Black Gate

Now that I’m home from the Nebula Awards and the Windy City Pulp and Paper show (and aaalmost finished unpacking all the great loot I brought back), I can start getting caught up. I’m way behind in my reading at Tor.com for example, and they do some darn fine stuff. The Fantasy/SF tale “Recalled to Service” by Alter S. Reiss looks like a splendid place to start.

Ao Laiei does not know what happened to the great revolutionary war hero Uroie Aei since she resurrected him, but she has long intended to find out. Finally, a clue from an unlikely information source – the confusing art of dream-diving – enables her to be present for a surprising strike against an academic aligned with the revolutionary government. Laiei quickly discovers that it is not the physical target she is concerned with, but his field of study, which may unlock the secret of what mysterious deeds the elusive Uroie Aei has been up to since his disappearance. This compelling tale from writer Alter Reiss is a rich look at the world of the Shoesi and the magic that drives Ao Laiei’s unique abilities.

Alter S. Reiss is the author of the Tor.com novella Sunset Mantle. “Recalled to Service” was posted at Tor.com on February 24. It was edited by Liz Gorinsky, and illustrated by Sung Choi. It’s available here.

We last covered Tor.com with Delia Sherman’s science fiction detective story “The Great Detective.” For more free fiction, see our recent online magazine coverage.

As it nears its landmark 200th issues, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has kicked off a subscription drive aimed at enabling the magazine to publish novellas for the first time (yeah!) The details are on the website, but here’s the basics.

BCS ebook subscriptions, available exclusively at WeightlessBooks.com, are only $15.99 for a full year/26 issues. (That’s less than 30 cents a story!) Subscribers can get issues delivered directly to their Kindle or smart phone, and they get new issues early, a week before the website. Forthcoming authors in BCS include Marie Brennan, Gregory Norman Bossert (whose first BCS story “The Telling” won the World Fantasy Award), Mishell Baker, KJ Kabza, Stephanie Burgis, Tony Pi, Catherynne M. Valente, Kameron Hurley, A.M. Dellamonica, Claude Lalumière, and more.

From now until June 3, if you buy a BCS ebook subscription or renew your existing subscription (you can renew at any time), you can help unlock our drive goals. Since BCS #1 in 2008 – 200 issues, 419 stories! – over a third of our fiction has been novelette-length or longer. Longer stories work great for awe-inspiring fantasy worlds, like you’ll find in every issue of BCS. Our word-count limit for submissions, 10,000 words, has always been among the longest if not the longest of pro-rate online magazines. With your help, we’d like to make it even longer!

• At 25 new/renewing subscribers, BCS will raise our submissions word-count limit to 11,000 words.
• At 50 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise our word-count limit to 12,000 words.
• At 100 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 13,000 words.
• At 200 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 15,000 words!

Every subscription makes a difference in helping us pay our authors, for their great stories of all lengths.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies is one of the top markets for adventure fantasy, and I’d be thrilled to see it start buying longer stories. At only $15.99 for a full year, it’s a terrific bargain. I bought my first subscription today, and I challenge Black Gate readers to follow my example. Let’s see if we can add 10 new subscriptions to the total.

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There’s plenty of great news for fantasy fans in May — including the successful launch of new top-tier magazine, Skelos, helmed by Jeffrey Shanks, Mark Finn, and Chris Gruber. We also wondered if Weird Tales was dead (it probably is), and started our coverage of Shock Totem — just in time for the magazine to go on hiatus. In the meantime, Rich Horton took a look at the January 1955 issue of Science Fiction Stories, containing short stories by Algis Budrys, Wallace West, and Raymond F. Jones, the author of This Island Earth.

In his April Short Fiction Round Up, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviews the latest issues of Swords and Sorcery Magazine and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #51  presented its usual complement of two stories in April… Jason Ray Carney. “The Ink of the Slime Lord” gave me nearly everything I could want from a S&S story: a wicked sorceress, dire magics, a dashing pirate, and plenty of monsters…. Carney’s complete lack of restraint and deeply purple prose are a large part of what made me dig this story completely. If you’re going to be extreme, go to 11. Good fun.

