Black Gate

The November issue of Locus, the news magazine of the science fiction & fantasy field, is packed with great stuff, including reports on the British Fantasy Awards and the Gemmell Awards, interviews with Pat Cadigan and Cat Rambo, a column by Cory Doctorow, a report on Japanese Science Fiction, obituaries of Robert E. Weinberg and Ed Gorman, and reviews of short fiction and books by Alastair Reynolds, Juliet Marillier, Laird Barron, Ilona Andrews, Jonathan Strahan, and many others. In addition to all the news, features, and regular columns, there’s also the indispensable listings of Magazines Received, Books Received, British Books Received, and Bestsellers. Plus short fiction reviews by Rich Horton and Rachel Swirsky. See the complete contents here, and click on the images above for a peak at the complete Table of Contents.

We last covered Locus with the September issue. Locus is edited by Liza Groen Trombi, and published monthly by Locus Publications. The issue is 62 pages, priced at $7.50. Subscriptions are $63 for 12 issues in the US. Subscribe online here. The magazine’s website, run as a separate publication by Mark R. Kelly, is a superb online resource. It is here.

See our November Fantasy Magazine Rack here, and all of our recent Magazine coverage here.

Woof. It’s tough keeping up with all the great fantasy magazines on the market these days. But somebody’s got to do it, and it might as well be us.

Our tireless freelance reporters this month included John Linwood Grant, who told us about the (now successful!) Kickstarter for Occult Detective Quarterly, the new journal of supernatural sleuths and psychic investigators, and Rich Horton, who gave us a Retro-Review of the May and June 1965 issues of Amazing Science Fiction, with stories by Poul Anderson, Clifford D. Simak, Roger Zelazny, David R. Bunch, and many others. We also revisited the Summer issue of Lackington’s, containing a new sword & sorcery story by Heroic Fantasy Quarterly editor Adrian Simmons.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our October 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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There’s a great mix of new and established writers in the latest F&SF, including masters such as Robert Reed, Gardner Dozois, Esther M. Friesner, and Matthew Hughes, and newcomers like Lilliam Rivera, Minsoo Kang, and James Beaumon. Tangent Online‘s Bob Blough has particular praise for Esther Friesner and Robert Reed in his online review.

Esther M. Friesner starts it off with a fairy tale based on Puss n’ Boots called “The Cat Bell.” This concerns a famous actor at the end of the nineteenth century and his love of cats. It is told from the viewpoint of his pinched, mean cook who is in love with her master. She hates cats and hates having to feed them every night—all 19 of them. Each cat has a bell around its neck. But the cat bell is what the cook uses to gather the cats for a meal. Inevitably Puss n’ Boots shows up and works his inevitable charm on the household. The cook receives her heart’s desire in a way that gives her just desserts as well. Fun and a well-rounded main character make this most enjoyable…

Robert Reed writes a lot of short stories. Most of them of very high quality, but in “Passelande” he has outdone himself. This is a sneaky story concerning Lucas Pepper. Lucas lives in a time just years ahead of ours in which the world is falling apart outside the town of Passelande. The plot is complicated and concerns identity as people have backups who, if given a body, are almost as real as the progenitors themselves.

I read it twice. I thought it was excellent on the first read but the second solidified it as absolutely first rate. It has all the echoes of great Gene Wolfe stories but remains completely Reed’s.

The cover is by Kristin Kest. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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One of the (many) reasons I enjoy Tor.com is the enormously diverse range of fiction, compliments of Tor’s large cast of contributing editors. The sixteen stories posted there in the last three months were selected by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Justin Landon, Diana Pho, Liz Gorinsky, Melissa Frain, Susan Chang, and other fine editors. They include YA fantasy, horror, hard SF, urban fantasy, dystopian SF, space opera, dark fantasy, post-apocalyptic SF, and historical fantasy. What’s not to love?

