Black Gate

There’s a new magazine devoted to speculative fiction with the unfortunate name of Bull Spec, which I hope for the sake of the editorial team does not become known as “BS” for short. I haven’t read any of the contents, though you can get a pdf version (there is a print edition as well)  Radiohead-fashion, i.e., pay what you want. Fiction  by C.S. Fuqua, Peter Wood, Natania Barron, Michael Jasper, with a serial graphic story by Mike Gallagher.

Its stated quarterly mission in exploring new fiction is: “Bring the best of speculative fiction with a focus on Durham-area authors and stories to a wide audience for shared discussion.” One critical comment: a particularly ugly website that looks like something coded in 1999.

World Literature Today (WLT), a publication of the University of Oklahoma, has an issue devoted to “International Science Fiction,” though a cursory review of the contributing authors makes it seem that “international” has a mostly eurocentric slant. In any event, you can read Kij Johnson’s story, “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” as well as various non fiction pieces and a poem that have been posted on line.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesterday, when publishers employed serials as a way to keep reader interest in wondering what happens next.  Apex is presenting a 20 part serial of “Jesus and the Eightfold Path” by Lavie Tidhar.  You can start reading here.

Justina Robson’s review of Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes in Strange Horizons struck a number of resonating chords for me. For one, her ambiguous feelings about reviewing echo my own. It’s not only wondering if you’re getting it right, it’s how one offhand sentence can be taken to mean something entirely more than what you intended. I, too, had my problems with Bold as Love (which you can read about here and here and here).

I also share with Robson that Gilman is undoubtedly an interesting and possibly profound writer, but it’s much too much work to appreciate it (“This brings us to the real doorstop of the collection, both in terms of page count and prose density. “A Crowd of Bone” by Greer Gillman invokes Celtic myth concerning…this is the longest story here; it is also the hardest to read… English majors who’ve ploughed through Beowulf in the original Old English may find the language fascinating. This English major found it tedious, and at one point just stopped reading it and went on to the next story. I did eventually go back to finish it, but still considered it rough going”).

Finally, I too struggle with balancing mixed feelings about books I actually like, or should like more, at certain levels, as, for instance, my review of Robson’s latest novel.

Over at Locus, Lois Tilton reviews Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Jim Baen’s Universe, and Subterranean Online.

In his “Scores” column for Strange Horizons, John Clute reviews the first volume (Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps) of Peter Straub’s American Fantastic Tales. As usual, it’s always an experience to read Clute.

Over at Clarkesworld, stories by Gord Sellar and Matthew Kressel, plus an interview with Kij Johnson.  This cool cover by Georgi Markov is called “Retro Robots.”

Kind of makes you miss magazines that you could hold in your hand and leave out on your coffee table to display.