Black Gate

In his editorial this month, Jason Sizemore celebrates the rich world of international SF.

I offer my customary welcome with a bit more glee than usual. This is a special month for Apex Magazine as we spotlight one of my favorite things: international SF. To make this happen, I turned to Cristina Jurado, a Spanish author and editor-in-chief of SuperSonic, the first bi-lingual semiprozine for the English and Spanish speaking markets. She did a wonderful job selecting the original fiction this month.

When Lavie Tidhar and I did the first volume of The Apex Book of World SF in 2009, few Anglo readers could name more than a handful of non-Anglo (specifically the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain) genre authors. On the eve of the release of The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 4, it pleases me to report that the scope of the genre has broadened substantially in the last six years. Perhaps the most buzzed about science fiction novel of the year is Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. The world owes Ken Liu a debt of gratitude for bringing Liu’s work to English readers.

This issue of Apex also includes a new story from Liu Cixin, “Mountain.”

Here’s the complete TOC.

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The September issue of the online magazine Nightmare is now available. In his editorial this month, John Joseph Adams justly celebrates his recent awards, nominations, and publications:

We won another Hugo! Our sister-magazine Lightspeed took home the rocket for Best Semiprozine, but also, just as exciting there were two other Lightspeed Hugo victories: Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s story from Lightspeed, “The Day the World Turned Upside Down,” won the Hugo for Best Novelette, and one of our illustrators, Elizabeth Leggett, won the Hugo for Best Fan Artist…

In other awards news, the World Fantasy Award nominations were also announced recently, and I’m pleased to report that I have been once again nominated in the “Special Award, Professional” category. I am extremely honored to be nominated again (now for the seventh time overall, including three Anthology nominations), and I will be in Saratoga Springs, New York for the World Fantasy Convention (November 5-8) when the awards are presented (where I look forward to losing to Gordon Van Gelder in person)… And ICYMI last month: Both Lightspeed generally and our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue specifically have been nominated for the British Fantasy Award!

Releasing this month, on September 15, is a new anthology I edited called Loosed Upon the World, the definitive collection of climate fiction… Then in October comes the debut of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, part of the prestigious Best American series. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy).

As we’ve noted previously, John Joseph Adams is one busy guy. It’s a full time job just keeping up with him.

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies #182 has new stories by Margaret Ronald and Jack Nicholls, a podcast by Suzanne Palmer, and a reprint by Wendy N. Wagner.

“Murder Goes Hungry” by Margaret Ronald
“It’s not—” I sighed as we reached the doors of the veterans’ wing. “It was a cruel thing for him to do. She has her vows, and too many of us veterans are too scarred to be any sort of decent companion.”

“Flying the Coop” by Jack Nicholls
They were in sight of the churchyard gates when the witch’s hut hopped out from between two buildings, thirty paces behind them.

Audio Fiction Podcast: “Moogh and the Great Trench Kraken” by Suzanne Palmer
It was more water than ever should be in one place, something so vast he scarcely could find the words. “Oh,” he said. “This is a very large river indeed.”

From the Archives: “Cold Iron and Green Vines” by Wendy N. Wagner (from BCS #69, May 19, 2011)
Most people didn’t bother replacing teeth; they all went wicker-and-cogwork as young as they could.

Issue 182 was published on September 17, 2015. Read it online completely free here.

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Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, one of the most reliable sources of new adventure fantasy, arrives right in time with their 25th quarterly issue. This one contains short stories by Michael Liguori, Linda Donahue, and N.G. Lancaster, plus a special surprise from editor Adrian Simmons.

“Beast Hunter’s Song,” by Michael Liguori
In a land where terrible creatures once terrorized the landscape an aging hunter gets one more chance to face a one of a kind beast.

“White Elephants,” by Linda Donahue
Escorting the Indian bride of the Shah of Persia is a task fraught with danger. Bandits! A disagreeable elephant! But when a passing Roc decides the elephant would make a fine meal, Darius, chosen treasure guard, has to take some big risks to get it all back.

“Engines Rarely Seen,” by N.G. Lancaster
In the breath before the armies move out again, a vendetta brings a group of vagabond mercenaries into the docks outside of town.

