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The May Fantasy Magazine Rack

The May Fantasy Magazine Rack

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 251-small Black Static 63-small Pulp Literature Spring 2018-small Uncanny Magazine 22 May June 2018-small
GrimDark Magazine 15-small Interzone 275-small Vastarien 1-small Weird Fiction Review 8-small

Lots of great new fiction in May, including new stories by Mark Lawrence, Nicholas Kaufmann, Kelly Robson, John Shirley, Naomi Novik, Erica L. Satifka, Steven J. Dines, Lynne Jamneck, Katharine Duckett, Michael Washburn, Robert M. Waugh, and many others.

The new kid on the block this month is Vastarien from Grimscribe Press, a 284-page journal “of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti as well as associated authors and ideas.” The first issue includes contributions from Michael Penkas, S.L. Edwards, Devin Goff, Christopher Ropes, Patricia Allison, Carl Lavoie, and many others. I’m also very pleased to see the latest annual issue of Weird Fiction Review, with a big color section devoted to the great D&D artist Erol Otis, plus new issues of GrimDark and Pulp Literature.

Here’s the complete list of magazines that won my attention in May (links will bring you to magazine websites).

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Birthday Reviews: Barry B. Longyear’s “Collector’s Item”

Birthday Reviews: Barry B. Longyear’s “Collector’s Item”

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Analog April 1981-small2 Analog April 1981-back-small

Cover by George Angelini

Barry B. Longyear was born on May 12, 1942.

Longyear received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1980, the year he won the Hugo and Nebula Award for his novella “Enemy Mine,” which was turned into a film starring Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr. That same year his novelette “Homecoming” also appeared on the Hugo ballot, as did his novelette “Savage Planet” the following year. His stories have twice topped the Analog Reader’s Poll and he has been nominated for the Prometheus Award three times and the Sidewise Award once.

“Collector’s Item” was first published by Stanley Schmidt in the April 27, 1981 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. The following year it was translated into German to be reprinted in Analog 2, a German language version of the magazine. Longyear also included the story as the lead off to his collection It Came from Schenectady.

Longyear examines the unenviable task of cleaning out a parent’s belongings after their death. For Jay Hall, who barely knew his father and had little to discuss with him, the natural inclination is to just take everything and sweep it into the garbage. A call with his father’s attorney, however, causes him to look through some of the papers his father has collected over the years. Among those papers are essays written by five of his father’s students in 1955.

The essays were assigned on prosaic topics, “What I Did Last Summer,” “My Favorite Dream,” “Things I Think About.” As Jay begins to read them, however, he finds that these five students all had things in common… notable, references to someone known as the Major. Furthermore, their essays all seemed to indicate that they were being fed knowledge of America’s future involvement in Viet Nam.

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Birthday Reviews: Elizabeth Engstrom’s “Seasoned Enthusiast”

Birthday Reviews: Elizabeth Engstrom’s “Seasoned Enthusiast”

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Cover by Allen Koszowski
Cover by Allen Koszowski

Elizabeth Engstrom was born on May 11, 1951. She occasionally writes using the name Liz Cratty as well.

Engstrom’s collection Nightmare Flower was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and she co-edited the anthology Imagination Fully Dilated with Alan M. Clark, which earned them an International Horror Guild Award nomination.

“Seasoned Enthusiast” first appeared 1990 in Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine: Horror, the seventh issue, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Engstrom later reprinted the story in her 1992 collection Nightmare Flower.

The short work “Seasoned Enthusiast” tells two parallel tales, one about a dancer performing in front of an audience, the other the story of a divorced woman who is considering her own self-worth in light of her husband’s new life.

The more interesting story looks at Lillian, whose life has fallen apart after her divorce and she’s living in squalor while her husband and his new wife start their life together in an upscale house, a symbol of the success which eluded the couple while they were married. Unable to separate her life from his, and seeing herself as a failure because she lost him, Lillian drives over to her ex-husband’s house without a firm plan in mind, feeding her obsession with him without any plan of action.

