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Winter 2016 Space & Time Magazine Now Available

Winter 2016 Space & Time Magazine Now Available

Space-and-Time-magazine-127-smallSpace & Time magazine celebrated its 50th Anniversary last year, an extraordinary landmark for a small press magazine. It was founded in 1966 by Gordon Linzner, who edited it for four decades. Hildy Silverman took over in 2007, and she has edited it for the past ten years. Honestly, I thought it had stopped publishing a couple of years ago, so I was surprised to find a copy of the Winter 2016 issue at my local Barnes & Noble last week. We’ve never covered the magazine here, but heck. It’s not too late to start.

Space and Time is one of the few remaining print genre magazines — and one of the only ones that’s not a digest. (The only others I can think of at the moment are Cemetery Dance and Locus.) The Winter 2016 issue has fiction by Peter David, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Christopher M. Cevasco, Mary Mascari, and others. The magazine is well designed and laid out, and illustrated throughout, with professional art by Martin Hanford, Alfred Klosterman, Alan Beck, Skikhar Dixit, and others.

In addition to the fiction and poetry, the magazine has highly readable nonfiction content, including an editorial by Silverman with some excellent writing advice, a film column by Daniel M. Kimmel that looks at classic SF movies (in this case the 1985 Enemy Mine), an interview with Leanna Renee Hieber, a review of The Winter Boy by Sam Tomaino, and more.

Here’s the complete contents.

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January/February Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Now on Sale

January/February Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Now on Sale

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction January February 2017-smallSteve Fahnestalk has been adding magazines to his review column at Amazing Stories, which I greatly appreciate. He’s an astute reader and a fine writer, and he has a talent for piquing your interest without giving away too much of the tale. Here he is on the sole novella in the January/February issue of F&SF.

In “Homecoming,” Rachel Pollack brings us her fourth, and longest, Jack Shade story in F&SF — the previous ones were published in 2012, 2013 and 2015. Jack Shade is a private investigator, occultist, and shaman; I can’t remember having read one before. When Jack gives his business card to someone and they return it with a request for help, Jack is bound to help them, through what he calls a “Guest,” but which sounds like a geas to me. A woman, Carole Acker, comes to Jack to tell him she feels as if part of her soul is missing, and she wants to hire him to help her. Because of the “Guest,” Jack is compelled to acquiesce, and begins tracing the missing part. Several times during the quest, Jack is told by those he encounters that he must stop; that he doesn’t know what he’s doing — but because of the Guest, he has to continue, and eventually brings Carole the missing part. It is then revealed that he shouldn’t have done that… the nay-sayers were right. Jack has three days to undo what he has done, or something extremely bad will happen. Pollack has created a world behind a world; in a New York that sounds just like our New York, there are shamans, night creatures and gangsters of this world and that one. Without being anything like Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series, this reminds me of that type of fiction. I enjoyed it. Rating: a solid ¤¤¤ plus.

Read Steve’s complete review of the issue (and The CW series Riverdale) here.

The cover of the January/February issue is by Charles Vess, illustrating Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s story, “Vinegar and Cinnamon.” Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Check Out the Tangent Online 2016 Recommended Reading List

Check Out the Tangent Online 2016 Recommended Reading List

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We’re approaching awards season, which means that there will be more and more Recommended Reading lists out there for novels, anthologies, collections, genre non-fiction, and much more. But for my money, the most useful list in the genre is the annual Tangent Online Recommended Reading List.

What’s makes Tangent‘s list so special? For one thing, it’s massive — 19 reviewers contributed to it, combing dozens and dozens of magazines and original anthologies to produce a comprehensive list of the top short stories, novelettes, and novellas of the year. And Tangent‘s editor, the tireless Dave Truesdale, has organized the list into one, two, and three star selections, and copiously illustrated the list with magazine and book covers — with live links to publishing websites. It’s a really terrific resource for anyone interested in learning what’s going on in short fiction markets, and I guarantee you’ll make some new discoveries. I cover over 40 magazines every month for Black Gate, and I still managed to find a few new ones. Thanks Tangent!

Here’s a handy set of links to all of their recent lists, including this year’s:

Tangent Online 2016 Recommended Reading List
Tangent Online 2015 Recommended Reading List
Tangent Online 2014 Recommended Reading List
Tangent Online 2013 Recommended Reading List
Tangent Online 2012 Recommended Reading List
Tangent Online 2011 Recommended Reading List
Tangent Online 2010 Recommended Reading List

Fantastic, June and July 1962: A Pair of Retro-Reviews

Fantastic, June and July 1962: A Pair of Retro-Reviews

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Cover by George Barr Cover by Emsh

Another pair of Cele Goldsmith-edited issues of Fantastic, featuring a Poul Anderson serial. And an interesting letter on the subject of Mervyn Peake by Michael Moorcock.

The editorials, by Norman Lobsenz, consider a Russian project to increase silk production by selecting for male silkworms, and a theory that the physical constants may not be constant. The covers are by George Barr (quite good) and Ed Emshwiller (not his best). Interiors are by Leo Summers, Dan Adkins, Emshwiller, and George Schelling.

