Okay, I don’t really know anything about Cosmic Crimes Stories. I’d never even heard about it until today. But I know it’s cool. And let’s be honest — that should be good enough for you. What is Cosmic Crimes Stories? I’m operating a little on faith here, since I’ve never actually seen a copy. But according to the website, it’s “a biannual digest of science fiction and fantasy crimes and criminals.” Um, what? A little more digging reveals that it’s a magazine…
The River of Shadows (Book III of the Chathrand Voyage Series) Robert V.S. Redick Del Ray (592 pages,$16.00, April 2011) Reviewed by David Soyka My purpose here is simply a warning. If you are part of that infinitesimally small [and ever smaller] band of dissidents with the wealth, time and inclination to set your hands on the printed word, I suggest you consider the arguments against the current volume. To wit: the tale is morbid, the persons depicted are clumsy…
The theme of our massive 15th issue, captured beautifully by Donato Giancola’s striking cover, is Warrior Women. Eight authors — Jonathan L. Howard, Maria V. Snyder, Frederic S. Durbin, Sarah Avery, Paula R. Stiles, Emily Mah, S. Hutson Blount, and Brian Dolton — contribute delightful tales of female warriors, wizards, weather witches, thieves, and other brave women as they face deadly tombs, sinister gods, unquiet ghosts, and much more. Frederic S. Durbin takes us to a far land where two dueling gods pit their champions against…
The March 2011 issue (#48) of the excellent Fantasy magazine is now online. This issue includes original fiction from George R. R. Martin, Tanith Lee, Holly Black, and Genevieve Valentine. It is the first issue assembled by the new editor, John Joseph Adams. Nonfiction includes author spotlights, and the articles “Three Real Historical Figures Who Embarked Upon the Hero’s Journey,” by Graeme McMillan, “Five Fantasy Worlds That You Wouldn’t Want to Visit,” by Te Jefferson & J. Corbeau, “From Story…
Over at Ecstatic Days, Jeff VanderMeer has announced that the annual anthology series he founded with Ann VanderMeer, Sean Wallace, and Matthew Cheney, Best American Fantasy, has wrapped up after three volumes. The first, published in 2007 by Sean Wallace at Prime Books and edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, was an eclectic and delightful mixture of fantasy assembled from Zoetrope: All-Story, Analog, McSweeney’s, Zahir, Strange Horizons, The New Yorker and others sources, featuring nearly two dozen writers I’d never heard of. The second offered…
Apex publisher Jason Sizemore has announced that the magazine has re-opened to submissions. This is great news for fans, since the magazine announced last May that it was temporarily suspending publication. It began as print edition Apex Digest in 2005, swtiching names to Apex Magazine when it became online-only in 2008. It resumed online publication in June 2009 and has published monthly since. Note that Apex has new Submission Guidelines. The pay rate is five cents a word, and the new fiction editor is…
I don’t know whether the third edition of Best American Fantasy, which has found a new home with Underland Press, represents the “best” fantasy, or why it matters whether it’s “American” (meaning, presumably, the United States). Of course, it’s a cliché for any anthology to proclaim its contents represent a “best of,” and the editors who’ve been doing it for a number of years frequently rely on stories from the usual suspects of authors who mostly all publish in the…
The January/February Interzone features a very cool, magna-like cover by Warwick Fraser-Coombe; he’ll be doing the cover art for all six issues in 2010, which are intended to be put together to form a larger image. Collect them all and assemble the collage to see exactly what’s up with this. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the contents of the magazine, which, by the way, has returned to a color interior; it’s a very attractive…
The new Realms of Fantasy coincides with the relaunch (as of December 11, 2009) of an actually informative website since Warren Lapine took over as publisher beginning with the August 2009 issue (and perhaps the fact that the website of previous owner Sovereign Media was essentially just a placeholder was indicative of the company’s general lack of interest in the magazine that eventually led to its sale). There was a free PDF version of this bimonthly available for a time,…
McSweeney’s is a quirky quarterly that breaks conventional publishing boundaries with each issue devoted to a unique theme, both in terms of editorial content and physical packaging. For McSweeney’s 32, its last issue of 2009, ten contributors were tasked with writing tales specifically set somewhere in the world that take place fifteen years hence in 2024. According to the editors: …we wanted to hear about where we’d be — to see what the world could look like when things had…