“Ram Daskanyarda,” by Adrian Simmons About a year ago, HFQ editor Adrian Simmons got the idea of updating/re-booting/re-imagining the H.P. Lovecraft classic “Nyarlathotep” for our modern, troubled, age. Turns out, from a marketing standpoint, this was a poor investment of time. However! Although it isn’t quite S&S fiction, he considered posting the story here at HFQ, but thought better of it when he realized that he could have the re-animated corpse of H.P. himself take time off from dispensing advice on the internet to read it aloud!

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Neil Clarke’s editorial in the latest issue of Clarkesworld is entitled “The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews.”

The sad truth about short fiction reviews is that the overwhelming majority of them have little-to-no impact on readership. After monitoring the incoming traffic for the online version of this magazine for nine years, I can say that the typical review has a statistically insignificant impact on the readership of a story or issue. The only notable exception to this has been reviews on high traffic sites, like io9 or Tor.com, that focus specifically on a single story. As the number of stories in a review increases, there’s a dramatic drop-off in story readership… Shouldn’t reviews of good stories have the effect of encouraging people to read the story?

In a discussion on his editorial here at Black Gate, Neil elaborated on his thoughts:

A review that doesn’t send new readers is functionally equivalent to emailing your thoughts to the author. Nothing wrong with that, but there are reviews that send the author a message and readers to the story. I’m saying that the we should all aspire to the former and that most reviewers aren’t. That’s the sad truth I was referring to in the title.

Issue #108 of Clarkesworld has seven stories — five new, and two reprints — from Robert Reed, Erica L. Satifka, Bao Shu, Elizabeth Bourne, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Tom Purdom, and Una McCormack.

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Black Gate blogger Derek Kunsken was the first to alert me to the birth of new online market Lackington’s last June. The Ottawa-based magazine is edited by Ranylt Richildis and appears four times a year; it publishes art and speculative fiction between 1,500 – 5,000 words in length. It has produced seven issues, like clockwork, which had me counting on my fingers… have there really been that many quarters since last June?

Anyway, it’s high time I started paying attention to this fine magazine, adding it to our regular magazine coverage, and answering some of your questions. Questions like, “Who the heck is Lackington?” That riddle is answered on their Donate page:

Once upon a time, a British bookseller named James Lackington made books affordable for nearly everyone. It was the late eighteenth century, literacy was on the rise, but books were still a luxury item for many Londoners. Lackington changed that by popularizing the cheap “remainder” and making a tidy profit for himself, in the bargain.

We’ll never make a profit at Lackington’s Magazine. Our principles, in fact, have us in a bind. We want to keep content accessible to everyone, the way Lackington did. But we also want to pay contributors, because we believe creative labour must be compensated. To do so, we rely on donations to buy stories and art. Help keep this project afloat, support creators, and ensure we remain open to anyone with an internet connection.

Lackington invented remaindered books? Seriously, that guy is totally my hero.

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One of the fun games you can play with F&SF these days is “Guess Which Editor Bought What?” New editor C. C. Finlay has been acquiring fiction at a good clip (and indeed, his very first issue, July-August 2014, produced a Nebula Award winner, Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i.”) But certainly outgoing editor Gordon van Gelder left him with a fair inventory of stories, so for at least his first year or so, the magazine will be a mix of his taste and Gordon’s. That’s the theory, anyway.

The September/October issue is only Finlay’s fourth, but fans are anxious to get a sense of his taste, so there’s lots of discussion and conjecture. But however you look at it, the magazine is packed with lots of great fiction, including tales from Paolo Bacigalupi, David Gerrold, Ron Goulart, Dennis Etchison, Elizabeth Bear, Richard Bowes, Albert E. Cowdrey, and others.

Jerard Bretts at Tangent Online has already reviewed the issue, with high praise for the contents:

Albert E. Cowdrey… always writes entertainingly. This time he contributes “The Lord of Ragnarök,” a fantasy novella in the grittily realistic Game of Thrones tradition, set in medieval Europe sometime after the Crusades. With some nice wordplay on the author’s name, it tells the story of slippery Sir Richard de Coudray and his rise from peasant boy to knight. One of Cowdrey’s major achievements here is to make us feel sympathy for this slippery and essentially Machiavellian character…

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