Black Gate

This month GigaNotoSaurus features Tamara Vardomskaya’s long story “Polyglossia,” which Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews described as follows:

This month’s story at GigaNotoSaurus is the longest of the year to date (though it being March that’s not saying too much) and tackles the complex nature of language. It is nice to read more longer stories, especially ones that really delve into the world building as this one does, providing a vivid picture of a breathing world. It’s one of the reasons that GigaNotoSaurus is such a treat to check out…

This is a story about language… It looks at people from very different situations, all brought together by language. A man who has lost the language of his mother. A woman who studies languages but cares little for the heritage of them… A boy who absorbs languages like a sponge, who sees each new language like a new city, full of adventures and secrets. There’s so much going on with this story and so much to see and enjoy, a world with layers of history and conflict that all come to a head here, in this story about a song…

And in the end I think that the story just works because it does such an elegant and nuanced job building its world… the cast is meticulously balanced and great… It’s an affirming, kinetic experience, about reaching out across the barriers that language can create to find common meaning. An excellent story!

Read the story free here, and read Charles’ complete review here.

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The eleventh issue of the online-only Fantasy Scroll Magazine, cover dated February 2016, is now available. In his editorial editor Frederick Doot gives us a sneak peek of the contents. Here’s a snippet:

We start 2016 with the heartfelt and enchanting “Sundark and Winterling” by Suzanne J. Willis featuring one of the most extraordinary homes you could imagine. The story hits all the right notes. We then move on to Paul Magnan’s “Red Cup,” a unique story that takes an inside look of trials and tribulations of a flower; no, it’s not all roses for our hero Red Cup. Next we are swept into a chaotic world with Stephen Walter Simpson’s “The Water Moon” following the fascinating life, and secret to some, of the lead character, Ivan.

We welcome another contribution by J.W. Alden, this time a flash fiction gem, “Battle Lines” which hits us early and hard, as the best science fiction flash stories can do. How can you settle the hostilities and egos and a decision between rival guildsman? “Talking with Honored Guests” by Alexander Monteagudo may provide one fiery way how.

Fantasy Scroll Magazine was long overdue for a pet alien love story, and we found a beaut with Ian Creasey’s “How I Lost Eleven Stone And Found Love,” a much more endearing story than the title suggests. We are happy that “The Great Excuse” by Jacob Michael King has found a home here at FSM; I won’t give much away, but I will say that Lovecraft would be proud. “The Velna Valsis” by Henry Szabranski is short, but sometimes a short jab to the gut is all you need to make your point, and this one hits the reader hard.

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Clarkesworld is one of the most-reviewed genre magazines out there. So if you’re too busy to read every issue, there are plenty of places that will point you towards the stories that might appeal to you most.

Take issue #114 for example. Just about everything in the TOC looks interesting, but I only have time for one story tonight. Enter Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews, who’s done an admirable job of profiling the entire issue. Sixty seconds is all it takes to determine that the story for me is Leena Likitalo’s “The Governess with a Mechanical Womb.”

This is a rather bleak story about humans on the edge of extinction and a young woman and her sister facing it under the care of a governess, under the care of something that used to be human but… isn’t quite any longer. The story excels at building an isolated and strange atmosphere, which seems to be a theme in this month’s issue, here rendered in a post-apocalypse where aliens have come to Earth and destroyed everything for reasons unknown, then started guarding [people] from themselves. It’s an unsettling story, and one with a heavy sense of mystery… It’s tense and it’s effectively done, a story about sisters and about guardians and about control and love. It is incredibly dark, as well, and I will admit that the ending was rather difficult, a mix of love and change that left me a bit unsure what to think. But it’s a neat piece with a great weirdness to it, and it’s worth checking out.

Of course, your mileage will vary. Check out the complete review at Quick Sip Reviews here.

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I’ve been catching up on some of the online fiction at Tor.com recently. They’ve published some new great fantasy by Joe Abercrombie, Matt Wallace, David Nickle, Jennifer Fallon, Melissa Marr, Delia Sherman, and many others.

Child of a Hidden Sea, the first novel in A. M. Dellamonica’s trilogy The Hidden Sea Tales, was published in hardcover last June, and we covered it and its sequel, A Daughter of No Nation, in November. But that doesn’t mean I’ve had time to read it… and I probably won’t for many months. So I was delighted to see her 6,900-word story “The Glass Galago” available free at Tor.com. See? There are ways to keep tabs on all the hot new fantasy authors, if you look hard enough.

A.M. Dellamonica is at it again! The thrilling adventures of Gale Feliachild and Captain Parrish continue in a series of prequel stories that offers to take us deeper into the fascinating world of Stormwrack.

When Gale and the crew of the Nightjar are called back to the fleet to handle an issue involving a law regulating new patents and a missing magical inscription, they soon find themselves embroiled in a plot that is could potentially pit island against island. Now, they must discover the mystery of the glass galago before time runs out for both it and the fleet.

“The Glass Galago” was posted at Tor.com on Jan 26, and tagged as “Epic Fantasy.” It was edited by Stacy Hill, and illustrated by Richard Anderson. It’s available here.

We last covered Tor.com with Jennifer Fallon’s “First Kill.” For more free fiction, see all of our online magazine coverage here.

I think you could read a healthy diet of exclusively short fiction every day, and not come even close to staying on top of all the great new fantasy stories published every month.

But don’t panic — Black Gate is here to help. And we’re happy to report that March has been shaping up terrifically for short fiction fans. Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace — editors of Clarkesworld — have packaged up all of the fiction from last year in Clarkesworld: Year Eight, now available in trade paperback. In his February Short Story Roundup, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed the latest sword & sorcery tales from F&SF and Swords and Sorcery Magazine. For our vintage magazine readers, Rich Horton took a look at two issues of Analog from either side of the Campbell divide, and Matthew Wuertz reviewed the April 1941 of Unknown, with stories by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Theodore Sturgeon, P. Schuyler Miller, and Robert Heinlein. And we reported on the news that the entire run of IF Magazine, one of the great 20th Century science fiction magazines, is now freely available online at the Internet Archive.

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

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Issue 49 of Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine, cover-dated February 2016, is now available.

In his February Short Story Roundup, Black Gate‘s roving reporter Fletcher Vredenburgh had this to say about the latest issue:

Issue 49 kicks off the mag’s fifth year. Congratulations are definitely due Mr. Ellett for holding the genre’s banner high…

The magazine’s second story, Lynn Rushlau’s “The Garden of Dreamers” is much better at achieving its author’s goal, which apparently was to creep the everloving snot out of me.

A group of guardsman and their commander have been sent to the Garden of Dreamers on a mission. They must overcome the Garden’s servitors, and their fears, to capture their quarry. It’s very short with little plot, but it creates an intense atmosphere of unpleasant closeness I found perfectly unnerving.

Each issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine contains two short stories, and is available free online. Here’s the issue summary.

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In his January Short Story Roundup, Fletcher Vredenburgh reported on the latest issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly:

As usual, HFQ has got the goods, and both stories grabbed me and then left me hanging. The stunning cover painting, Forbidden Valley is by Brad Fraunfelter.

The first is “Crazy Snake and the Tribute for Pachacamac” by Eric Atkisson. It’s the third story about the Comanche warrior wandering south from the Comancheria (read the others here) into Central America… Fleeing Walker’s soldiers, he and his faithful horse, Aahtaqui, find themselves in the ocean, swimming toward a silver-mist-shrouded shore. Pretty much everything you could want in a S&S story shows up on shore: stone idols, an evil god served by evil priests, fighting, mad sorceries, and ancient curses…

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