The letter column was quite irregular in Fantastic, but it’s present in the July issue, for something of a special occasion, perhaps. Michael Moorcock, then a very young writer (his first story, in collaboration with Barrington Bayley, appeared in New Worlds in 1959, and his first solo work in 1961 in Science Fantasy), had read comments about Mervyn Peake and his Gormenghast books in Fantastic earlier that year, and he wrote to mention that Peake (whom he knew well) was seriously ill and unlikely to write another Titus Groan book.

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Occult Detective Quarterly #1 Now Available

Occult Detective Quarterly #1 Now Available

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Back in October, shortly after the launch of the Occult Detective Quarterly Kickstarter, we welcomed co-editor John Linwood Grant to Black Gate to tell us a little about his exciting new project. Here’s what he said, in part.

I was always a Carnacki man, staunch and true. An Edwardian adventurer, willing to admit that I was afraid, but determined to stiffen that lip and see the game through. And as a follower of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghostfinder, I quickly took to games like Call of Cthulhu when it first came out in the eighties. The dedicated investigator pitted against almost indescribable horrors had an obvious appeal. It turned out to be a shock, because unlike our usual, intriguing fantasy RPG campaigns, in CoC we died a lot. A real lot. We were, generally, doomed.

So when we decided that we would launch a new magazine, Occult Detective Quarterly, we knew what we wanted. Someone even suggested that Doomed Meddler Quarterly would be a good alternative name. We wanted tales of psychic detectives, amateur supernatural sleuths, embittered foes of the Dark, and people who ended up having to investigate malevolent forces against their wills. New Lovecraftian terror was welcome, as was old-fashioned pluck. Stories from Carnacki to Constantine, with terrified innocents thrown in along the way.

The first issue of the magazine is now available, and it’s exceeded my expectations in virtually every way. We are witnessing the birth of a major fantasy magazine.

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Modular: Who Would Win? John McClane and James Bond versus a Tribe of D&D Goblins

Modular: Who Would Win? John McClane and James Bond versus a Tribe of D&D Goblins

Knights of the Dinner Table 142-smallI came across a fascinating piece by Noah J.D. Chinn in Knights of the Dinner Table issue 142 (August 2008). Chinn’s guest editorial for the “Gamer’s Pulpit” column is an intriguing analysis of how the realism bar for heroes has shifted radically from the days of our youth (us Gen Xers) until now.

The single most interesting fact he presents is a piece of data generated by Mike Hensley charting how many goblins a first level fighter could kill before dying across all iterations of Dungeons & Dragons (at that point there were 6 versions, 5th Edition not yet having debuted). He ran the combats at least 1,000 times for each fighter in a Javascript simulation program, with the fighter facing the goblins one at a time, producing an average for each version. This is what the data reveals:

  • OD&D: 2.7 goblins killed
  • BD&D: 4.1
  • AD&D1: 4.3
  • AD&D2: 7.3
  • D&D 3e: 10.1
  • D&D 4e: 23.4 Holy Crap!

(It would be interesting to further extrapolate from this data: Does it suggest that a 4e first-level fighter could, one-on-one, take out 4 or 5 OD&D fighters before succumbing? Or that a first-level 4e fighter is roughly equivalent to a third-level fighter in Basic?)

Chinn argues that this hero power inflation cuts across popular culture. He uses the Die Hard movies as an apt illustration:

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Another Magazine Gone: Fantastic Stories of the Imagination Packs it In

Another Magazine Gone: Fantastic Stories of the Imagination Packs it In

Fantastic Stories of the Imaginations January February 2017-smallThere’s a healthy number of genre magazines on the market in 2017… but that doesn’t mean that all (or even most) of them are healthy. The vast majority of independent and small press magazines operate on paper-thin margins, which means that even minor setbacks can put the whole enterprise at risk.

We lost one of the highest-paying short fiction markets in the industry last month, as publisher Warren Lapine announced on January 18th that a combination of financial difficulties and personal setbacks had conspired to doom Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. In his Message From the Publisher he writes:

It’s with deep regret that I announce the closing of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. The January issue will be our final regular issue and the People of Color Take Over issue will be our final issue. I’m really proud of the body of work that we produced at Fantastic. There are a number of reasons that now is the time for me to close the webzine. According to my projection, it’ll take more than five years for Fantastic to become self sustaining, and I simply don’t feel that that is a reasonable time frame.

I had planned to stick it out another year, but my personal life has made that much more difficult. Last month my daughter’s house burned down and she and her family are staying with us while we try to sort everything out with an insurance company that doesn’t want to pay; and this month my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer… For those of you who are owed portions of an electronic subscription. Your subscription will be filled with electronic copies of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Cascadia Subduction Zone. That means you’ll be getting two magazines for every one we owe you.

Fantastic Stories of the Imagination was founded in August 2014, and published 17 issues over the past two and a half years. It took its name from the fondly-remembered digest Fantastic Stories, published from 1952-1980 by Ziff-Davis, and continued the original’s numbering scheme. The modern version was a free webzine that published two new stories every issue, plus reprints, reviews and commentary. It was edited by Warren Lapine and published by Wilder Publications, and available free online, and in a variety of digital formats for $2.99.

