Black Gate

In his review of Pulp Literature 10 last April, Fletcher Vredenburgh wrote:

Pulp Literature has been around for several years now, having published ten thick issues… While it has only a few swords & sorcery stories, I was blown away by PL’s quality and richness…. Pulp Literature is filled with a wide variety of genres. Senior citizen detectives, Jewish monsters in contemporary Ontario, poetry, all sorts of good things. Don’t let that literature tag scare you off. The editors’ love of pulp in so many varieties means they have a love of storytelling and don’t neglect it. How such a magazine has escaped wider notice eludes me… Pulp Literature reminds me of Michael Chabon’s undertaking to revitalize contemporary literary writing with plot and narrative — which I completely appreciate and love.

That sounds pretty darn good. After I read Fletcher’s review I promised myself I’d check it out, so I was delighted to see the Winter 2017 issue had not one but two stories by acclaimed fantasy author Matthew Hughes (Black Brillion, The Damned Busters), one under his full name and a second under “Matt Hughes.” (He also publishes under Hugh Matthews, because why not?) Plus there’s also fantasy tales by FJ Bergmann, Rebecca Wurtz, Anna Belkine, Carolyn Oliver, Mel Anastasiou, and JM Landels.

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The May/June F&SF features the second appearance of Matthew Hughes’s new series character Baldemar, in the issue’s cover story “The Prognosticant.” Matt had an interview with Stephen Mazur on the Fantasy & Science Fiction blog in which he discusses the series.

It’s a continuation of the career of young Baldemar, who was introduced in the last issue in “Ten Half-Pennies” as a budding wizard’s henchman working for a thaumaturge who calls himself Thelerion the Incomparable (though his fellow wizards would likely change that to “Incompetent”).

In “The Prognosticant,” Baldemar and his supervisor, Oldo, are sent out to a ruined ancient city in the desert to bring back a magical object known as the Helm of Sagacity. But the Helm, it turns out, is not just an object: it’s an entity, and a powerful one. And it has its own agenda…

I’m writing the life of a character in a Jack Vance-inspired, Dying Earth fantasy world. Like most of my characters, Baldemar is an outlier, as becomes evident as he deals with what the world hands him. He’s not your average henchman.

The cover is by Maurizio Manzieri. The issue also includes fiction by Richard Bowes, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Leah Cypess, Shannon Connor Winward, and others.

Victoria Silverwolf has a fine review of the issue at Tangent Online, with particular praise for the stories by Brian Trent, Kelly Jennings, Zach Shepard, and R. S. Benedict. Here’s a snippet.

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Tor.com is one of the most successful and acclaimed sources of genre short fiction we have. They routinely lead the field in award nominations, as they did with this year’s Hugo nominations. And as recently as 2014, they swept the short fiction categories of the Hugo Awards.

They publish one new work of short fiction every week, completely free, at the Tor.com website. But because they don’t have regular issues, I don’t do a very good job of including them in our regular magazine coverage. So that means I have to report on them as best I can every few months. Which brings us to today’s massive catch-up post featuring 30 stories and 11 flash fiction pieces — enough to fill two decent-sized anthologies.

And what a dazzling list of contributors! Over the last 6+ months Tor.com has published brand new fiction from Peter S. Beagle, Carrie Vaughn, Yoon Ha Lee, Lavie Tidhar, Max Gladstone, Jo Walton, Kelly Robson, M. Dellamonica, Theodora Goss, Allen Steele, S.B. Divya, Stephen Leigh, and many others, plus reprints from Ken Liu, Ellen Klages, and others. All of it gorgeously illustrated by a talented group of artists, and available online completely free. You owe it to yourself to check it out.

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Howard V. Hendrix is experiencing a bit of a comeback in the pages of Analog magazine. He launched his career with a well-respected SF trilogy in the late 90s [Locus Award nominee for Best First Novel Lightpaths (1997), Standing Wave (1998), and Better Angels (1999)], but he hasn’t published a novel since Spears of God in 2006.

But since September 2007 he’s published no less than eight stories in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, including two novellas:

“Palimpsest ” – September 2007
“Knot Your Grandfather’s Knot” -March 2008
“Monuments of Unageing Intellect” – June 2009
“Red Rover, Red Rover” – July-August 2012
“Other People’s Avatars” – July-August 2013 – novella
“The Perfect Bracket” – March 2016 (with Art Holcomb)
“The Infinite Manqué” – May 2016
“The Girls with Kaleidoscope Eyes” – May-June 2017 – novella

The May/June Analog contains that last one, the novella “The Girls with Kaleidoscope Eyes.” Victoria Silverwolf, in her Tangent Online review, summarizes it as follows.