In the other story, a crowd gathers around to watch a woman dance in an apparently primitive setting. As the dance sequences are interwoven with Lillian’s story, it becomes clear that things aren’t quite as they seem. There is an element of danger in the woman’s dance and she has suffered for her craft as she has perfected it.

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Birthday Reviews: William Tenn’s “The Lemon-Green Spaghetti-Loud Dynamite-Dribble Day”

Birthday Reviews: William Tenn’s “The Lemon-Green Spaghetti-Loud Dynamite-Dribble Day”

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Cavalier January 1967-small

William Tenn was born Philip Klass on May 9, 1920 and died on February 7, 2010. He was named an Author Emeritus by SFWA in 1999.

Tenn received a Nebula nomination in 1966 for the short story “The Masculinist Revolt” and his collection Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2005. In 2006, he received the Forry Award from the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS). He was one of the Pro Guests of Honor at Noreascon 4, the 62nd World Science Fiction Convention, held in Boston, MA.

“The Lemon-Green Spaghetti-Loud Dynamite-Dribble Day” was originally published as “Did Your Coffee Taste Funny This Morning?” in the January 1967 issue of Cavalier, a men’s magazine edited by Robert J. Shea. The same issue carried essays by Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon. The story gained its current title the following year when Tenn included it in his collection The Square Root of Man. In 1973, it was reprinted in German in Venus—Planet für Männer. Tenn included it, against his better judgement, in the NESFA Press collection Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume 1 and selected it for inclusion when Mike Resnick invited him to pick one of his stories for the anthology This Is My Funniest: Leading Science Fiction Writers Present Their Funniest Stories Ever. An audio version was produced for Drabblecast B-Sides #29 in 2013.

Tenn claims that “The Lemon-Green Spaghetti-Loud Dynamite-Dribble Day” “certainly isn’t science fiction,” however if you consider science fiction as a look at how technology changes lives, it can arguably be considered as such (and if you argue science fiction is what is written by science fiction authors, it definitely is).

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May Short Story Roundup

May Short Story Roundup

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oie_755858H7Y1HRDMEach month I sit down with the hope of reading nothing but good, solid sword & sorcery fiction. I may read all over the place most of the time, but I do the roundups to get a fix of the stuff that inspired me to blog in the first place. When I open the electronic covers and start reading, I want swords, wizards, warriors, big honking monsters. The basics.

When I finally sat down to read this month’s batch of stories for the roundup, I felt as if I was being deliberately messed with by everyone. There were a few applicable stories, but for the most part, what I read could have been found in the confines of other, less genre-affiliated magazines. It’s not that any of the stories were bad. In fact, they were quite good. They just weren’t heroic fantasy and that’s what I was looking for. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting old and cranky, maybe I’m just a dope, but I was not an especially happy S&S reader this month.

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, the gold standard by which I judge even the superlative new Tales from the Magician’s Skull, let me down. Issue 36 has the usual complement of three stories and three poems. I don’t dislike any of them, but I only like one of them.

“More Blood Than Bone” by E.K. Wagner is not the one I liked. The issue of who is entitled control of natural resources and who gets to wield the power they confer is couched in a nautical tale starring a sea monster, a naturalist, and a sorcerous aristocrat.

Divided into several sections, each commences with an entry from The Bestiary of Tierence Stillson, Esq.. In the first section, Tierence herself appears on the deck of a ship hunting the dangerous haukfin, in order to gain a better, up-close understanding of the creature and one of its teeth, a source of great magical potential.

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Birthday Reviews: Susan Casper’s “Mama”

Birthday Reviews: Susan Casper’s “Mama”

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction August 1984-small The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction August 1984-back-small

Cover by Paul Chadwick

Susan Casper was born on May 8, 1947 and died on February 24, 2017. Casper was married to author and editor Gardner Dozois.

