Black Gate

Asimov’s continues its 40th anniversary celebration with its March/April issue. Thirteen stories, half a dozen poems, and plenty of little asides about what the magazine means to the various contributors.

It begins with “Soulmates.com” by Will McIntosh, a story about love in the digital age which reads like it was meant to be charming, but came off rather creepy. Both characters behave like vengeful stalkers at different points in the story and it all got tied up far too neatly, with the one of the characters essentially “hacking” all of the problems away.

Next up is “Number Thirty-Nine Skink” by Suzanne Palmer. The story concerns a robot designed to colonize an alien world by producing perfect duplicates of various Earth lifeforms and dispersing them across the planet’s surface. The robot continues with this project, despite most of the colonization crew leaving and the only human who stayed behind dying. On top of the robot coping with the concept of loneliness, there are also some native lifeforms that object to a robot that mass-produces invasive species. This one’s a bit tricky to follow at first as the reader figures out what’s going on. The cover art by Tomislav Tikulin depicts a scene from this story.

Next up is “Three Can Keep a Secret …” by Bill John and Gregory Frost. Strip out the mimic suits and space travel and what you’ve got is a basic caper story in which a professional assassin is hired by two separate clients to kill one another. Like the best capers, the solution is right there in plain sight, but not obvious until the story’s end.

“The Ones Who Know Where They Are Going” by Sarah Pinsker is less of a science fiction piece and more of a thought experiment on the virtues of sacrifice.

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Full disclosure before we start this review: one of the contributing authors is a friend of mine, so take that part of the review with a grain of salt.

The issue starts with “Driverless” by Robert Grossbach, one of those “what if machines came to life” stories told in a near-future where driverless cars dominate the roadways. A few decades back, this would have been nothing but fanciful storytelling, but with recent advances in both artificial intelligence and driverless technology, it might actually be a problem that we have to deal with in the years to come.

“The Toymaker’s Daughter” by Arundhati Hazra takes a common story idea of toys magically coming to life and follows it through the real world consequences.

“Ten Half-Pennies” by Matthew Hughes is the first story in what promises to be an ongoing series about a wizard’s apprentice (the next story is actually advertised as set to appear in the May/June issue). Here we see a bullied child grow into a collection agent and then wizard’s apprentice, all the while maintaining his own moral code. Both the characters and the magic system are well-defined in this piece about honor and debt.

“The Man Who Put the Bomp” by Richard Chwedyk is the next novella in his award-winning Saur series. The basic premise is that miniature talking dinosaurs are designed by a genetic research firm and sold as pets. When problems arise with the saurs, production is discontinued and surviving saurs are relocated to shelters. The series concerns one such shelter and the wonderful assortment of odd characters (both saur and human) who live there. I’ve been listening to Richard Chwedyk read these stories for years and it’s impossible for me not to hear his voice in my head when I’m reading them. Not only do we learn about the man who put the “bomp” in these saurs, but we find out why they should never be placed behind the wheel of an automobile (the cover art by Bryn Barnard should give a hint as to how badly it can go). I’m seriously waiting for a collection of all these stories to appear somewhere and will keep you posted when it happens.

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One of the biggest advantages that digital magazines have over print magazines is that it’s very easy to keep digital editions available indefinitely. So if you discover a magazine starting with, say, issue 52, it’s easy to go back and purchase every back issue at “cover price.” Which is why, during my month-long wait between new issues of Nightmare, I can wile away the hours by reading from their extensive backlist.

My favorite story of the issue just happens to be the first, “I was a Teenage Werewolf” by Dale Bailey. This is part of a series of stories Bailey has written that take the titles of cheesy 1950s sci-fi/horror movies and uses them as springboards for brand new pieces (check out “Invasion of the Saucer Men,” “I Married a Monster from Outer Space,” and “Teenagers from Outer Space“). It’s bit of slow going at first, but we eventually get something that’s not only a story about a werewolf, but about how adults will use any excuse to restrict the freedoms of the young “for their own good,” all while doing almost nothing to actually protect them. If nothing else, read it for a prom scene that beats the prom in Carrie, hands-down.

Next up is “Blood Drip” by Brian Evenson (originally published in Granta), a story that plays nicely with the unreliable narrator trope. Coupled with a vague setting, the story feels timeless in both its themes and its surreal imagery.

“The Dark Edge of Life” by Livia Llewellyn, on the other hand, goes out of its way to define time and place as a “found document” style of story. We know that something terrible has happened and the story fills in enough blanks to scare, but not so much to bore us with detail. The added effect of presenting the story in fragments (suggesting that pieces of an original manuscript were either consumed in a disaster or purposefully destroyed) adds to the mystery.

Finally, “The Opera Singer” by Priya Sridhar (originally published in She Walks in Shadows) is a compelling take on the “deal with the devil” and possession tropes, told from the point of view of an aging woman asserting her will against … well, it’s not exactly a demon.

As always, you can go to www.nightmare-magazine.com and read all of these stories (as well as accompanying author spotlights) for free. But Nightmare is only able to continue showcasing this work with financial support, so why not drop $2.99 and buy an issue? If you like it, they’ll have plenty more back issues to sell you.

Michael Penkas has been writing horror, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy stories for years. His first mystery novel, Mistress Bunny and the Cancelled Client, is available in print and electronic editions. Learn more about his work at http://www.michaelpenkas.com/.