Black Gate

The September issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction looks like a very solid issue, with fiction from Carrie Vaughn, Ian R. MacLeod, Robert Reed, Rich Larson, Jack Skillingstead, and others. Here’s the full description from the website:

Jack Skillingstead’s September 2016 novelette takes us on a terrifying journey across universes. Pursued by malevolent forces, a brilliant mathematician struggles to clean up “The Whole Mess.” Failure means destruction and subjugation. The penalty for success could be worse.

New York Times best selling author, Carrie Vaughn exposes the debilitating consequences space travel holds for some in “The Mind Is Its Own Place”; appearing in Asimov’s with her first professional sale, Tegan Moore shines a light on some dark and twisted relationships in “Epitome”; Human and Alien intelligence slowly learn to communicate in Rich Larson’spoignant excavation of “All that Robot…”; World Fantasy Award winner Ian R. MacLeod introduces us to the enigmatic “Visitor from Taured”; Peter Wood runs  us around in some vicious, yet funny and perhaps all too recognizable, “Academic Circles”; and Robert Reed tells the old tale of migration and the promised land — this time with aliens — in “Dome on the Prairie.”

Robert Silverberg’s hilarious Reflections column reveals why it’s not a good idea to exclaim, “‘Darn,’ He Smiled”; Peter Heck reviews works by Charlie Jane Anders, Laura Anne Gilman, Fred Chappell, and others; plus we’ll have an array of poetry and other features you’re sure to enjoy.

The cover is by the great Michael Whelan.

Over at Tangent Online Bob Blough raves about the issue, and especially Ian M. McLeod’s “A Visitor from Taured,” which he calls “a potential award nominee.”

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People have been watching Trevor Qachari’s rein as the new editor of Analog pretty closely. It’s been four years exactly since he took over from Stanley Schmidt in September of 2012, plenty of time to get a sense of his editorial taste.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Trevor is a bit more experimental than Stan, especially in his willingness to blend genres a little. The October issue features a pair of stories that playfully mix SF and pulp thrillers, including perhaps the last thing I would have expected to see in Analog: a Shadow homage by Robert R. Chase, “Revenge of the Invisible Man.” Here’s a snippet from Jason McGregor’s review at Tangent Online.

The Shadow gets on the trail of the Invisible Man. Sort of. In the near future, a company has been working on human invisibility and has succeeded in making a human invisible — but not in getting rich off it, which means the guinea pig gets no reward either and, worse, it turns out not to be reversible. So the heads of the company start falling down stairs and having their throats cut. This prompts a call to a mysterious Power who sends his agent, our protagonist, in to discover how the invisible man has been committing these crimes from the locked room in which the company holds him. The agent adopts the name Kent Allard (one of the Shadow’s real names) for this mission (which… seems likely to be one of a series) and proceeds to investigate. The strongest feature of this story is probably the direct, sinewy prose… a good read.

While we’re at it, he’s a sample from Jason’s review of the other SF thriller, Adam-Troy Castro’s novella “The Soul Behind the Face.”

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I’ve been relying more and more on Charles Payseur’s Quick Sip Reviews to point me towards the fiction that will interest me each month. Charles doesn’t just tell me why he enjoys each story… he gives me enough detail to let me know which stories will grab my attention right out of the gate. Here he is on Rich Larson’s 12,000-word novelette “The Green Man Cometh” in the latest issue of Clarkesworld, for example.

This is a rather thrilling story about technology and damage, about ideology and fanaticism… [it] shows a nicely cyberpunk vision of Earth post-Calamity (which sounds familiar and I can’t remember if I’ve read a story or stories set in this world before), where most of the population has concentrated into one megacity. And in that megacity Eris is a cab driver with prosthetic arms and a bit of a chip on her shoulder because she was born on a neoprimitive colony and then sent away because of her disability… The action is fierce and the characters are fun. I quite liked the play between Eris and Kit, the government agent that gets assigned to her. The tech and the setting are richly explored and it’s a fun story with some nice points… Eris has to grapple with her own frustrations with the system against the terror that is what the cult plans. And yeah, it’s fun and it’s fast and it hits a lot of nice beats with its twists and turns. For an edge-of-your-seat thrilling science fiction, look no further. Very fun and very worth checking out!

