I do not envy the awards panel for the Nebula Awards this year. There are two excellent novellas equally deserving of the award in that category.

The first of the novellas I refer to is “The Man Who Ended History:  A Documentary” by Ken Liu.  This story concerns the Pingfang District in China and the infamous Unit 731 maintained there by the Japanese for biological and chemical weapons research before and during World War II. I had never heard of Unit 731 before reading this novella, and was shocked to learn of its existence and the role of the United States in hushing it up after the war in order to profit from the research. It sounds so innocuous to refer to “the research”: in fact, the Japanese used Chinese peasants for their research, including amputating limbs, infecting them with syphilis, and vivisection without anesthesia. But Liu hasn’t written a simple history. His story posits that it is possible to travel through time to see precisely what happened in Unit 731, as documentary evidence is sparse and victims few and old. The mechanism for this time travel involves the way light travels and the nature of Bohm-Kirino particles and quantum entanglement. Understanding the made-up physics isn’t necessary to feel the power of this story, however, because the real subject is how we understand and experience history, and how enmeshed history is with politics and power. Liu’s novella is a fascinating extrapolation about how the world would react to an ability to actually view an historical event, and how easily the world would blend its standard political reactions into the new reality posed by this technology.

The other extraordinarily good novella among this year’s nominees is “With Unclean Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro. If his name sounds familiar, it’s because two weeks ago I said that his short story, “Her Husband’s Hands,” was my pick for the best short story of the year. “With Unclean Hands” is part of a series Castro has been writing about Andrea Cort, a member of humanity’s diplomatic corps in a time when humanity is but one species among many that populate the galaxy. There are numerous species that are technologically advanced far beyond humans, but the Zinn are one of the most, and had previously spanned the galaxy with an empire beyond anything seen before or since. But the Zinn now occupy only a single city on the species’ home world, having retreated as other races grew more numerous and took more territory.  The Zinn, in essence, surrendered their empire without a fight. Murder is unknown among them; war is a horror in which they have never indulged. Now, they seek to acquire a human murderer to study evil up close. This murderer is not intended as a slave, and his quarters on the Zinn home world are far more luxurious than the maximum security prison in which he could expect to spend the rest of his days as a human prisoner.  Andrea Cort’s job is to sign off on the transaction, for in return to turning the murderer over to the Zinn, with his enthusiastic consent, the Zinn will share with humans technology that is a good millennium more advanced than anything the humans presently have. Cort struggles to understand why this transaction so troubles her. The reader figures it out as she does in this gripping story of life, loss and sacrifice. There are other novellas and novels regarding Andrea Cort, but this is the first in her personal chronology. I was so taken with this novella that I’ve gathered the other novellas and purchased the two novels presently available regarding this character. I recommend keeping a close eye on Castro, who strikes me as very much an up and comer.

I wrote about Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Kiss Me Twice” when it was first published in Asimov’s in June 2011.  This accomplished work is a smart science fiction mystery about Metta, an artificial intelligence who works with the Portland, Oregon police department. Her personality is her own, because she is a true artificial intelligence. One particular police officer, Huang, is one of her favorites, and he cares for her, too. The mystery turns on the kidnapping of Metta; that is, according to the cameras in the central station, masked intruders burst in and grab Metta’s chassis. Huang is the only officer who thought to ask Metta to show him a picture of the intruders, but even that is so limited that the best he can testify to is that there were three of them. Huang also quickly comes to the conclusion that Metta has been taken in order to affect one of the investigations going on at the time of the kidnapping — and it becomes clear that it is Huang’s murder investigation that was the target of the intruders. The mystery unwinds from there. Huang is aided in his work by a rebooted Metta — not the original Metta returned, but a sort of new person with a few hours’ less memory, an interesting complication when one considers the nature of true artificial intelligence. “Kiss Me Twice” is thoroughly enjoyable, ranking very high in the ranking of science fictional mysteries. It plays fair with readers and manages to disguise clues without hiding them in high tech. When I first read it, I expected to find it nominated for awards, and I’m glad to see that it is on the Nebula list.

Kij Johnson’s “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” is another excellent novella. It is set in a world in which there is a river of mist (presumably with water underneath the mist, but no one has ever seen it) that divides a country neatly in two. Engineering has advanced to a degree that it is now possible to build a bridge over the mist, an undertaking that will bring enormous changes to the country and especially to the two cities on either side of the mist, which were previously open to one another only through an extremely dangerous ferry ride over the mist. This mist isn’t like the mist you and I experience here on Earth; it is thick, burns the skin, and is the home to a sort of fish, ranging in size from (apparently) your average trout to creatures so large that they seem to outdo whales. It isn’t always safe to cross, and the family that traditionally ferries people and goods across the river has a sort of feeling for when it is possible to cross without becoming fish food. The man who arrives to take charge of the bridge project at first finds this ferrying business enormously frustrating, but as the years go by and the bridge grows, he comes to a deep understanding of the dangers of the mist and the height of his accomplishment. It is a quiet, slow story told from the point of view of the bridge builder.  It builds in resonance just as the bridge spans the water over time, ultimately leaving the reader with a sense of awe.

Catherynne M. Valente writes more beautifully than anyone else working in science fiction, fantasy and horror today, with a control over language that makes virtually every sentence a separate work of art.  Her novella, “Silently and Very Fast,” seems like a counterpoint to Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” which was nominated for a Nebula last year. It concerns Elefsis, an artificial life form that came into being when a child inadvertently integrated it with her own brain. The enduring question posed by the story, and, by design, not completely answered, is how this entity is different from the individuals in which it resides over the centuries, whether it has an independent existence, and whether it experiences emotions – an extension of the Turing Test for artificial intelligence. Elefsis is the narrator of the tale, and we learn of his/her/its reasoning by metaphor and how that led to an existence almost completely defined by fairy tales. It is gorgeously told.

The last of the six novellas nominated for the Nebula is Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “The Ice Owl.” This novella is about a teen who is, by some measures, well over a hundred years old, but by more conventional measures still a teenager: she has traveled widely throughout the galaxy, trips taking decades but during which she is in a sort of suspended animation, her molecules diced up and reassembled at the other end of the trip. Her mother is an irresponsible sort, taking up with men for as long as they’ll have her and then moving on to another man, another world, dragging her daughter with her. At the time this story begins, the mother and daughter are living on a planet called Glory to God. A group called the Incorruptibles appears to be attempting to gain control of the planet, and it has some strange ideas; for instance, it appears to be opposed to the education of the young, for it destroys the girl’s school. She seeks out a private teacher, a man who appears to know something about the Gmintan Holocide, which she begins to consider more closely herself. The two form a bond over art and history that culminates in his gift to her of an ice owl, a creature that lives most of its life in frozen suspension – much as the girl seems to live hers. The story is charming and entertaining.

There isn’t a bad choice in this entire lot of novellas. This seems to me to be the strongest of the short fiction categories of Nebula nominees this year, perhaps because the novella is such an ideal length for a science fiction or fantasy tale: long enough to build and populate a world with interesting characters, short enough to have the punch of a single idea fully explored. Still, as good as all of these pieces are, the Liu and the Castro are the stories that rise to the top like cream. The Liu is available online and is linked above; the Castro appeared in the November 2011 issue of Analog, and is worth the cost of the magazine all by itself. Read them!

It was a treat to reread Geoff Ryman’s “What We Found” to prepare to write this column. As I noted when I wrote about this story for my review on the issue of F&SF in which it originally appeared, Ryman has been writing in recent years of third-world cultures, in such a way that the reader becomes immersed in the culture, surrounded by sights, scents, tastes and sounds of a world so foreign to a first-worlder that it might as well be an alien civilization. This time, the setting is Makurdi in central Nigeria, a city with air conditioning, solar panels, smartphones — and roosters crowing outside the window on the morning of the narrator’s wedding day. As Patrick tells his story of his strange scientific findings and their decay, the apparent effect of observation, he also tells the story of growing up with a father who slowly lost his mind and a favorite brother who followed suit. The tale of a family riven by madness, unkindness and poverty is sad but fascinating. As the implications of the narrator’s scientific findings start to seep through the pages to the reader, it seems that everything comes undone at the same time that it is stitched up. While the nominees for the Hugo Award for best novelette this year are all good stories, “What We Found” is clearly the winner in terms of sophistication, subtlety, elegance and skill. If you read only one of the novelettes discussed in this column, make it this one.

Charlie Jane Anders wrote the fascinating “Six Months, Three Days,” about a relationship between the only two clairvoyants in the world. Both of them know exactly when and how their relationship will end — badly — but each chooses to proceed with it regardless. Doug does so because he feels he has no choice. His life, he believes, has been predetermined, and he is merely following the steps already laid out. Judy, though, is precognitive in a different way: she sees her choices and the branches that would follow from each possibility. Doug and Judy argue frequently about whether they have free will, and it is their differences on this score that, ironically, is the basis for their ultimate break-up. It’s a cool idea for a story, and Anders writes it well.

I also really liked “Sauerkraut Station” by Ferrett Steinmetz, though it offers little in the way of new ideas. Lizzie is a 12-year-old child who is one of three crewmembers on a small space station that serves as a sort of pit stop for interstellar cruisers. Lizzie befriends a younger boy named Themba when he passes through the station on his way to serve as a hostage for one of two empires; the friendship between the two of them is immediate and deep. When war erupts, the station remains neutral, providing services to soldiers from either of two vast forces — including medical services, as Lizzie is apprenticed to a physician and proves to be a quick learner. The war becomes one of attrition, and the station is ultimately seized by one force, and it is at this point that the story truly becomes one of survival. The description of Lizzie’s battle to keep not just her home, but her life, is exciting.

“The Migratory Pattern of Dancers” by Katherine Sparrow is about a world in which birds no longer exist. In fact, when a flock of sandhill cranes was discovered and believed to be the last, hunters vied for the distinction of being the one who made them extinct. Humanity discovers it misses birds, though, and so it compensates: it implants bird DNA in humans, who reenact the dances of the birds at the national parks. For absolutely no reason at all, these humans must move from park to park by bicycle, rather than any other mode of transportation. Furthermore, these gene-engineered human-bird hybrids are sponsored on their “migrations” by a rich man who wants to pension them off when they get older in order to avoid paying a huge fee to a human-bird’s survivors if they die while migrating. The failure to link the two major concerns of this story, bike riding and birds, is a major flaw in what is otherwise an imaginative tale of genetic engineering as an answer to human depredation. (It is worth noting that this story and “Sauerkraut Station” were both first published in an online magazine called Giganotosaurus, which is dedicated to publishing one longer piece of science fiction or fantasy each month. These two stories caused me to make Giganotosaurus a permanent link on my computer.)

Jake Kerr was being sly when he named his story “The Old Equations.” This story depends on the reader’s deep knowledge of science fiction and assumes a fundamental understanding of physics for its full effect. The title of the story is a take-off on Tom Godwin’s famous — some would say infamous — short story, “The Cold Equations,” which stands for the proposition that no amount of intelligence, charity or wishful thinking can get around the hard science of the universe: when a fuel supply will only get so much weight just so far, nothing will change the math. Kerr posits a universe in which Einstein died in World War I, after having published his revolutionary paper in which he revealed that E=mc², but not breakinig through with this news into the physics community, which dismissed him as a crank. Rather than working from that equation, then, science instead discovers and becomes enthralled with quantum mechanics and undertakes to explore space. When an astronaut takes off on a five-year voyage, certain old equations reassert their authority. It’s clever, but a bit too pleased with its cleverness. I’m also not sure whether it makes any scientific sense; how could you have the science to launch a spaceship, but never have stumbled over the speed of light as a cosmic speed limit?

“Ray of Light” by Brad R. Torgersen is another hard science fiction story, this one first appearing in Analog. Humanity has been forced to relocate to the bottom of the sea when an alien race, without a word of communication, much less explanation, sets up a shield of mirrors to prevent sunlight from reaching the Earth. The extreme cold on the surface of the planet forced humans to live near the boundaries between tectonic plates, where hydrothermal vents provided sufficient heat. Since then, no one has returned to the surface; it’s impossibly far, and the layers of ice too thick even at the equator to make it worthwhile. But the younger generation refuses to accept the prospect of a life totally without sunlight, and takes matters into its own hands. The story is predictable and ultimately trite in its resolution, even if its premise is imaginative.

Life after death has always been a fruitful area for speculation for writers. Rachel Swirsky writes of one possibility for an afterlife in “Fields of Gold.” Dennis finds himself “in another place” after he dies, with dead people coming toward him with party hats and presents. It’s a strange party, with not only the family and friends who predeceased him there, but also Cleopatra, Napoleon and Shakespeare. It feels rather like a big high school prom, only the punch is legitimately spiked and the music is good. Dennis meets up with the cousin he was in love with when he was a kid, and has a long talk with her father, his uncle. And he learns that he didn’t arrive on The Other Side in quite the way he expected. It’s a strange fantasy that suggests (as so many stories do) that the best of life is left behind in our childhoods when we grow up. Fortunately, if Swirsky is right, Heaven makes up for that.

Perhaps Geoff Ryman’s story was so excellent that it cast a long shadow on the other nominated stories, because generally speaking I found the other nominated stories competent but not outstanding. I’m terribly disappointed that Ryman‘s is the only nominated story that does not appear to be available on line — but you can find it in the September/October 2011 issue F&SF or the just-published Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year 6, edited by Jonathan Strahan. As the story has also been nominated for the Hugo Award, I’m hoping F&SF will ultimately decide to post it online, but really, it’s worth purchasing a copy of the magazine just for this single story.

For the second year in a row, Adam-Troy Castro has a short story nominated for the Nebula Award which I think the best of the nominees. “Her Husband’s Hands,” originally published in Lightspeed Magazine, posits a world in which medical technology is so advanced that virtually any bit of a soldier can be retrieved from the battleground and kept alive, complete with a memory recorded at some point before the attack that “killed” him or her. In Rebecca’s case, only her husband’s hands have survived. They have been fitted with light-sensitive apertures at the fingertips, which allow her husband to see; the wrists end in thick silver bands that house his life support and his “brain.” It’s at least as creepy as it sounds, particularly as Castro describes how the relationship between Rebecca and her husband’s hands proceeds, complete with post-traumatic stress disorder and all the other adjustments military spouses and the soldier-mates must make after a long deployment. Of course, there are a few additional adjustments that the partial nature of Rebecca’s husband makes necessary, as Castro spells out in detail.

When I reviewed Nancy Fulda’s “Movement” in Asimov’s last February, I called it “a short story of exceptional power,” and, upon rereading it, I still feel that way. It is about Hannah, a girl – very nearly a woman – who has temporal autism. I cannot find any indication that such a condition has been identified in our world, but in the context of the story it means that Hannah experiences time differently from the rest of us. Conversations can take weeks in her brain; a question you asked her on January 5 might receive an answer on January 28, but it takes that long for her to choose the right words to answer your inquiry precisely. The real question Hannah must answer is whether she wants to be “cured.” What would she give up if medical personnel started messing about with her brain? Would it be worth the price? And who should make that decision, Hannah or her parents?

Aliette de Bodard revisits the world of her series, OBSIDIAN AND BLOOD, moving it far forward into the future in her short story, “Shipbirth.” In this universe, Mexico is the dominant world power. It has extended that power well into space with ships capable of traveling faster than light through the “deep planes.” This travel is made possible because certain women give birth to Minds – not children, precisely, but entities capable of traveling the deep planes without losing their sanity. In this story, originally published in Asimov’s, one woman has given birth to such a Mind, but neither it nor she seems to have survived, at least not whole. It is a story of great pain and powerful gods.

Ken Liu’s “Paper Menagerie” is a charming story from F&SF about a mother who makes origami animals from old Christmas wrapping paper for her son. She is Chinese, picked out of a catalog by her American husband in 1973. She spoke no English when they met, and learned little in the years following their marriage and the birth of her son. But she has a magic: her origami animals are alive. The story is a quiet one about the relationship between this Chinese mother and her American son, ending on a melancholy note that will give you goose bumps.

“Mama, We Are Zhenya, Your Son” by Tom Crosshill is a story originally published in Lightspeed Magazine of a child sold by his mother for use in a scientific experiment to run a quantum motor. The physicist running the experiment, however, fails to take the extreme youth of her subject into account, not to mention that she might not know everything there is to know about quantum mechanics. It’s a mad scientist story with a twist, and that twist stings.

“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu is getting lots of love this year, as it has been nominated for the Hugo as well as for the Nebula, which must be making Clarkesworld Magazine quite happy. I concede that the story of a war between bees and wasps, and the movement among young bees to find a new way to live that doesn’t include slavery, is clever. So is the notion that wasps draw detailed maps inside their hives, and that an enterprising scientist would find this of great interest. Indeed, the story is bursting with ideas. But it lacks any emotional punch whatsoever, and the ideas are not quite clever enough to make up for the absence of a genuine plot.

Whether free will really exists is the question David W. Goldman poses in “The Axiom of Choice,” a story told in much the same way as those old “choose your adventure” books for kids – except that, quite often, when the reader is told to go to a certain paragraph upon making one choice, that paragraph isn’t there. In other words, there is no choice, which is sort of the point. The “you” to whom the story is addressed is a musician who survived a plane crash, but whose hands were so mutilated that guitar playing will no longer come easy. What happens from there? You choose. Or do you? The story was originally published in The New Haven Review.

These six stories come from four different sources.  It is perhaps no longer noteworthy that two of the sources (for three stories) are online-only publications. Certainly it is a blessing for those without magazine subscriptions that all the stories are available to read online. Which story is your pick for the Nebula?

Interzone is a British science fiction and fantasy magazine that’s been around since 1982. It’s expensive as SF magazines go for American readers, but Interzone’s great fiction and detailed movie, television and book reviews are worth the expense. After a period of relative penury has eased somewhat, I’ve subscribed again, and I’m greatly enjoying some very good fiction.

One of the strongest stories in the most recent issue (#239) is “Tangerine Nectarine Clementine Apocalypse” by Suzanne Palmer, a hard science fiction story that starts out sounding like a fantasy. It takes some time before the reader places the fruit stand at which most of the events of the story take place on a generation ship instead of a far distant planet. The ship is called Utopia, and no payment is exchanged for goods. The boy, Echa, believes in what his government teaches, but cynicism has captured many around him. He is apprenticed to Bota, who teaches him how to properly dispense the fruit that the ship provides – and there is something of an art to it. A very special art, when it comes to the rare pomelo. It’s an excellent story, and I will keep an eye out for more of Suzanne Palmer’s work.

Steve Rasnic Tem’s stories always seem to be infused with melancholy. “Twember,” which is no exception, envisions a world in which ghostly escarpments regularly pass over the land. Most of the time, they have no apparent destructive effect; but on occasion, they can topple trees or destroy walls – or worse, affect minds. They seem to indicate the end of the world, but in a slow and miserable way.  How does the average person react to no more leaves on the trees, weather that’s the same almost every day, vaguely worsening health, no television reception, no one knowing what to do? Will is just one more man trying to adjust and survive, despite crippling losses. I can’t think about this story without feeling a deep sense of slow, sad horror.

Another powerful story in this issue is “Rail Riders” by Matthew Cook. In the far future, hobos ride the rails – which, in this time and place, means that they sneak onto interstellar ships and move from planet to planet, the eternally homeless, looking just for a meal and a warm place to sleep. It’s a dangerous way to live, as it has ever been; the dangers aren’t just the “bulls,” the enforcers who come looking for stowaways, but the possibility that the holds in which the hobos ride will suddenly be deprived of oxygen if the cargo doesn’t require it. Drugs and sex hold their sway, as always, and death is omnipresent. It’s a grim way to live, and a grimmer way to die. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Jon Wallace’s “Lips & Teeth” is set in the China of the Great Leap Forward, if I’m remembering my history correctly – or, perhaps, in the future of an Asian country going through a similar crackdown on “elites.”  It involves a man who has so accepted his punishment that he has forgotten that life was ever any different. He has been so thoroughly brainwashed that he believes everything that the regime wants him to believe – at least on the surface. Deep down, perhaps he retains knowledge of who he is, and what he can do with his especially powerful voice. The story suggests that the worst sort of helplessness may not be as completely hopeless as at first appears.

Is the fact that a house is haunted a selling point or a warning to keep away? Jacob A. Boyd explores this question in “Bound in Place.” Perhaps, Boyd posits, in the far future, when ghosts can be chained to a dwelling place and made to serve the living human occupants, they will seem to be no more than technology, and can be used with thought to what the use means to them. There is a cruelty to what the humans do; they essentially make slaves of the ghosts, without knowing whether the ghosts have sentience, without understanding if they love. And what effect does this relationship have on the humans who make such use of the past, of the spirits?

Nigel Brown posits a new form of alien life in “One-Way Ticket.” Dying humans – those with diseases that offer no hope of a cure – travel to a distant planet where they bond with the aliens for the relief of their pain. It isn’t clear what’s in it for the aliens, but the experience appears to offer humans some form of eternal consciousness. Kyra, who is genuinely ill but a journalist to the end, has snuck recording devices into the cave where the respite lies, and what she sees is almost sufficient to make her change her mind about seeking her end. But instead it makes her question whether, in this one particular case, more knowledge is better than less.

The fiction in this issue is provocative enough standing alone, but the many pages of reviews that follow are astonishing in their breadth. Tony Lee starts with “Laser Fodder,” in which he reviews seven movies on disc that have at least a tangential relationship to the fantastic – not the fantastic in quality, mind you (there seems to be precious little of that), but fantastic in subject matter. Nick Lowe follows with “Mutant Popcorn,” in which he reviews eight different films that you might still find in the local multiplex. “Book Zone,” by various authors, brings reviews of nine books and an interview of Chris Beckett, the author of the novel Dark Eden, an ecological science fiction novel about a strange planet. One of the nine books under review is a work of criticism, From Elvish to Klingon:  Exploring Invented Languages, edited by Michael Adams. There is something for every taste here.

Interzone has always been a remarkable magazine. I’m pleased to report that it remains so.

The March/April issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction is worth its cover price for the new Peter S. Beagle novelet all by itself. In “Olfert Dapper’s Day,” Beagle demonstrates that there are still new tales to tell about unicorns if you’re a master of the short fantasy tale. Dr. Olfert Dapper was a seventeenth century conman who wrote books about the strange creatures to be found all over the world, even though he never left Holland – that is, the actual historical figure never left Holland. In Beagle’s imagination, though, Dapper flees Utrecht just in time to avoid arrest, taking flight for the New World. He winds up in in No Popery, in the “vaguely delineated colony” of Maine. There, he is more or less forced to become the medical doctor he has purported to be, without much justification. He particularly learns from an Abenaki Indian named (as far as the name can be translated) Rain Coming, who shows him various herbal remedies. One day, while the two are scouting for plants in the early spring, they come across a unicorn – and there begins the heart of Beagle’s tale, which I shall not spoil for you. It is enough to say that it is a charming and sad story.

Richard Bowes’s “The Queen and the Cambion” is a short story about help rendered to Queen Victoria of the British Empire by a certain wizard of mythological fame, sworn to aid England. It is a sympathetic picture of a queen who reigned for 60 years, but seems to have only truly known happiness for 20 of them, the years during which she was married to Albert. The story is a nothing more than a bon bon, but it is a delicious one.

“Twenty-Two and You” by Michael Blumlein, is one of a series of related tales Blumlein calls The Doctor Diaries. It portrays a world in which gene therapy can prevent a woman from developing breast and uterine cancer without removing her physical organs. Occasionally, though, there is a price. I greatly enjoyed this melancholy tale of how and why people change, this wonder at how a mind that so wanted one thing then can want the exact opposite now. Blumlein’s biographical note says that he has a collection of short stories called What the Doctor Ordered: Tales of the Bizarre and Magnificent coming out this fall, which I suspect will contain this collage of tales; I look forward to it.

