Black Gate

The June issue of Asimov’s SF has arrived in stores. It usually goes on sale simultaneously with its sister Dell Magazines publication, Analog, but I didn’t see it on the stands. I was especially interested in Analog this month, as it’s the commemorative 1000th issue, a pretty big milestone. (If you’re having trouble doing the math, it takes a monthly publication 83.3 years to produce 1,000 issues. Analog published its first issue, under the name Astounding Stories, in January 1930, and has been publishing more-or-less continuously ever since.) I guess I’ll have to make another trip to the bookstore this month.

I always read Sheila Williams’ editorials in Asimov’s first, but there’s a guest editorial this issue, from author Kathleen Ann Goonan, on “Teaching Science Fiction,” which is also very readable. Robert Silverberg’s always-interesting Reflections column, titled “The World to End Last Month” this month, talks about the rich tradition of apocalyptic SF:

Foreseeing the end of the world has been the business of SF writers ever since there was such a thing as science fiction, and back before it. What sort of end-of-the-world stories our primordial preliterate ancestors told we will never know, but the oldest such tale that has come down to us, the five-thousand-year-old Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, describes a deluge that drowns the whole Earth, save only a certain Ziusudra… The Norse myths give us a terrible frost, the Fimbulwinter, in which all things die except a man and a woman who survive by hiding in a tree; they follow the usual redemptionist course and repeople the world, but then comes an even greater cataclysm, Ragnarok, the doom of the gods themselves, in which the stars fall, the earth sinks into the sea, and fire consumes everything….

As always, there’s lot of great fiction too. This month’s authors include Django Wexler, Henry Lien, and Sarah Pinsker.

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The sixth issue of the online-only Fantasy Scroll Magazine is now available.

Fantasy Scroll was launched with a Kickstarter campaign on April 23, 2014. It raised enough to fund a full year (four issues); all four issues were released last year, as promised. Since then it’s been continuing nicely under its own steam. It has supported itself by selling merchandise, launching a mobile app, soliciting donations — and through a Starlight Patrol of enthusiastic backers and supporters at Patreon who help keep the magazine going.

The previous issue was cover-dated February 2015; this one is April 2015. It seems to have switched to bi-monthly publication, which is great news.

Fantasy Scroll has published original short fiction by Sarah Avery, Ken Liu, Mike Resnick, Piers Anthony, Cat Rambo, Rachel Pollack, and many others. The magazine is edited by Iulian Ionescu, Frederick Doot, and Michelle Muller. It contains all kinds of fantastic literature, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal short-fiction.

Issue #6 includes nine short stories from Robert Reed, Ian Creasy, Beth Cato, and others, plus interviews and a handful of book and film reviews.

In his editorial, Iulian Ionescu reports that the magazine is experimenting with publishing longer stories (novelettes) for the first time.

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The April issue of the online magazine Nightmare is now available.

One of the things I most enjoy about Nightmare is its broad focus. Editor John Joseph Adams delivers all kinds of dark fantasy within, from zombie stories and haunted house tales to visceral psychological horror. Fiction this month is:

Original Stories

The Island by Desirina Boskovich
Spring Thaw by Charles Payseur

Reprints

Ishq by Usman T. Malik (from Black Static 43, Nov 2014)
The Age of Sorrow by Nancy Kilpatrick (from Postscripts, Spring 2007)

The non-fiction this issue includes the latest installment “The H Word,” Nightmare‘s long-running horror column, plus a feature interview with Richard Chizmar, the man behind Cemetery Dance, as well as author spotlights, and a showcase on this month’s cover artist.

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We kicked off our coverage of John Joseph Adams’ excellent online magazine Lightspeed last month with #58, the March 2015 issue.

Lightspeed publishes fantasy and SF, both new fiction and reprints. Among other stories, the April issue contains a reprint from Ken Liu, author of the breakout fantasy novel The Grace of Kings, just released this month. Now’s your chance to get a taste of his short fiction, and see what all the fuss is about. Here’s the first two paragraphs of “The Ussuri Bear”:

By the time we arrived in the Manchu settlement of Tanbian, the Russian expedition had already left a day earlier.

For the last five days, we have been moving through deep snow and dense primeval forest in the Changbai Mountains, trying to catch up. The superiority of the mechanical horse is becoming clearer with each passing minute.

There’s also a free excerpt from The Grace of Kings in the ebook version.

Here’s the complete fiction contents of the April issue.

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The newest issue of Clarkesworld, one of the most acclaimed fiction mags on the market, is now on sale. Issue 103 contains six short stories — including one by the source of that other big 2015 Hugo controversy, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, who also writes as the notorious blogger and book reviewer “Requires Hate.”

Sriduangkaew’s long-running campaign of intimidation and death threats against other genre writers was detailed in Laura J. Mixon’s exhaustive “A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names,” for which Mixon was nominated for a 2015 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer.

Short stories featured this issue are:

“The Empress in Her Glory” by Robert Reed
“Let Baser Things Devise” by Berrien C. Henderson
“The Petals Abide” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
“Postcards from Monster Island” by Emily Devenport
“Noble Mold” by Kage Baker
“Weep for Day” by Indrapramit Das

Non-fiction includes “Small Markets, Big Wonders” by Julie Novakova, a report on a roundtable on Spanish science fiction by Alvaro Zinos Amaro, “Another Word: The Precious Five-Star and the Reviewers of Mount Doom” by Alethea Kontis, and an editorial, “Danger! Radioactive!,” by Neil Clarke. This issue also includes three podcasts.

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