A new story is posted at Tor.com every week. Not sure which ones you’d enjoy most? That’s what Tangent Online is for. Here’s Seraph on Rebecca Campbell’s “The High Lonesome Frontier,” illustrated by Linda Yan (above left).

As I drifted along these memories of the man who wrote the song, and the woman who sang it, and the mother who loved it, and the granddaughter who wasn’t even sure it was real yet loved it anyways… I realized the true beauty of this story, and the legitimacy of its claim to being science fiction. This story is of a 4th, or perhaps 5th-dimensional viewpoint, following the thread of this one song in a direct course from one life to the next, experiencing it all as a single moment in time, yet never in a linear fashion, as if the story itself is the river of which the song forever echoes, where does that water run. Magnificent.

Read Seraph’s review here. And here’s Jason McGregor on Lettie Prell’s hard SF tale “The Three Lives of Sonata James,” illustrated by Kevin Hong (above middle).

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Adrian Simmons is one of the editors of the highly-regarded Heroic Fantasy Quarterly magazine. But he’s also a fine writer in his own right, as Charles Payseur reminds us this week, in his review of the Summer 2016 issue of Lackington’s magazine, containing Adrian’s short story “How I Came to Be Raised by Balniwan the Fool.”

Just ahead of the release of their next issue, Lackinton’s has dropped the paywall on their Possessions issue and it’s a great collection of rather dark stories… there are a lot of ways that these tales circle around what it is to have possessions, and what it is to be possessed. Most of the pieces are solidly fantasy, the magic alive and well and further complicating the theme but also giving it a wild fire that casts some wicked shadows…

This story takes an interesting angle on the idea of possessions, focusing on a child living in a world defined by violence. Under the rule of their father, Alebeg, the children as possessions, less than people. He scares them and he awes them and he lives a bit like a cult leader on a hill, though with a rather Norse feel to it. So as I read [the] main possession of the story is that of the main character, who is treated more like property than a person… It’s certainly a visceral story that comes with the taste of blood and the bitterness of being someone powerless in the face of force and power. A fine way to kick off the issue!

Read Charles’ complete review here.

Every issue of Lackington’s has a theme, which gives the magazine an interesting focus. The theme this issue is “Possessions.”

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Uber-editor John Joseph Adams has had enormous success with his Kickstarter-funded DESTROY special issues of Lightspeed, Fantasy, and Nightmare. The original idea sprung from the ludicrous Alt-Right claim that women were destroying science fiction; that gave birth to the brilliant and groundbreaking Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue of Lightspeed, a massive 479-page issue released in 2014.

Since then there have been multiple successful iterations, including Queers Destroy Science Fiction in June of last year, and People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction, in June of this year. The People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy! special issue of Fantasy will be published in December, and The People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! special issue of Nightmare magazine arrived this month. Here’s the description from the website.

Nightmare was founded on the core idea that all horror is real horror. The whole point of this magazine is that horror fiction is vast. It is inclusive. Horror is about all people and for all people.

The People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! special issue exists to relieve a brokenness in the genre that’s been enabled time and time again by favoring certain voices and portrayals of particular characters. Here we bring together a team of POC writers and editors from around the globe to present horror that explores the nuances of culture, race, and history. This is horror for our present time, but also — most of all — for our future.

People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! is 100% written and edited by people of color, and is lead by guest editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia, with editorial contributions from Tananarive Due, Maurice Broaddus, Arley Sorg, and others. It features four original, never-before-published short stories, from Valerie Valdes, Nadia Bulkin, Gabriela Santiago, and Russell Nichols. Plus, there’s four classic reprints by Nisi Shawl, Priya Sharma, Terence Taylor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz. On top of all that, we also have an array of nonfiction articles and interviews, from Alyssa Wong, Chesya Burke, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, and Chinelo Onwualu, as well as original illustrations by Kimberly Wengerd, SainaSix, Maggie Chiang, and Reiko Murakami.

Enjoy the destruction!

Here’s the complete TOC for this special issue.

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