We last covered Fantastic Stories of the Imagination with the September-October 2015 issue. The final issue will be the Kickstarter-funded People Of Color Take Over Fantastic Stories, inspired by the hugely-successful People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction special issues of Lightspeed and Nightmare. The last regular issue contains new fiction by Wendy Nikel and Tamoha Sengupta; check it out here.

January 2017 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

January 2017 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

Nightmare Magazine January 2017-smallThe January 2017 issue of Nightmare is now available, with original fiction from Cadwell Turnbull and Carrie Vaughn, and reprints by Lilliam Rivera and Ashok Banker. Here’s Kevin P Hallett’s thoughts from Tangent Online:

“Loneliness is in Your Blood” by Cadwell Turnbull

This short dark horror describes a female vampire who makes herself invisible while she hunts for human blood. The vampire thinks she is immortal, living among the American slaves. But after hundreds of years, she finds herself growing old. As she ages, she is compelled to suck a young couple dry of their blood, an act that induces her own pregnancy and the birth of a new girl vampire…

“Redcap” by Carrie Vaughn

This horror short introduces us to Violet, the youngest of three sisters charged with minding the sheep. Her elder sisters warn her each day of the dangers outside the home, and that they will all starve if any sheep are lost. One day, as she prepares to herd the sheep from the pasture, she finds a lamb missing. Violet is torn between her sister’s warnings about the dangers and their cautions about starving if any sheep are lost.

She decides to search for the lost sheep. Drawn to its bleating, she climbs the haunted hill where the demon, Redcap, traps her… The story had a nice pace to it and the plot was engaging, pulling the reader forward…

Read his complete review here. The complete contests of the issue are listed below.

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January 2017 Apex Magazine Now Available

January 2017 Apex Magazine Now Available

Apex Magazine January 2017-smallThe January 2017 Apex is a Special Double Issue, with brand new short stories by Lia Swope Mitchell, Iori Kusano, James Beamon, and J.J. Litke, a novelette by Ursula Vernon, and reprints from Rich Larson and Mike Allen. Mike’s contribution, “The Quiltmaker,” the sequel to his Nebula nominee “The Button Bin,” is a massive 20,000 word novella which Mike calls “easily my most gruesome published work to date” (and as the guy who edited and published his The Black Fire Concerto, easily the most gruesome novel I’ve ever read, I can tell you that means something). Here’s editor Jason Sizemore with his summation of the January issue.

Ursula Vernon returns to our pages with the powerful “The Dark Birds.” This dark fantasy (and dare we say…horror) allegory is my favorite Vernon piece thus far. James Beamon explores time travel and racism in “Soliloquy in a Cheap Diner Off Route 66.” “The Invisible Box” is a fun and quick little story of revenge. “Next Station, Shibuya” by Iori Kusano continues the conversation our magazine has ongoing with Japanase-influenced horror and SF. In “Mag, the Habitat and We” Lia Swope Mitchell’s little protagonists protect and fight for their home. Our two reprints are from Mike Allen and Rich Larson. “The Quiltmaker” is a terrifying dark fantasy/horror novella that will leave a mark. “Masked” by Rich Larson will have you thinking of Black Mirrors, but hey, his story came out before the third season of the show, so we’re giving Rich all the credit for the idea!

Our nonfiction includes interviews with cover artist Aaron Nakahara and author James Beamon. Dr. Amy H. Sturgis contributes a scholarly piece titled “The Once and Future Chief: Tecumseh in (Science) Fiction.” Be sure to check out our August, 2017 issue as Dr. Sturgis will be our guest editor and will focus on First Nations and Indigenous authors of North America.

Poetry contributors this month include Barton Paul Levenson, Laura Madeline Wiseman, Tracy May Adair, and Amanda Pekar.

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

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The Late January Fantasy Magazine Rack

The Late January Fantasy Magazine Rack

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The-Ultimate-RPG-Handbook-rack Black-Static-56-rack Shimmer-35-rack Some-of-the-Best-from-Tor-2016-rack

This month the first issues of Analog and Asimov’s SF in their new bimonthly format arrived — with an extra 16 pages each — and I like the change already. We also welcome PC Gamer to our magazine checklist for the first time, courtesy of the irresistible Ultimate RPG Handbook special issue. But the big news for short fiction fans was the release of the massive annual compilation of Some of the Best From Tor.com, containing 25 recent stories from one of the most acclaimed digital magazines in the genre. I hope you managed to nab a free copy at Tor.com while they were available! If not, free copies are still available through Amazon.com and B&N.com for a limited time.

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

As we’ve mentioned before, all of these magazines are completely dependent on fans and readers to keep them alive. Many are marginal operations for whom a handful of subscriptions may mean the difference between life and death. Why not check one or two out, and try a sample issue? There are magazines here for every budget, from completely free to $35/issue. If you find something intriguing, I hope you’ll consider taking a chance on a subscription. I think you’ll find it’s money very well spent.

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