The cover story, “Electrica” by Sean Mullen, is an epistolary novelet set during the Napoleonic Wars, told by an officer and code breaker for the British forces. Lieutenant Michael Fletcher seeks a new assignment following his traumatic experience working with Sir Charles Calder. Sir Charles had allegedly invented a new device for transmitting messages called an amberscope, which sounds to my non-technologically-oriented ears like a primitive telegraph. Fletcher’s assignment is to learn everything there is to know about the new device, and to pass this knowledge along to other troops. But there is more going on with Sir Charles’s experiments than a mere means of conveying coded messages; indeed, the fate of all humanity may hang in the balance. But then, Fletcher is not the most reliable narrator in the world, and it is hard to tell the fictional truth from the truthful fiction in this sly story.

Time travel stories so often seem to bend in on themselves, turning the reader’s mind into a pretzel as it tries to follow the convoluted realities. “The Man Who Murdered Mozart” by Robert Walton and Barry N. Malzberg is no exception. The protagonist is Howard Beasley, born in about 2042, a hugely rich but completely mad man who believes that he is exceptional, especially in his love of Mozart. He tries to master an instrument so that he can play his beloved composer’s works, but he succeeds only in torturing the ears of his very expensive violin teacher. So he takes the natural next step: he will abduct Mozart from his deathbed and bring him into the future, there to finish his Requiem. There are clones and poisons and purple spiked hairdos, all mixed in with the Sanctus and the dying man, spiced with the the concept of certainty and the needs of narrative. It’s a heady mix, and it might give you a headache, but it’s the kind of headache that’s worth getting. You’ll want to reread this one once or twice to see if you can figure out what has happened.

Robert Reed’s “One Year of Fame” is the story of a writer who has long since stopped writing. Now he lives in a small town that seems to be a mix of all the clichés of small towns in one package, complete with twin sisters who hate one another and a bar where everyone gathers. But the difference here is that, in this future, artificial intelligences have attained the ability to appreciate the best the arts have to offer – and they discover the writer who no longer writes. Soon AIs from all over have become tourists to the town just in the hopes of glimpsing the writer. But then – ah, then. The AIs grow up.

Tim Sullivan’s “Repairmen” is about a couple of men who are charged with keeping the different universes from colliding with one another. It’s a tough job, especially if you happen to fall in love with someone in a universe where you cannot stay.

“Perfect Day” by C.S. Friedman offers a look at tomorrow that will make everyone want to stay in the present, a world where computers live inside our heads and constantly give us input on how much salt we can put on our eggs – and report us to our health insurers, with an increase in premiums, if we disregard the “advice” we are given. And those computers are no less susceptible to viruses than our present machines, sometimes to terrible, if terribly funny, effect – like the nudie virt that makes everyone appear to be naked. Worse, advertisers have their noses in everything, dictating the route one takes to work to ensure one sees the proper number of billboards as well as the number of advertisement one must view on an e-reader before one can start reading the book (and I could swear that I read something about precisely this latter example in a blog this week). It’s a perfect example of science fiction that posits what life will be if life as it is merely goes on the way it’s going. It makes me happy to be living today instead of tomorrow.

Geoffrey A. Landis indulges himself is a fantasy about authors who can vanish into the worlds they have created in their books in but a few pages in “Demiurge.” I can think of a few fantasy worlds I wouldn’t mind living in, can’t you?

I’m convinced that it’s much more difficult to write a funny story than a sad one. Albert E. Cowdrey succeeds at that tough task more than he fails, but “Greed” isn’t one of his better efforts. His protagonist, Vern, the caretaker of his uncle’s modern-day castle, manages to outwit even himself when he gets mixed up with a fugitive from justice and computer crime. Throw in a strange reptile, the Ku Klux Klan, and a trip to a whorehouse, and you have a complicated mess that fails to coax forth so much as a grin.

“The Tortoise Grows Elate” by Steven Utley also very nearly misses the funny mark. It is one of Utley’s series of stories set in the Silurian Age, and depends on stereotypes of college students, female college professors, and others for the force of many of its jokes. It is saved only by a series of references to Jane Austen, who can improve almost anything.

KJ Kabza is tired of every genre with a “-punk” attached. He wrote “Gnarly Times at Nana’ite Beach” to prove how absurd the whole thing is. We therefore have here the only extant example of beachpunk. While it has some fairly cool ideas embedded in it, I found it a shame that the characters had to be so stupid for the tale to work.

The single poem in this issue, “Hanging Noodles” by Sophie M. White, is a nice bit of absurdist, even surreal, poetry.  Paul di Filippo’s regular feature, “Plumage from Pegasus,” is funnier than any of the longer stories that aspire to that status. The book columns by Charles de Lint and Chris Moriarty are informative and well-written. Lucius Shepard’s film column, in which he considers “Melancholia,” will make you want to add that film to your Netflix queue.

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The April/May 2012 edition of Asimov’s Science Fiction is full of some of the best short fiction I’ve read in a while. The best story is a subtle novella by Rick Wilber called “Something Real.” It helps if you know a little bit about the baseball player and World War II spy named Moe Berg, an actual if little known historical figure who is brought vividly to life in this alternate world tale. The Moe Berg of this story is just as talented as the fellow who lived in our world, proficient in a number of languages and able to speak intelligently about cutting edge physics. Berg’s most important assignment, in life as well as in this story, was to attend a seminar Heisenberg gave in Switzerland in December 1944 and attempt to determine how close Germany was to building an atomic weapon. If Berg concluded Germany was close, he was to assassinate Heisenberg. This story is built around that particular encounter, and is as fascinating from a historical perspective as from a fictional perspective. Wilbur knows his subject well; Wibur’s touch is so sure that it is often hard to distinguish the fact from the fiction.

A close second in my affections, “Living in the Eighties” by David Ira Cleary, is a novella in which two music lovers discover a website that promises travel to either the past or the present; just pick your date. Clayton, a bassist, wants to travel to the future to find a cure for his diabetes before he loses his few remaining toes. The first-person narrator, Bob, wants to travel to 1986 — for the music, he says, but we learn soon enough that his real aim is to save the life of his then-girlfriend. The key to traveling in time turns out to be listening to really loud music while watching a flickering computer screen on the right website. There is much fun to be had in this story if you’re a lover of eighties music, as the references to genres, bands and individual pieces are numerous. Even if you could do without ever thinking about Sid Vicious again, though, this story of a world gradually changing the more Bob travels to the past is a nicely complex tale of regret and change.

The opening novella, “The Last Judgment” by James Patrick Kelly, is a detective story set in a world where aliens have eliminated all the men from Earth. The aftermath wasn’t what the aliens intended — an incredible outpouring of violence as women killed themselves and others in despair and anger. The aliens keep the species going by “seeding” the women without so much as a by-your-leave, and many women simply have themselves “scraped,” not wishing to bear a child under such circumstances. As the first person narrator, the private detective confronted with the mystery, says, the whole notion filled her with “stony rage.” The worst part of the aliens’ error, though, is their complete misunderstanding of gender roles in human society. Given the state of our medical science, one need not have a XX chromosome to be male. Indeed, the new society created by the aliens appears to be creating new men medically. This background comes to overwhelm the simple case of theft the detective is asked to solve, making this story a rich brew of sexual politics without any preaching. I was taken aback, however, by the implication toward the end of the story that women fulfilling leadership roles are necessarily more male than women fulfilling more nurturing roles. The story also seems to suggest that a human world without men would have to create them. Thus, Kelly seems to be having something of an argument with Joanna Russ, the author of the classic story, “When It Changed,” in which male settlers on a newly discovered planet are killed by a plague, while the women survive — and appear not to miss their male counterparts at all. I do not mean to imply that Kelly’s story is a pretext for arguing a premise; it’s a story, a good, sharp, provocative story. It provides plenty of fodder for speculation and discussion.

The best of the short stories is Tom Purdom’s “Bonding with Morry,” in which an elderly man who is beginning to have some trouble taking care of his needs on his own is pressed to accept a robot companion. Well, not actually a companion. In fact, Morry insists that his robot is a tool, not a housemate, and refuses to give it human features:  it has wheels instead of legs, it does not have a simulated face, and Morry even names it “Clank.” Morry’s world isn’t happy with how he treats his robot, though; some call them “CyberAmericans” and argue that they are entitled to full rights. Years go by and Morry is more or less forced to make some physical changes to Clank, but his opinion of Clank’s essential character as a machine doesn’t change — or does it?

“Sexy Robot Mom” by Sandra McDonald is another robot story, this one about a robot who serves as a gestational chamber for babies. Alina is on her fourteenth pregnancy when she abruptly goes into stasis, presumably because of some ecological disaster. When she is awakened fifty years later, her part of the world has fallen into a deep freeze because of global climate change, and her rescuer tells her that the parents of the fetus she carries are dead. But Alina’s directive cannot be overridden, and she insists on setting off for Georgia regardless of the wishes of her rescuer. The story is not entirely successful, but it makes a nice complement to “Bonding with Morry.”

Gray Rinehart explores mechanization from the other end of the spectrum, the one in which humans are enhanced by machines, rather than machines becoming human. Holly is a soldier who has been implanted with hardware and software that allow her to hear the thoughts of everyone within a wide range. It’s painful, requiring her to live in a sort of cage lined with layers of fine wire mesh that keeps the voices away. But when Holly is on a mission, she becomes a part of a flying spy vessel with incredible capabilities. This would be sufficiently interesting all on its own, but the stakes increase when she is shot down on a mission and turned over to a Russian who has the same capability she has, and isn’t afraid to use it against her in the most brutal fashion possible. How Holly reacts, and what conclusions she comes to about the technology she has used, are fairly predictable, but the story is well-told nonetheless.

“Souvenirs” by Ian Creasey is a story about a seller of handmade objets d’art at a spaceport who is the victim of an unscrupulous customer who pays for her most expensive single object with a counterfeit bill. Fortunately for Kendra, the spaceport authorities take her complaint seriously. It’s a nice slice-of-future-life story in a world better than ours in some ways and worse in others.

“Greener,” by Josh Roseman, is a yarn about a man who divorces his wife and then regrets it. The only futuristic bits of the story is that the couple weren’t married, but contracted to each other; the divorce is not a divorce per se, but a refusal to renew the contract. They find their way back to each other, and ultimately bond forever in a way that I found mawkishly romantic and impractical. But love will do that to you sometimes. It’s the weakest story in this issue, but still well-written and tightly plotted.

I’m aware that I should automatically admire Carol Emshwiller’s writing. But “Riding Red Ted and Breathing Fire,” though charming, is not one of her strongest efforts. It is about a soldier who has been provided with a mutilated dragon to ride to a village owing a tithe to the central government; the dragon is supposed to be sufficiently intimidating to cause the recalcitrant village to comply. The soldier is pompous and arrogant, and one would expect him to be cut down to size in the typical story; but Emshwiller doesn’t write typical stories, and in this one the soldier finds an odd sort of redemption in the village he was to have terrified.

This issue also contains a books column by Norman Spinrad that is surprisingly dense and difficult to read, including extensive coverage of a novel available only in French. As interested as I am in science fiction and fantasy from other countries, I (and, I fear, most Americans) am unable to read a novel available only in a language I stopped studying nearly 40 years ago, and even Spinrad’s ecstasies make me unwilling to learn another language for the sake of this book. Another of Spinrad’s choices is a book he assures us is out of print and hard to find, a mash-up of voodoo and quantum physics. I’m perplexed by Spinrad’s choices, to say the least.

The poetry in this issue is generally not particularly good, though the first few stanzas of Bruce Boston’s “The Music of Particle Physics” are lovely, as these first few lines demonstrate: “The Music of Particle Physics / is absolutely relative, / precise and differential, / linear and curved.” That the poem loses its force at the end only makes it clear how difficult this business of science fictional poetry is.

Asimov’s maintains its position at the top of the heap of science fiction and fantasy magazines. I read this issue with great joy, and look forward to the next.

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Apex Magazine is a monthly e-magazine that publishes two short stories, one reprint story, a nonfiction piece and an interview in each issue, together with the occasional poem. In the three issues I read, the reprint fiction tended to outshine the original fiction — which doesn’t mean the original fiction was bad, just that it couldn’t quite live up to the standard set by the well-chosen older stories. The interviews are thoughtful and generally go well beyond the usual topics, either to discuss the author’s work in considerable detail or to go into areas not normally explored in most interviews. The nonfiction is variable in topic but uniformly strong work. A subscription to Apex Magazine seems to be worth the $19.95 per year asking price, though the most recent issue suggests some caution.

In the December 2011 issue (No. 31), the editor-in-chief, Lynne M. Thomas, explains in her notes (a column entitled “Blood on Vellum”) that the new year would see additional nonfiction and less poetry: “I am exceedingly picky about poetry, and I prefer to focus on publishing only the pieces that take my breath away.” That is a sensible procedure to follow, given the iffy nature of science fiction, fantasy and horror poetry; some is excellent, but most is terrible.

The first story in this issue is “The 24 Hour Brother” by Christopher Barzak. It tells the tale of the short life of the narrator’s brother, Joe, who is born, grows to adulthood, and dies all within 24 hours. Joe not only learns to speak quickly, with a mastery of language that many never experience in their lives; he is writing haiku almost the moment he returns home from the hospital where he was born. The story is ultimately not so much about Joe, but about the narrator and Joe’s effect on him, his realization that we are all alien, and the need to forget that which it is unbearable to remember. It’s a sharp, clean, sad story.

“Faithful City” by Michael Penzer is a less satisfying story about a world that seems to have undergone a sort of environmental holocaust. Only one city survives, and it calls to those it wants. The question is what exactly does the city want to call the people for? Unfortunately, the answer to that question doesn’t seem to be entirely clear even to the author.

“The Yellow Dressing Gown”, the reprint in this issue by Sarah Monette, is the story of Michael Overton, one of the curators of the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum. Overton’s specialty is eighteenth-century textiles, with an emphasis on women’s clothing — not the sort of thing one would expect of the “loud, bustling, back-slapping man, red-faced and brash and quite, quite stupid.” But Overton is exceedingly good at what he does, even if he does consume more than his share of the museum’s resources. Overton especially likes to find clothing worn by this or that celebrity, a famous criminal of a bygone era or an actress from the days when acting was not an honorable profession. Overton’s mania for collecting has as its particular focus the dressing gown of the artist Ephraim Catesby. He’s certain that a local descendant of Catesby’s has the gown, though she denies it. But when that descendant dies and Overton gets his hands on that gown, it becomes clear that sometimes having your most fervent wish granted is the worst thing that can happen to you.

There are two poems in this issue, both unobjectionable. Sandi Leibowitz’s “To a Gentleman Who Is Visited” is about the ghost of a woman who had been an anorexic in life, but sees no reason to continue dieting in death. F.J. Bergmann’s “A Woman of a Certain Age” is about a woman who seeks lovers much younger than she — by centuries.

E.E. Knight contributes a nonfiction piece about holiday movies for those who love science fiction, fantasy and horror. I had forgotten that some of these movies feature anything to do with Christmas — “Gremlins”? “12 Monkeys”? Really? But Knight’s enthusiasm is contagious, and before you know it you’ll be popping corn for an evening of mistletoe and blood.

This issue’s interview is with Jennifer Pelland, an author new to me. After reading her interview, though, her book of short stories, Unwelcome Bodies, and her new novel, Machine, are now both on my want list.

The January 2012 issue (No. 32) starts off with Cat Rambo’s “So Glad We Had This Time Together.” Those of my generation will read those words and immediately flash on Carol Burnett’s variety show, a staple of our childhoods — and will therefore not be surprised that this story is about television. More specifically, it’s about a reality TV show called “Unreality TV” in which the contestants are a ghost, a vampire, a werewolf and a demon, all locked up together in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. What could go wrong with that premise? Well, quite a lot, actually, and Rambo clearly has a glorious time spelling out the details.

“Sweetheart Showdown” by Sarah Dalton seems to owe much of its plot to Suzanne Collins’s HUNGER GAMES trilogy. Indeed, it owes rather too much to Collins. The story is about a beauty pageant in which the contestants have all sorts of artificial enhancements, down to and including the ability to infiltrate the minds of their opponents. The contest culminates in a fight to the death between the two finalists. It isn’t so much a parody of the Miss America and Miss Universe pageants as it is a new arena for young people to realize that they are the bread and circuses of their time.

Jim C. Hines is more than a writer: he has also worked as a rape counselor. His nonfiction piece, “Writing About Rape,” gives the aspiring writer excellent advice on how to write about this subject in a way that is accurate and not merely shorthand for a story’s villain. Even more to the point, Hines gives instructions on how not to be sexist when portraying this crime of violence. It’s trickier than even an experienced writer might think.

“The Prowl” by Gregory Frost is the reprint story in the January edition, and it is excellent. I’ve long been a fan of Frost’s writing, so this story came as a genuine treat. It is about a creature known as a plateye, one who arrived in the United States on a slave ship from the coast of Africa in the eighteenth century. The story portrays slavery in the unsparing first person account of a man who knew the plateye, and what the plateye did for him.  It’s a wonderful fusion of history with folklore. In his interview, which follows the story, Frost talks about doing research, the best books about writing, story structure and more.

The February 2012 issue (No. 33) is the weakest of the three issues that I read for this column. The first story is David J. Schwartz’s “Bear in Contradicting Landscape.” It’s about an author who meets one of his characters on the Chicago elevated train one day, just past Division Street. It’s an old trope, but the story is nicely written. Carrie Vaughn’s poem “Caverns of Science” follows. It is opaque, failing to reveal itself even after repeated readings. A.C. Wise’s “My Body, Her Canvas” is about a tattoo artist and her subject, who appears to have reduced himself to nothing but a surface for ink. The fantasy or horror aspect of this story is implied, and may be merely the protagonist’s mental illness, a technique that does not quite work here. The reprint story is Maureen McHugh’s “Useless Things,” which appears in her recent collection, After the Apocalypse. It’s an odd story set in a world that is only a step or two away from our own, in which the Great Recession was just a touch deeper. McHugh writes well, but her world is terribly bleak, as the interview that follows the story seems to confirm. Alex Bledsoe’s nonfiction piece, “No Mortals Allowed,” competently explains why real vampire or werewolf societies could never exist.

This last issue makes me leery about what comes next. I hope that its weakness is not because the pile of stories left behind by Catherynne Valente when she left the post of editor in October 2011 has now been exhausted. Watch this space for a follow-up in a few months.

It took an act of faith for me to read the new issue of Phantasmagorium – the second in its run. The first quarterly issue, published in October 2011, was disappointing despite its lovely cover photograph, which suggests an angel taking flesh from a stone sculpture. A few stories were well-written, but not particularly original or frightening:  Scott Nicolay’s “Alligators,” Simon Strantzas’s “Strong as a Rock” and Stephen Graham Jones’s “No Takebacks.” They were overwhelmed by the inexplicable “Cardoons!” by Anna Tambour, a humorous fantasy story about dragons made soft by modern living, and the incoherent “And this is where I go down into the darkness,” a lengthy, stream-of-consciousness tribute to Thomas Ligotti by Joseph Pulver. Genevieve Valentine’s “Bufonidae,” good as it is, was not sufficient to save the issue.

But the magazine is edited by Laird Barron, who writes the scariest stuff around and knows the genre inside and out. His recommendations for good reading have always been on the mark before. So, I thought, maybe the first issue was just Barron making the transition from writer to editor with a touch of uncertainty. Maybe the second quarterly issue would show an editor more in command of his material.

It does. The January 2012 issue of Phantasmagorium is shorter, tighter, and much better. It contains three stories and two poems, about half the content of the first issue – but twice the quality.

In the first story, “Endless Life” by Nadia Bulkin, a ghost is mistaken for another ghost. Melanie, a hotel maid, was a woman who was unnoticed when she lived and unmourned when she died. Now she is trapped in the room where she slipped and fell while cleaning the bathroom. It happens that the room was also the spot where General Jon Henry Fest, known as the Jackal or the Black Ribbon, killed himself after being ousted from his bloody dictatorship. Lauren and Ed, a pair of “dark tourists” – those who seek out the places most relevant to the lives of horrible people who are now dead – visit the hotel room in the hopes of meeting up with the General’s ghost. Instead, they get Melanie. But Melanie sees her chance for glory, and impersonates the General. After all, who can tell which ghost was the one who oozed ectoplasm? The horror here is not what the “dark tourists” experience, nor the haunting; it is Melanie’s life, and death, and afterlife. This thoughtful, sad story is haunting.

“Almost, Majic Man, Posters and Doors that Never Lock” by Chesya Burke takes place in 2111, when a pandemic of psychosis hits a small town. No one knows why people have suddenly taken to carving up their own bodies, not to kill themselves, but to root out an evil they perceive inside themselves because a loved one has told them so. Is this some new form of communicable disease? The stricken are taken to the hospital and left there, where they are patched up and live in peace. Oddly, no one visits them – not parents, not spouses, not friends. But they do not seem bereft; they are calm and happy. What, exactly, is going on here?

The best story of the three is Paul Tremblay’s “House of Windows.” In this surreal tale, a building appears right next to a big city library one day. It’s pink and aqua-blue, looking as if it belongs on an island instead of smack in the middle of a city. There are no doors, but plenty of windows. Not that the windows offer any clues, because they’re all covered with draperies on the inside, making it impossible to find out what’s going on in there. The police cordon the building off, but inexplicably, do not break a window to gain access; instead, they simply try to keep the curious crowds from touching it. But all bets are off when the building begins to grow, and when more of them pop up around the city. This is a wonderful, weird story that paints pictures with a tropical palette with one hand and the grays and blacks of endless urban routine with the other. The story was my first exposure to Tremblay, but it won’t be my last.

The poetry is mixed. “Having Sex with Sylvia Plath” by Steve Harris seems like the recitation of a dream, and is about as interesting as other people’s dreams usually are (that is, not very). “Budding” by Mike Allen is a better poem about parents troubled by the apparent artistic talent of their baby, who seems to be painting like Francis Bacon while still in her crib. Those parents are proud as can be, but worried – maybe even scared. It’s a successful horror poem with some nice imagery (“sketched houses with screams for doors,” for instance).

There is promise in this new magazine. I’m looking forward to the April issue.

My favorite email every other week is the one containing the new issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Each issue contains two stories of what the online magazine calls “literary adventure fantasy.” The quality of the stories has been high throughout the year or so I’ve been reading the magazine, but it seems to be getting even better with recent issues.

Issue #83, published December 1, 2011, opens with “The Gardens of Landler Abbey” by Megan Arkenberg. The tone and setting of the story remind the reader of Jane Austen or other Regency fiction, and the tale’s emphasis on issues of manners and class reinforces this initial impression. The major difference between this tale and anything Austen conceived of, however, is that a woman is the principal actor here, and more than that, she is a woman who served honorably in the military in her country’s recent war. Gethsemane von Reis has purchased an estate formerly owned by another branch of her noble family, and is revitalizing the extensive gardens. The narrator, a professor at a nearby university, asks von Reis for a tour, and she grants his request. Lady Xavior, piqued at being excluded from von Reis’s hospitality, seems ready to embark on a long conversation condemning von Reis at a later social gathering, and her husband, in an effort to avoid the embarrassment of such gossip, turns the discussion to a newspaper article about war criminals from the recent conflict. It appears that the countrymen and women of those gathered were tortured, a practice that all abhor. But when the next question is asked — did we commit torture as well? –  the professor begins to believe that knows more about von Reis than he has been told outright, both because of her injuries and because of his own wartime experience. And the dead do not lie easy. This story becomes Austen crossed with an M.R. James ghost story, a combination skillfully handled to the inevitable conclusion.

