Steampunk Tales offers an interesting convergence of the new and old, a pulp magazine for the iPhone (don’t worry, non-Apple heads, there’s also a downloadable PDF version). Volume 4 features ten stories: “Convergence Culture, Pt. 2” by C.B. Harvey “The Brass Pedestal” by Natania Barron “The Gods of War” by Arkwright “Miluth” by Alison Boyd “Stormada, Pt. 3” by SatyrPhil Brucato “An Unfortunate Engagement, Pt. 6” by G. D. Falksen “Sideways” by Andrew Singleton “The Choice for Cibyl” by David…
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While her work sometimes hints at the fantastic, Lydia Millet isn’t strictly speaking a fantasy writer, certainly not in the sense of questing elves or weird alternate universes, and certainly not as evidenced in her new short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys. Yet Millet’s work is frequently mentioned in genre venues; indeed, one of the stories collected here, “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov,” (in which the famed inventor of light bulbs and power generation attains metaphysical illumination by continually re-running…
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For this edition of my irregular review of the latest (more or less) short fiction, I thought I’d try something a little different. Usually I try to focus on the stories that worked the most for me, with maybe some attention on those that didn’t and why; at the same time, I also try to convey a flavor of everything else, if only just to alert you that an author is in the publication without, for any number of reasons,…
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Fans of Tom Waits are often divided into two camps: those who favor the early boozy Kerouac, be-bop inspired crooner of life’s derelicts and losers up until he transmogrified beginning with the “Heartattack and Vine” album and “crossed over” into Kurt Weill cacaphonous orator of the absurd; fans of the later period sometimes disdain the earlier, and vice versa, despite the obvious connections. Me, I’m in the third camp as a huge admirer of both milieus. (I suppose there’s…
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Apologies to David Soyka and all for posting off my usual day, but I thought I should keep finish what I started (for once in my life). It’s been a busy week, but I did finally manage to acquire and read the remaining Nebula-nominated novels. And I’m glad to say that my preliminary generalization in the first installment of this post holds up: these books are not all created equal, but they are, in their way, all worthwhile reads. And…
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“So just what is science fiction?” asks editor Lou Anders in the preamble to his second and latest volume of Fast Forward, an annual collection of original genre stories (you can find my review of the first edition here). Theodore Sturgeon, whose definition Anders includes in the epigraph, used to seem to say it best: “…a story about human beings with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its science content.” Maybe…
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The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Tall Tales on the Iron Horse Reviewed by David Soyka Well, here we are again with another short fiction collection with a dumb and unoriginal title – The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy is the latest entrant in a long line of insipidly titled collections that have contributed their small part towards the ghettoization of the genre. Presumably this is not editor Ellen Datlow’s fault, but rather that…
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Theodore Beale is the author of five science fiction and fantasy novels, including Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy. An active member of the SFWA, he has participated on three Nebula Award juries. He is a professional game designer and he lives in Italy. Judith Berman’s last Black Gate offering, “Awakening,” was a finalist for the 2007 Nebula Award. Residing in another wing of the genre, her most recent story, “Pelago,” is a far-future sf novella forthcoming…
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We at Tin House endeavor to widen the circle of lit. mag. readers, and to make extinct the preciousness and staid nature of journals past. That is our mission. Please lift your glasses in toast, and read on… Thus proclaims the website for Tin House magazine, one of the more arch-literary venues to dip into the realms of the weird and fantastic in recent memory. Their thirty-third issue was devoted to “Fantastic Women” — a title guaranteed to attract the…
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By David Soyka Copyright © 2008 by New Epoch Press. All rights Reserved. Tin House Issue #33: Fantastic Women ($17.00 postpaid) The “Fantastic Women” themed issue of Tin House (Volume 9, number 1) was rightly named by Amazon as a “10 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2007.” However, this quarterly being a “literary” magazine, there actually isn’t any science fiction (the one possible exception is Lydia Millet’s wonderful “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov,” in which the famed inventor attains…
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