In James Lecky’s “But the Dreams of Men,” a man wracked by guilt over the horrible sins in his past inadvertently finds a path to redemption of sorts… Lecky does it quite well.  He consistently finds the right balance between characterization, narrative, and action. If you haven’t read him before, this is an excellent place to start.

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Way back in March of last year, when I announced we were expanding our magazine coverage at Black Gate — and was bold enough to list the 16 magazines we’d be covering regularly — there was an immediate outcry that we were being too limited. And the very first magazine that readers requested we add to our list was the American small press horror ‘zine Shock Totem (thanks, Wild Ape!).

After a year of sustained effort, we’ve built up our coverage to the point where we report on 41 magazines regularly, or at least semi-regularly (41! I had no idea there were 41 fantasy magazines on the market when I started this crazy project). But Shock Totem still isn’t one of them. Time to correct that! Today, I’m here to tell you about the tenth issue of the magazine of “Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted,” which shipped in March.

But first, I should share this unfortunate announcement from K. Allen Wood, posted on January 1 of last year:

The next issue of Shock Totem, number ten, will be our last issue for a while. The reasons for this are many, but the biggest reason is simple: kids… As of right now, the goal is to take a complete break from publishing the magazine in 2015 and reopen for submissions on January 1, 2016, with a new issue scheduled for July 2016…

In the next few weeks we will begin accepting novel and novella submissions… we’re not going away, not completely; we’re just scaling back for a time so I can be a father.

As the father of three, I can certainly understand that. It took over a year for issue 10 to materialize, but with regard to the novellas Allen was as good as his word. In August of last year Shock Totem Publications announced they were open for novel and novella submissions, and on January 31 they rolled out this very impressive publishing schedule for the year.

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When I arrived at the Nebula Awards conference on Thursday, one of the first things I received was a complimentary copy of issue #208 of the flagship publication of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, The SFWA Bulletin. It’s an oversize magazine (not a digest), an impressive 84 pages on heavy stock, which I read on my long train ride back to St. Charles later that night.

The SFWA Bulletin has changed a lot over the years, and I’ve enjoyed plenty of issues. But this is certainly the best single issue of the magazine I’ve ever read. It is devoted almost exclusively to the 2016 Nebula Award nominees, with a 50-page section that examines each and every nominee in detail — with mini-author bios, a story synopsis, a few paragraphs on the origin and story-behind-the-story from the nominees, and fascinating tidbits on each tale, such as favorite reactions from fans, thoughts on possible sequels, and lots more.

There’s also cover reproductions — book or magazine as the case may be — for each entry, which I greatly appreciated. (I don’t know why I enjoy seeing high-res cover reproductions of recent magazines, but I do!)

This also happens to be Neil Clarke’s first issue as full-time editor of the Bulletin (he’s been acting as interim editor since John Klima’s departure last year). While he’s done a stellar job, it’s clear he’s not 100% satisfied. In his editorial, he wonders whether readers might not be better served with a post-Nebula issue instead.

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I love Peter Mohrbacher’s cover for the May issue of Clarkesworld, a gorgeously creepy piece titled “Ananiel, Angel of Storms” (click the image at right for a bigger version.) Mohrbacher has covered other Clarkesworlds — mostly recent issue 111 — but this is the first to really make me sit up and take notice.

Robert L Turner III at Tangent Online raves about Rich Larson this issue, calling him “an excellent new talent.”

“Jonas and the Fox” by Rich Larson is set in a post revolution farming community. Fox is a poet and fugitive from the new junta after the revolution starts to eat its own. He is hiding in the body of his nephew who is brain dead after an accidental fall. His Nephew Jonas, the other title character, must come to terms with the stranger inhabiting his brother’s body. The novelette cleverly links the revolution’s rewriting of history with the disconnect between Fox and his new body. The story is touching, and manages to keep you guessing as to how it will end. Larson is a young author and well worth keeping an eye on. If this piece is representative of his work, we could be looking at an excellent new talent.

Read his complete review here.

Clarkesworld #116 has five new stories by Cat Rambo, Robert Reed, Cassandra Khaw, Rich Larson, and Luo Longxiang, and two reprints by Joe Abercrombie and Sunny Moraine.

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