“Princess Courage,” by Nadia Bulkin tells the tale of how King Courage led his people to explore and conquer new lands, as prescribed in the Secret Atlas – this people’s holy book. That the new lands are already populated appears not to matter, especially since the Atlas demands that the king confer “order” on them. The native peoples are (oh, this sounds so familiar) discovered to be “not more than animals.” One of them, a child called Isadore the Blue, meets the king when he visits one of the settlements: “What savagery, I thought, what coarseness,” is his reaction to meeting her and noting the handprint painted on her face. Yet these savages somehow manage to survive in the forest despite the presence there of a species of half-man, half-lizard that seems to prey upon the settlers. King Courage proposes a pact between his people and the natives against the Garrow-Low, as the half-lizards are called, but the natives refuse. “The Garrow-Low do not hunt us if we stay out of their way. But your people do,” they tell the surprised king. The tale continues as it must, into war and madness, as Isadore the Blue transforms into Princess Courage as she defies the king. This story is predictable but well-told, with a lesson that bears retelling.

Issue #84 opens with “Heartless” by Peadar O Guilin, a story that will tear the heart from you much as it is torn from the narrator in the first few paragraphs. “Heartless” is a tour de force about a land in which magic does everything for everyone, all the time. For instance, rocks are made into food, into feasts; no other food is even available. But the magic comes at a terrible price: a family member must be bathed in the town’s springs, and then caged in the family home, working magic at the order of the head of the family and becoming more and more insane and sickly as he or she accomplishes more and more magic, life growing shorter with each new trick. As each family member dies, another must take his or her place. When brought to the spring, though, the person to be sacrificed to his or her family’s honor is asked: “Do you ask for death?” No one ever does, until Malern is asked. And the town leader grants her death, of a sort, by tearing her heart from her, but keeping her alive with magic. The leader learns that acts have consequences — and so, ultimately, does Malern. This story is new, challenging, exciting, unlike anything I’ve read before. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more by O Guilin.

Derek Kunsken’s “The God Thieves” is another highly original tale set in an Italy not of this world, in the time of a Renaissance different from ours. In Don Mateo’s world, one can harbor the soul of another being — a gryphon, a dragon — in one’s own brain, and with it, wield superhuman powers to achieve the destruction of another city — Venice, in this case — in defense of one’s own — here, Genoa. The powers are necessary to prevent Venice from harvesting the power of a nearly forgotten god to use as a weapon of enormous destructive power, power sufficient to destroy Genoa entirely in a cataclysm that sounds much like nuclear annihilation. Only Christ will not fight in this continual war; or so it seems. Is there a way to force his hand? Don Mateo must make choices that will literally sunder his very soul.

Issue 85 begins with “The Death of Roach” by Spencer Ellsworth. It is about a girl and boy raised by their father to be vicious assassins, told from the perspective of the girl, who always seems to fall short of her father’s expectations. She kills her first man when she is five years old, but her inability to slaughter her own brother when her father orders her to makes her inferior in his eyes. What effect must such an upbringing have on a girl as she becomes a woman? When everything appears to be a test, where can such a woman find rest?

Seth Dickinson’s “The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds” completes the issue. It is a fascinating tale of a particular physical wound suffered by Baru Cormorant, a wound that swallows half her world, a neurological injury that literally makes everything that happens on her right side invisible in every way: not only invisible because she is blind in her right eye, but unthinkable as well; it is as if what happens to her right has been wiped from existence.  She considers it a wound she deserves. Her ruler poses her a test, sending her a woman who is an enemy of the state, demanding that Baru put her to death. The ruler knows that the woman is Baru’s lover, Tain Hu. Baru finds that turning away from the woman, once in her hands, does away with the sight of the woman, but not with the pain of her presence. Baru’s own future lies upon whether she will do as she is ordered. The story, while not altogether surprising is original, is so well-told that it resonates with the reader long after the last word is read.

The first issue of the new year, Issue #86 (January 12, 2012), gives us every reason to believe that Beneath Ceaseless Skies will continue to flourish and grow. “Calibrated Allies” by Marissa Lingen is a steampunk tale of a world similar to ours except for the early discovery of clockwork automata. In a time that appears to be the equivalent of our nineteenth century, slavery is still the way of life in “the colonies,” but is a more flexible institution than it came to be in the Deep South in the decades just prior to the Civil War. A black man might be freed to attend school and learn to use his talent with machinery to greater advantage, as is the case with Okori. Okori becomes involved with a group of students who speak of revolution. He sympathizes with them, but points out that they know only of metaphorical slavery. Yet he allows his sympathy to outweigh his — not contempt, precisely, but his perception of their naivety. Not surprisingly, it is he who comes up with the tool that makes their revolution possible. This look at slavery through the lens of a different world in a different universe makes the horror of the peculiar institution all the more apparent.

“The Lady of the Lake” by E. Catherine Tobler is set in a Japan full of dragons and princes and, of course, the titular lady of the lake, a woman strangled by her own mother and transformed by the water. Susanoo is a prince who rises from the lake to demand the lady’s help in completing a task before he can be married:  he must retrieve a sword embedded in the tail of an eight-headed dragon. To say more would be to say too much about this story, which seems to have a surprise on every page. The language of the story is poetic in places, funny in others, and the story is altogether satisfying.

Not a single story in these issues is less than a fine example of adventure fantasy. The range of the stories is epic, reaching from one century to another, one culture to another, creating new worlds and referring back to the old. The editors, Scott H. Andrews and Kate Marshall, are doing a fine job of finding and publishing excellent fiction. Beneath Ceaseless Skies is well worth a subscription.

Granta strikes me as an unusual place to find horror fiction; it normally is home to the toniest of literary fiction. But Issue 117 is entitled “Horror,” so I thought I’d see what a literary magazine’s vision of this genre is.

As it turns out, the issue is a lot more about horror in real life than it is about the type of horror that is more safely tucked away in my imagination. Tom Bamforth’s nonfiction essay about war in Sudan, “The Mission,” presents a picture one wishes were only imagined, of children starving, women used as shields, soldiers with orders to shoot on sight. How easily we go about our days without ever thinking of these people: children too ill to even brush the flies away from their eyes, fourteen-year-olds wielding rocket launchers, the complete absence of men from home life, living hours away from the nearest fresh water, elderly family members abandoned at their own request so that there would be enough food — or at least more food — to feed to the children. It will make you feel unspeakably privileged.

At the other end of the non-fiction spectrum is Mark Doty’s “Insatiable,” an essay about sex — sex divorced completed from love, sex that is about the celebration of the body and nothing more (nor less). Doty takes his cues from Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker, strangely enough, writing about how Whitman was supposedly the model for Dracula and implying that both Whitman and Stoker were obsessed with sex. Doty relates some of his own sexual experiences in short, bruising sentences, taking enormous joy in stories that seem grotesquely promiscuous, completely shameless, a sort of sex life that can only be lived in a world of cities, wealth and tolerance, a world so remote from Darfur that it might as well be in another galaxy.

The fiction in this issue will break your heart. Stephen King’s short story, “The Dune,” is classic King, putting you so completely in the mind of the protagonist that you forget you are anyone else until you reach the twist. You can easily imagine that it was the receipt of this story that caused Granta to consider a horror issue, as it is easily worthy of having an entire issue built around it.

Julie Otsuka’s story of a beloved mother’s slow descent into Alzheimer’s Disease, “Diem Perdidi,” is heartbreaking. Written entirely as a catalog of what the unnamed “she” of the story remembers and what she no longer can keep inside her head, this story tells the history of a Japanese-American woman in the middle of the 20th century and all that entailed: racism, internment during World War II, the loss of a beloved, the death of a child. Again, this is the horror that one lives in real life. No ghosts, no ancient gods, no serial killers with vivid imaginations; this horror is felt by many in our world, our country, our hometowns every day. It’s the best story in this issue.

In the same vein is Paul Auster’s “Your Birthday Has Come and Gone,” a memoir oddly written in the second person, as if Auster is writing to himself about the death of his mother, attempting to understand this event by distancing himself from it ever so slightly. Following on Will Self’s “False Blood,” an essay about Self’s discovery that he was suffering from polycythaemia vera, it is yet another reminder of how fragile life is, how subject we all are to illnesses both mental and physical.

I didn’t care for Sarah Hall’s “She Murdered Mortal He,” a story of a woman on vacation in an African resort that is still very sparsely populated and rather wild. She has a quarrel with her lover and decides to take a walk on a deserted and somewhat dangerous beach. Each moment of her walk is fraught with tension as she balances on rocks, avoids what initially seem to be wild animals, and winds up in a bar that is no place for a woman alone. Yet the real danger seems to lie elsewhere, for others. It’s an odd little story, a bit too precious in the telling for its own good. Joy Williams’s “Brass” seems not to work entirely either, being dependent on a shocker of a last line for its effect.

Daniel Alarcon’s short essay, “The Ground Floor,” is about the opening of a new “crypto-gothic fight club” in Los Angeles called the Foam Weapon League. It’s hard to see how this piece fits into the horror theme, except that there’s plenty of fake blood in it.

“The Infamous Bengal Ming” by Rajesh Parameswaran is a story narrated by a tiger that escapes from the zoo, almost inadvertently. This creature doesn’t seem to understand his own nature, or his own powers, at the beginning of the story; he seems like a careless teenager more than a wild, caged animal. But given freedom, his fundamental nature comes to the fore. The horror here is that of the natural world, red in tooth and claw.

Don DeLillo’s contribution is from his new book, The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories. “The Starveling” is about a man who spends his days watching movies, carefully scheduling his four or five shows a day around Manhattan with sufficient precision to allow for transportation hassles and time for previews. It’s an odd picture of a life oddly lived, a life without purpose or love, told through the eyes of a protagonist who doesn’t even seem to understand that he’s missing anything, or that there’s anything to miss. It’s a strange story.

“Deng’s Dogs” by Santiago Roncagliolo is an autobiographical essay about Peru and its guerrilla movement, the Shining Path. It is another tale of real-life horror, but one that seems less immediate than Bamforth’s discussion of Darfur. Perhaps this is a matter of my own knowledge about the latter situation and my relative ignorance about the former. Both pieces make it clear, though, that humans don’t need anything supernatural in nature to create hell on earth.

Robert Bolano’s story, “The Colonel’s Son,” is an odd, once-removed zombie story, the retelling of a movie the narrator has seen. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from a friend after a drink or two, when he starts to believe that his experience of old movies is going to sound fascinating to you. You want to tell him to shut up, but you also want to know what happens next; you find yourself sucked into his narrative, not that you ever want to see this movie, just that you have to know. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, one that I’m not entirely certain is successful.

One can only conclude from this issue that the literary world sees horror a good deal differently than do those of us who like our fiction very dark. Horror is based very much on what already exists in this world, and requires nothing unusually evil to manifest; all it needs is human nature. Granta’s horror issue isn’t frightening, but it is horrifying.

The Empress of Mars is a new quarterly production of Dreadnought Press. The inaugural issue of January 2012 is a lovely glossy magazine with good art, starting with the cover image of a trio of idealized spaceships by Martin Rotherham. Alas, the fiction within rarely matches the promise of the cover. And the magazine desperately needs a copy editor, one who can fix the run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and the many instances where “it’s” was used when “its” was meant. Perhaps, as with many magazines, these are merely labor pains, and future issues will be better; heck, I’m old enough to remember the inaugural issues of Asimov’s, which were almost equally wanting.

The magazine starts on a grim note, with “Obituary,” a paragraph written by Alexandra Wolfe about the death of a 13-year-old boy killed by his own DNA when he committed yet another act of stupidity. Apparently the humorous Darwin Awards have been codified in this world, so that the Statute of Evolution gives you only so many chances before you explode. This take-off on the notion that stupidity resulting in one’s death prevents breeding, thus ensuring survival of the fittest, might have worked if the victim were not a child guilty of nothing but drawing graffiti. As it is, I found nothing funny in the short tale of a child’s gruesome death.

Things improve with “The Green Planet” by Stuart Sharp. Giles Chuzzlewit is a fabulously expensive public relations consultant, the sort of fellow called in when every other ploy has failed to properly position a client’s product. It doesn’t much surprise Giles when he is called in by the inhabitants of Mars, who are complaining that their tourism industry has been destroyed by Earth’s constant pronouncements that there is no life on that planet. The Martians’ complaints are long and varied, with the catalog including references to some of the best SF writing about Mars for the experienced reader to pick up and chortle over. Giles tries everything until he finally comes up with a drastic solution. There’s a twist at the end, too.

“Carousel Seven,” by Bren MacDibble, is one of the two best stories in this issue of the magazine. Donna, a middle-aged tax consultant, is suffering through yet another business trip when someone walks off with her luggage at the airport. It’s late, and the security office is closed, so Donna does the only thing she can think to do: she takes someone else’s luggage. The effect of this small theft isn’t what she expects:  she is addressed as “Miss Sabine” and dragged off to sing at a club. When she gets a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she’s astonished to see that her rather clunky accountant’s body has become sleek and lovely – and addicted to heroin. Donna finds herself in a situation she has no experience dealing with, but she’s going to handle it, by God, and vanquish the villains and save the salvageable. It’s a fun story.

“Snailam’s Watch,” by Mark J. Howard, is the other good story in this issue. A soldier returning from World War I makes a trip to visit the man who saved his life on the battlefield, Captain Snailam, and to return the watch that Snailam lent to him. The captain had told him it was a magic watch, one that would prevent him from dying despite his wounds, and indeed, the soldier makes it from behind enemy lines back to a British unit, losing an arm but keeping his life. Who is Captain Snailam? That’s the real question behind this story, which plays out nicely.

“Delicacy” by Bren MacDibble is a funny story about protocol and aliens. When an upstart young officer thinks he knows better than the ambassador who has been in place for years, he learns a lesson in anthropology he won’t soon forget.

Life isn’t easy for a video game hero, as Stuart Sharp illustrates in “Squired Up.” One might very well choose to be just a squire – at least until one’s knight shows himself to be so incompetent that the squire can’t help but step in. The characters do not always behave consistently. For instance, the supposedly smart squire puts a sword that will cut through anything into a bag to haul it around, with predictable results. The means by which and the reasons why one moves from a modern life into this videogame setting isn’t explained, though it seems apparent that this life is an invented one instead of the normal course of things. The story would have benefitted from a thorough rewrite.

Alexandra Wolfe’s “Twist of Fate” is a short short story based on a Greek myth. The first person narrator sees her thread of life cut and begs for more time. It’s an interesting play on the notion of dying people seeing a tunnel of light. Do those from different religious backgrounds see different things when they’re dying? Wolfe’s third piece in this issue (if one doesn’t count the editorial; that would make it the fourth) “Finley’s Last Chapter,” concerns an alien invasion and how the heroine saves the world. It feels unfinished and unpolished. There is more to the tale than is told here, it seems – a recurring problem for many of the writers. The stories are decent first attempts, but require further drafts and significant editing.

Mark J. Howard’s “Kissed by Venus” is a fragment of military science fiction that piques the interest; it is to be continued in the next issue. Unfortunately, it’s so full of clichés that it reads like a parody of military SF rather than the real thing. Maybe it will improve in further installments.

Howard’s third story in this issue, “In the Wink of an Eye,” poses an interesting physics discovery in the nature of a new element with unusual properties. Howard doesn’t seem to have figured out what to do with this neat idea, though. The story doesn’t so much develop and explore the idea as set it out and wrap up the tale.

I’ve noted before that writing poetry is difficult to begin with, but writing good fantasy poetry is almost impossible. “Sleeping with the Fishes” is a decent fantasy poem by Tracie Mcbride. It has some nice imagery. “Tastes Like Chicken,” another Mcbride poem, is macabre. Mcbride also has a story in this issue, “Last Chance to See,” about a society in which one can come back from the dead for 24 hours following one’s death to bid farewell to one’s family and wrap up unfinished business, like signing a will. Mcbride has a bigger idea than she has story to tell, but it’s a fairly interesting treatment of a very complicated setup.

An interview with fantasy writer Gregory Frost rounds out the issue. The questions are not particularly original, and there’s no indication that the questions asked were particular to this author and his works – which is a shame, as Frost is a heck of a writer who is not widely enough read. But Frost is clever enough to use the standard questions to tell a tale of his own career, as well as to discuss many of his books.

Ultimately, this magazine is lovingly produced and beautifully illustrated. The stories strike me as needing more work to make them truly worth reading. The Empress of Mars reads like a group of amateur writers got together and decided to put on their own show, so to speak. The group would do well to seek out professional editing, and to keep writing.

I love fantastic literature with a literary bent. Give me a good Italo Calvino novel, a Jorge Luis Borges short story, or any of Steven Millhauser’s work, and I’m a happy camper. So the new periodical, Unstuck, should be perfect for me. It states its mission this way:

“We emphasize literary fiction with elements of the fantastic, the futuristic, the surreal, or the strange — a broad category that would include the work of writers as diverse as Borges, Ballard, Calvino, Huxley, Tutuola, Abe and (of course) Vonnegut. In our pages, you’ll find straight-up science fiction and fantasy; domestic realism with a twist of the magical; and work that experiments with form or blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose. We also publish a small selection of poems and essays.”

Add that it’s a beautifully produced volume with almost 350 pages of fiction, poetry and one essay that reads like weird fiction, and I should have been in heaven.

And, in fact, I was at first. The first story, Amelia Gray’s “Monument,” is a very short story that I haven’t stopped thinking about since I first read it. It’s about a town where everyone gathers at the graveyard on a single day to clean it up – a day of regular maintenance performed with reverence. It’s a beautiful picture, peaceful, contemplative, laid out economically in a mere three paragraphs. And then one worker accidentally chips a gravestone. What happens from there is surprising, life-affirming and, to my way of thinking, quite lovely. You may see it differently, finding horror where I find charm. That’s one of the best things about stories, isn’t it?

“Ancestors,” a poem by Kiki Petrosino, is perfectly placed following “Monument,” and utterly chilling. Is it about ghosts? Is it about the shadows our forebears cast upon us? Is it, more broadly, about how the past haunts us? The images are frightening and inhuman.

After about a hundred pages, though, I realized that I was no longer charmed by these stories, no longer eager to read them, but bored. The stories are so similar in tone, style and structure, so self-consciously literary, that they all began to sound like the same story, repeated over and over. I slowed my reading of the magazine to a story or two a day, hoping to rediscover the oddness of each individually. Alas, it was not to be.

This is not to say that the stories are bad; they’re not (though some of the poetry is execrable). Some are worthy enough to be included in next year’s Best American Short Stories volume. For instance, “Dokken,” by Matthew Derby, is about an entrepreneur who deliberately has himself and his personal assistant — soon his lover — stranded alone on the gyre of plastic trash that has become almost its own continent in the middle of the Pacific. The first-person narrator has visions of making this useless hulk of trash into a resort island. He is so exuberant over his corporate coup in purchasing the trash that he takes a run up and down the “beach” — an area directly adjacent to the water where the plastic has broken down into nodules that texturally resemble sand. Careless of where he is running, he impales his foot on a hypodermic needle, and immediately contracts AIDS. By the time of this story, AIDS has been vanquished by medication so that it is as uncommon as polio is in our world. But is any of that medication available on the trash heap? The entrepreneur is sure he’ll find some somewhere: “I’ve seen boxes full of Wellbutrin, Paxil, Erythromycin, OxyContin. Crates of the stuff half-buried in the substrate. Good as new.” “Substrate”? That one word contains more of an insight into this man’s mind than all the words that went before. But Derby isn’t content with the search for a cure to the entrepeneur’s AIDS. He has a bigger tale to tell us about the condition of the world. Soon we start to recognize that this is a version of the hoary old idea of an Adam and Eve story — a shame, really, given the oddity of living on a trash heap and what more could have been done with that setting.

I really liked Judson Merrill’s “Inside Out,” another tale of the apocalypse, this one told from inside a prison. The first person narrator “escapes” his imprisonment by climbing into the walls and taking up a shadowy existence in the pipes and airshafts. This prison exists within a prison, contained in a bubble that protects the inhabitants from the poisonous atmosphere that humans have made with their mines and factories and warfare. The first person protagonist has been imprisoned because he opposes taking the bubble down, afraid that it will mean the end of them all. With his escape, he becomes a sort of ghost, while the world moves on.

The stories are well-written. Each sets out a fantastical premise, but instead of a plot they often settle for an explanation or are slices of weirdness wrapped up in literary tricks and lovely language. For example, Leslie What’s “Big Feet” is the story of a literal giant sitting in coach class of an airplane, seated by a woman with clownishly large feet that she can’t seem to keep to herself. “R” by Helen Phillips is about a pair of sisters (or so we think) who discover wind in their caged city. “Six Flags” by Meghan McCarron takes place after a plague has killed all the children, but left behind their ghosts, and how a ghost hunter manages to disperse them. “The Carrot” by Arthur Bradford is about giant vegetables and tiny miniature vegetables. “Wonderblood,” by Julia Whicker, is yet another post-apocalyptic tale in which magic seems to have become a force to oppose science.

Perhaps the paradoxically best way to explain how much these stories all start to blur together is to examine the one nonfiction piece: “The Eel” by Rennie Sparks. This essay is a description of Sparks’s interest in and experience with eels, together with some interesting information regarding how eels spawn and migrate. I didn’t realize I was reading nonfiction until after I finished it, as eels are such odd creatures that describing them is like describing a monster created by a fantasist. It’s a great piece. But its resemblance to the bulk of stories in this volume can’t be denied. It is presented in the first-person, as are eight of the 21 stories. It sets out a few strange facts and makes them the focus of the piece, with no discernible plot. It is apocalyptic in some ways, discussing the Bermuda Triangle and the possible extinction of the eel due to human depredation of their environment. It ends without reaching any real conclusion. In the context of the other pieces, it feels like more of the same, rather than something individually amazing, which is how it might well have seemed if discovered in the pages of the New Yorker or other mainstream periodical.

Ultimately, the stories collected here are individually worth reading. But the predominant voice is that of the editor, not the individual voices of the authors. Some of this is because the stories are not arranged felicitously: one seems to flow into another thematically, so that they are difficult to distinguish one from the other. Some is because the stories really do seem invariable. Matt Williamson, the executive editor, and his board of editors seem to have a very particular taste, one that likes the weird and the literary jammed together in a specific way.

Yet I have high hopes for this magazine. As I’ve said, there are many fine stories here. It appears that this is Williamson’s first job of editing what is essentially an anthology of weird tales, and the members of his editorial board show little editing among their credits. I hope that next year’s edition has more variation and more life. There are possibilities here, and I would love to see them fulfilled.

Interzone is a periodical I find delightful as much for its excellent nonfiction as its terrific fiction. David Langford’s “Ansible Link,” for instance, reports what’s going on in the speculative fiction community. It also provides information on how that community is viewed from outside in a section entitled, “As Others See Us,” usually pointing to something stupid said in the mainstream media about science fiction, fantasy or horror. My favorite bit has always been the section entitled “Thog’s Masterclass,” pointing out silly sentences in published fiction.

“The Book Zone” is another great resource, with reviews and interviews of important fiction — much of it not yet available in the United States. In this issue, Maureen Kincaid Speller interviews Lavie Tidhar, the author of Osama — a book about a figure that one would think could not be written in a fictional manner (Speller says it’s on her “best of the year” list). Eight pages of book reviews are followed by five pages of film reviews, which in turn are followed by eight pages of reviews of DVDs and blu-rays. Even if the fiction were nothing but an afterthought, Interzone would be worth buying for its reviews.

