The June-July 2011 Black Static cover features a still from the film Agnosia and a crop of the artwork by Riki Rawling for V. H. Leslie’s story “Time Keeping.”  Here’s the opening paragraph:

Monday, 11:29 am

Time waits for no man. But Howard wasn’t just any man and Time would wait if it had to. Howard didn’t like to keep it waiting if he could help it. In fact, the only time he had kept time waiting was June 5th 2006 and that was only for 5 minutes and 45 seconds while he, agitated and bewildered, ran through darkened streets back to his flat, then around his workshop hastily setting in motion the mechanisms to resume it once more.

Other fiction for this bimonthly dark horror magazine includes “For Their Own Ends” by Joel Lane, “Electric Dreams” by Carole Johnstone, “Hail” by Daniel Kaysen, and contest winner “The Harvesting of Jackson Cade” by Robert Davies.

You can subscribe to the print version here, or the electronic edition here; there’s also a special discounted rate for a joint subscription to both Interzone and Black Static.

Congratulations to Realms of Fantasy on its 100th issue (which actually has 101 pages, but I guess the extra page is for good luck, and doesn’t make for quite the same alliterative headline), a notable accomplishment for a publication that has been brought back from the dead on several occasions.  In fact, the magazine has had five publishers, with founding editor Shawna McCarthy the only person who has been there for the duration, according to the issue’s “Little Known Facts.”  Fiction contributors include Leah Bobet, Josh Rountree and Samantha Henderson, Sharon Mock, Thea Hutchinson, Patrick Samphire, Euan Harvey and David D. Levine, as well as poetry by Ursula Le Guin and various art, book, gaming and movie reviews along with the regular Folkroots column by Theodora Gass.  Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

I’m guessing that Realms of Fantasy has never before been mentioned in the same breath as The Paris Review, so we here at Black Gate Tastemaker Central take particular pleasure in noting that the latter literary bastion has much of interest to the same people who read the bastion of fantasy genre tales (and perhaps vice versa?). The Summer 2011 features “Art of Fiction” interviews with  Samuel R. Delany and William Gibson, as well as a story by Jonathan Lethem, “The Empty Room,” that’s available online.

I’m beginning to wonder when Interzone will be retitled Jason Sanford’s Interzone; the guy seems to snag the magazine’s featured author slot more times than most. Case in point is the May/June issue  in which Sanford’s “Her Scientification, Far Future, Medieval Fantasy” gets top billing, “plus other new stories” by Suzanne Palmer, Lavie Tidhar, Will McIntosh and Jon Ingold.  I normally find Sanford intriguing, but this is one of those “I’m in an artificial reality, and I find out that I’m not as real (or more than real) as I thought” stories that is okay but doesn’t add much to the trope that hasn’t already been done before. The first paragraph is a real hoot, though, which I felt the rest of the story didn’t really hold up to:

Princess Krisja Jerome stood before her tower’s lone window, listening to the sounds of battle in the courtyard below. Metal clashed on ceramic. rifle shots zinged off the castle’s stone abutments. Lasers buzzed the moat to steam. From Krisja’s viewpoint, it looked like her father’s knights fought valiantly against the invaders from, well, from somewhere outside the kingdom. Where exactly, Kris couldn’t say. But then so few invaders announced their origins. It simply killed the romance, claiming to be a Sir Lancelot hero when you really hailed from a Scranton or Sheboygan nowhere.