Black Gate

Black Gate would like to salute editor Scott H. Andrews and the entire team at Beneath Ceaseless Skies for achieving a remarkable milestone: publishing an amazing 200 issues over the last eight years. (To put that in perspective, that’s 185 more than Black Gate, every one of them on time! I get light headed just thinking about it.)

Simultaneous with their landmark 200th issue, the magazine wrapped up their subscription drive aimed at enabling the magazine to publish longer stories, and announced that they are now open to stories up to 11,000 words. Sweet!

But the big news is the big double issue. Issue #200 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies is dated May 26 and features fiction by Catherynne M. Valente, Kameron Hurley, Yoon Ha Lee, and Seth Dickinson, podcasts by Yoon Ha Lee and Seth Dickinson, and a Gaunt and Bone reprint by BG author Chris Willrich. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

“The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery” by Catherynne M. Valente
So it came to pass that over the weeks remaining until the parturition of Perdita, I fashioned for her, out of crystal and ebony and chips of fine jade, twin organs of sight not the equal of mortal orbs but by far their superior, in clarity, in beauty, even in soulfulness. If you ask me how I accomplished it, I shall show you the door, for I am still a tradesman, however exalted, and tradesmen tell no tales.

“The Judgment of Gods and Monsters” by Kameron Hurley
She shouldn’t have gone to the trial, or talked to that stupid reporter, even for a second. Her father would know, now, that it was her who had his file. It was her who had been called upon to bring him in. She wouldn’t have shown up at the trial otherwise, and he knew it. “Two bits to the one whose family it isn’t,” she said to Merriz, and rolled up to get a look at the shooters.

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It’s all subjective, but 2015 really seemed to be the year of Sam J. Miller and Kelly Robson. If you weren’t reading their stuff you were missing something special. There were others, like Alyssa Wong, but you needed to read Sam and Kelly. Just like the year before it was Kai Ashante Wilson and Usman Malik.

While thankfully none of those fine writers have gone away, this year seems to belong to Rich Larson and Dominica Phetteplace, both of whom have had fine stories in a range of publications. Larson has had strong work in Interzone, Analog, F&SF and elsewhere, while Phetteplace has set up home in Asimov’s with a series of excellent stories. She also has a new one in the upcoming July/August F&SF, “Spells Are Easy If You Have The Right Psychic Energy,” that I really enjoyed. And both authors are in the current issue of Asimov’s, July 2016 (above right).

Lots of great reading for fantasy fans in June, and the month is just getting started.

In addition to all the new magazine releases, our intrepid reviewers kept you posted on classic fiction — including the latest installment from Matthew Wuertz of his long-running re-read of Galaxy magazine from the early 50s, and our look at the first two volumes of The Best of Amazing Stories, The 1926 and 1927 Anthologies, edited by Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our May 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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I know I said last time that I’d limit myself to covering issues of Analog that have dinosaurs on the cover. But Bob Eggleton’s cover for the June issue is so good I made an exception (click the image at right for a super-big version. You’re welcome.)

To be honest, I kinda gave up on Analog during the Stanley Schmidt era. The science was great, but the fiction just didn’t cut it for me. And since he was the longest-serving editor in the magazine’s history (34 long years, from 1978 to 2012), that’s virtually all of my adult life. I want to like Analog, I really do, but at this point it’s kinda like trying to date the girl who kissed you on the playground in Junior High… the memories are magical, but there’s been a lot of years, and a whole lotta great kisses, between then and now.

But I hear good things about the new editor, Trevor Quachri. Promising things. And Quachri sure knows how to pique my interest with his issue summaries. Here’s his enticing words for the June issue.

It’s rare that we’ll pick a later installment in a series to be the lead in an issue, but when the story is as good as Michael F. Flynn’s “The Journeyman: In the Great North Wood,” we make an exception. As the title suggests, we find Teodorq sunna Nagarajan in the Great North Woods, where he and his compatriots are roped into protecting a team of proto-archeologists, but of course, there’s more going on than anyone expects or understands. (And as ever, the story rewards close reading.)

We also have part two of Edward M. Lerner’s time travel fact piece, “Here we go Loopedy Loop,” as well as a story about time travel, Bill Johnson’s “When the Stone Eagle Flies”; and a story about, well, the opposite of time travel, in Marie Vibbert’s “Hold the Moment”; as well as Christopher L. Bennett’s tale of “Murder on the CisLunar Railroad”; Jay Werkheiser’s “The Anthropic War”; J.T. Sharrah’s tongue-in-cheek (but not entirely unrealistic) “The Nult Factor”; and Brandon Ghislain’s take on the dangers of taking some proverbs too literally in “That Which Grows on Trees.”

There’s a Bill Johnson story? I love Bill Johnson! We shared an office at Motorola about a hundred years ago, around the time he won a Hugo for his magnificent tale “We Will Drink a Fish Together.” I even bought a novella from him, “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” which I published in Black Gate 4. Okay, if Bill Johnson is back in Analog, things are definitely looking up.

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