Casper’s first story was “Spring-Fingered Jack” in 1983 and in 1988, she co-edited the anthology Ripper! (also Jack the Ripper). Other stories included “Covenant with a Dragon,” “Nine Tenths of the Law” and “Up the Rainbow.” Her short fiction was collected posthumously in Up the Rainbow: The Complete Short Fiction of Susan Casper and she also had a novel, The Red Carnival, published posthumously.

“Mama” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Edward L. Ferman, in the August 1984 issue. It would be reprinted in 2017 in Up the Rainbow.

Gloria’s mother is over-bearing and somewhat typical of a Jewish mother in “Mama,” although she could have been just as stereotypical had she been a mother of numerous other ethnicities. The key is that she disapproves of Gloria’s life choices and while Gloria is just trying to live her own life, suffering from a sudden breakup with the boyfriend she didn’t seem to have much invested it, her mother is trying to “fix” her life, making it better in the only way she knows how.

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Birthday Reviews: Gene Wolfe’s “The Cat”

Birthday Reviews: Gene Wolfe’s “The Cat”

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Cover by Rowena
Cover by Rowena

Gene Wolfe was born on May 7, 1931.

Wolfe received the Nebula Award for his novella “The Death of Doctor Island” in 1974 and in 1982, he received the Nebula again for the novel The Claw of the Conciliator, the second volume in his Book of the New Sun. He has a total of twenty Nebula nominations and in 20013 was recognized by SFWA as a Grand Master.

He has received the World Fantasy Award for his novels The Shadow of the Torturer and Soldier of Sidon as well as for his collections Storeys from the Old Hotel and The Very Best of Gene Wolfe. The Shadow of the Torturer also won a British SF Association Awards. The Sword of the Lictor received the August Derleth Award from the British Fantasy Society and the final volume of the Book of the New Sun, The Citadel of the Autarch, received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Prix Apollo. The later, fifth volume, The Urth of the New Sun was recognized with the Italia Award.

Wolfe has also received a Rhysling Award for his poem “The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps.” In 1985, he was the Guest of Honor at Aussiecon Two, the Worldcon in Melbourne and a GoH at the World Fantasy Con in 1983. He received a Skylark Award in 1989 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from World Fantasy Con in 1996. In 2007, Wolfe was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

“The Cat” was first published in the Souvenir book for the 1983 World Fantasy Convention. Gardner Dozois picked the story up for the inaugural volume of his long-running The Year’s Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection and also reprinted the story in Magicats!, co-edited with Jack Dann. Wolfe included the story in his collection Endangered Species and later in the collection The Castle of the Otter, published by Centipede Press and which included the earlier Zeising Brothers book The Castle of the Otter along with additional material published in the intervening 23 years. In 1990, the story was translated into French as “Le Chat,” and has been published in France at least three times.

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Imaginative Tales, July 1957: A Retro-Review

Imaginative Tales, July 1957: A Retro-Review

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Imaginative Tales July 1957-small Imaginative Tales July 1957-back-small

Imaginative Tales was the adventure oriented companion magazine to William Hamling’s Imagination. Imagination (often called Madge) is still affectionately remembered by some older fans — it was a fun magazine, though I can’t say it published much really memorable fiction. Imaginative Tales arguably tried to be even funner, but I think less successfully, based on my limited exposure.

(Hamling, by the way, is a controversial figure, not really remembered, I gather, as affectionately as his magazine. He lived to be 95, dying in 2016. He is reported to have rather gruffly rebuffed any attempts to discuss his SF publishing career over the past few decades of his life. He started Rogue magazine in 1955, as a competitor to Playboy, and much of his latter-day publishing efforts were in the “adult” genre.)

The cover is by Malcolm Smith. The interiors are uncredited, though I recognize a signature for “Becker,” and the ISFDB suggests W. E. Terry for another. The interiors are 2 color, by the way.

