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Skelos 2 Now Available

Skelos 2 Now Available

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When we folded the print version of Black Gate, I took some solace in the fact that there would be new magazines that came along eventually and picked up the banner of weird fiction and adventure fantasy. And you know what? I was right. In particular, I’ve been very encouraged by the ongoing success of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the recent launches of the excellent Occult Detective Quarterly and the promising Cirsova.

But the magazine that I think Black Gate readers will be most excited about is Skelos, edited by the triumvirate of Mark Finn, Chris Gruber, and Jeffrey Shanks. In its first two issues, it’s published new fiction by Keith Taylor, Scott Oden, Arianne “Tex” Thompson, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Milton Davis, Robert M. Price, Adrian Cole, and others — including a brand new Dabir & Asim tale from Howard Andrew Jones in the second issue!

The magazine is gorgeously illustrated by professional artists, with full-page art accompanying many of the stories and even the poetry. And the magazine feels substantial in your hands. Issue #2, cover-dated Winter 2017, is 200+ pages in heavy pulp-sized format. It’s the kind of thing you can sink into your chair with for hours, as it transports you to worlds dark and mysterious.

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Premiere issue of New Pulp Magazine Broadswords and Blasters, Now Available in Print and Kindle

Premiere issue of New Pulp Magazine Broadswords and Blasters, Now Available in Print and Kindle

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Broadswords and Blasters 1-smallEditors Matthew X. Gomez and Cameron Mount have launched a new sci-fi/fantasy magazine into the fray, touting it as a “pulp magazine with modern sensibilities.” The debut issue is available on Kindle for $2.99 or in a print edition for $6.99. They have also been posting regular mini-essays called “Pulp Appeal” on their website, spotlighting seminal pulp authors and characters like Conan, John Carter, Elric, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Here is the back copy from the first issue:

The editors of Broadswords and Blasters are proud to present the first issue in a new line of pulp fiction serial publications. The stories in this issue blew us away when we read them, and the overall response confirms what we’ve always suspected: Action-oriented short fiction is still a hot commodity in the 21st Century.

In this, our debut issue, you will encounter subterranean horrors, time traveling lovers, two-fisted private investigators, space Mafiosi, and torturers turned political rabble-rousers, and that’s just a sampling of the great cast of characters you’ll meet along the way. Join us in celebrating the art that is pulp fiction. And tell your friends.

Here is the complete Table of Contents.

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Thrilling, Startling, Futuristic: The Adventure House Pulp Reprints

Thrilling, Startling, Futuristic: The Adventure House Pulp Reprints

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I acquired many fine treasures at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Show here in Chicago last week. And there were more than a few that escaped my vile clutches. One of the biggest mistakes I made was not spending more time in the Adventure House booth. I passed it several times — you couldn’t really miss it, they had an absolutely marvelous wall display with hundreds of colorful pulps — and just about every time my eye was drawn to a rack crammed full of high-quality pulp replicas. Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories. Captain Future, Startling Stories, all bright and crisp and brand new… it looked like a magazine rack from the 1930s, catapulted eight decades into the future.

Now, I’ve picked up one or two pulp replicas in my day. They’re not just reprints of the editorial contents of old pulp magazines, but photostatted replicas, right down to the ads. For example, Girasol Collectables in Canada does a brisk business in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and Spicy Detective replicas. Most cost $35 each, which is more than I paid for the original issues of Weird Tales I have in my collection. So I’m a little guns shy about replicas, and I didn’t stop to investigate that eye-catching rack.

But I thought about it after the show was over, and two minutes online showed me that Adventure House pulp reprints are broadly available — at Amazon and other online sellers — and that they’re much more reasonably priced than the Girasol variety, at just $14.95 each!

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April 2017 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

April 2017 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

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Lightspeed April 2017-smallI’ve fallen into an odd routine with a few online fiction magazines. Instead of reading them as they come out, I hang out at Tangent Online and use their reviews to point me towards interesting stuff. It works out pretty well, and for the most part the TO reviewers keep on top of the flood of online fiction a lot better than I do. Victoria Silverwolf’s review of the April issue of Lightspeed magazine appeared on Tuesday, and it’s got several stories that sound right up my alley.

“Infinite Love Engine” by Joseph Allen Hill is a lightning-paced tale of a cyborg sent on a mission to save the universe from a thing which causes all lifeforms to love it. Along the way she encounters a wide variety of bizarre beings, from a dangerous “braincube” to a planet-sized entity known as the Drowning King. Narrated in a highly informal style, this wild and woolly space opera doesn’t seem intended to be an out-and-out comedy, although it’s hard to take it too seriously with characters called Beeblax and Zarzak…

Much more intimate is “Seven Permutations of My Daughter” by Lina Rather, although its scientific content is no less fantastic. The narrator is a physicist who has built a device which allows her to journey to parallel universes. For story purposes, this might as well be magic. She uses it in an attempt to find a world where her estranged, heroin-addicted daughter is safe and happy…

“Remote Presence” by Susan Palwick seems at first to take place in our own mundane reality. We soon find out, however, that the characters all accept the fact that ghosts are real, and that sometimes they must be helped — or forced — to move on to the next world. The protagonist is a hospital chaplain. In addition to his many other duties, he also has to deal with an elderly woman who has died in the emergency room and who continues to haunt it, only because she is lonely and wants someone to talk to….

