Black Gate

As it nears its landmark 200th issues, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has kicked off a subscription drive aimed at enabling the magazine to publish novellas for the first time (yeah!) The details are on the website, but here’s the basics.

BCS ebook subscriptions, available exclusively at WeightlessBooks.com, are only $15.99 for a full year/26 issues. (That’s less than 30 cents a story!) Subscribers can get issues delivered directly to their Kindle or smart phone, and they get new issues early, a week before the website. Forthcoming authors in BCS include Marie Brennan, Gregory Norman Bossert (whose first BCS story “The Telling” won the World Fantasy Award), Mishell Baker, KJ Kabza, Stephanie Burgis, Tony Pi, Catherynne M. Valente, Kameron Hurley, A.M. Dellamonica, Claude Lalumière, and more.

From now until June 3, if you buy a BCS ebook subscription or renew your existing subscription (you can renew at any time), you can help unlock our drive goals. Since BCS #1 in 2008 – 200 issues, 419 stories! – over a third of our fiction has been novelette-length or longer. Longer stories work great for awe-inspiring fantasy worlds, like you’ll find in every issue of BCS. Our word-count limit for submissions, 10,000 words, has always been among the longest if not the longest of pro-rate online magazines. With your help, we’d like to make it even longer!

• At 25 new/renewing subscribers, BCS will raise our submissions word-count limit to 11,000 words.
• At 50 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise our word-count limit to 12,000 words.
• At 100 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 13,000 words.
• At 200 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 15,000 words!

Every subscription makes a difference in helping us pay our authors, for their great stories of all lengths.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies is one of the top markets for adventure fantasy, and I’d be thrilled to see it start buying longer stories. At only $15.99 for a full year, it’s a terrific bargain. I bought my first subscription today, and I challenge Black Gate readers to follow my example. Let’s see if we can add 10 new subscriptions to the total.

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There’s plenty of great news for fantasy fans in May — including the successful launch of new top-tier magazine, Skelos, helmed by Jeffrey Shanks, Mark Finn, and Chris Gruber. We also wondered if Weird Tales was dead (it probably is), and started our coverage of Shock Totem — just in time for the magazine to go on hiatus. In the meantime, Rich Horton took a look at the January 1955 issue of Science Fiction Stories, containing short stories by Algis Budrys, Wallace West, and Raymond F. Jones, the author of This Island Earth.

In his April Short Fiction Round Up, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviews the latest issues of Swords and Sorcery Magazine and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #51  presented its usual complement of two stories in April… Jason Ray Carney. “The Ink of the Slime Lord” gave me nearly everything I could want from a S&S story: a wicked sorceress, dire magics, a dashing pirate, and plenty of monsters…. Carney’s complete lack of restraint and deeply purple prose are a large part of what made me dig this story completely. If you’re going to be extreme, go to 11. Good fun.

In James Lecky’s “But the Dreams of Men,” a man wracked by guilt over the horrible sins in his past inadvertently finds a path to redemption of sorts… Lecky does it quite well.  He consistently finds the right balance between characterization, narrative, and action. If you haven’t read him before, this is an excellent place to start.

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