Buy issue 44 from Apex
Buy issue 44 from Amazon

The issue can also be read for free online at www.apex-magazine.com.

Interzone 243 and Black Static 31

Interzone 243 and Black Static 31

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527526Together again, TTA Press releases Interzone and Black Static in the same month as part of its new publishing scheduling. (I understand the economic reasons why the publishers are doing this, but I liked the old way of alternating issues. Ah, well, if it’s the price to be paid for having a magazine that is actually printed instead of pixalated, it’s well worth it.)

The Nov–Dec issue of Interzone is the second in the new slightly more compact format, with novelettes by Jon Wallace, and Jason Sanford, plus stories by Chen Qiufan (translated by Ken Liu), Caroline M. Yoachim, and Priya Sharma. Cover art is ‘The Star’ by Ben Baldwin.  Features include “Ansible Link” by David Langford (news and obits); “Mutant Popcorn” by Nick Lowe (film reviews); “Laser Fodder” by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews); book reviews by Jim Steel and the team, including an interview with Adam Roberts conducted by Paul Kincaid.

Black Static features cover art by Richard Wagner; novelettes by Jackson Kuhl, Steven J. Dines, and Victoria Leslie; stories by Seán Padraic Birnie, Steven Pirie, and James Cooper; illustrations by Ben Baldwin, David Gentry, and Rik Rawling; comment columns by Stephen Volk and Christopher Fowler; book reviews by Peter Tennant; and DVD/Blu-ray reviews by Tony Lee.

Apex Magazine #42

Apex Magazine #42

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apex-magazine-42-smallIssue 42 fiction include “Splinter” by Shira Lipkin, “Sprig” by Alex Bledsoe, “Erzulie Dantor” by Tim Susman, and “The Glutton: A Goxhat Accounting Chant” by Eleanor Arnason.

Non-fiction includes “The 21st Century SF/F Professional at Conventions” by editor Lynne M. Thomas, “Behind the Convention Curtain: Programming” by Steven H. Silver, and “An Interview with Alex Bledsoe” by Maggie Slater.

The cover art is by Nicoletta Ceccolli.

Visit the magazine at www.apex-magazine.com.

Apex Magazine Subscription Drive

Apex Magazine Subscription Drive

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Apex Magazine is having a subscription drive from now until November 15th. Featuring the work of folks such as Catherynne M. Valente, Mary Robinette Kowal, Sarah Monette, Ken Liu, Elizabeth Bear, Rachel Swirsky, Jennifer Pelland,  Kij Johnson, Geoff Ryman, and Maureen McHugh, Apex Magazine earned a Hugo Nomination for Best Semiprozine in 2012. Here’s the pitch:

image012_largeYearly subscriptions are available through the Apex website and Weightless Books. For $17.95, $2.00 off the normal subscription rate, you can have 12 months of Apex Magazine delivered to you in the file format of your choice: ePub, mobi, or PDF.  That’s at least 24 brand new short stories dropped into your eager little hands for the price of an anthology. Plus, you get the reprints, poetry, nonfiction and interviews. Quite a deal, right?

Subscribe via Weightless Books
Subscribe via Kindle
Subscribe via Apex

Not convinced you want to commit to a whole year or (I like this scenario better) don’t want the hassle of having to renew your subscription each year, Amazon can help you out.  For only a $1.99 a month, Apex Magazine will be auto-delivered straight to your Kindle. You never have to think about it again. On the first Tuesday of every month the new issue will be right there waiting for you, ready to go with you wherever you want to take it, no more need for a clunky computer or an internet connection once it’s downloaded.

Smaller is Better

Smaller is Better

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interzone-242Arriving in the mail the other day was not one, but two small parcels from TTA Press, mini versions of Black Static and Interzone, now both in a more compact, dare I say it, iPad-ish, format, with spine and laminated color cover. Sort of like a book (or, if you prefer, the aforementioned  iPad).

Kinda cool. The rationale seems to be a way to pack more content at what I assume is a more inexpensive way to print it (which may also be why both issues will now come out at the same time, six times yearly,  instead of alternate months.) Even if it isn’t completely a cost issue, the new versions are quite handsome and, even better, more handy.

black-static-30A definite updagrade. Kudos to Andy Cox and crew for trying to preserve the magazine in print format.

Hey, maybe it’s like vinyl records in a digital age: it may be a minority format, but there are people who still want to buy it (I’m one of those in both camps).

The September–October issue of Interzone has new stories by Ken Liu, Debbie Urbanski, Lavie Tidhar, Priya Sharma, CW Johnson, and Karl Bunker. Black Static has stories from James Cooper, Ray Cluley, Daniel Mills, Susan Kim, Carole Johnstone, and David Kotok.

Click either cover to see a full-size version.

You can subscribe to one or both here.

Apex Magazine #40

Apex Magazine #40

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apexmagissue40Apex Magazine turns 40 with its September issue, featuring  “During the Pause” by Adam-Troy Castro (who is interviewed by Maggie Slater), “Sexagesimal” by Katherine E. K. Duckett, “Sacrifice” by Jennifer Pelland, and “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall” by Elizabeth Bear (reprinted from The Del Ray Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, a review of which you can read here) . Cover art by Julia Dillon. Nonfiction by Peter M. Ball and editor Lynne M. Thomas.

Apex is published on the first Tuesday of every month.  While each issue is available free online from the magazine’s website, it can also be downloaded to your e-reader from there for $2.99.  Individual issues are also available at  Amazon, Nook, and Weightless.

Twelve-issue (one year) subscriptions can be ordered at Apex and Weightless for $19.95; Kindle subscriptions are available for $1.99 a month.