Read Victoria’s complete review of the April issue here.

This month’s Lightspeed offers original fantasy by Susan Palwick and Jess Barber, and fantasy reprints by Genevieve Valentine and Charles Yu, and original science fiction by Joseph Allen Hill and Lina Rather, plus SF reprints by Paul Park and Nancy Kress. The non-fiction includes an editorial from John Joseph Adams, author spotlights, Book Reviews by Andrew Liptak, a review of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter by Carrie Vaughn, and an interview with Aliette de Bodard by Christian A. Coleman.

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March/April 2017 Uncanny Magazine Now on Sale

March/April 2017 Uncanny Magazine Now on Sale

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Uncanny magazine March April 2017-smallOne thing I dislike about the current crop of digital magazines is their near-exclusive focus on shorter fiction. Are the print mags our only source of novellas these days? No wonder the Best Novella category for this year’s Hugo nominations is thoroughly dominated by Tor.com.

So it was great to see a long novella by Sarah Pinsker in the current issue of Uncanny. Here’s what Charles Payseur had to say about “And Then There Were (N-One)” at Quick Sip Reviews.

Okay wow, this is a rather strange novella that at first glance fills me with all sorts of hesitations. It’s a bit of a meta-piece, after all, casting the author as not just the character in the story, and not just the main character, but pretty much every character in the story, in a cross-dimensional convention of Sarah Pinskers.

For all this could be an adventure in navel-gazing, though, I find it instead to be a deep and complex look at possibility and the pull of diverging realities, the hurt of loss and the wondering what could make it better, wondering what if the loss had never happened to begin with. Oh, and it’s a murder mystery and [SPOILERS] the murder weapon is a Nebula Award. So it’s also a lot of fun…

Read Charles’ complete review here

The March/April issue of Uncanny includes all–new short fiction by JY Yang, by Stephen Graham Jones, Beth Cato, S. Qiouyi Lu, and Sarah Pinsker, and a reprint by Kameron Hurley, plus nonfiction by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Sam J. Miller, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, Paul Booth, Dawn Xiana Moo, and Shveta Thakrar, plus poetry, interviews, and an editorial. All of the content became available for purchase as an eBook (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) on March 7, 2017.

Here’s the complete fiction contents

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Evil Wizards, Robot Guardians, and the Maze of the Minotaur: Rich Horton on The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson

Evil Wizards, Robot Guardians, and the Maze of the Minotaur: Rich Horton on The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson

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Jack Williamson’s novel The Reign of Wizardry was originally published in three installments in the grand old pulp magazine Unknown, beginning in the March 1940 issue (above left, cover by M. Isip). Its first complete appearance was as a 1964 Lancer paperback (middle), with a cover by none other than Frank Frazetta. It’s been reprinted nearly a dozen times since, including a 1981 paperback edition from Sphere in the UK (right, artist uncredited), and most recently in the 2008 Haffner Press collection Gateway to Paradise.

Jack Williamson was a SFWA Grand Master. His first story appeared in Amazing Stories in 1928 when he was 20 years old and, in a remarkable career than spanned nearly eight decades, he was still winning major awards in his 90s, including a Hugo and a Nebula for his novella “The Ultimate Earth” (Analog, December 2000). He died in 2006, at the age of 98.

The Reign of Wizardry enjoyed multiple editions over the decades, and last year it was nominated for a Retro Hugo for Best Novel of 1941 (it lost out to A.E. van Vogt’s Slan). Recently Rich Horton gave it a warts-and-all review at his website Strange at Ecbatan.

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March Short Story Roundup

March Short Story Roundup

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oie_2535049EywGcOBUIt’s roundup time again, folks. This past March we were treated to two stories from Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine and a trio from Adrian Collins’ Grimdark Magazine. Some I liked, some not so much. Without further jib jab, I’ll start the reviews.

Swords and Sorcery #62 opens with “The Sword Over the River Thar” by Bryan Dyke. It’s a thoughtful and introspective tale of a reluctant soldier looking back over his childhood and his own wartime experiences. There are many fine moments in the story, some quite moving. Unfortunately, the story suffers from moments of weak prose, including an overreliance on the word portal. References to such disparate elements as hoplites, barons, elves, and the distinctly Anglo-Saxon-sounding placename Norwich, make the setting feel ramshackle. I hope to be of service by pointing these things out. This is Dyke’s first published story and there is far more than the germ of a good story on display here. I hope to read more by him in future.