But the fiction is anything but an afterthought. The best story in this issue is “Tethered,” by Mercurio D. Rivera. It is the story of a species that is unaccountably attracted to humans, attracted even against their will. For some reason humans make them feel especially good. Some members of the alien species believe this to result in a sort of slavery, so that the two species are secretly at war. Others give in to the servility that biology urges upon them. But at its base, the story questions whether true friendship is possible between two species with such an odd biological relationship. The story carefully works through all the consequences of the biology of the two species in a way that is the essence of sociological science fiction. I would not be surprised to find this story on award ballots next year.

Jon Ingold’s “The Fall of the City of Silver” is a fantasy about Tarassos, an ancient Greek harbor city that was known to be rich in metal. In this story, the metal is silver, which confers such wealth upon the city that it was as “a glittering diamond resting on the blue silk cushion of the Aegean sea,” where people “lived in a luxury only the Gods did not envy.” The narrator, an eighteen-year-old girl named Euanthe, worries when her brother Olmos fails to come home one night. Olmos had always sworn that he would find adventure one day, traveling away from the city of his birth. But Euanthe does not believe that he has simply run away to sea. And when her father disappears as well, she determines to find out what has happened. In the process, she discovers more about her home than she would have chosen to know.

I got far less from “The Ever-Dreaming Verdict of Plagues” by Jason Sandford than I might have if I’d read the story to which it is a sequel, “Plague Birds,” but alas, this issue is the first in my subscription. Despite coming in late, however, I still found the story to be fascinating. It depicts a world in which artificial intelligences have combined with biological hosts for various purposes; but the relationship between the species (if you will) has become such that the AIs exercise more control than they ought, and humans seem to be little more than their tools. I would love to read a novel set in this universe.

“A Time for Raven” by Stephen Kotowych is about a man who sees no further reason to live until he is on the brink of death, and a man who suffers for his disobedience to ancient precepts. It is poetically written, at times almost prayerful.

Fiona Moore’s “The Metaphor” posits a world in which every job has somehow become a role-playing game, until we no longer understand that we’re in a game; all we know is that there are rules that we must obey, tasks we must complete. What becomes of the relationship between the story and the storyteller, the story and the audience, when the audience is in the story? Metafiction or  metaphysical contemplation, this story will send a chill up your spine.

I first subscribed to Interzone years ago, and dropped it when I found I had too much to read and too little time. I’m delighted I decided to give it another chance, because this issue makes it plain that Interzone is worth making time for.

We thought that Halloween was the perfect occasion on which to combine Magazine Monday with Horrible Monday and bring you a review of a horror magazine. Black Static is a British horror magazine notable not only for the high quality of its fiction, but also for its great commentary and extensive reviews of horror films and books. This was my first experience reading the magazine, but my plan is now to subscribe, because this is great stuff.

Simon Bestwick’s story, “Dermot,” starts off calmly enough, with a man who seems mentally disabled boarding a bus. He’s wearing a suit that seems a bit big, but it’s clean and pressed, and he’s carrying an old-fashioned briefcase. He sounds, from the description, like a man who is playing dress-up, pretending that he has a job. He seems harmless, but he makes people uncomfortable; the man next to whom Dermot sits on the bus gets up and changes seats for no apparent reason. Dermot doesn’t care, but it seems like an unkind act by that nameless man. The scene abruptly changes to an office in a police station, a department labeled “Special Needs,” and the reader begins to wonder whether this is where Dermot works. The officers working there, though, have some sort of dread of their jobs. They’re the butt of jokes by others in the department. When Dermot gets to the door, it seems that the jokes come because these officers work with individuals who do, in fact, have “special needs,” though at first that seems like a relatively harmless pursuit — but those officers seem afraid of Dermot, and why is that? It isn’t until the deal between the police and Dermot is made explicit that the horror of this work is revealed. You’ll feel your stomach turn over when you get to the denouement.

“A Summer’s Day” by K. Harding Stalter is mysteriously creepy. The reader doesn’t learn exactly who the narrator is, but he seems to be the victim of torture, day after day, year after year, to the point where he’s named the instruments used on him:  Macintosh, Carmichael, McKinsey, Jones. He is used to demonstrate something to an auditorium of students.  Is it torture, or medicine, or something else altogether? The story doesn’t say. But one day, at the conclusion of that day’s festivities, he escapes into the summer. The grass and ground beneath his feet, the sun and shade, all are almost new sensations, it’s been so long since he felt them.  And how does our narrator use his freedom? Ah. That would be telling.

A new story by Ramsey Campbell is always a treat, and “Recently Used” has an elegiac quality that can lead you as easily to tears as to horror. It’s a story of loss rendered as nightmare, and communicates something of the never-ending grief caused by the death of a loved one. “You’ll feel better soon” is not something one can say to Charles Tunstall. This is a story that only a master could write.

Have you ever loved someone who loved even the darkest parts of you – indeed, who perhaps loved those parts of you the most? Jeff finds such a love in Rachel in “Still Life” by Simon McCaffery. Why doesn’t he realize there’s something odd about a woman who loves to look at his photographs of charred corpses and other horrors of war? Are Jeff’s motives in taking these pictures — to make war so horrific that it will stop — really as pure as he tells himself? Is Rachel too enamored of his work? It’s a cautionary tale, and then some.

“How the 60s Ended,” by Tim Lees, is a less successful story about a friendship between two young boys. This ghost story is a bit too gentle and subtle, failing to deliver the punch one would expect from the notion of a child’s death.

There are 12 pages of horror film reviews in a column entitled “Blood Spectrum” by Tony Lee. I’m astonished that anyone can view that much horror in a mere two months, and still find time to write about it all. The reviews are short and to the point, making it easy to determine whether a particular film is one you’d like to watch. I’m not a horror film aficionado myself, finding such films too gruesome, even though I can read the most gruesome stories without flinching. But if I watched horror films, I’d find Tony Lee a very fine interpreter. Peter Tennant’s “Case Notes” follows, with smart, in-depth reviews of horror fiction. Tennant writes with cold passion about books he enjoyed and the books that disappointed him, noting faults and flashes of brilliance. Black Static would be worth purchasing for the reviews alone. Tennant also interviews Kaaron Warren in this issue, causing her fiction to move up in my “to be read” pile.

There are three columns at the front of the magazine, allowing three writers to talk about whatever takes their fancy. Stephen Volk writes about how to name characters in “Coffinmaker’s Blues.”  Christopher Fowler writes about the resurrection of censorship in “Interference.” Mike O’Driscoll writes about our seeming willingness to trade privacy for security — or even just for gossip — in “Night’s Plutonian Shore.” It’s an interesting trio of articles to find in a horror magazine; all three are well-written and interesting to read. Finally, the magazine also contains a column entitled “White Noise,” containing snippets of news for horror fans.

Even as many mourn the apparent passing of the age of print, it seems that more and more speculative fiction periodicals are coming into being. When I first heard of Fantastique Unfettered, I was certain that it must be an internet-only publication. Yet as far as I can tell, it isn’t even available in electronic format. Instead, it’s a traditional magazine, full-size (as opposed to the digest-size of Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF), and chock-full of black and white illustrations. The stories are fantastical in the best sense of the word: strange and marvelous, full of the inexplicable.

My favorite story in this issue is “The City at Night” by Jeremy Schliewe. Ben is a young man who discovers, as he is attempting to sleep one night, that a glow is emanating from the corner of his bedroom, almost as if there is a night light where he knows one could not exist. He gets out of bed to investigate, and finds a miniature skyscraper, wholly alight but empty. It is translucent, immaterial and very odd indeed. But things get progressively odder and more wonderful, as each night the city grows, and then gains a suburb, and then fades into country complete with a mountain. The beauty of it keeps Ben awake longer and longer each night, making him less and less productive at work. It doesn’t impede his developing romance with Janeane, but it shortly becomes apparent that Janeane can’t see the city at all. What is this city? A figment of his imagination? A mysterious visitation? A random bit of beauty intruding on his otherwise rather dull life? It’s a lovely story that reminds me forcefully of Steven Millhauser’s work. I’m definitely going to be keeping an eye out for more from Schliewe.

“Twelve Days of Dragons,” by Mari Ness, is another tale of mysterious visitations. It’s Christmastime, and the unnamed protagonist is alone and unemployed. He has nowhere to be and no one to be with, and he is feeling quite sorry for himself. That night he hears something brushing at his door, and opens it to find someone has left a small gift-wrapped box. He finds a glass dragon inside. No note, no card, no call to tell him who sent him a gift. Just the glass dragon, which is oddly warm to the touch. The next night he finds two packages, each one containing a glass dragon. The next night, three, and one of them seems to have moved from one shelf to another, to join the other two. This calls for some medication, and the protagonist proceeds to get very drunk on very sweet liquor, an overly sweet assortment sent by a relative. He doesn’t even open the three packages, but they seem to get opened anyway. As the days go by, each bringing more dragons, his life is changed; it’s like reading about the return of joy to a lonely man’s life.

“First Born,” by Samantha Kymmell-Harvey, is a retelling of the fairy tale generally known as “Bluebeard,” one that used to thrill me with fright when I was small. First Born is Bluebeard’s child, who tries to warn each successive wife of the fate that awaits her, even as she is ignored and unloved. Only the last wife loves her, and always will.

“Two Steps Forward” is a story I’d probably label New Weird. Sandra Odell tells the story of Kinsey, who awakens in a world completely different from the one in which he went to sleep. This world seems to contain nothing that is completely human any longer, except himself; all the humans have been strangely transformed in one way or another. But then Kinsey meets Brahn, another human pretty much like him. The two travel together, exploring the Way, fending off danger and dealing with the strange new world in which they find themselves. But soon Kinsey learns that Brahn is not completely like him. And the world keeps getting stranger. And the world gets more dangerous.

Beth Cato’s “A Spectacular Display” may be the most conventional story in the magazine. A revenge tale with a twist, it will do every woman’s heart good. May is the object of Kendall’s affections, and he is an amazing catch. But some women don’t want to catch even the biggest fish.

Amir is a child who needs a friend in Julia Rios’s “The Lesson of the Phoenix.” Evangeline – Geli – is a young woman with a broken heart whom Amir’s fancy has lighted upon, and he visits her in her dreams. Together they learn to fly.

“The Jelly Fish Queen,” by Jaelithe Ingold, is the story of two high school girls who are friends, but one of whom seems to be outgrowing the other. The question is which is which. Cordelia is a strange girl, an object of derision for her schoolmates. Kate is bound to Cordelia by years of friendship, but now she’s interested in Jason Crawford, who’s on the swim team. Cordelia, on the other hand, is interested only in jellyfish. In fact, Cordelia is so interested in jellyfish that, when she gives a report on them to her biology class, she forgets to be properly submissive to the most popular boy in school, with predictable results. But Cordelia is no longer prepared to simply endure the bad treatment. It all sounds so straightforward, unless you pay special attention to the behavior of the jellyfish at the aquarium – and at the swim meet.

“The Singularity of Puppies” by Michael Furlong did not appeal to me, but that is simply a matter of taste. I can’t argue that it isn’t well-written, well-imagined, well-plotted, only that stories with talking animals are not to my liking. That applies even when the talking puppy is evil. Or dead. Or both.

“First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia” by Zen Cho deals with an unusual minority in a country that is seemingly made up of dozens of minorities. It reminds us that there is more to the world than we know. And it also reminds us that we’re never too old for romance.

The poetry in this issue seems mostly to be trying too hard for allusions that it could not reach. “Blodeuedd, or, The Maiden of Flowers” by Robert E. Stutts, is the most successful of the poems, though that may be because Stutts first explains the Welsh legend from which it springs. Stutts’s second poem in this issue, “The Cartographer’s Ache,” is a nice extended metaphor. “Green Rushes” by J.S. Watts is lovely, but seems to refer to a myth or legend that I can’t place; it would feel richer if I knew what it was meant to refer to. “In Defense of Sleek-Armed Androids” by Lisa M. Bradley is depressing without any gorgeous language or mesmerizing imagery to save it. Bruce Boston, who usually writes excellent speculative poetry, misses the mark completely with “Relative Weights and Measures,” stringing together six stanzas that seem to have nothing in common but numbers.

The nonfiction in Fantastique Unfettered includes something so rare that I genuinely can’t remember ever seeing an example of it before: a review of a book of speculative poetry. Alexandra Seidel writes about Hal Duncan’s new collection, Songs for the Devil and Death, in a way that will really let the reader know whether she wants to read more of Duncan’s work, using examples well. There is also an interview with Mike Allen and extended contributors’ notes.

The description Fantastique Unfettered claims for itself is “A Periodical of Liberated Literature.” Fortunately, it does not seek liberation from the standards of good stories, well told. This magazine is worth seeking out.

The September/October issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction is always a feast: 258 pages packed with stories by some of the top talent in the field. It isn’t unusual for this issue each year to contain at least one story that will show up on the award ballots the following year, and that’s true this year as well. My nomination goes to Geoff Ryman’s “What We Found.” Ryman has been writing lately of third-world cultures, in such a way that the reader becomes immersed in the culture, surrounded by sights, scents, tastes and sounds of a world so foreign to a first-worlder that it might as well be an alien civilization. This time, the setting is Makurdi in central Nigeria, a city with air conditioning, solar panels, telephones with ebooks – and roosters crowing outside the window on the morning of the narrator’s wedding day. As Patrick tells his story of his strange scientific findings and their decay, the apparent effect of observation, he also tells the story of growing up with a father who slowly lost his mind and a favorite brother who followed suit. The tale of a family riven by madness, unkindness and poverty is sad but fascinating. As the implications of the narrator’s scientific findings start to seep through the pages to the reader, it seems that everything comes undone at the same time that it is stitched up. Only Ryman could have written this story. If it were the only work in this magazine, it would be worth the cover price.

But there is much more good reading here. M. Rickert, a master of the short form, offers “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece,” the story of a man who literally paints corpses. He doesn’t simply apply makeup, the way a funeral director might, but making them an artistic statement on their lives. He lives in isolation, as one might expect given his profession. The sheriff who brings him the bodies on which he is to work, though, has a peculiar and uneasy respect for the man, even if he would not allow the painter to work on his own child – at least, not immediately upon that child’s death. The sheriff’s strange decision, and the corpse painter’s work, make for a story that is ideal for Halloween.

Sara Langan’s story, “The Man Inside Black Betty: Is Nicholas Wellington the World’s Best Last Hope?” is about a small black hole that enters Earth’s sky in 2012, settling in at about two hundred feet above Long Island Sound. Scientists squabble about how to get rid of the hole before it swallows the earth, but Nicholas Wellington seems to be the only one with a real answer. The story strikes me as a convoluted metaphor for global warming and the controversy concocted by those who don’t want to believe what the science tells us. It’s a frightening story, quiet as it is.

“Anise” by Chris DeVito is an angry story about life after death. In this case, that’s literal; science has found a way to reconstruct and resurrect those who have died, returning them to life with the use of machines that require constant servicing, flushing and refueling. Anise is married to Robert, who died some time ago, but now wants sex more than he ever did before, even as he grows away from her in other ways. Anise thought he was truly dead; when he died in an automobile accident, resurrection was far less common. It’s hard for her to adjust to the idea that he’s really alive, and even harder to deal with the way a return to life has changed him. What, precisely, would immortality mean for our relationships? And what perversions would people create out of their new bodies? Because it always comes down to sex, DeVito seems to say, and sex can be right next to ugliness. It’s not a pleasant novelet, but it is a good one.

Jon Armstrong offers a strange vision of the future of marketing in “Aisle 1047,” where price wars become actual wars. First, though, they go through a phase of advertising language as poetry, which strikes me as far more enjoyable. But since when is the pen truly mightier than the sword?

“Time and Tide,” apparently the last short story by Alan Peter Ryan, who died of pancreatic cancer this past June 3, is a sad story of a young man named Frank who is just about ready to leave for college. Frank either did or didn’t watch his brother Junior drown one summer afternoon a few years ago. Junior was always the favored child, but Frank didn’t really resent it – or so it seems. It’s not clear whether Frank himself really knows the answer to that question, any more than he seems to know if he truly let his brother drown without doing anything to stop it. But his father seems to know, and so does the huge, heavy piece of furniture his father wants to move into his room on the final night before he leaves for college.

I’ve never been a fan of Esther M. Friesner; her brand of humor is not my own. Her new story, “Rutger and Baby Do Jotenheim,” did nothing to change my mind about her work. It’s a mash-up of trailer trash with Norse mythology that misses the mark. Unless you find the notion of a stereotyped bimbo outwitting Loki to be hilarious, this is probably no more your story than it was mine.

“A Borrowed Heart” by Deborah J. Ross is another mash-up, this one of fantasy and romance with an unexpected denouement. The characterization is strong, even if the protagonist is the cliched prostitute-with-heart-of-gold. But the tale feels unnecessarily chopped off just when it was starting to get especially interesting. It would have been more successful if the protagonist’s early encounter with a succubus were more directly tied to the situation with which the protagonist is faced when she returns home to a father who had previously rejected her.

Several other stories offer fine diversion, but are not particularly original. Daniel Marcus’s “Bright Moment” is a predictable but well-written story of the human race’s first contact with an intelligent alien species in the shadow of money and business and a human need for space. Albert E. Cowdrey offers a fanciful ghost story in “Where Have All the Young Men Gone?” “Spider Hill” by Donald Mead is a mildly amusing tale of witchcraft on Halloween, set in a pumpkin patch that is the perfect setting for the uneasy dead. Karl Bunker’s “Overtaken” is a melodramatic and well-worn tale of human courage in the face of adversity; if you do not hear echoes of Spock in this one, you are not only not a Trekker, you’re not of this planet.

The nonfiction in this issue is up to F&SF’s usual high standard. I don’t agree with Kathi Maio’s opinion of Woody Allen’s latest film, “Midnight in Paris,” but I enjoyed our disagreement. She writes well about film, and reading her column always feels like having a conversation with someone who is passionate about the medium. Charles de Lint’s “Books to Look For” is as idiosyncratic as ever, right down to the choice of books for review. Michelle West’s “Musing on Books” is a more conventional – and better – look at some of the current offerings, though the time lag between reading, writing and publication is so long that the books West writes about were necessarily old news by the time this issue hit the stands. Finally, Paul DiFilippo’s irreverent look at Broadway theater in this month’s “Plumage from Pegasus” will make you long for an immersive theatrical production of Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg that uses CERN as a stage in order to create the massive gravitation necessary to the plot. Or not. In fact, probably not. But it’s fun to imagine.

The arrival of a new issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is always an event. There is no set publishing schedule, so a subscriber is never quite sure when an issue will arrive. No. 27 landed in my mailbox just last week, full of amazing fiction. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a couple of these stories on awards ballots next year.

Three stories in particular struck me as special. The first is “Music Box” by David Rowinski. Rowinski’s protagonist, Patrick Sutton, has broken into his wife’s home to retrieve his belongings after she has thrown him out for sins unspecified. His buddy, John Ferris, disobeys Patrick’s instructions to take only the plastic bags with his stuff, and steals a black lacquer music box, hoping it’s where Patrick’s wife stashes drugs. Patrick disabuses him of this notion with an irritated insult, but John, still curious, winds the box up and starts the music. Out of nowhere, a severe storm flares up; “A sharp note seared lightning.” Patrick slams the box shut, and the storm ceases. John, not quite up to speed yet, opens the bottom drawer of the box, selects another music cylinder to play, and suddenly the air is full of birds.

The tone of “Music Box” is what makes it work: despite the magic of the box, what we read about is an estranged husband who misses his wife, but not enough to patch things up. We read about the beer Patrick buys for John in return for his help in the stealthy job of retrieving his belongings. We read about Patrick’s memories of his married life. The tone stays solidly grounded in the day-to-day even as the music box creates wonders all around. It’s not that Patrick doesn’t see or appreciate the magic; it’s that the magic is seamlessly woven into the mundane. It’s a beautiful trick of writing that you don’t see until the second or third time you read the story, because the first time through you’re simply enthralled by the tale.

M.K. Hobson’s “A Sackful of Ramps” is, at first glance, a retelling of “Rapunzel.” Anyone who loves fairy tales will recognize the bones of the story: a pregnant woman begs and begs her husband to bring her vegetables (in this case, ramps – a type of wild leek) from the garden of the witch who lives nearby. The man finally obliges and, of course, the witch catches him and demands that the child be given to her in return for the vegetables. In the fairy tale, this is a tragedy; in this story, things turn out a bit differently. One questions who the real prisoner is. Certainly it is not the as-yet unborn child.

The dark and moody “Thou Earth, Thou” by K.M. Ferebee is another outstanding story, and may be my favorite in this issue. Dunbar and Mason have just moved from the city – which Mason preferred – to the suburbs, which is Dunbar’s natural environment. Dunbar is delighted with the garden, where anything at all seems to grow, whether in season or not, in an abundance that doesn’t seem natural. Soon Dunbar is digging up items that seem far too strange to really belong: shark’s teeth, bones, items that feel wrong. Then the strangeness starts bleeding out into the neighborhood as a whole – does anyone really live there at all, or is this slice of suburbia entirely one of the mind? – and Mason can’t reconcile his dislike for the suburbs with quite this degree of darkness. The whole piece is a study in the inexplicable, in that horrible feeling you get sometimes that something’s wrong without being able to put your finger on exactly what it is that’s off – and what exactly are you supposed to do about it? It’s a beautifully frightening story, especially in what it doesn’t say.

Any story by Carol Emshwiller is a treat, and “The Mismeasure of Me and How I Saved the World” is no exception. You know from the first couple of sentences that you’re in skilled hands: “I’ve always wondered who I was. I took time off to find myself, but I could only afford a year and that wasn’t anywhere near long enough.” The first person narrator’s problem of self-identity becomes acute when she meets a man she wants to present with “the real me” – if only she knew who that was! Fortunately, there are dreams to help, or maybe it’s reality?

This issue of LCRW also contains a good deal of poetry, five poems by Sarah Heller and five by David Blair. Heller’s “Garden” is the best of a good lot: an off-kilter look at the Garden of Eden, complete with serpent. I particularly liked the vision of “vertebrae the size of a slithering house.”

This small black and white irregularly-published journal is much bigger inside than it is outside. You can find it as an ebook through Small Beer Press, WeightlessBooks.com and Fictionwise.com as well as in hard copy at the more perceptive book stores and magazine stands. It is worth searching for.

The September 2011 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction is a mixed bag, with a couple of amazing stories and a few not so amazing. One of the former is “The Observation Post,” by Allen M. Steele. A recurring motif in science fiction is visitors from the future watching hot points in history, and for this story that hot point is the Cuban Missile Crisis. The story begins with a voyage in a blimp that seems fictional, like something out of a steampunk story, until one realizes that the Navy really did use a few blimps until November 1962, one month after this story takes place. Placed up against this reality that feels fictional, Steele puts something fictional that feels real: observers watching how events play out in alternative universes, and pinpointing precisely what action causes what reaction.

“The Odor of Sanctity,” by Ian Creasey, posits the existence of a device called the Olvac, which can record and disperse scents. The dispersal doesn’t make the device sound much different from a Glade air freshener, but a recorder of scents is something new. Creasey doesn’t make as much of the evocative nature of scent as he might, but then, that’s not what he’s after here. His story is more about the intersection of religion and money, commerce and charity, and how doing the right thing can sometimes mean doing the wrong thing as well. It’s an interesting commentary that made me think about Mother Teresa and the controversy about whether she was a shrewd manipulator and even blackmailer of businesses, or a saintly figure who merely pushed business leaders to be their better selves. This story gives the reader a lot more to think about than a new invention.