A government agent investigates an apparent attempt by a teacher to kill a classroom full of girls with a bomb, although at the last second he protected them from the explosion, seriously injuring himself in the process. She interviews the teacher while he is in custody in a hospital. He reveals his strange motive for his aborted crime, stating that “before there can exist a world of machines that can pass for people, there first must be a world of people that can pass for machines…”

Silverwolf praised several other stories this issue, including work by Julie Novakova, Eric Choi, Manny Frishberg and Edd Vick, Lavie Tidhar, and Bud Sparhawk. Here’s a few of her story descriptions I found most intriguing.

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Rocket Stack Rank gives Evan Dicken’s “How Lovely Is the Silence of Growing Things” three stars, saying:

The world is ending, but Kate and her daughter Mel survive by hiding in the basement during the day eating peanut-butter-and-spider sandwiches… Plenty of action. Plenty of tension.

Intriguing, although it’s not much of a story description. I prefer Jason McGregor’s review at Tangent Online, which has a more off-the-wall summary:

I could describe a lot of the surrealistic details about the sun turning green and poets hanging around like bats and centipedes fighting at Ohio Stadium but, basically, this is about a kid and one of her two mothers running around in a sort of nightmare…

Read Jason’s complete review here.

The May issue of Apex contains new fiction from Evan Dicken, E. Catherine Tobler, and Karen Lord, as well as a reprint by John Chu, a podcast, an editorial by Jason Sizemore, short fiction reviews by A.C. Wise, an article on writing by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, plus interviews with Evan Dicken, Stephen Korshak, Robert J. Sawyer, and cover artist Marcela Bolívar.

Here’s the complete TOC, with links to all the free content.

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The cover story this issue is “Nexus,” by Michael Flynn, with cover art by Tomislav Tikulin. A series of coincidences brings a time-traveler, an immortal, a group of aliens mostly passing as humans, a secret military android, a telepathic private-eye, and an alien invader all together. It has a lot of plates spinning, and looks a little silly packed into that last sentence, but Flynn pulls it off.

The nonfiction article this issue is “Sustainability Lab 101, Cuba as a Simulation of Possible Futures,” by Stanley Schmidt. Condense Cuba’s history, pick a couple of outlandish internet comments and go! Dr. Schmidt presents a good case, and opens up some interesting discussions. Still… for a sci-fi guy, I find his lack of imagination about the future to be a bit alarming.

“Europa’s Survivors” by Marianne Dyson. This has a great illustration by Vincent DiFate, but the story doesn’t quite measure up to it. The tale demands a bit too much of the reader — rockets landing on Europa have to actually smash through the ice (a “thin layer”) and go down the same shaft where the pumps that keep the ice from being a “thick layer” are housed; robo-stress relief pets and a convenient lack of qualified personnel. I liked the basic set-up with the cancer patient going one-way due to the radiation exposure in space and, although it was a bit much, the problems faced and the solutions found were quite good.

“Eli’s Coming,” by Catherine Wells. One of seven (eight if you count “Nexus”) time travel stories in this issue. An owner of a time-traveling business tries it out for himself, ends up at the wrong place and time, instead of the Herod’s Palace at the top of Masada in 10 BCE, he ends up at Herod’s Palace at the top of Masada as the Roman 10th Legion is just finishing up their siege ramp. This one I liked quite a bit. The rebels under Eleazar are desperate, the situation is dire, and Eli (the MC) is trying his best to keep calm and survive until his retrieval chip activates.

“Time Heals,” by James C. Glass. Another time travel story. I’m going to admit that at this point I wasn’t in much of a mood for another one, so after the first attempt to change the past and discovering one couldn’t change the past, I skipped it.

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In his report on Edinburgh’s Monthly Mini-Convention, Event Horizon, M Harold Page alerted me to the existence of the Scottish SF magazine Shoreline of Infinity, which somehow managed to produce 7 issues and still fly below my radar. Not to worry! I’ve added it to the list, making it the 48th genre magazine we track. Whew! That’s a lot of reading every month.

In other news, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed issue 63 of Swords and Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #32 in his April Short Story Roundup. For our vintage digest fans, Rich Horton reviewed the February 1962 issue of Fantastic, and Matthew Wuertz continued his issue-by-issue journey through Galaxy magazine with October 1953, containing the first installment of Isaac Asimov’s classic The Caves of Steel.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our early May Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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