This issue features a novella, “World of Never-Men,” by Edmond Hamilton, and five short stories. One is by Robert Moore Williams, “The Red Rash Deaths,” and the other four are by some combination of Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg, who, as I recall, were working together at the time, producing reams of fiction for the likes of Hamling.

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Birthday Reviews: Craig Strete’s “Time Deer”

Birthday Reviews: Craig Strete’s “Time Deer”

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Cover by Rick Sternbach
Cover by Rick Sternbach

Craig Strete was born on May 6, 1950.

Strete was nominated for two Nebula Awards in 1976 for the short story “Time Deer” and the novelette “The Bleeding Man,” both published in December of 1974. He received a third Nebula nomination in 1981 for the short story “A Sunday Visit with Great-Grandfather,” which also placed in that year’s Locus Poll. His first collection was initially published in the Netherlands with subsequent collections appearing in the United States.

He published the magazine Red Planet Earth in 1974, focusing on Native American science fiction, and his novels have been published under his own name and the pseudonym Sovereign Falconer. He is of Cherokee descent and Native American themes and characters often appear in his works.

“Time Deer” was originally published in the November 1974 issue of Worlds of If, edited by Jim Baen. Baen included it in The Best from If, Volume III and Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss selected it for their Best SF: 1974. The story was included in Nebula Award Stories Eleven, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin. Strete included it in his collection If All Else Fails…, which was first published in Dutch. In 1986, Joseph D. Olander, Martin H. Greenberg, and Frederik Pohl picked it as a representative story for Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology. The story was been translated into Dutch, French, German, and Italian.

In “Time Deer” Strete takes a look at an eighty year old man whose daughter-in-law and son have decided it is time for him to enter a nursing home. Even as his son, Frank Strong Bull, has conflicted feelings about the action and Frank’s over-bearing wife, Sheila, just wants to get the man put away, he communes with his past, focusing his attention on a deer, although whether the animal is actually there or not is left up to the reader.

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Birthday Reviews: Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica”

Birthday Reviews: Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica”

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Clarkesworld
Clarkesworld

Catherynne M. Valente was born on May 5, 1979.

She began publishing poetry and fiction in 2004 with the appearance of the poem “The Oracle Alone” and the novel The Labyrinth. She has won the Hugo Award twice for her work on SF Squeecast and won the Andre Norton Award for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which had only appeared on her website at the time.

Her novel The Orphan’s Tale: In the Night Garden received the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award and, along with its sequel Orphan’s Tale: In the Cities of Coin and Space, the Mythopoeic Award. Her short story “The Future Is Blue” earned Valente a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She won the Lambda Award for her novel Palimpsest and her poem “The Seven Devils of Central California” was recognized with the Rhysling Award. Valente has also won five Locus Awards, two each in the novella and young adult book category and one in the novelette category.

“A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica” was originally purchased by Neil Clarke and Nick Mamatas for Clarkesworld issue 20, published in May 2008. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer selected the story for Year’s Best Fantasy 9 and Rich Horton reprinted it in Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 2008 Download. The story was also used in Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine and Valente reprinted it in her collection Ventriloquism. It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.

Maps are cool, and although Valente doesn’t include any actual maps in “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” she does provide detailed descriptions of six fictional maps of Antarctica and the South Orkney Islands. Her descriptions, written as if they appeared in an auction house catalog, go far beyond simply providing details of the map.

Valente’s catalog entries paint a picture of two very different cartographers whose lives and interests intertwined. Nahuel Acuña is a serious cartographer who does his best, often under trying conditions, to accurately map the edges of the world. His quest is aided by his ability to garner funding from a variety of sources. On the other hand, Villalba Maldonado, who was on the same initial voyage as Acuña, and scrambles for any money in pursuit his interests, seems to relish depicting the world as he would like it to be, as well as trolling his rival with his creations.

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