An espionage story by Alan Wall, “Burning Bibles,” plays on fears of Islamist violence combined with our continuing fascination with extra – well, here, intrasensory perception, but really, they amount to the same thing.  In a world like ours, where everything that goes wrong is chalked up to terrorism, it’s sometimes the quotidian that goes unnoticed.

I liked “Grandma Said,” R. Neube’s story about a teenage delinquent on a planet that’s not Earth in a future that seems distant, though the human condition seems much like today’s. The law includes a Delinquency Act that requires teenagers to work for three hours a day to keep them out of trouble – and that’s on top of school. The first-person narrator of this tale has chosen to work with the Plague House, fighting the highly contagious cholly plague, much to his mother’s dismay (which seems to be one of the very reasons he chose that type of work – again, much like teenagers everywhere, in every time). His adventures with the plague, other depressed teenagers, and a helicopter parent oddly combine to make for a story that will have you chuckling, just as prescribed by Grandma.

Robert Reed’s “Stalker” is a chilling story about robotic support for a budding serial killer. It’s a nice example of how to use the second person voice to make a story dark enough to linger in the reader’s imagination at midnight. I thought this an excellent combination of a thriller with a science fictional concept.

“Shadow Angel” is confusing and chaotic, but its author, Erick Melton, seems to want it that way to convey the experience of piloting through space-time. I found the story difficult to follow even after several readings. One cannot tell the dive-dream from the hallucination from the actual experience of piloting (“diving”), much less past from present from future. I suspect Melton’s forthcoming novel set in this universe will not be for me.

Carol Emshwiller’s “Danilo” is a sad, strange story of two women looking for men to love. They are not women from our world, though they seem much like us in many ways. They seem to be poor, at best one step above homeless; perhaps that is why they dream of finding happiness. One woman pretends she has, that a man is coming for her in the spring, and she sets out to meet him. Another woman follows her, ostensibly to protect her from herself, but ultimately, it seems, because she, too, wants the happiness the other woman has found in her dream. It is a sad story about loneliness, poverty and the strength of hope.

This issue also contains plenty of poetry. Two of the six poems are quite fine. Bruce Boston’s “The Music of Robots” has some lovely imagery – a strange word to describe writing about sound, but still apt.  The final two stanzas will stay with me like a tune. “Stone Roach,” by Fiona Moore, is a sturdy tribute to a species that will probably outlive the human race.

Finally, Robert Silverberg’s customary “Reflections” column describes a bit of Japanese history that was entirely new to me, about a method of government in place for a time that seems mostly unique. Oddly enough, though, Silverberg used a very similar design in his Majipoor books, without knowing the history. Paul di Filippo contributes an informative review column about publishers who are working to preserve the heritage of science fiction and fantasy, looking at books that are unlikely to be reviewed in any depth elsewhere. If this column introduces even a handful of new readers to Theodore Sturgeon, it will have done its job; he is one of the finest short story writers ever to work in the genre.

Asimov’s is available in traditional paper, as well as in just about any downloadable format you might require, be it as a download to your desktop, laptop, tablet or telephone; or for Kindle, Nook or Sony eReader.

Bull Spec is a print and electronic science fiction and fantasy glossy magazine named for its home of Durham, North Carolina. The word “Bull” seems to have become associated with Durham because of a tobacco factory in the city, which itself took the name from the picture of a bull that appeared on the label of a mustard that the tobacco factory owner believed was manufactured in Durham, England; it’s all very complicated, but at least we know that the magazine’s name is based on where it is published. The publisher, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, seems a bit surprised that the name of the magazine is mysterious to many outside of North Carolina, but he likes it. As well he should, because Bull Spec is a fine addition to the ranks of science fiction, fantasy and horror magazines.

“Mortal Passage” by Roger Williams is the best story in Issue #5 of this quarterly journal. It is about humanity’s attempts to create an artificial intelligence that is sane. In this world AI’s aren’t that difficult to come up with, but keeping them from turning homicidal is. The solution is ultimately to use a human brain itself as the foundation, uploading a human consciousness when the human body is on the point of death. Just as with most computer software, the creators of this software are able to tinker with it, making each version better, so that the program still remains somehow human but also more and more machine. As time passes – as millenia pass – and the story progresses, the work for the computer/human hybrid becomes more complex. It’s a fascinating story of one possible future for humanity.

Rebecca Gomez Farrell’s “Bother,” the cover story, is more about fear than dragons, and more about love than fear. It’s a fine tale about whether we will allow our minds or our emotions to order our days.

Tim Pratt’s “Hell’s Lottery” is a wicked tale about a new torture Lucifer has just thought up. Lucifer is a lot more subtle than the demons who report to him, who don’t understand how running a lottery for two days back on Earth can possibly be painful to a damned soul. It’s pretty immediately apparently to the reader, though, and Pratt plays out all the consequences – with a special zinger at the end.

“The Coffeemaker’s Passion” is a delightful romp by Cat Rambo. Most of us don’t think too hard about the fact that there’s a computer in almost every appliance we use these days, but Rambo did, and this story is the result. If you find your refrigerator looking at you funny after you read this story, you might not be as crazy as that sounds.

“Cael’s Continuum” by Preston Grassmann is a thought more than a story, a meditation on a boy who misses his twin brother. M. David Blake’s “Absinthe Fish” is an example of weird fiction based on hallucination based on Schrodinger’s Cat, making for a potent drink. “The Messengers,” by Benjamin Paul, is a teen writing contest winner on the theme of teen siblings attempting to stop a war, and is some fine writing for a seventh grader. “The Long Lives of Heroes,” written by Jeremy Whitley and illustrated by Jason Strutz, is the beginning of a graphic novel that will be published over several issues. So far it’s not entirely coherent, but further installments should solve that problem.

A good half of the magazine is given over to nonfiction, with interviews of Jason Morningstar, the writer-designer responsible for the Bully Pulpit Games 2009 ENnies Judge’s Spotlight Award-winning Fiasco, a role-playing game; Hannu Rajaniemi, the Finnish-born author of first novel The Quantum Thief; Jonathan Strahan, a well-respected anthologist of speculative fiction (this interview is especially fine); David Halperin, the author of first novel Journal of a UFO Investigator; and Gail Martin, author of the series The Chronicles of the Necromancer. There are many well-written book reviews by Joseph Giddings, Fred Chappell, Paul Kincaid (who reviews a work of criticism, something rarely found in science fiction and fantasy periodicals), Richard Dansky, Patrick Ward, Nick Mamatas, Brian Howe, John Bowker and Daniel M. Kimmel. The books reviewed are as varied as the reviewers, ranging from hard science fiction to epic fantasy to film criticism. These portions of the magazine are invaluable to anyone who wants to beef up her library, or learn more about the writers and anthologists who put together the books he reads.

Bull Spec #5 also offers six poems. “Kyrielle for a Cloned Baby” by Lisa M. Bradley is the best of these offerings. Science and emotion both are packed into these rhyming lines about a bereaved mother and her new child. “The Dirty Vampire, A Recipe,” by Alexandra Seidel, is amusing to anyone who knows anything about the Twilight novels (and who could be in touch with popular culture and have missed at least some reference to these books?). “Snake Eyes,” by Nathaniel Lee, is a story poem about the fickle nature of luck, well told in poetry form.

I was impressed with this magazine, and I’ll be reading future issues.

The nonfiction in the Summer 2011 issue of Weird Tales is interesting and informative, telling readers a good deal about a number of diverse topics. Genevieve Valentine offers “A Sweet Disorder in the Dress,” the title taken from a Robert Herrick poem, about the fashion of Alexander McQueen, and especially his Spring 2010 collection, Plato’s Atlantis. This collection was famous, or perhaps infamous, for the huge shoes – a foot high! – that looked like lobster claws, and much of the fashion on display fell into the “who would wear that?!” category (the answer: Lady Gaga, but almost no one else). Seen through the lens of fantasy, however, the collection begins to take on an intellectual shape and texture to match that of the garments. Valentine calls McQueen “an artist who left his mark as a master of the uncanny,” and she proves her point nicely, something difficult to do with a bare minimum of pictures. It takes some strong writing to do that.

Robert A. Kowal is the author of “Weird Cinema: Through the Lens Darkly,” about how to tell weird cinema when you see it. Of particular interest to me is Kowal’s discussion of David Lynch’s “Mullholland Drive,” which I thought deliciously surreal. Kowal explains how Lynch was able to make “Mullholland Drive” work, when others he has directed, especially “Inland Empire,” failed.

Cynthia Ward‘s “The Library: Books, Tomes & Grimoires,” discusses the new science fiction and fantasy imprint, Angry Robot Books, which is targeting the “brand-savvy post-modern fan and the ever changing world in which s/he lives,” and making a success of it. It is its intent to publish only “genre-bending novels and WTF fiction” from authors from the UK, US, France, Israel, Australia and South Africa. It has taken an unconventional approach, enlisting an army of reviewers and genre lovers as its Robot Army to spread the word. A number of the Angry Robot offerings are discussed in brief following the article, making it possible for you to consider for yourself whether this imprint is something to look for.

Carrie Ann Baade, an artist, is interviewed by Ann VanderMeer. Baade’s cover for this issue, “The Angel Maker’s Daughter,” is not attractive or even particularly interesting to my eyes, but other examples of her work offer an insight into her classical heritage that is altogether strange and sometimes wonderful. It’s a surprisingly frank interview, which is starting to become a hallmark of Weird Tales’ asthetic for me; the interviewers somehow get the interviewees to open up further than I’ve seen elsewhere, including in interviews of the same figures.

Many of the stories in this issue take place in or around Hell, and yes, that includes a “deal with the Devil” tale, “A Contract without Loopholes” by Eric Lis. In Lis’s tale, we’re rooting for the demon (who, by the way, isn’t all that sure there really is a Satan) to come up with a contract that the human selling his soul can’t wriggle out of at the last minute. Apparently, this human has read everything that fantasists have to tell about this sort of deal, and between C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and the Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett book, Good Omens, he’s got all the angles figured. But our demon friend Nolth finds a way. Once you read it, you’ll slow down at executing contracts yourself.

“The Diner on the Edge of Hell” by Ramsey Shehadeh, is about the ongoing war between angels and devils, between Heaven and Hell. It quickly becomes difficult to see a distinction between the good guys and the bad. Nik Houser’s “A Beginner’s Guide to Sandcastle Alchemy” is a sad story of the transition from boy to man, in a world where the transition takes a special ceremony. “Look at the Jam I’m In” by Richard Holinger is a fine short joke, perfectly set in a subway. “The Hand” by Gio Clairval is another short tale that seems based on Jesus’s stricture that, “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” though the offending organ is the hand of the title; the story explains the offense.

“Jagannath,” by Karin Tidbeck, is a story that is weird – seemingly for the mere purpose of being weird, and not to serve any plot or idea. In this tale, children are “born” when they are excreted from a tube protruding from the Nursery ceiling; it all sounds very mechanical. And it is, indeed, mechanical, as we learn later in the story, for Mother appears to be a cross between a biological organism and a century ship, one intended to keep the race alive, though for what purpose is unstated. If this is intended as a metaphor, a cautionary tale, or anything besides a portrait – essentially, “Hey, look at this weird thing I wrote!” it escaped me entirely. I’m happy enough to read the occasional piece that is simply strange, but I generally prefer there to be a point to the strangeness, if only to point out a beauty that I might otherwise have missed. Nothing of the sort is available here.

But “Jagannath” is an ideal of considered thought and careful plotting in comparison to “Beelzebub’s Messiah” by Brant Danay. I see no point to this story whatsoever save to induce the utmost disgust in the reader. Why would an author choose to do that? Who is the audience for this sort of fiction? It is vile. It presents us with a picture of a priest of one religion who is crucified by the adherents of another religion in the most hideous way possible, described in morbid detail. I’ve been looking for a sentence to quote for you to give you the flavor of this story – a word I use loosely – but my gorge is rising just skimming to find something appropriate. Try this one: “The enteral device hooked into his flank continued to churn and vibrate and gurgle all the while, and his wounds began to fester in the rancid swampwater that bubbled and dripped like liquid vomit from his mouth.” Charming, no? No. Why was this story published? There is no humor to it, no lesson to be learned, no frisson of fear runs down one’s spine; it is just repulsive. Beware.

Subterranean Online’s summer issue is devoted to young adult fiction, but the authors seem to have taken that directive as license to be subversive. It’s been true for a while now that the only thing “young adult” about most “young adult” science fiction, fantasy and horror is that the protagonist is not an adult. The stories just as entertaining for 50-year-olds as for 15-year-olds, and the themes are by no means limited to the worries of teens. This issue makes it clear why so many genre readers pay no attention to the labels slapped on books these days, but browse around the entire bookstore for the best stuff. But it’s more than that: many of the stories in this issue are exceptional.

“Queen of Atlantis” by Sarah Rees Brennan is one of those stories that makes you wonder why anyone thinks fairy tales are only for children. Mede is a princess who has lived all her life in the shadow of her elder sister. But her elder sister is now a queen to a faraway king, and Mede has become the princess who is the cynosure of all eyes, and she must act the part. When the day comes on which she must be sacrificed to relieve her city of the poison tides, she is eager – for the “sacrifice” is symbolic only, though it actually works to save the city from the tides. She quickly learns what her sister never told her about this duty, and must make a choice she never anticipated. It is a tale that feels as genuine and classic as “Snow White” or “Sleeping Beauty,” except here the woman acts rather than is acted upon. I’m looking forward to reading more from this author’s pen.

Genevieve Valentine’s story, “Demons, Your Body and You” is a wonderful takedown of decades of young adult fiction. It’s about a high school girl, Katie, who becomes pregnant by a demon over the summer, and how she deals with that, told through the eyes of her “proximity friend” (that is, a girl who is a friend because she lives three doors away and not because of any actual affinity between them). Apparently the demon was really hot – not in the sense of body heat per se, but in the sexy sense – and Katie really loved him and is feeling very betrayed that he didn’t stick around. It is funny yet poignant, as good an exploration of many of the issues surrounding teenaged pregnancy as the movie “Juno.”

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what happens when every beholder sees computer-enhanced images? Does real beauty even exist if the face on which it is built by a machine is essentially no more than a canvas? Tobias S. Buckell addresses this sort of question in “Mirror, Mirror,” portraying a world not far in our future where true beauty can go completely unrecognized by the vast majority. The use of mirrorshades as the mover of the tale brings cyberpunk and Bruce Sterling to mind, but this story is even more reminiscent of Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See,” about a technology that makes the mind unable to see either beauty or ugliness. When everyone’s beautiful, what does beauty even mean anymore?

Karen Joy Fowler’s “Younger Women” is really for older women, not a young adult story at all. How does a mother react when she finds that the handsome boy who is dating her daughter is a vampire? Well, for one thing, she asks him the questions you feel should be directed toward those sparkly vampires of page and screen: what the heck is a hundred-plus-year-old doing hanging out with high school kids? What’s the attraction? But there’s a lot more to this story than that satisfying line, about loss and love and raising a daughter all on your own. Fowler has a way of writing about relationships that gets right to the heart of a matter without spelling things out so completely that the magic is leached out of her stories. And despite the fact that this is a story for moms, not kids, she has teenage lingo down cold.

Science fictional extrapolation makes Kelly Link’s “Valley of the Girls” shine darkly. It’s about a world in which rich people buy “Faces” for their children, and render their children literally invisible to cameras and kidnappers, substituting these stand-ins. If no one can see or hear you, why not behave as badly as possible? It’s a tale of pure invention with heavy emotional weight.

Tiffany Trent’s “Seek-No-Further” is a fantasy from the time just after the Depression. Ilsa is a farmgirl whose parents are out helping the family’s cows give birth on a night when the snow is falling hard and cold. Ilsa’s father disappears that night, but he leaves behind a wife who has gone through eight pregnancies and has only one living child to show for it, Ilsa’s mother. The two women manage to keep the farm going, but with great difficulty. Ilsa finds her comfort in the apple orchard, and in one strange fruit that seems to sing to her. The story gives a vivid picture of a time and a place, but the plot doesn’t work well and ending resolves almost nothing.

That endings are hard to write well is also clear in Malinda Lo’s otherwise beautifully told tale, “The Fox.” This story, another fairy tale, is about a broken heart, and how difficult it is to heal one. Lo chooses her words with great care, lending a poetic cadence to her story, as delicate as a valentine.

Richard Larson’s “The Ghost Party” is yet another example of endings that just aren’t right. Larson builds up to what should be a fascinating climax, but everything fizzles. Once you’ve invoked the Elder Gods, you have to find a way to deal with them apart from, “But it was all a dream,” which is the functional equivalent of Larson’s ending.

Finally, Alaya Dawn Johnson has written a gross but funny story in “Their Changing Bodies.” Kids who still find bodily functions hilarious will get a kick out of this one.

The Theodore Sturgeon Award will be given to one lucky author at next weekend’s Campbell Conference Awards Banquet in Lawrence, Kansas. The banquet caps both the Writers Workshop in Science Fiction and the Novel Writers Workshop in Science fiction, and is the kick-off event for the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction. Writers mingle with academics, which must make gathering that a studious reader would find pretty lively. I wish I were going to be there myself.

Instead, I’m doing the next best thing and reviewing all of the nominees for the Sturgeon Award. This award is granted to the best science fiction short story, though the length of the “short” story varies widely in this year’s field, from Eleanor Arnason’s “Mammoths of the Great Plains, a long novella, to the tidbit that is Yoon Ha Lee’s “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain.” The stories vary in quality as much as in length, and even though a couple of the nominees are clearly inferior, the awards committee is likely to have a difficult time choosing the best out of an overall strong field.

“A Letter from the Emperor” by Steve Rasnic Tem is one of my favorites among the nominees, and has a strong feel of Sturgeon to it in its hard-edged sentimentality. The story takes place in a universe where a far-flung empire is dissolving much as Rome did, a victim of its own expanded borders and the concurrent difficulties in communication. In the far reaches of the empire, a patrol ship visits outposts that operate entirely independent of the broad arm of the overweening government. As the story opens one of the two men who make up the patrol has committed suicide, and the ship’s computer is trying to figure out why with the help of the remaining crewman, who never claimed to be his shipmate’s friend. The suicide occurred only a short time before the patrol was due to visit a nearly barren planet, an outpost in a neverending war against an alien Tem never describes. The remaining crewman continues with his dutiful visit to the planet, named Joy – whether in irony or because being stationed so far from the war truly was a joy – where an aging officer is nearing retirement, and eagerly awaits his letter from the emperor congratulating him. The officer and the emperor served together in the war a long, long time ago, and the officer is certain that the emperor will not have forgotten him. But in a dissolving empire engaged in a long war, a retirement letter is a nicety that is rarely observed any longer. And thus the crewman is given a choice. The story plays out beautifully and honestly, and I suspect Sturgeon would have loved it.

I didn’t like “Dead Man’s Run” by Robert Reed when I first read it for my very first Magazine Monday column, and it didn’t improve on rereading. The long distance running milieu still feels artificial and unnecessary to the plot. Anyone who doesn’t run would necessarily feel alienated from this story, which depends on an understanding and interest in the pastime. Because I love mysteries, I had hoped for more from the central notion of using the “back-up” of someone who has died to try to solve his murder. But the plot is poorly executed, and the novella length unsuitable for the thin story.

I previously wrote about “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis, which was a nominee for the Nebula. As I said then, this story is bursting with ideas and innovations. The worldbuilding by which Venus becomes livable seems scientifically sound and is interesting to read about – especially because people don’t live on the planet, but above it, in floating cities. Wouldn’t you love to see that? Landis writes of a society built even more on money than we have going right now, with great wealth buying enormous privilege by a few families who come to rule the planet. This economic structure has as much influence on the events of the story as does the geology and biology. For those who love hard science fiction, this story is for you.

I’m still not sure I entirely understand “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” by Yoon Ha Lee, even after several readings. Perhaps it’s just that I can’t wrap my mind around the notion that “in some universes, determinism runs backwards.” I suspect being able to understand that notion is critical to understanding how the being who wields Arighan’s Flower comes to her decision to begin killing again. Arighan’s Flower is one of four guns created by a prisoner of the empire, each of which has unusual powers. This particular gun is called “the ancestral gun”; it destroys the target’s entire ancestral line. The wielder’s work is requested by an android – a “constructed sentience” – for a specific purpose related to another of the guns, and thereby hangs the tale.

Peter Watt’s story, “The Things,” requires that the reader be at least somewhat conversant with the movie “The Thing,” which was based on the John W. Campbell story of many years ago, “Who Goes There?” In this rendition of the tale, the narrator is the Thing itself, an alien coming to earth as “an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary,” intending to spread “the communion” and help the universe move ever upwards. It crashes into Earth, and is attempting to regroup and adapt when it is attacked by humans who do not understand it – a misunderstanding that is entirely mutual. The Thing figures out that the humans don’t accept integration any more than the Thing can deal with being an individual. The fight between the two species plays out from this alternate point of view in such a way that the Thing seems not just understandable and sympathetic, but downright reasonable and sensible. It’s a great piece of tradition science fiction writing.

I wasn’t equally fond of Lavie Tidhar’s “The Night Train,” which is as referential as “The Things” but to a completely different strain of science fiction, cyberpunk. The story shows its colors from the first sentence: “Her name wasn’t Molly and she didn’t wear shades, reflective or otherwise.” If you’re not already hearing echoes, you haven’t read your Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. And the story plays out much like a cyberpunk tale, though this time with much more of a biological component than I recall in any of the progenitors of the subgenre. For instance, the viewpoint character, Hua Lamphong, is a kathoey — a third sex; from the context, apparently a transgendered female, but very possibly with some differences from the transgendered we know today (many, apparently, grow breasts but keep their penises, for instance). Hua is a bodyguard of sorts, and her job in this story is to keep a train from derailing and killing everyone on it, including the target of the attack, her boss. The train isn’t what you’d expect, and neither is the boss. Everything in this story has a spin, and you’ll feel well and truly spun when you finish it.

Damien Broderick’s “Under the Moons of Venus” isn’t cyberpunk, but it spins just as much as Tidhar’s story. It’s impossible to tell whether the protagonist, Blackett, is crazy or has simply lived through amazing, unexplainable, apocalyptic times. From his perspective, the Earth’s moon retreated from Earth’s sky and became a moon of Venus, along with Ganymede, formally one of Jupiter’s moons. Not long thereafter, almost all of humanity was translated to Venus as well, which had by then formed an atmosphere suitable for human life; the acidic atmosphere by which we know Venus was moved to what used to be Earth’s moon. Can this really have happened? Why were there no geological consequences to the Earth – or indeed, any of its structures – when this took place? And if that’s not what happened, where did the majority of Earth’s population go? Is Clare, Blackett’s patient (he is a psychiatrist, as is she; each thinks the other is his/her patient) correct when she points out that the moon still rises? We see only through Blackett’s eyes, so we never see the moon, and we do see an ocean with no tides. This is a surprisingly enjoyable story.

Perhaps my favorite story in this slate of nominees is Eleanor Arnason’s “Mammoths of the Great Plains.” Taking the form of a grandmother’s story, told to her granddaughter, this story is about how American Indians used to live side by side with the mammoths, rarely hunting them, until they died out. The Indians were respectful of the animals with whom they lived, and the Earth on which they dwelt; the invading white men were not, and their depredations ultimately led to the last mammoth dying of a disease imported with circus elephants from India and Africa. The narrating grandmother’s own grandmother was a scientist, a biologist, raised and educated in the white world, returning to her Indian roots only late in life. Her mission was to preserve mammoths even as they were becoming extinct, in the hopes that science would one day be able to return the species to the Great Plains. Her story is moving and inspiring, and makes one long to see herds of mammoths in the wild. More, it makes me want to learn much more about American Indians. And Arnason’s writing makes everything so real that I felt like I needed to check to make sure that mammoths didn’t really wander the Great Plains as late as the early twentieth century.

