Black Gate

Over at Tangent Online, Rebecca DeVendra reviews the riches at hand in the latest Clarkesworld.

Andy Dudak writes the mind-bending tale “Fool’s Cap.” There [were] points when I felt like my brain had been melted and hung over a clothesline. It was great. Most stories that try to write about time-loops and parallel universes fall into many paradoxical traps: this is the nature of the thing. Dudak handles these ingredients like a master chef. The story follows Beadith, a Tribunal agent chasing a killer, and she gets stranded on an island with him. Weak and helpless, he has given himself over to a sentient moss that affixes itself to his head and shows him several versions of himself. Beadith communes with the moss as well, and starts to converse with other versions of herself…

“Neptune’s Trident” by Nina Allan is a dark post-apocalyptic tale shot through with tension that never really crescendos. Allan’s sybaritic prose beguiled me, so much so that when I got to the end of the story I felt as if I’d had an odd dream, filled with a dread I couldn’t define. The story tells of an invasion by nonhuman beings that work through infection, making people sick. They are called “flukes” in the story and all sorts of political misfortunes befall them, from internment camps to executions. Allan’s world is full of suspicion and dread, and I admit I felt a bit flensed after being immersed in it.

Read her complete review here.

The June Clarkesworld contains original fiction from Andy Dudak, Julia K. Patt, Nina Allan, Sam J. Miller, and A Que, plus reprints from Jay Lake and Aliette de Bodard.

The cover, “Sea Change,” is by Matt Dixon.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Lots of interesting stuff in our magazine coverage this month. Adrian Simmons reviews the March/April issue of Analog, with fiction from Catherine Wells, Michael Flynn, Tom Ballantyne, Adam-Troy Castro and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, and many others. For fans of Asimov’s SF and Analog, we shared the good news about Dell Magazines’ Science Fiction Value Packs, a great way to get packs of back issues at ridiculously cheap prices.

And in a far-ranging interview, our roving reporter Joe Bonadonna grilled Adrian Simmons and David Farney of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly on their earliest influences, what they look for in short fiction, and their long-range plans for the magazine.

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

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Locus is one of the few magazines I read cover to cover. It’s packed full of news, interviews, conventions reports, color pics, enticing ads, and especially reviews of interest to me. For over 40 years it’s provided the most reliable and comprehensive coverage of the SF field on the market.

The June issue is crammed full of good stuff, including:

• A lengthy interview with John Kessel (The Moon and the Other)
• Winners of the Nebula and Bram Stoker Awards
• Complete US and British Forthcoming Books
• Review columns by Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Gary K. Wolfe, Faren Miller, Russell Letson, John Langan, Adrienne Martini, Liz Bourke, and others

One of the most interesting features for me was a spotlight on Scott H. Andrews, founding editor of  the excellent Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Here’s a snippet:

I started BCS in 2008 because the F/SF short fiction field had no dedicated home for literary or character-driven secondary-world fantasy. There were lots of great literary fantasy, slipstream, and magical realism, and decades of great literary SF, but rarely were magazines publishing character-centered or stylistically bold fantasy set in invented worlds.

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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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