Read his complete review of the issue here.

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Locus magazine publishes a quarterly Forthcoming Books wrap-up, and have been doing so for at least the last 25 years, and the latest one appears in the new September issue. In years gone past I spent a lot of time pouring over those lists, making shopping lists and then calling Mark Zeising Books in California to make an order (or two). So reading the following brief post by my friend and follow book collector Arin Komins brought back a wave of nostalgia.

Spent the evening with the quarterly Locus Mag forthcoming books list in hand, highlighting happily (books to buy for the next 6 months or so.)

This will be followed by the quarterly pre-ordering frenzy, I suspect.

This says something sad about me, I am sure 🙁

It’s funny how publishers catch and lose my interest, too. Finding less and less on the Tor list (with a few notable exceptions), and more and more on the Titan one. Still have a few holdouts with Ace, Roc, Del Rey, etc, but Pocket is all but dead to me anymore.

Still, well pleased to see a new Norman Spinrad coming… and 2 new Kim Newman books. A couple of new Ken MacLeod. The expected 2 new L.E. Modesitt Jr books (of which Recluce Tales is what I am most waiting on.). No new non-Star Wars Alan Dean Foster (sad!). A handful of fun looking anthologies. Jared’s new book! New non-YA by Rachel. New Simon R. Green (Moonbreaker). Misc various others, including guilty pleasure reading (latest Cal Leandros book, newest Valdemar, Butcher anthology, new Chris Golden anthology, some Ari Marmell,etc.). Latest pretty thing from Charnel House that I won’t be able to afford.

Ah the exciting life of a book fiend. Don’t you envy me? (Hah!)

As a matter of fact I do, Arin! These days I spend all my time writing blog posts, and not nearly enough reading magazines. But I did recently renew my subscription to Locus. So that’s a step in the right direction.

See all the details on the September 2016 issue of Locus here. We last covered Locus with the July 2016 issue.

The September Clarkesworld, issue #120, is packed with new fiction by Jack Skillingstead, Rich Larson, Bogi Takács, and others, plus reprints by Tom Crosshill and Nick Wolven.

Here’s the complete list of stories.

“The Despoilers” by Jack Skillingstead
“Aphrodite’s Blood, Decanted” by Jennifer Campbell-Hicks
“The Green Man Cometh” by Rich Larson
“The Opposite and the Adjacent” by Liu Yang
“Toward the Luminous Towers” by Bogi Takács
“The House of Half Mirrors” by Thoraiya Dyer
“The Dark City Luminous” by Tom Crosshill (from The Baltic Atlas, 2016)
“No Placeholder for You My Love” by Nick Wolven (from Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2015.)

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Tor.com has become one of the top sites on the internet for genre fiction — and I love the artists and writers it’s been attracting recently. I don’t have time to keep up with it every week…. but that’s what Tangent Online is for, to point out the stuff really worth my time. Here’s Kevin P Hallett on Aliette de Bodard’s “Lullaby for a Lost World,” illustrated by Alyssa Winans (above left).

Charlotte has died a brutal death to save the house in this short fantasy set in a bleak future. Her torn body allows her master and the house to live on. Interred, she struggles to have some meaning, to influence the world, to put an end to this cycle of death. When her master prepares a new girl, Charlotte strains against the earth of her entombment; can she play a role again? It is hard to put this short story down once you’ve begun…

And here’s Jason McGregor on Rajnar Vajra’s “Her Scales Shine Like Music,” illustrated by Jaime Jones (above middle).

In this first-contact story, “Poet” is a bodyguard on a small commercial interstellar mission to a planet that’s not expected to be very interesting but turns out to have a sort of abandoned campsite with alien tech. Legally, someone must stay behind to keep this claim for the finders and their company and it falls to Poet to be the guy. Some of the story is taken up by the narration of Poet’s battle against loneliness and depression and the (cold) elements and so on, in a pretty usual castaway tale. Things change considerably when something emerges from the lake near the two campsites… the gigantic alien seemed quite novel and fascinating… an enjoyable read.

And finally, here’s Jason again on one of the last stories selected by David Hartwell for Tor.com, “Up from Hell” by David Drake, illustrated by Robert Hunt (above right).

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