I was unable to track down a copy of the final story nominated for the Sturgeon Award, Alistair Reynolds’ “Troika.” I could not find a way to contact Reynolds, and Jonathan Strahan, the editor of the Science Fiction Book Club anthology in which Reynolds’s story first appeared, Godlike Machines, did not respond to emails.

I would have a hard time deciding between Arnason’s “Mammoths of the Great Plains” and Steve Rasnic Tem’s “A Letter from the Emperor” for the Sturgeon Award. The stories are different in almost every possible way, but they have in common some truly excellent writing and deep meaning that goes beyond verbal or scientific fireworks. These stories make it plain that speculative fiction is a healthy field.

I am happy to report that Weird Tales has grown weirder since Ann VanderMeer has taken the helm as Editor-in-Chief. This is to be expected of the co-anthologist (with her husband, Jeff VanderMeer) of The New Weird, an collection of tales essential to the library of everyone who loves the truly strange; and the co-anthologist of an enormous anthology due out sometime soon from Atlantic called The Weird. While we all wait for this last book (I with bated breath), we can read Weird Tales every quarter and enjoy its increasingly strange and wonderful offerings.

The best and weirdest story in the Spring 2011 issue of Weird Tales is Mark Meredith’s “A Short Trek Across Fala Moor.” The tale is about a man who spends his days off work roaming around southern Scotland, always with the help of MacFakaar’s guide, A Most Excellent Array of Scottish Perambulatin. (I particularly like that the “g” is dropped from the end of that title, so you almost have to read it to yourself with a Scottish accent.) The narrator of the story is quick to tell us that MacFakaar didn’t set out his walks with only two eyes – one for beauty and one for practicality – but also for the third spiritual eye for deep religious experience. Although the guide is very large and heavy – two feet by three, weighing four stone – it can be carried on walks with the hiker who is careful to have acquired several children of his own for the task.

I’ve long held the theory that “weird” literature is more about place than is most fantasy, and Meredith’s story proves my point. The Scotland of this story is a very odd place indeed, and Meredith describes it in detail. MacFakaar’s walks go through strange weather, cross unusual borders, and bring one face to face with some very odd persons. I truly wish I had one of his guidebooks; I’d be on the next plane to Scotland just to take one of his perambulations.

On the occasion of this story, the narrator has chosen what ought to be a relatively easy hike with no companions, not even his children. He admires the bog through which he hikes, the beauties of which were “subtle, understated.” He comes across unusual wildlife, which he names according to proper scientific nomenclature, with a smile, before passing some unusual sheep, until finally he meets a dog in need of a friend, which he takes home. Sounds like a fairly common stroll, but in the world Meredith has created, all of these events are quite weird indeed, as his detailing of them reveals. This story is a genuine treat.

“Portal” by J. Robert Lennon offers almost as much weirdness. Some years ago, a father narrates, his family discovered that their new home had a magic portal out in the back acre. The children discovered it first, and brought their parents to see before attempting to pass through themselves – a good thing, even though on that first trip through the family discovers the portal goes only to the vacant lot behind the public library. But the portal seems to take the family to stranger and stranger places as time goes on, suggesting that it might be out of order (or “declin[ing] into senility,” as the narrator suggests) ; and, of course, the family has no real idea how to repair it. Worse, the portal strongly affects the family aside from what they see and do on their trips. Can anything be done?

“The Last Thing Said Before Silence” by Peter M. Ball is set in a world invaded by mimes. These aren’t your usual annoying folks in exaggerated make-up; when they mime a wall, a wall comes into existence, even if it is invisible. The mimes are the security forces for the Leviathans. Humanity apparently has given up in the face of this invasion, but there is a resistance, and the narrator can tell us about it. It’s a sad story about the silencing of laughter – worse, a world where laughter has virtually become a crime.

Karin Tidbeck’s “Augusta Prime” is immediately weird, in that croquet is apparently played very differently where Augusta lives than in our backyards. But the degree of weirdness only becomes apparent later in the story, when Augusta learns that a piece of jewelry she has picked up in the rough off the croquet course is a “watch” that tells “time” – both concepts completely foreign to her. Her situation worsens when a djinneya comes to call, and gives her information completely inconsistent with her world.

The setting of “The Trojan Girl,” by N.K. Jemisin, is both more familiar yet equally as strange as the other lands we are asked to visit in the stories in this issue. The characters here appear to be bits of code wandering around some giant computer, working as hard as they can to avoid Singularities, incorporating whatever code seems useful and avoiding enemies of all stripes. Meroe runs with a pack that discovers a child who has some unusual attributes. The pack sets out to make her its own, though it isn’t clear whether they intend to tear her apart or make her one of their number. The girl runs, and they pursue, with terrible consequences for the meat that is jacked into the system. And, ultimately, there are consequences for Meroe and his pack as well.

Karen Heuler’s “Fishwish” is a takeoff on the fairy tale of the fishwife who is persuaded to spare the life of a fish because he grants her three wishes. This short story is a nice twist on an old tale.

There are two poems in this issue, “Love Thy Neighbor” by Seth Lawhorn, suitably strange; and “The Future History of Cats” by Kurt Newton, about what happens to our furry friends after the Apocalypse. This issue also contains an interview of Caitlin R. Kiernan, author of the magnificent novel, The Red Tree, and one of the frankest and saddest interviews I’ve ever read. It should also be noted that the cover illustration is beautiful, and the interior illustrations are excellent accompaniments to the stories.

I look forward to the next issue with the same joy that I anticipate the novels of Felix Gilman, China Mieville and Steph Swainston. Weird Tales has become truly weird with VanderMeer at the helm, and that is the highest compliment I can give.

The May/June issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction is bookended with stories about music by two stalwarts of the field, Chet Williamson and Kate Wilhelm. Both demonstrate that they still wield a strong pen; both tales are excellent.

Chet Williamson’s “The Final Verse” is about two men who set out to find the final verses to a folk song called “Mother Come Quickly.” It’s supposed to be one of the best-known songs in popular music, performed by just about everyone of note, but it has its origins in Appalachia, and those origins are foggy. The structure of the song indicates that something’s missing; the last verse has only four lines, while all the other verses have eight. Pete Waitkus, the grandson of the man who first discovered the song, thinks that he knows how to discover the missing lines, because he’s listened to an old recording of his grandfather discussing the song with an old mountain woman. There’s information there, Pete thinks, that his grandfather overlooked. And so he looks up his buddy, Billy Lincoln,who narrates the story, and asks him to come along on an Appalachian outing to find the family the song is about and get them to reveal the missing verse. Billy’s a more or less washed-up bluegrass and country musician who sees in this a chance to get his name back into the limelight, so he goes along. Off the two go in Pete’s nice RV, over rutted roads and down tree-blocked roads.

Billy and Pete find an old mansion “where the two creeks meet,” as the song goes, and conclude that it’s the right place. But it’s the dark of night when they get there, so they make dinner and crawl into bed. Or at least Billy does; Pete apparently can’t sleep, because the next thing Pete knows he hears some terrible yowling that it takes him some time to decipher as human singing. Billy crawls out of the RV and discovers Pete talking to an old, old woman with whom he seems surprisingly enthralled – enthralled not by what she’s saying (which is interesting enough, since it’s about the song), but by the woman herself, whom he inexplicably seems to find as sexy as can be. And this is where the wheels come off the bus — or the RV, if you will — and things start to get seriously weird. There’s magic up in those hills, and it’s not all the white kind, either. But there’s an escape, and just when we think things might go well for Billy, Williamson gives us reason to seriously doubt it. It’s a beautifully constructed story, easily the best in this issue.

Wilhelm’s story is gentler, a tale of a jazzman and his lover who have died but still somehow seem to inhabit the beautiful southern home they inherited in Memphis. The musical legacy of the two infects new generations and lingers on its own as well. This isn’t a story in which plot matters much; it’s the milieu that Wilhelm evokes that stays in one’s mind long after the last page is turned. There are some problems with the story that are surprising from a pro like Wilhelm — for instance, the point of view changes from one character to another and back again without warning or reason — but it’s a pleasant story.

The novella “Rampion,” by Alexandra Duncan, might confuse you if you don’t know the fairy tale on which it is based – I didn’t, and don’t, and therefore didn’t quite understand why this story of a blind man in Cordoba, Spain, during the time of the Umayyad Moors is in a fantasy and science fiction magazine; it seems to be purely romantic historical fiction. One character is rumored to be a witch, but there’s no evidence of it, no magic in the story, nothing that suggests fantastic occurrence. The story is a straightforward tale of a Moor who seduces a Christian woman in a time when women weren’t allowed to make their own choices. He pays a heavy price for it, but finds a way out of his troubles. Much as I’ve enjoyed the tales set in Muslim countries and with Arabian themes that seem to be regularly popping up lately, I found Duncan’s story flat and insufficiently detailed to truly establish a faraway time and place.

There’s an intriguing pair of stories from Robert Reed. The first, “Stock Photos,” left me entirely mystified. It has to do with a man out mowing his lawn when a man and a woman drive up and ask to take his photograph as stock footage. They goad the man into other poses and activities for further photographs until finally they have him posing with a Belgian assault rifle, and things start to snap into place, just a little — but not enough. It is only when you read the follow-up, “The Road Ahead,” that things start to make sense. Very clever work.

“Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer” by Ken Liu is an unusual story of what happens after we all become nothing but a bunch of zeros and ones, totally digitized — life after the Singularity. As tempting as essentially eternal life might seem, would it really be an altogether good thing to give up the exploration of anything but inner space? Or are we meant to go to the stars? Profound questions are posed in this short but thought-provoking story.

“The Black Mountain” by Albert E. Cowdrey is about the attempt to preserve the only beautiful part of a truly ugly building, and what is discovered in undertaking that effort. “Signs of Life” by Carter Scholz features a gene sequencing project in which some interesting patterns are discovered in junk DNA, which comprises a surprising amount of the human genome. “The Old Terrologist’s Tale” by S.L. Gilbow seems to be trying to say something about how danger and beauty are inextricably linked in a planet’s geography, but it’s not clear whether the lesson is that we should terraform worlds so as to eliminate beauty in order to eliminate danger.

“Agent of Change” by Steve Popkes is about Godzilla — no, really, it’s about Godzilla. “Fine Green Dust,” by Don Webb, is also about lizards. It must be something in the overheated air that is making these authors see green. Scott Bradfield’s “Starship Dazzle” is a third story intended to be humorous, though this time the animal involved is a dog and not a lizard. All three remind the reader that comedy is difficult; none of them works well.

The one bit of writing in this issue that truly did make me smile was Paul Di Filippo’s recurring feature, “Plumage from Pegasus.” This entry in the series, entitled “Building a Readership,” is about a writer who purchases a Lector-5000, a robot produced by — of course! — Apple, and intended to be a companion to readers, able to discuss books, recommend new reading material, and generally be a reader’s best friend. Here the reader-purchaser also happens to be a writer, and he makes the fatal mistake of asking the electronic gadget to read and comment on his work. That might sound bad enough, but he makes an even more classic mistake before he gets this far. Fortunately, that mistake can be corrected, and it takes care of everything else.

Gordon Van Gelder’s editorial about F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre is touching and sad, the finest of the features — book reviews, movie reviews and a nonfiction piece about a past F&SF editor — that round out this edition.

The April 2011 issue of Realms of Fantasy is identified as a “Special Dark Fantasy Issue.” The nifty cover illustration by Brom fits the theme perfectly. And there’s lots more Brom inside, including an interview by Karen Haber and a considerable number of examples of his work. This is a man who must use up his blue, gray, red and black paints with considerable speed — but he never seems to use up his imagination.

The best story in this issue is about the Cthulhu Mythos, which has really been enjoying a renaissance these days. “The Strange Case of Madelein H. March (Ages 14-1/4)” by Von Carr is that rarity in fantasy, a story intended to be funny that actually will make you laugh. Maddie has been left in charge of the family home while her parents and her elder sister go on a trip to visit potential colleges, and wouldn’t you know it, the Elder Gods take this opportunity to manifest themselves in the basement. Maddie knows that if she can’t get rid of them, her parents will never let her hear the end of it. After a number of hilarious attempts to solve her problem, Maddie finally comes upon the proper metafictional solution. While it’s not exactly dark fantasy, it’s about dark fantasy — it mocks dark fantasy in a loving way, actually — and it’s great fun.

The other stories are more of what you’d expect from a dark fantasy issue. Randy Henderson’s retelling of the Grimm Brothers tale of Hansel and Gretel in “A Witch’s Heart” reveals a sibling rivalry not previously included in the tale. It also casts an entirely new light on the relationship between the witch and Gretel. The two powerful women in this tale are temporarily defeated by the only male, but it is clear that the tale is not over when Henderson is done with the telling. While the idea behind this story is not entirely original, it is a good retelling.

“The Sacrifice,” by Michelle M. Welch, deceptively begins as yet another fantasy tale set in yet another medieval fantasy world filled with knights and wars. The names of the characters are clearly intended to set the reader thinking that she has seen this world before: two young knights, Anders and Gilien, are apprenticed to the judges in one of King Harald’s villages. They are assigned to investigate the case of a woman who has clearly been gang-raped and beaten, but who refuses to speak of what was done to her, even to accuse her assailants. In this kingdom, the absence of a criminal means that there is no crime. Anders confidently predicts that the woman will herself be tried one day soon for strangling her child once it is born, for, he reasons, she must be pregnant.

Obeying an impulse he does not understand, Gilien hides the woman, keeping her warm and fed and trying to offer her his support. One day she is not where Gilien has hidden her. Gilien breaks his silence and tells Anders what he has been doing, so distraught is he at her disappearance. Anders carefully explains that there is nowhere for the woman to go save to destroy herself: her father wouldn’t take her back, no man would marry her, and so on. Perhaps, the two men conclude, she is seeking out magicians to make her a virgin again. But the woman has something else in mind, as we learn when war comes to the village. “The Sacrifice” does not proceed as you would expect it to. This original tale is well-written and captivating.

Lisa Goldstein’s story, “Little Vampires,” is an interesting take on family life, and especially the bonds between a mother and her daughter. I don’t want to say more because the sting of this story would be drawn by any discussion; it’s short and sharp and, ultimately, lovely.

“The Shackle and Lash,” by Euan Harvey, is another in a recent series of fantasy short stories and novels to take advantage of the rich culture of Arabia for a setting and a magic system. In this tale, two members of the Mukhabarat are demoted to prison duty when they run from a Hand of Afaz. We are told little about the Hands, or why these brave men fled; that adventure is merely the starting point for a tale of a mysterious blue-eyed prisoner who abides in unspeakable filth but carries in her eyes cloudless summer skies and the smell of hay. What this prisoner does to the two men makes a story worth reading.

This issue of Realms of Fantasy also contains a “Folkroots” column by Theodora Goss on “Vampires in Folkore and Literature.” It is a fine piece of popular scholarship about the history of this literary trope. It’s good to know that Goss doesn’t like sparkly vampires, and good to know, too, that she knows their background in literature through and through. I learned only recently that Goss is a lawyer as well as a writer, and now that I know, I can see it in her nonfiction writing: she is organized, precise, carefully presenting evidence to support each statement. Literature’s gain is law’s loss.

Realms has always paid close attention to quality book reviews, and this issue is no exception. Paul Witcover and Elizabeth Bear write well-considered reviews of all sorts of fantasy, giving a reader a good idea of whether the book under discussion is worth picking up. Bear’s reviews of paranormal romance and urban fantasy give attention to a corner of the field that gets relatively little attention from reviewers despite its popularity, making them especially helpful. Michael Jones writes short reviews of young adult fiction that can serve as a good guide for any parent or friend of a young person who loves to read — not to mention that so much young adult fiction these days makes some of the best reading for adults as well. Finally, Andrew Wheeler writes about graphic novels, another area that is under-reviewed. These pages at the back of the book are very valuable for the fantasy aficionado.

The June 2011 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction has a beautiful cover of a woman who is partly constructed of a gold metallic weave. The artist, Jacques Barbey, poses her at the shore of a river or lake golden with the sunset, wearing a headdress that appears to be functional in some way, apparently as a weapon. It doesn’t seem to match up to any of the stories in this issue, but it is a lovely image all on its own. And who says fantastic paintings need to refer to anything but the artist’s own imagination, anyway?

Most of the issue is consumed by a new novella by Mary Robinette Kowal, “Kiss Me Twice.” This accomplished work is a true science fiction mystery, which is much harder to pull off than might be immediately apparent. The author can’t pull out some amazing technological gimmick to solve the puzzle, because that would be cheating; so she has to set out the rules of the society and its technology, and then stick to them, leaving all the clues for the reader to unravel. Kowal manages this beautifully.

The story is about Metta, an artificial intelligence who works with the Portland police department. She dons various avatars for the different officers she works with. They all see her in their VR glasses, and, of course, she can interact with many of them at the same time, all with seemingly different personalities. But really, her personality is simply her own, because she is a true artificial intelligence, fully — well, I almost wrote “fully human,” though that obviously isn’t the case. She’s definitely her own person, though. When she works with Huang on the case that makes up this story, she wears the face of Mae West in her Diamond Lil character, even going black and white for the occasion. Huang seems to be one of her favorites, and he cares for her, too, treating her like a real person (although some members of the police department insist on treating her as nothing more than a glorified computer).

The case starts when Huang is called to a murder scene on the roof of a building. The victim is a wealthy, powerful white male who has his finger in every real estate pie in the city. In the middle of the initial investigation of the scene, Metta is kidnapped; that is, according to the cameras in the central station, masked intruders burst in and grab Metta’s chassis. Huang is the only officer who thought to ask Metta to show him a picture of the intruders, but even that is so limited that the best he can testify to is that there were three of them. Huang also quickly comes to the conclusion that Metta has been taken in order to affect one of the investigations going on at the time of the kidnapping — and it becomes clear that it is Huang’s murder investigation that was the target of the intruders.

The mystery unwinds from there. Huang is aided in his work by a rebooted Metta — not the original Metta returned, but a sort of new person with a few hours’ less memory, an interesting complication when one considers the nature of true artificial intelligence. The effect of the tampering with the computer — because, don’t forget, Metta is also a police computer, serving all the functions one might expect of a computer, from document preparation to recording statements — turns up interesting clues, if Huang can trust his own memory instead of relying on Metta, as is his wont.

“Kiss Me Twice” is a thoroughly enjoyable novella. It rates very high in the ranking of science fictional mysteries, playing fair with readers and managing to disguise clues without hiding them in high tech. I hope Kowal writes more science fictional mysteries, because few can write them as well as this story proves Kowal can.

Ian R. MacLeod’s novelette, “The Cold Step Beyond,” is a different sort of mystery. Bess doesn’t know much about who she is and where she came from. She knows that she has been highly trained as an acolyte of the Warrior Church. She is deadly in a million different ways, and particularly proficient with her sword. She has only recently completed her training, and her first two missions have been unremarkable. Now she in a forest in the Island City of Ghezirah, waiting for evidence of what her mission is (as her instructions were frustratingly obscure). One morning, as she is encased in her body armor and going through her sword exercises, a small creature appears, a human female armed with a laser gun. They manage to get past the first few moments of their acquaintance without killing one another, and start to form a sort of friendship. Elli, Bess’s new friend, takes Bess to Elli’s home on the Isle of the Dead, which starts to explain a bit more about who Elli is. Oddly, it also starts to explain to Bess who Bess is. It’s a different sort of mystery from “Kiss Me Twice,” but it’s also beautifully constructed and told.

Carol Emshwiller’s latest short story also appears in this issue. Emshwiller is a treasure in the genre, and not as well known as she should be. This story will likely set you off in search of her stories and novels. “All the News That’s Fit” is about a small mountain village so cut off from the world that it is entirely reliant on a man, Flimm, who travels from the big city on the other side of the mountains at regular intervals to tell them the news. When Flimm ceases to come, Darta decides to go after him and find out what happens. It is an arduous journey, and many possible explanations for Flimm’s failure to return present themselves in the dangers that Darta faces. The real explanation, though, is one no one in the mountain village could have predicted. It’s a sad story, ultimately, and one has to wonder if Darta makes the right decision in the end.

Alan DeNiro’s “Walking Stick Fires” is almost incomprehensible — or, if not quite that, at least pointless so far as I could tell. Much as I enjoyed DeNiro’s novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less, he lost me with this story of Parka and Jar and their motorcycle journey. These two beings — not quite human, but not entirely alien, either, it seems — travel through the southwestern United States, on the run from the law and looking for safety. They encounter a number of hazards that make the world appear not quite as we know it, and not even quite real. Somehow, the insects known as walking sticks (which are very strange looking and wonderful, by the way; check them out sometime) play a role in all this, and may even be a major power in this odd version of the world. This is a weird story, a wild work of imagination, but it does not fall together into anything I recognize as a plot, a character study, or even a dream. I have no clue what DeNiro was trying to get at here.

“Apocalypse Daily” by Felicity Shoulders is about game developers who destroy the virtual world they have created in a different way every day. It becomes pretty difficult to come up with creative ways to end life as we know it once you’ve covered earthquakes, an eruption of the supervolcano that underlies Yellowstone, nuclear war, epic flood, and so on, and Katrina is having a tough time forcing new ideas out of her team. But the team comes up with a doozy, proving in the process that it is the rare apocalypse that can compete with office politics when it comes to making your life miserable.

The short “The Fighter,” by Colin P. Davies, is a nice complement to Kowal’s novella. It tells the tale of an individual who isn’t quite what he seems, when he is stopped by police on what at first seems to be a routine traffic stop. The story is so short that saying any more about it would ruin it, so I’ll leave it for you to read and enjoy.

The poetry in this issue reminds me how difficult it is to write good science fictional or fantastic poetry. Two of the three poems are near misses, but Bruce Boston’s “Ancient Catch” is lovely. Have you ever looked, really looked, at a fish? They are so old, a life form that doesn’t seem to have changed much in millenia. Boston catches that great age and the great ordinariness of it in his poem. It reminded me of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” one of my favorite poems; there is no greater compliment I can pay Boston than that.

I was well into drafting a column for today when my husband told me that President Obama was about to address the nation with earthshaking news. Being science fiction and fantasy fans, we both hoped this meant that we’d discovered intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We knew that it had to be that — or else that we’d gotten Osama bin Laden at least. Turned out the latter was true, and it’s news almost as good! Congratulations to the CIA, the Navy SEALs and President Obama for a job well done.

Magazine Monday will resume next week, when I’ve finished celebrating!

I’ve always thought that the novella was a perfect length for short science fiction or fantasy, because it gives an author space enough to build a complete world and form characters who live and breathe in the reader’s imagination. You need more room to do this in these genres than in mainstream literature, where an author can assume that the reader is at home in the world of his characters. Yet a novella is also short enough to be read in a single sitting – a perfect lunchtime read, for instance – and a reader can take in an author’s entire milieu and ideas in one gulp. Where copies of the novellas are available online for those who wish to read them, I have linked them so that you can have as good a week of lunches this week as I had last.

There are six novellas nominated for the Nebula this year. They are all of exceptionally high quality, and the variety is enormous, so much so that comparison of one to another seems almost silly. The jury is going to have a heck of a time choosing a winner.

