Black Gate

The last two weeks have produced some tremendous new fiction and articles. We started our coverage of TwoMorrows Publishing’s altogether splendid comics magazine Back Issue with issue #86, containing their giant-sized look at Marvel Bronze Age Giant comics. For fans of classic magazine art, our man Doug Ellis dug into his massive collection to examine early interior illustrations from Kelly Freas and Richard Powers. For vintage magazine readers, we took a look at Galaxy magazine’s $6,500 Novel-Writing Sham from 1953, and Thomas M. Disch’s detailed review of the Best Science Fiction of 1979, from the February 1981 issue of F&SF. For those looking for Award recommendations, we surveyed the annual Locus Recommended Reading List, compiled by the editors of Locus magazine, and the always-reliable Rich Horton’s Hugo Recs. Finally, Fletcher Vredenburgh contributes his January Short Story Roundup, reviewing Swords and Sorcery 48, Grimdark Magazine #6, and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #27.

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

As we’ve mentioned before, all of these magazines are completely dependent on fans and readers to keep them alive. Many are marginal operations for whom a handful of subscriptions may mean the difference between life and death. Why not check one or two out, and try a sample issue? There are magazines here for every budget, from completely free to $35/issue. If you find something intriguing, I hope you’ll consider taking a chance on a subscription. I think you’ll find it’s money very well spent.

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The February 4th issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies features their 400th story — a damn impressive milestone. BCS has been showcasing the best authors in the business, and promoting and developing new fantasy writers, since 2008. It has become one of the most important periodicals in the business, and you owe it yourself to check it out.

Issue 192 has original short fiction from K.J. Parker and Tamara Vardomskaya, a podcast, and a reprint by the marvelous Rachel Swirsky. Scott Andrews has also changed up the cover art; this issue features “Plains of Another World” by Leon Tukker.

“Told By An Idiot” by K.J. Parker
I accepted that master Allardyce had the potential to write the greatest play ever; a play so good that if God were to summon Mankind before the bar of Heaven and demand to know one good reason why He shouldn’t send a second flood and drown the lot of us, all we’d have to do is hand Him the manuscript and there’d be no case to answer. I knew that, in order to write this play, master Allardyce needed to drink himself stupid, get beaten up twice a week, and generally mash himself down into a cheese, like the cider-makers do, before he could ferment and distil his very essence into words on a page. But I have a business to run, and I need crowd-pleasers. Master Allardyce’s monument-more-enduring-than-bronze would just have to wait until I retired. Accordingly, I gave him no peace.

“The Three Dancers of Gizari” by Tamara Vardomskaya
It dawned on me that he enjoyed watching me squirm; a proud competent woman but to him just Nahemiah’s commoner puppet. “Ten thousand!” I spat out the words intentionally in the heaviest Tavalland accent that the theater had eradicated in me twelve years before. “Ten thousand thalers for your measly sculpture that the Opera rejected!”

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The January/February issue of Interzone magazine is now on sale. With the new year comes a new cover artist, Vincent Sammy, who illustrates this issue with a piece titled “The Orion Crusades” (click the image at right for a bigger version.)

Interzone #262 contains six stories:

“The Water-Walls of Enceladus” by Mercurio D. Rivera
“Empty Planets” by Rahul Kanakia
“Geologic” by Ian Sales
“Circa Diem” by Carole Johnstone
“A Strange Loop” by T.R. Napper
“Dependent Assemblies” by Philip A. Suggars

Non-fiction this issue includes an interview with artist Vincent Sammy, on his thoughts on providing the cover art for the next six issues, Future Interrupted by Jonathan McCalmont, Time Pieces by Nina Allan, this month on Virgina Woolf, plus David Langford’s Ansible Link, and the regular columns: book reviews, Nick Lowe’s Mutant Popcorn film reviews, and Tony Lee’s DVD column, Laser Fodder. Issue 262 is nearly 100 pages and packed with fiction, columns, and top-notch art.

Interzone is the sister magazine of Black Static, both are published by TTA Press in the UK. The distinguished Andy Cox is the editor of both.

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Neil Clarke makes a pretty big announcement in his editorial this issue.

It’s time to give up the day job. My family and I are trying to work out how to make that happen, but we need help to do so. If you are already subscribing to Clarkesworld or Forever, then thank you, that’s keeping the option on the table. If you haven’t been subscribing, now’s the time that would make the biggest difference to the future of this magazine.

I’ve mentioned before that a small percentage of our readers converting to subscribers would do the trick, but that’s easier said than done. Experience says that Clarkesworld will only be part of the puzzle. The new SFWA job helps. Forever helps. The anthologies help. Nothing stands on its own, but like a crowdfunding project, all the little bits add up to take you to your goal.

I think this is going to be a good year.

If you’re a fan of Neil and Sean’s work at Clarkesworld (and you definitely should be), then perhaps you might consider a subscription… this is the year when your support could really have an impact. And if you’ve never tried Clarkesworld or Forever, this is a great time to do so. Check out their support page — or why not buy their upcoming Clarkesworld: Year Eight anthology? It collects all the stories from last year, and the proceeds go towards supporting the magazine.

Issue #113 of Clarkesworld has four new stories by Paul McAuley, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Nick Wolven, and An Owomoyela & Rachel Swirsky, and two reprints by Ted Kosmatka & Michael Poore, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

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In her editorial in the latest issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sheila Williams explains why SF often gets a bad rap for predicting the future.

As I write this, I am awash in the flood of published reminisces about Back to the Future Part II’s journey into the future…. Most of these ruminations seem to be rather disappointed with the real 2015… They claim that these special effects from a late eighties flight of fantasy were somehow promised to all of us, but the future didn’t deliver.

I’ve seen these sort of complaints levied at science fiction on numerous occasions. Robots don’t have positronic brains, dilithium crystals are not a thing, and settlements on the Moon and Mars remain a distant dream. Yet anyone who’s at all conversant with SF soon realizes that most science fiction is descriptive rather than predictive…

For all his forward thinking, Isaac was as much a product of his time as any writer. Although he eventually became an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, his early fiction described a society that wasn’t very different from his own… While I’d love to have an FTL drive that would take me to Terminus and Trantor, I don’t want the future to look like the world of 1951, and I don’t expect it to look like 2016. I don’t fault the young man who created that society unaware of the actual changes in mores and social structure that lay ahead anymore than I’d fault today’s writers for not getting their future facts straight.

I’m glad that our prospects are still unknown. I wouldn’t mind a jetpack, but I’m happy that so far we aren’t standing on Nevil Shute’s beach waiting for death from nuclear fallout or from Racoona Sheldon’s screwfly solution.

The first interview I ever did, as a young internet blogger for SF Site in 1997, was a phone interview with the late writer and editor Algis Budrys. He argued the exact same thing. “Why should SF predict anything?… SF is for speculating, not predicting,” he told me. I debated the point at the time, but over the years I’ve come to see that he — and Sheila — are right.

Read Sheila’s complete editorial here.

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