Stephen M. Davis There is, of course, a story behind this essay, which didn’t start out as a look at Web poetry at all. In fact, the first idea I’d had was to look at speculative poetry in the print medium. What I discovered is that this is no easy task: most speculative poetry is originally printed in the Small (well, Teenie, if truth be told) Press, in magazines that occasionally have runs of 200 copies. I then decided to…
March-April 2024 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and the Winter 2024 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Covers by Eli Bischof (for “Ganny Goes to War”), Eldar Zakirov (for “How Sere Kept Herself Together”) and Mondolithic Studios. There’s some great old-time serial adventure in this month’s print SF magazines. In the Asimov’s SF novella “How Sere Kept Herself Together,” Alexander Jablokov brings back his cynical detective Sere Glagolit (introduced in “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry,”…
January-February 2024 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Cover art by Julie Dillon, and Maurizio Manzieri (for “Burning Grannies”) It’s February 10th, and I’m a little concerned to see there’s no sign of the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Not on their website or Facebook Page, both of which still show the November-December issue, and not on Twitter/X or Amazon. I can’t even find a copy of the cover, which I…
There are a lot of ways to go about writing a Sherlock Holmes story. Some folks attempt to very carefully emulate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own style, and to turn out a tale that feels as if it might have been penned (or typed these days) by the creator of the great detective himself. No surprise that results vary. GREATLY. Hugh Ashton and Denis O. Smith are the best I’ve found in this regard. You can find stories ranging from…
Gather round friends – it’s once again time to don the footie pajamas, pour a steaming hot-toddy and hunker down until spring with the most awesome reading list of the year: namely the annual nominees for the coolest award ever. The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the active members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Several members of the HWA including Dean Koontz, were originally reluctant to endorse…
Courtship Rite (Timescape/Pocket Books, September 1983). Cover by Rowena Morrill I still remember the buzz of excitement in Ottawa fandom when a young local writer named Charles de Lint sold his first novel to Ace Books. Riddle of the Wren wasn’t particularly groundbreaking — not like the breakout books soon to come from Charles — but everyone read it, and it was passed around and enjoyed with the kind of hometown pride that quickly catapulted Charles into literary stardom, at…
Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #58 hit the electronic shelves on November 26th. We’ve got three stories and three poems — a full complement! Fiction Contents “Dragon Tears Part II,” by Caleb Williams. Exiled sorcerer-scribe Larohd du Masiim continues his quest to gather the rare artifacts needed to gain back his lost love, the princess Yadira. Catch up with Part I here. “Isle of the Thousand-Eyed Strangler,” by R. A. Quiogue. Quiogue returns to our pages with a tale of fantasy south-seas derring-do among the…
November-December 2023 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by 123RF, Shutterstock, and Alan M. Clark This is another great batch of print magazines, with a tale of a failing space colony by Jeff Reynolds (in Analog), an exciting new Quiet War novella by Paul McAuley (in Asimov’s), and a tale of mysterious AIs on a moon of Saturn by Geoff Ryman and David Jeffrey (in F&SF)….
Being Michael Swanwick (Fairwood Press, November 21, 2023) Prolificity is in the DNA of science fiction. H. G. Wells, whose most famous works date back to the 1890s, wrote some fifty novels, seventy non-fiction books, and one hundred short stories. Pick almost any SFWA Grand Master and you’ll encounter a bibliography that will engulf your life for many months, if not years. How many shelves to house the hundreds of books published, for instance, by Andre Norton, or Poul Anderson,…
Ashes of Time (Hong Kong, 1994/2008) Chinese director Wong Kar-wai, whose films are visually intense, almost hallucinogenic, had a long-time love of the wuxia genre, and in the early ‘90s, when he was having trouble raising money for his production company, he agreed to make a historical martial arts film based on the classic Condor Heroes stories. Excited by the story but wanting it to be perfect, he spent almost three years on the project, but the result was Ashes…