Black Gate

Walter 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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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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In his editorial in the April issue, Clarkesworld founder Neil Clarke reflects on his first few months as a full time editor.

I left my day job at the beginning of February, but it’s only now beginning to feel real. Previously, whenever I had vacation time, I’d shift to full-time editor, so when I finally did quit, it just felt like one of those vacations: lots of work, little downtime. The same here, initially: I had a small mountain of tasks on my to-do list and I’ve been head-down plowing through them. It’s hard to notice your world has changed when you are that focused.

It took nearly two months for me to clearly notice that this is my new life. I’ve been doing some freelance consulting for my former employer — a few hours here and there — so I haven’t fully disconnected from them. It’s all been remote assistance, so when I stopped by to help them with a more difficult problem, I noticed that stress that I had felt while working there, was gone. While there, I talked with friends about the ongoing situation and I sympathized, but it didn’t generate any anxiety. I walked to my car knowing that I was free.

A few days later, I left for a week of back-to-back events… Coming back from all the travel was a return to my new routine. Taking care of a sick child, reading story submissions, sending out contracts, paying the insurance bill, vacuuming the house . . . This is my career now. It’s no longer just what I do on the side. It’s not a vacation, so maybe I need to add one of those to my to-do list. I like the sound of that.

Read Neil’s complete editorial here.

The April Clarkesworld contains original fiction from Robert Brice, Bogi Takács, Vajra Chandrasekera, Juliette Wade, and Fei Dao, plus reprints from Adam Roberts and Michael Swanwick.

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The March-April issue of Britain’s longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine has new fiction by Sean McMullen, Tim Akers, Richard E. Gropp, Christien Gholson, and Steve Rasnic Tem, plus David Langford’s Ansible Link, film reviews by Nick Lowe; book reviews, columns by Jonathan McCalmont and Nina Allan, and a guest editorial by Steve Rasnic Tem. Kat Day, writing at Tangent Online, had lots of good things to say about the issue.

This issue of Interzone brings us five substantial short stories… The illustrations in this magazine also deserve a mention – Richard Wagner has created some absolutely gorgeous images to accompany the first three stories in particular….

In “Still Life With Falling Man,” by Richard E. Gropp… we meet Julian, whose job is to hunt down “nexûs” — places where time has inexplicably slowed so much that it almost seems to be frozen, sometimes trapping people with it. We learn that ten seconds for such victims would last a little over twenty-seven million years, giving them (from their point of view) a speeded up journey to end of the universe. This story is a really clever take on the notion of relativity, and also tackles themes of relationships and the difficult idea of accepting oneself as a tiny part of an infinite reality. This was very much my favorite story in this issue…

“The Common Sea,” by Steve Rasnic Tem (who also writes the editorial in this issue) is set in a near-future where sea levels have risen so much that Tom and his extended family are living in a house sitting in water, raised up on stilts. The only form of travel is by boat. One day he sets off the “the Dock” — a collection of floating barges and platforms connected to a small strip of land. The normal trajectory of such a tale would be to describe a hopeless, dystopian future where everything is awful and everyone is downtrodden and depressed. It’s refreshing that Rasnic Tem doesn’t take this route — instead choosing to reflect on the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. A pleasing end to this issue of Interzone.

Read Kat’s complete review here.

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