In the past, most recently in December’s roundup, I have been harsh towards the stories of Jeffrey Scott Sims. I have found them to be in possession of solid plots wrapped in clunky, faux-archaic prose. So I was surprised when I found myself quite enjoying his new story, “A Sojurn in Crost.” Bereft of supplies, stranded in enemy territory, “Lord Morca, wizard and warrior of ancient Dyrezan” and his battle-tiger, Treenya, are making their way to the coast and safety when they come across the town of Crost. There’s little mystery to what’s going on in this quite familiar story, but Sims spins his yarn with enough conviction to overcome any staleness. Sims’ style remains similar to that of his previous tales of Dyrezan but is deployed with more control and concision.

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April 2017 Apex Magazine Now Available

April 2017 Apex Magazine Now Available

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Apex Magazine April 2017-smallWalter Mosley is the author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins series, hard-boiled detective novels featuring a black private investigator in post WWII L.A. But he’s also dabbed successfuly in science fiction, with the novels Blue Light and The Wave, and the collection Futureland. So it wasn’t too much of a surprise to see a brand new Walter Mosley story in the latest issue of Apex. Here’s Stephanie Wexler’s take at Tangent Online.

Marilee Frith-DeGeorgio in “Cut, Cut, Cut” by Walter Mosley gets by creating social media advertising to pay rent, producing bad pottery and spending her days pursuing men on a date site called People for People. Pretty sure her ideal man is not her husband or her first date (body odor challenged) and then she meets Martin, man of mystery and plastic surgeon. It isn’t long before Marilee discovers Martin is too good to be true, when she is interviewed by a Detective Wade. The Detective claims he is still a subject of interest in their missing persons case. What is even stranger is Martin’s version sketches a love affair. Despite Martin’s omission, she continues to act as double agent for Detective Wade. The mystery deepens and her tryst with Martin becomes more than just a nightly romp between the sheets. She even confesses to her sister this double agent role is arousing her even more. Martin is pretty accepting of her questions and isn’t even upset that she is probing. At this point, I am committed to seeing where Marilee’s actions lead her and why Martin is so adamant that Marilee visit his lab…

Read Stephanie’s complete review here.

The April issue of Apex contains new fiction from Walter Mosley, Sheree Renée Thomas, Chesya Burke, and Kendra Fortmeyer, as well as poetry, a podcast, an editorial by guest editor Maurice Broaddus, an article on diversity by Tanya C. DePass, and interviews with Sheree Renée Thomas and cover artist Angelique Shelley.

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

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The April Fantasy Magazine Rack

The April Fantasy Magazine Rack

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We had lots of great coverage for magazine fans this month, including Doug Ellis’s look at 1930s-era letters from famed editor and fan Julius Schwartz on A. Merritt, Amazing Stories, and the First Worldcon, and Derek Kunsken’s report on Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine‘s 40th Anniversary Celebration in Manhattan. For vintage magazine fans, we had Rich Horton’s retro-review of the October 1968 Galaxy, and Allen Steele’s new take on the classic pulp hero Captain Future.

We also added no less than three new magazines to our coverage for the first time: 3×3 Illustration, Wired, and the brand new magazine of fantasy, science fiction, Lovecraftian horror, and sword & sorcery, Gathering Storm.

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

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Wired: The Fiction Issue

Wired: The Fiction Issue

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Wired The Fiction Issue-smallI used to read Wired magazine back in the days when it was actually cool to have an email address (you had to be in academia or some tech savvy business). This was in the dark ages before web browsers and the Internet wasn’t just a place to buy stuff, host porn, post cute cat videos and spread fake news. The only people who used Apple computers were in advertising and not everyone had a cellphone; the ones who did liked to showoff by appending their email with “Sent from my Blackberry” — remember Blackberry?

It was when I was just getting into cyberpunk, which was the magazine’s patron saint of sorts. Bruce Sterling was on Wired‘s inaugural cover and William Gibson (see below) was featured on the fourth issue (1.4 in Wired parlance). Wired was for the cultural technoliterati, the folks “wired in” (hence the title in the days well before Wi-Fi) to how computer technology was going to change the world. And, boy, did it ever.

It was also hard to read, because graphic designers thought they were making some sort of statement using odd and multiple fonts along with disorienting colors and just stuff that gave you a headache to look at but had the appearance of cutting-edge style. Fortunately, someone finally realized that jettisoning the visual clutter made it possible for people to actually read the articles instead of just being bedazzled to gaze at them. Though certain tics remain even today, like sticking a 0 in front of double digit page numbers — pagination doesn’t actually being until page 21, or as Wired likes it, 021 — in a vertical position that isn’t easy to see and mostly only on the left hand even pages. C’mon.

Somewhere about the time when the Internet stopped being an interesting forum of discussion and innovation and turned into a wasteland of constant connection and commerce, I let my subscription lapse. But this past January, Wired published its first ever all-fiction “sci-fi issue.” Despite the unfortunate terminology (which has connotations of bad adventure flicks in futuristic settings, although perhaps the disdain is just insider snobbery — do people nowadays still care and argue about such things?), I thought I’d check out the issue’s idea to, according to editor Scott Dadich, “Think about what is possible, what is plausible, what is terrifying, what is hopeful.”

Lot of plausible here with not much hopeful. Which might be terrifying were it not so close to actual experience (both psychological and technological) that today is, alas, more mundane than profound.

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