Black Gate

The newest issue of Clarkesworld, one of the best genre mags on the market, is now on sale. Issue 104 contains five new short stories, plus reprints from James Van Pelt and Hannu Rajaniemi.

Short stories featured this issue are:

“The Garden Beyond Her Infinite Skies” by Matthew Kressel
“For the Love of Sylvia City” by Andrea M. Pawley
“Mrs. Griffin Prepares to Commit Suicide Tonight” by A Que, translated by John Chu
“Ossuary” by Ian Muneshwar
“An Evolutionary Myth” by Bo-Young Kim
“Solace” by James Van Pelt (from Analog, June 2009)
“Tyche and the Ants” by Hannu Rajaniemi (from Edge of Infinity, Nov 2012)

Non-fiction includes “Destination: Mars” by Andrew Liptak, who’s also been writing a fine series of pulp and classic SF retrospectives SF at Kirkus Reviews over the last few months (see a partial list here); “Another Word: It’s Good to Be Lazy and Foolish” by SF author Ken Liu; an interview with author and editor Cat Rambo; and an editorial, “Overload!” by Neil Clarke, in which he talks about (among other things) his upcoming Year’s Best Anthology: The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1, to be published “sometime in 2016” by Night Shade Books. This issue also includes two podcasts.

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The June issue of Asimov’s SF has arrived in stores. It usually goes on sale simultaneously with its sister Dell Magazines publication, Analog, but I didn’t see it on the stands. I was especially interested in Analog this month, as it’s the commemorative 1000th issue, a pretty big milestone. (If you’re having trouble doing the math, it takes a monthly publication 83.3 years to produce 1,000 issues. Analog published its first issue, under the name Astounding Stories, in January 1930, and has been publishing more-or-less continuously ever since.) I guess I’ll have to make another trip to the bookstore this month.

I always read Sheila Williams’ editorials in Asimov’s first, but there’s a guest editorial this issue, from author Kathleen Ann Goonan, on “Teaching Science Fiction,” which is also very readable. Robert Silverberg’s always-interesting Reflections column, titled “The World to End Last Month” this month, talks about the rich tradition of apocalyptic SF:

Foreseeing the end of the world has been the business of SF writers ever since there was such a thing as science fiction, and back before it. What sort of end-of-the-world stories our primordial preliterate ancestors told we will never know, but the oldest such tale that has come down to us, the five-thousand-year-old Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, describes a deluge that drowns the whole Earth, save only a certain Ziusudra… The Norse myths give us a terrible frost, the Fimbulwinter, in which all things die except a man and a woman who survive by hiding in a tree; they follow the usual redemptionist course and repeople the world, but then comes an even greater cataclysm, Ragnarok, the doom of the gods themselves, in which the stars fall, the earth sinks into the sea, and fire consumes everything….

As always, there’s lot of great fiction too. This month’s authors include Django Wexler, Henry Lien, and Sarah Pinsker.

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