My personal favorite for the win is one of the two hard science fiction stories, “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis, originally published in the September 2010 issue of Asimov’s. This story is bursting with traditional sensawunda (that’s “sense of wonder” for the uninitiated); the ideas and innovations burst from every page. Want to live on Venus? Here’s how. Actually, you can’t live on the planet; the acidic atmosphere would strip the flesh from your dead bones after you were crushed by the atmospheric pressure. But you could live in a cloud city above the atmosphere, in a closed environment. What kind of society would develop in such cities? Landis posits a society built even more on money than we have going right now, with great wealth buying enormous privilege by a few families who come to rule the planet. Of course, there’s always an underground in such societies, isn’t there?

More directly, Landis’s story concerns Leah Hamakawa, an accomplished ecologist, and the man who loves her but is afraid to tell her so, her assistant, David Tinkerman. Hamakawa is invited to Venus by Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum, one of the satraps of Venus who is, it turns out, only 12 Earth years old. On Venus, that is not too young to be considering marriage, and it quickly becomes apparent that Carlos has his eye on Hamakawa. But that isn’t the only reason he has invited her to Venus; he wants to talk to her about terraforming the planet. That seems scientifically impossible, but Carlos is more devious than you would expect of a 12-year-old. Sociology and physics blend beautifully here. Science never overwhelms the story, and the infodumps needed to place the reader fully into the context are painless and well-written. It’s a wonderful blend of erudition and entertainment. I’d be delighted to see this story take the prize.

The other hard science fiction story nominated is Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.” Usually if Chiang’s name is on a prize ballot, you can predict with confidence that he will be the winner, but I thought Chiang had a rare miss with this story of software pets, called digients, that develop personalities through interaction with their owners. Chiang poses a number of interesting ethical questions regarding what obligations, if any, humans might own to such creations; can you simply choose never again to boot up an artificial intelligence if you get tired of it? This is one case in which the novella length failed the author, for there is not enough room to play out all the implications of the scenario Chiang posits. I also found Chiang’s writing to be much more stilted and summary than his usual seamless prose.

I think of myself as a fairly sophisticated reader, but I confess that my reaction upon completing Paul Park “Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance,” from the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was, essentially, “Huh?” Much as I love metafiction – fiction about writers and writing and fiction itself – the point of this story completely escaped me. Set in 2019, this imaginary memoir of a future Park seems to portray a United States in serious decline, with energy largely unavailable and universities – and especially libraries – fallen largely into disuse. Park recounts a family history that includes at least a touch of the eerie, though nothing is ever completely spelled out. It’s as if Park deliberately set out to write an impenetrable novella. I like a difficult read as much as the next woman, but I prefer to be able to figure out what’s going on with a bit of close attention and effort; here, that effort was not rewarded. The story is literary, abstruse, and very strange. If you don’t mind not knowing what the heck is going on, this might be the story for you.

The other three novellas are all fantasies, and are all exquisite. The first is Rachel Swirsky’s “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window,” about a sorceress, Naeva, whose queen – her lover – assassinates her. But it’s not a complete assassination; she can be recalled to a limited sort of life to give advice, first to her queen, then to those who follow. As the millennia go by, she is recalled less and less, but each time she faces a culture that has changed radically. Her own beliefs are abandoned by society almost immediately, but she is never persuaded that men are anything more than worms, and she stands by this principal even under the most dire circumstances. It is a strange form of immortality she has attained, and one she hates. Then, when the universe dies and is reborn, she is given a choice: continue or end? I loved this story as much as I hated – yet understood – Naeva. It’s hard to handle a broad sweep of time, as Swirsky does, but she does it well.

“The Alchemist,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, is a departure from hard science fiction into fantasy for this multiple award-winning author. It nonetheless shares with Bacigalupi’s science fiction a concern with the harm that humans can unthinkingly render on their environment by the use of energy. The difference is that in this story, the energy is magic instead of fossil fuels. In this universe, using magic causes bramble to grow – a terrible growth that overwhelms fields, streets, whole towns, and can barely be kept back by fire and ax. Worse, the spines of the bramble are extremely poisonous to humans, inducing a sleep from which the victim never awakens. The story is told in the first person by Jeoz, a man who used to be an artisan of beautiful things, and wealthy from it. Now he has turned alchemist, trying to find a way to beat the bramble without using magic. He succeeds in his quest, saving the life of his beloved daughter, Jiala, in the process. But that’s when the problems begin: when he takes his invention to the mayor and the mayor’s sorcerer, nothing but trouble follows. How Jeoz escapes, and what he does with his new technology, makes for an excellent story. If you’re interested, Kat has reviewed the audiobook version of this novella.

“Iron Shoes,” by J. Kathleen Cheney, is the first work I’ve read by this author, but it won’t be the last. This charming story, apparently set in the early days of the 20^th century, is a love story at its heart, the only one of the nominated novellas to which that term can fairly be applied. Imogen Hawkes is a young woman whose husband has died, leaving her a horse farm that is mortgaged to the hilt. Although she has reached an agreement with her banker, that banker sells the debt to another banker who chooses to disregard it – all the better to gain Imogen’s hand in marriage, not to mention her farm, which adjoins his. If Imogen can’t pay the mortgage, she’ll have little choice but to consent to a marriage that is anathema to her. And her only hope for paying the mortgage is for her horse to win the Special Stakes.

Imogen’s father was a puca, her mother human; she has some small magic, but no control over it, and her mother raised her to be afraid of it. So when another puca arrives on her farm in the form of a new stallion, kept in that shape and controlled by the iron shoes nailed to his hooves, she believes nothing but trouble awaits. Still, she has too soft a heart to continue to torture the creature, and removes the shoes. In his human form, the puca is a charming and handsome man. The story proceeds from there, pretty much along the lines of a typical romance, but with the spice of magic added. I thought I’d outgrown romances, but this story convinces me otherwise.

And so: six excellent stories. I’ve had a wonderful week reading them all. I’m eager to see which one will win the Nebula.

The novelettes nominated for the Nebula Award this year are so dissimilar that it’s going to be difficult for the judges to compare them and make a decision. Ranging from hard science fiction to the softest of fantasy, these stories are a testament to the breadth of the field. Ruth Arnell and I teamed up to take a look at the seven nominated stories.

One of the nominees is from the pages of Analog:  Eric James Stone’s “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made.” Its central character is Harry Malan, the president of the Sol Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – a church that exists at the heart of the sun, adjacent to the interstellar portal that exists there. The story does not explain how humans came to discover this portal, or the energy shield that allows humans to exist at the core of a star, literally in the middle of an ongoing fusion reaction – but then, that’s not an issue that would be of particular interest to a Mormon funds manager for CitiAmerica who has been stationed at Sol Central in order to get an eight-and-a-half minute jump on the market.

There are only six human members of the Mormon congregation in the sun. There are, however, forty-six swale members. Swales are a species made of plasma, and have existed for millions of years before mammals even began to appear on earth. They are huge creatures, the smallest being double the length of a blue whale. And they are apparently immortal, for Malan soon has a confrontation with Leviathan, the biggest and the oldest of the swales, who claims to be the first of her kind who created all others – to be, in fact, God. When she challenges the Mormon faith of a young swale due to the interference of Malan, the young swale is forced to decide between religions. In an extremely pat ending that would work better in a religious text than a science fiction magazine, it’s Christianity to the rescue.

James Patrick Kelly’s “Plus or Minus” is the hardest science fiction story of this group. It takes place on an “asteroid bucket” – a spaceship that sticks to our solar system mining asteroids. Mariska is a teenager who has been gene-engineered to hibernate, which her mother hoped would mean that she would embrace a career exploring deep space. But like teenagers everywhere and everywhen, Mariska resents her mother’s interference in her life, and joins the crew of the asteroid bucket. It’s not as good a rebellion as she thought it would be, though, as she finds herself mostly on “crud duty” – disinfecting the mold and fungus that grows all over the spaceship. But when disaster strikes, Mariska has to figure out a way to help the crew survive the fact that it doesn’t have enough air to get home. If you’re looking for a scientific riddle, this is the story for you. Indeed, it reminds me of the granddaddy of all hard science fiction stories, Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations.”

“The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard, appears to take place in an alternate universe where the Aztec rule of Mexico was never overthrown, and the modern country is a political power to be reckoned with. The story is one of political machinations, and the science fictional details are surplusage; one does not need the imminence of intelligent computers to explore whether a leader’s betrayal of the deep beliefs of her constituency was good or bad. It’s a beautifully written story, in an interesting culture, but the plot does not hang together as well as it should.

“The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard Van Oost and Oludara” by Christopher Kastenschmidt is apparently an introduction to the title characters, a Spanish explorer in Brazil and a slave he buys and frees so that they might together explore the thick forests and their monsters during the sixteenth century. It’s a fine adventure tale of humans matching wits with magical creatures, but Terry was really puzzled at its inclusion on the Nebula ballot. The story is no better or more interesting than dozens of other adventure tales published in the last year; why was this one singled out?

“Stone Wall Truth” by Caroline M. Yoachim originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of Asimov’s.  It appears to take place in an alternate Africa that was once visited by an alien race. The only remnant of that race is a wall and tools by which to use its special properties. Njeri is the wielder of those tools, the one who pins alleged miscreants to the wall and flays them while they are alive, then resews them and restores them to life. The punishment is intended to show the darkness hidden within the criminals, for it comes crawling from their bodies when they hang there, open to the world. But one woman whom Njeri sews up challenges Njeri’s belief that the darkness is evidence of evil, and causes her to question the policy of treating the latest political outcasts in such a manner – and thereby calls the punishment down on herself. Njeri learns in the course of her flaying that the original use of the wall was something much different from how she and her people now use it. It leads to an ending that would have been much powerful if it weren’t for the fact that the same result reached through enormous pain could as easily have been achieved by writing and reading books. As good as the writing is here – and it is quite good – the mechanism behind the plot just seems silly when one takes a hard look at it.

Two of the nominated novelettes were part an original anthology of young adult fairy tales edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, The Beastly Bride. The first is “Map of Seventeen” by Christopher Barzak. Ruth didn’t much care for this story, finding the plot line was trite and predictable. To her, this story differed from the usual star-cross lovers tale only in that it dealt with two males instead of a male and a female – not a sufficient difference, even if one of the men was a beast of sorts. Ruth found the story too similar to Holly Black’s “A Coat of Stars” from her anthology The Poison Eaters, another tale about an artistic gay brother who came home from NYC to a culture that doesn’t accept him, bringing along a magical love interest – a story that Black did better. Still, these objections would not have bothered her overly much, because one doesn’t necessarily expect much innovation in a collection of modern fairy tales for young adults. But Ruth found it odd that the entire story was told through the eyes of an unsympathetic minor character. Her momentary glimpse of a hidden reality was supposed to be a paradigmatic shift for her, but Ruth believes she’s been dealing with issues like this since she was seven. Ruth found Barzak’s story oddly flat, an attempt to be “meaningful” or “literary” rather than good, a prosaic account of someone growing out of their teenage angst into young adult idealism. She found it to be an average piece of writing, and was surprise at its nomination.

Terry, on the other hand, thought it an excellent story. She believed that Meg was the absolute center of the story from beginning to end, and that the older brother’s return to the homestead was merely the occasion for her to be shaken from a sort of small town, down on the farm complacency that she doesn’t even recognize she holds. Terry doesn’t believe it is ever clear that Meg has been dealing with a sort of supernatural power – the ability to impose her will on others – from the age of seven, but rather wonders if that perceived ability isn’t really a childish inability to recognize that people will sometimes do as she wants just because it’s so obvious from her face and demeanor how hurt she would be if they didn’t. The brother and his husband are interesting characters, but they are mere foils here, almost beside the point to Meg’s maturation over the summer before she starts college. Terry found Barzak’s story to be one of the stronger of the novelettes nominated and, unlike Ruth, would not be surprised if it were to win the Nebula.

The other novelette from The Beastly Bride is “Pishaach” by Shweta Narayan, an immersive tale of Shruti, a young woman growing up in India. When her grandfather dies, her grandmother disappears; she has returned to her existence as a Naga, a snake. But before she disappears, she tells Shruti that she, too, is Naga, and tells her how to ensure her transformation when she reaches puberty. Bequeathed with the secret for reclaiming her snake form, Shruti goes mute, refusing to interact with the human world anymore. When her transformation ritual is interrupted and she is stuck forever in human form, Shruti has to learn how to negotiate a world where she is denigrated for being female and a danger because everyone can tell that her strange affection for snakes is a sign of not normal. Shruti illuminates some of the beastly characteristics of humanity – fear, ostracism, and abuse of power – and reveals some of the simpler, more honest characteristics of snakes. The resolution to the story isn’t exactly a happy ending, but rather a claim about the way that those that society rejects can find happiness out of the limited options they have available to them. Narayan is quite convincing at creating fully realized characters and settings within a short format which is a difficult feat. This novelette resonates with mythic weight.  Ruth thinks it is a serious contender for the win; Terry believes it is the clear winner.

Seven short stories from six sources have been nominated for the Nebula Award. Six of them are available for free online, so by following the links in this article, you’ll be able to find them and pick the one to which you’d give the prize.

The only exception to the “available online” category is Harlan Ellison‘s story, “How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” which was pulled from the internet when the Nebula voting period ended, and which is therefore available only in the February 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy. In my opinion, you’re not missing the winner if you can’t track this one down. It’s a well-written story, as one would expect from Ellison, about a man (the narrator) who creates a five inch tall man whom he teaches to speak, refuses to name, and dresses in tiny suits. All is going well until the creator and the man appear on a Sunday morning news show, and some religious nuts go – well, nuts. A woman with a talk show pronounces the tiny man a “monstrosity,” among other descriptors, concluding that “This thing would make Jesus himself vomit!” It sounds very familiar to those who pay any attention to the ongoing political battles over abortion and stem cell research in this country, and the next step is predictable: after a passel of commentators condemns the existence of the tiny man and his creator, and threats start to be a way of life, authority figures tell the creator that the tiny man “had to go.” The creator tries to protect his creation, moving from place to place, but there is no hiding; ultimately, the Feds corner them. From that point, Ellison offers two alternative endings, both equally valid, both horrors.

Ellison’s piece strikes me as too much of a polemic to work as a story. One can write a story that is polemical, but a polemic is not automatically a story. Here, the politics overshadows the story, rather than forming part of it, or developing out of it. This is all argument and no fantasy or science fiction. Perhaps one should properly call it a fable, right down to the moral.

“Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro is also polemical, but Castro is more successful than Ellison in building a story to convey his theme. He takes as his starting point the angry charge hurled by liberals at conservatives that they only care about a human being before it’s born, and abandon it once birth occurs. Thus, in this story, a person is considered legally “alive” only while in utero, and legal “death” occurs at birth. That is why only females without special potential are born, upon which time their bodies are trained to within an inch of tolerance – and often beyond, if healing is possible – while their minds are so drugged that they never develop any sort of personality. Those same drugs are very humane, keeping these beings content. Their wombs are altered to be plush, wired, safe and sound for their eventual passengers. And they love their passengers. They are recreational vehicles, “Arvies,” for the fetuses that purchase them and direct how they are to be used.

“Arvies” focuses on one fetus who is “entirely typical” in her range of activities and accomplishments, from success in the arts to ruthlessness in business. Jennifer Axioma-Singh has been a fetus for 70 years now, having a wonderful time, using up and discarding a whole raft of Arvies. She purchases a new one, Molly June, for the sole purpose of giving birth – experiencing what it is to actually, physically expel a baby from a human body. It’s a cause celebre when she announces this, because birth is “messy and unpleasant and distasteful.” But there’s no law against it, and Jennifer is allowed her desire, regardless of what it does to Molly June, not to mention the fetus in the twin womb installed in Molly June. No, of course Jennifer didn’t intend to herself give birth or be born; why would she? Through the technology of the day, she can experience everything from her bird’s eye seat inside Molly June.

This is a powerful story about the disposability of human beings and the treatment of women as mere vehicles for fetuses. As an “if this goes on” story, it’s on a par with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

“Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland, originally published in the original anthology Dark Faith, is about the aftermath of 9/11, but uniquely. Pelland imagines that everyone who jumped from the Twin Towers that fateful day in 2001 relives the jump over and over and over again, existing as a ghost with no other apparent purpose. The jump is never less frightening, never less painful, but “fresh and raw each and every time.” It’s hard to imagine a worse afterlife. Between falls, one nameless woman wonders if she’s in hell. She can remember nothing but the moments immediately before she jumped, not what she might have done in life to have deserved this punishment, not why she was in the Towers, not even what she looked like. Even as rebuilding proceeds, she continues to fall, and fall, and fall again.

But she makes some discoveries as time passes. For one thing, even though the living can’t see her and the other ghosts, they unconsciously feel them, and will alter their path to avoid contact. For another, her fate appears to apply to all those who jumped from buildings, all over the city, and they can talk to one another. She learns that her falling will continue as long as people remember 9/11, which means that her torture will continue virtually forever. An eternity of pain lies behind her. How would you react to learning such a hard truth?

“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan is a love story about the time dilation effect of traveling close to the speed of light. Yes, that sounds odd, but imagine: the man you love leaves on a spaceship flying close to the speed of light. By the time he returns from his voyage, you’ve lived a lifetime: married, had children, grown older, aging to your fifties, while he is still “a hot young thirty-something.” Would you react as this heroine did, taking off to see the stars because you had to see what he did? For you it’s a vacation, a short time away. Now add cryogenesis to the mix, and what have you got? Star-crossed lovers, for a certainty. The tone of the entire piece is elegiac, anger damped down by time, almost poetry. Kaftan chose to write in the second person, but the tone is not accusatory, precisely; more the way I imagine one would speak to a lost love years after his death. It is a profoundly sad story.

“Conditional Love” by Felicity Shoulders is stylistically a more traditional story than many of those nominated this year, which tend to play with voice (the Kaftan story) and structure (the Castro story). It straightforwardly tells the story of Grace, a doctor who cares for gene-engineered children who are abandoned by their parents when things go wrong. Minerva is one of the patients; she was born without limbs, and the hospital is persuading her body to grow arms and hands, to “fix” her. Minerva is a fascinating character, a child who knows her own mind (she wants to stop medical treatments after she has her arms and hands, but the hospital appears set to work on her body to grow legs, too, regardless of the wishes of the patient, not to mention the pain, the setbacks, more pain, surgeries, pain and pain).

But the patient Grace focuses on in this story is Daniel, a boy who remembers nothing from one minute to the next. He imprints on every adult he sees, just like a duckling, and forgets them the moment they leave his sight. Grace shudders at the implications for abuse inherit in such a child, one who trusts and loves anew everyone he sees. When it becomes clear that there is no way to help this child, and that he will be essentially warehoused in a perm-ward for the rest of his life, Grace takes action. That action means that Grace must abandon Minerva, and will not be able to help her in her battle to stop the treatments and get on with her life, a decision that sat so poorly with me that I became irrationally angry with the fictional Grace. Her other major decision, about how to settle things for Daniel so that she remains his only focus, makes good sense, and it’s hard to fault her for that one. But the real story here, the one that hurts, is Minerva’s.

“Ponies” by Kij Johnson is a fantasy about growing up. Every girl has a pony, with wings and a unicorn horn and a voice, and there is a special bond between them. But a time comes when every girl and her pony must go to a cutting-out party, and the pony must lose two of her special gifts. No one questions this; no one seems to think it’s cruel to the ponies; and even the ponies accept it. Each girl must perform the surgery on her own pony. It’s like performing surgery on a doll, and it doesn’t seem to cause physical pain, but it’s no less ugly for all of that. The moral: growing up means becoming cruel or being ostracized: your choice. And if you won’t become cruel yourself, those around you will ensure that cruelty nonetheless haunts you. This story is a short, sharp tale that will leave you feeling slightly ill.

“The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar starts with the description of a book as if to list it for a bibliography or a catalog, but quickly segues to a letter written by Dominic, a student and apprentice to Leuwin, a scholar, about the book. The letter carefully copies out the content of the book, and it quickly becomes clear that the book is more than it appears on its face. Someone – Cynthia, for we learn her name – has been imprisoned within its pages, and can only communicate through words welling to the surface of the page. Leuwin appears to have figured out how the book works, and through “conversation” – writing back and forth on the blank pages of the book – Leuwin falls in love with Cynthia, and she with him. But Cynthia insists that she is dead, that the book is her only body. More, she insists that he loves only the book, ink on a page, not a real woman. Her refusal of him moves him to seek out a way to save her, to remove her from the book to a human existence. And Dominic fears for him, and writes of his fear to his correspondent. As he does, more writing appears in the book, this addressed directly to him. If the hairs on the back of your neck don’t rise at that point in the story, you’re not paying close enough attention.

These are all powerful stories, all worth reading and cherishing. I do not envy the judges. Upon first reading, I thought that “Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro was most deserving of top honors. It is a beautifully written yet harsh story told through well-chosen language in a manner that challenges traditional narrative forms without losing the ease of reading inherent in those forms. It has an essential truth to it that shines clear and strong. I will not be at all surprised if this is the story that is awarded the Nebula.

And yet – in the days since I first read these stories, I have found that it is “The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar that stays with me. I find my mind drifting to the notion of a woman imprisoned in a book, a living death that allows her to fall in love but never to be kissed. And I keep trying to figure out what that last bit of writing means, why Cynthia pities Dominic, who the Sisters are –it’s a story that continues to challenge the reader long after it has been read. I do not think it likely that this story will be awarded the prize; it’s a little too strange, a bit too different, not a story one would describe as “powerful,” but, rather, as “haunting.” Nebulas go to powerful stories, not haunting ones.

Read them all, and tell me what you think. Which is going to win, the Castro or the El-Mohtar? Or do you think it will be one of the others? One thing is certain: the genre we love is very healthy indeed to have produced seven such stories in the course of a single year.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies is a bi-weekly online magazine that publishes literary adventure fantasy. Each issue contains two stories. Each issue is available for free online, or can be downloaded to an e-reader for a mere $.99. I read the two issues published in February 2011 for this column, but there are already two March issues available. Fortunately, past issues are available in all formats. In addition, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has published two “best of” anthologies.

Issue #63, published on February 24, 2011, contains “The Ghost of Shinoda Forest” by Richard Parks. Its first-person narrator, Lord Yamada, meets Kenji, a “reprobate priest,” in the forest of the title, near the remains of Enfusa Temple. Oddly enough, Lord Yamada has not been drinking sake, and doesn’t even want to, which Kenji finds somewhat frightening. But apparently something in Yamada is keeping him off the sauce and has put him in the forest, and that something is soon revealed: Princess Teiko’s ghost has been seen there. Teiko is Yamada’s lost dream, a woman who killed herself on the way to exile before Yamada could prove her innocence. When Teiko appears, she asks forgiveness, nothing more, but she also warns that her son’s life is in danger – as is Yamada’s. So begins the search for the would-be assassin of Prince Takahito, a nice adventure filled with fox demons, ghosts, princes, swordplay, ogres, evil abbots – they’re all here, and they all fit the story nicely. It’s fun to read.

The story I liked best this week was “Dirt Witch” by Eljay Daly. It’s one of those stories in which a poor peasant girl triumphs over all manner of sorcery, trickery, deceit and hard living in order to save her entire village. That might sound like it’s just another collection of clichés, but it’s not; much was new to me, probably because of the Far Eastern or Russian setting (the names suggest both). It’s a grim tale, but Dorota – the village girl who is smarter than she knows – is a wonderful heroine with a darned good head on her shoulders.

Issue #62 starts with Kris Dikeman’s “Silent, Still and Cold,” takes place in a land of endless winter, during a war that never ends. Sorcery catches and holds an invading army in this tale of wretched men who cannot remember having been warm, forced to march on and on.

My least favorite story of the week was “The Adventures of Ernst, Who Began a Man, Became a Cyclops, and Finished a Hero” by Jesse Bullington. It’s clearly intended to be humorous, but it succeeds only in being nauseating. Bullington has his hero literally wallowing in excrement, sexually abused, mutilated, turned into a system of transportation for an enormous spider, and otherwise tortured and degraded, but asks us to laugh at it all. There’s a story under all this, of an abbey where all the monks simultaneously committed suicide for some unknown reason, a mystery that Ernst ultimately manages to resolve, if only by accident. Worse, even though he triumphs over evil, he is denied a happy ending.

The March 2011 issue of Apex Magazine confirms my judgment of several weeks ago that this is a good magazine to follow for the best in off-center, genre-crossing quality fiction.

This issue begins with the story “The Dust and the Red” by Darin Bradley, a fine example of the oddness of the fiction that fills Apex. It is narrated by Caroline, a girl who is part of a family suffering through the Dust Bowl. The family is protected by a pearl that is kept in a niche beneath the door jamb, but only to an extent; Caroline’s father is forced to sign away bits and pieces of the family’s farm as the agricultural crisis worsens. That pearl burns in the mind of Caroline’s brother, Jonah, who suffers for it. Another family talisman, owned by the Fincher family, seems to provide greater good fortune to that family than the pearl can to Caroline’s. It’s an odd story, oddly told, unconventionally plotted and strangely resolved yet unresolved, skipping about in time. All this oddness makes the story stick in your mind, as if you had directly experienced it.

Kat Howard’s “The Speaking Bone” seems like an extended description of an island made from bones, an ossuary. There is no plot in the usual sense, no dialogue, no story as one expects a story to unfold; the story is inherent in the nature of the place being described. The island is a place of priestesses and pilgrims, for the bones occasionally provide answers – “true answers, like miracles, [that] come at a cost.” It is another bit of fiction that feels almost experimental, yet still contains the essence of fantasy.

“Rats,” by Veronica Shanoes, is a story about the nature of story, masquerading as a fairy tale. Fairy tales, by their nature, the author says, are constantly repeating and never advancing: Cinderella is always trying on a glass slipper, because otherwise she becomes “just another tired old queen,” and Little Red Riding Hood is never a child running through a sprinkler in her yard on a hot summer day, but always walking through the forest to meet the wolf. Fairy tales are not life; they are lies, the author explains. This fairy tale is about a young couple in love, but who cannot have a child. They do everything, visiting “the oracles of doctors’ offices,” “left sacrifices and offerings at the altars of fertility clinics.” To their great joy, the woman finally becomes pregnant. Upon hearing this news, the four shadows bestowed gifts on the child growing in her mother’s womb – is this starting to sound like a familiar tale? It is, to an extent, and yet it is entirely new and different. One of the shadows bestows the “gift” of pain on the child. Ah, how can the last fairy fix that? This story is sad and frightening; its characters do not live happily ever after. It is a thoroughly amazing piece of writing.

This issue also contains two poems. “Quest” by Jessica Wick is beautifully written: “I’d go by gloaming when the moon is milk/down to the ivy where the wood is rotted/and three bridges are clotted in spider silk.” Lovely imagery. But the poem ultimately doesn’t seem to actually say anything, though it seems to be trying to. Someone is loved, someone has died, maybe the narrator is trying to bring her love back to life? Or is she trying to catch the eye of the Green Man of myth? Nothing comes clear, no matter how many times you read this poem, and while poetry sometimes means to be ambiguous, I don’t think that’s what the poet intended here.

“The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves” by Mike Allen, Sonya Taffe, and Nicole Kornher-Stace is a more successful poem. Again, the imagery is drawn with immense care, and the language is chosen to great effect. This poem, though, doesn’t just draw pictures – a noble enough quest for a poem standing alone, of course, if not the goal of this trio of poets – it tells the tale of the rivalry between the King of Cats and the Queen of Wolves across time. This is a perfect poem to read to celebrate April, which, after all, is National Poetry Month.

John Joseph Adams, in recent years the editor of a raft of excellent anthologies on different science fiction, fantasy and horror themes, has now become the editor of Fantasy Magazine. The March 2011 issue is the first published under his red pencil, so to speak, and its mix of new and reprint fantasy material is promising. All content is free on the web, though ebook subscriptions and editions are available for sale.

“The Sandal-Bride,” by Genevieve Valentine, is about Sara, a woman who needs to travel from one land to another to join her husband, a shoemaker who has gone before her. She chooses to join the spice merchant who narrates the tale, offering a sapphire necklace as a “dowry,” in lieu of bed rights; she will be his sandal-bride, his wife for the course of the journey. The merchant accepts the deal, thinking mostly that it means trouble despite the richness of the dowry. Sara is excited by the trip; she’s never been outside the walls of the city in which she was born before. And she is full of curiosity. She insists on sleeping outdoors, in order to see the sky, and she asks anyone and everyone she sees for his or her story. And oh, is she a good listener!  And so, by her unassuming ways of encouraging others to talk, she changes the lives of all those around her, and especially the spice merchant’s. This story is so quiet and deceptively simple that it draws the reader into its time and place with no boundary crossing; one moment you’re reading, and the next you’re under the stars, learning the constellations along with Sara. She brings out generosity in those around her with her keen desire to learn all about them, and they quickly forget that she is ugly. “I saw how people changed as they spoke of things they loved,” says the merchant, and the whole world changes for him.

Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, will be published by Prime Books this year. After reading this story, I’ll be the first in line to buy it.

Holly Black’s tale, “The Dog King,” is a werewolf tale with a king who hides a secret. It is elegantly told, a nice recombination of fantasy tropes into a new shape. To say more would be to betray the tale, and you really should just read it for yourself. The story is reprinted from Black’s excellent collection, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories, which I recommend as well.

Tanith Lee has always been one of my favorite fantasy writers. “The God Orkrem” is a new tale, joining her vast collection of about 300 short stories and 90 novels and collections. Orkrem is a harsh god who lets mothers die in childbirth, allows women to betray their loving husbands, and lets children grow up alone – like the narrator, who has seen much too much of Okrem’s gifts to his people. The narrator vows to seek out Orkrem, and climbs to the top of the sky to find him. When he is face to face with his god, he gets a gift he did not expect – and does not want. The story is typical of Lee’s writing, the prose just this side of purple, rich as fudge and as delicious. Lee makes us wrestle with the big questions, too, unwilling to just give us something pretty.

“The Lonely Songs of Laren Door” is a story reprinted from George R.R. Martin’s A Song for Lya and Other Stories, first published more than 30 years ago but still as fresh as when it first appeared. It is the story of Sharra, a woman who travels between the worlds, looking always for her lost lover. She arrives on one world to find there a man, Laren Door, the only living human on his world, exiled by the Seven Guardians of the gates that allow for passage from one world to the next. Sharra agrees to stay with him for a month, offering her both rest and love. She agrees, somewhat reluctantly, but comes to enjoy his company – and his world – more than she expected. Still, when the month is done, she prepares to leave. And it is then that the secrets are revealed. It is a dark, sad story, one that will leave you melancholy but enriched.

Each of the fiction pieces is followed by a short interview with the author, except for the Martin piece, which is followed by a long biographical note. There is also a lengthy interview with Steven Erikson, who has just finished his 10-volume series, the Malazan Book of the Fallen. The interviews are competently done, well worth reading.

Grame McMillan’s nonfiction piece, “Three Real Historical Figures Who Embarked Upon the Hero’s Journey,” is a fine follow-up to Valentine’s fiction. Short and to the point, it gives short histories of Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo and Alexandra David-Neel, all of whom traveled far and wide in a world in which that required a lot more effort than getting on a series of airplanes. I’d never heard of Battuta and David-Neel before, and I’m curious now to read the works they wrote when they’d finished their travels.

Te Jefferson and J. Corbeau offer “Five Fantasy Worlds That You Wouldn’t Want to Visit,” calling out various settings created with a little too much reality for the comfort of these authors. Regardless of the grandeur of Middle Earth, for instance, would you really want to visit? And is there any good fantasy world that isn’t riven by war? Think twice when you book your next vacation.

Finally, LaShawn M. Wanak’s essay, “From Story to Screen,” offers glimpses of fantasy stories that have moved from the page to the camera, and how successful those translations where.

Fantasy Magazine seems to be in good hands under Adams’s leadership. I enjoyed the fiction more than the nonfiction; aside from the interviews, the nonfiction offerings weren’t particularly strong examples of the art of the essay. Perhaps I’m asking too much from this sort of magazine, which doesn’t seem to be looking for creative nonfiction, but for straightforward informational pieces. Still, if I were to complain about Fantasy at all – which I’m really not – it would be to ask for richer, juicier nonfiction. There’s room for that in this field, and this forum would seem a good one for it. Few magazines seem to have the emphasis on any sort of nonfiction except reviews of one sort or another, and it rather looks to me as if Fantasy is trying to experiment in that field. It will be interesting to watch to see if I’m right.

Black Gate has been published irregularly (sometimes only once a year) since 2000, but I’ve only just discovered it. And what a time to do so! The Winter 2010 edition, Number 14, is 385 pages long, the size of a hefty book. The price reflects that; few magazines will run you $15.95 in the print edition ($8.95 for a PDF version that doesn’t translate well to Kindle). But then, few magazines will give you as much great fantasy as this one, including first stories by four promising new authors.

There are a very great many stories in this issue – 16 short stories and three novellas. Four of the offerings are first publications by their authors. More than a few of the pieces are exceptional, real standouts in a day when fantasy stories are as numerous as stars. Many of the stories are competent but unoriginal; reading one after the other makes one weary of noble peasantry, evil wizards, valiant swords and medieval settings. Why does fantasy eschew technology almost always?  Are magic and machines really enemies? At any rate, if you read too many in this latter category in a single sitting, they tend to blur together.  But it is notable that only a few of these stories are real clunkers.

“Devil on the Wind” by Michael Jasper and Jay Lake, reminds you how what is old can be made new. This story is about Lena, one of the Killaster Witches, a woman who has just committed suicide – and been reborn – for the fifth time. There are eight witches, led by Black Mattieu, and they demand obeisance from the kingdoms that surround their hold. When Prince Falloe of Ironkeep fails to send the proper tribute, substituting instead two coppers (symbols of the pennies laid on a dead man’s eyes), Black Mattieu sends Lena to teach the kingdom a harsh lesson. To say that Lena is not saintly hardly begins to tell the tale, but her compatriots seem to be somewhat worse, and her enemies at least as bad. I found myself rooting for Lena, even as I acknowledged that she was evil, for things grow steadily worse for her as she undertakes her assigned task. The language used to describe her doings is rich and graphic, and the twists and turns of the tale unpredictable. “Devil on the Wind” is a marvelous story.

Peter Butler’s novella, “The Price of Two Blades,” is equally original and refreshing. A bard who is heading into a village notices the sizable cemetery outlying it, and notices that a great many of the tombstones all show the same date of death. He theorizes that the deaths could somehow be connected to the disappearance of the noted bandit gang led by King Kruthas. Soon, the villagers reveal that this, in fact, the case, and they sit him down to tell him the tale of how they were rescued from that dreaded army. The method of their rescue is one completely unique to fantasy, so far as I know, and the lesson one learns is sad and necessary. This novella is a small masterpiece, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it grace an awards ballot or two.

James Enge’s “Destroyer,” another novella, is about Enge’s series character, Morlock Ambrosius. In this outing, Morlock is leading a party through the mountains, intending to avoid both the spiderfolk and the Khroi, both species who have uses for humans that don’t involve the continued life and health of the humans. Indeed, both use humans for grisly purposes: to feed their young once they hatch within the bodies of humans who have been implanted with their eggs. Morlock is a decent guide, but even he is no match for the Khroi.  Enge’s creatures are imaginatively drawn, reminding me of the monsters created by China Mieville and Steph Swainston – creatures so new that the mind struggles to form a picture of them. I’ve had Enge’s first novel, Blood of Ambrose, in my “to be read” pile for some time now; this novella makes me eager to get to it very soon.

The third novella offered in this issue of Black Gate is also a winner. “The Natural History of Calamity” by Robert J. Howe offers up a new flavor of urban fantasy:  a private investigator, of sorts, who works by figuring out what’s going on with her clients’ karma. Debbie Colavito discovered her calling when she read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Compensation,” which, seen in one way, is an explanation of karma:  this balances that, “every sweet hath its sour, every evil its good.” Suddenly she understood that she could actually sense that balance, and help people nudge their karma back into the positive, and her business was born. In this case, she is helping Will Charbonneau figure out why his girlfriend left him. The break-up seemed to come out of the blue, and Charbonneau’s own karma is in perfect balance, so what happened? From that question hangs quite a tale, and Colavito finds her own karma taking substantial hits as she investigates. The original concept of a karma detective really works here, and I hope I’ll be reading more about Debbie Colavito.

The stories written by first time authors  are among the best in this issue of Black Gate. Matthew Surridge’s “The Word of Azrael” is the story of Isrohim Vey, a soldier who sees Azrael, the Angel of Death, on the battlefield at Aruvhossin, where seven kings and their armies lie dead but Vey still lives. Indeed, he seems to be the only living thing left on the battlefield after 36 hours of fighting.  The Angel smiles at him and speaks a single word before vanishing, and Vey knows that he will see the Angel again. Vey makes the study of death the occupation of his life. He sees many sights, seeking the Angel, and meets many people worth meeting, and others better avoided, not all of them living. It is a life worth living and a tale worth telling. I look forward to what will certainly be Surridge’s long career, with many a good story and novel to support it.

Sylvia Volk’s “On a Pale Horse” takes place in south Arabia, among the Bedouins. Salsabil is a beautiful young maiden who walks out with the flocks and the family’s mare every day, and comes home so flushed that her family soon suspects she is being wooed. She is quickly betrothed to her cousin, the man she had expected to marry all along, and her family is curious at her seeming eagerness for the marriage. When her father asks her who she meets when out with the flocks, she confesses that it is a beautiful stallion that she sees there, perfect in every way – except for the horn upon his head. The unicorn plays a part in the conflict to come. Although Volk’s tale ends tritely, the telling itself is nicely done.

La Senora de Oro, by first-time author R.L. Roth, is an intriguing story set in 1850, during the California Gold Rush. A mining partnership happens across a statute of a woman made all of gold, but with sharp teeth – a statue that changes the lives of all of them as it drinks their blood. This dark, sad story, told in the form of letters home by one of the miners, makes me eager to read more from Roth.

The fourth story by a first-time author is “The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying” by Alex Kreis. It is that very rare creature, a fantasy story meant to be funny that actually achieves that goal. In a few short pages, Kreis has her character renounce the most hideous crimes as “embarrassing” or “unwarranted,” and pledging his (literally) undying loyalty to the regime that replaced him. A nice effort.

Other stories are noteworthy, if not among the best in the magazine. In “Dark of the Year” by Diana Sherman, Matai is seeking the true name of his granddaughter, whose mother died in childbirth while her father is at war. If he cannot find her name by moondark, the Shadows and darklings will take her. Matai undertakes a journey across the war-torn land to find a war mage who will be able to divine his granddaughter’s name, a journey fraught with danger and unasked-for kindness from others.

“The Hangman’s Daughter” by Chris Braak, is a coming-of-age story about a girl whose dreams at night try to choke her. The boys she plays with tell her it’s the bogeymen who take her breath, and that everyone gets visited; only a few fail to survive the experience. But Cresy isn’t content merely to suffer and hope that she isn’t one of the few who will die. Her father’s only advice is that there are some things that cannot be fought with one’s hands, his evident pride in her decision to fight otherwise stopping his mouth. It’s another competent story.

“Red Hell,” by Renee Stern, is about Kellen’s indentured servitude, and how he manages to break free of it with a bit of magic. This better-than-average story has a likable character, an interesting milieu and a strong plot. Jan Sterling’s “The Lady’s Apprentice” is another above-average tale. I enjoy reading a story every now and then in which the viewpoint character is an old woman, rather than a younger person; sometimes it’s interesting to read a tale told from the perspective of experience, pride, cynicism and pain, rather than of nobility and youth. Sterling does well with her story of Nyla’s service to her Lady. “The Wine-Dark Sea” by Isabel Pelech is another good story in an unusual setting, with a magic that works differently from most.

The issue is rounded out by extensive columns on gaming, classic fantasy, and reviews of contemporary books. There are a few poems strewn throughout the magazine as well. This extra content, on top of a number of excellent stories, makes this comparatively expensive magazine a worthy investment of your reading dollars.

The first issue of Realms of Fantasy published by Damnation Books feels no different at all from issues published while it was owned by different publishers, and no wonder:  the editorial staff is the same. Shawna McCarthy continues to fulfill the role of fiction editor, as she has since the magazine was founded. That explains why the February 2011 issue contains such a fine offering of short stories. Douglas Cohen is still the editor, and that explains why there is such a fine selection of nonfiction, from Theodora Goss’s “The Femme Fatale at the Fin-de-Siecle,” a piece that would be at home in any academic journal, to Karen Haber’s art column about Dominic Harman (munificently illustrated), film reviews and book reviews. In fact, this seems like a much stronger issue than the last. I hope this bodes well for the continued good health of the magazine.

“The Swan Troika” by Richard Parks is a new take on the Russian fairy tale of the rusalka. Pyotr meets the rusalka while on his way to his Great Aunt Svetlana’s party in the middle of the winter. Because the rusalka is a creature of the water, and the river is frozen hard, it’s unusual to see such a wild-haired and emerald-eyed thing, but apparently she has simply tarried on the shore too long. Pyotr feels it is safe enough to gather her up and bring her along to the party. But Svetlana recognizes the being Pyotr has christened “Anya” all too well, and she is determined that Pyotr shall not become her victim. “The Swan Troika” is a lovely retelling of an old story with a new twist.

Desirina Boskovich’s “Thirteen Incantations” tells the story of a girlhood friendship bound up with perfume – specifically, with perfumes created by Ana Celina’s mother. Ana Celina confidently tells Elisabeth that her mother Neve is not just a parfumier, but a witch who makes her scents to bewitch and enrapture those who breathe them in. In fact, Ana Celina’s mother has prepared a special box of perfumes for her daughter to share with her friend. Through the perfumes, the girls learn the history of Neve’s romance with Ana Celina’s father. It strengthens their friendship, which threatens to blossom into something more; but adolescents fear and grow and change, and some things are too precious to be destroyed by coming into being. This is another story that has the feel of a fairy tale, and it’s beautifully written.

In “Magpie,” Mark Rigney’s Cath is the only one in her family to survive a flood. What is she to do now? A stranger coming along the road sees his opportunity, and snatches Cath up much as magpie seizes a bit of shiny treasure, just as Fagin chose his pickpockets in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. But there is a magic to his choosing. Whether, ultimately, Cath benefits from being his choice or not does not seem to be the issue; what is, is. And the cycle repeats, seemingly without end.

The narrator of “No Tale for Troubadours,” by Pauline J. Alama, is so practical, straightforward and sensible that she quite belies the normal notion of a warrior maiden. I greatly enjoyed this story of a maiden turned mother who is asked to return to her sword even as her children cling to her skirts. Her former companion, Isabeau, is now Sister Agony in the Garden, and she, too, is called upon to leave her calling and return to the field of battle. How these women accomplish their task despite age, fat and faith is wryly and wickedly told.

“The Time of His Life,” by Scott William Carter, reminded me powerfully of “The Most Important Thing in the World” by Steve Bein from the March Asimov’s. Instead of a suit left behind in a cab, though, the time-tampering mechanism in this story is a room in a new house Tim and his family have just moved into. Time simply doesn’t march on in this room; Tim can spend hours, days, weeks working on comic strips (his avocation, one he can rarely take time from his teaching career to indulge in) without missing his children’s bedtime. But the extra time is as addictive as a drug, and Tim finds himself grabbing for more and more of it, neglecting his wife, his children, his job. He even starts to sneak home in the middle of class periods to grab a day or two in his private sanctuary, and gets back before the bell rings. Tim has to decide what he wants: time or family. It’s a quandary we pretty much all find ourselves in every day of our adult lives, and we’d probably all like a room like Tim’s. But would we, too, find that time had become a drug?

With five strong stories and excellent reviews and features, Realms of Fantasy is thriving. If you’ve wondered whether the change in ownership means you should put off subscribing, wonder no more: this magazine is in fine fettle, and looks set to continue that way.

Crossed Genres, a magazine published online, digitally and in print, has a unique approach to genre fiction: every month it chooses a genre and requires that the stories it publishes that month combine the chosen genre with some aspect of science fiction or fantasy. Issue 27 offers a mash-up of science fiction and fantasy with tragedy. Surprisingly, none of the five short stories uses the traditional tragic element of a hero with a fatal flaw, which would seem tailor-made for SF and fantasy. Instead, the writers simply write stories that end in sadness.

“Nadirah Sends Her Love” by Ada Milenkovic Brown is the most imaginative of the stories. It takes the form of letters from Nadirah to Azim, her husband, in Hijiri Year 1432 — or, as westerners figure time, 2011. In this world, the Arab nations continued to grow and develop their scientific acumen, while the western world remained mired in the Dark Ages. Religion is the be-all and end-all for the westerners, who refuse to recognize the value of such things as medicine. Of particular importance is their insistence that their women wear chastity belts except during pregnancy or sexual relations with their husbands. Reproductive tract and urinary tract infections are chronic and considered normal — and can kill. But even when a chastity belt truly must be removed for medical treatment, it is not allowed. Nadirah defies this law in order to treat a middle-aged woman. To say that there are consequences barely begins to tell the story. This alternate universe tale reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I’d love to see this idea of an alternate Arabia expanded.

Therese Arkenberg’s “The Halcyon in Flight” is a complicated fantasy about a sorcerer who can transform into a bird — the halcyon of the title. It’s a bit hard to keep the characters straight on a first reading, but the story of a rebellion by one royal against another is ultimately fairly standard. The atmosphere Arkenberg creates is lovely, though, and once again I found myself wishing for a longer work based in this world.

“Rule of Threes” by Corinne Duyvis takes place in an Australia that is under attack by a lizard species that eats human flesh, and swarms with such numbers that whole communities die before they have any chance at all to avert the crisis. The lizards remind the reader of the Biblical plagues that beset the Egyptians who would not let Moses and his people go. The story is about one family — two boys and their aunt — attempting to outmaneuver the lizards to find water first and safety second. The boys, apparently raised as typical middle class kids, do not understand the sacrifices that must be made for the sake of survival, and their aunt pays the price. Still, one wonders: did the aunt really need to abandon those she seems to give up so easily?

“They Gather in the Green” by Michelle Muenzler is a fantasy about a family that has fallen apart:  the father has followed the mother, who was — at least according to family legend — abducted by fairies. Their children, Rook, a hard-eyed boy, the elder, and his dreamier and insufficiently grounded sister, Salla, attempt to farm enough food from the family’s holdings to survive. The sister’s job includes herding the goats, but she often allowed them to get into the blackthorn, which sours their milk. One day, as Rook is attempting to get one of the goats out of the blackthorn, a stone beneath him sinks into the mud, revealing a green glass ladder leading to — where? Rook isn’t inclined to find out, not trusting holes in the earth to lead to anything good, but his sister insists. Rook’s trip into the earth confirms his misgivings, and he forbids Salla to climb down the ladder. Salla is as good at obeying her brother as she is at herding goats, and her trips down the ladder lead to the truth — and tragedy.

Richard Larson’s “I’ll Take You With Me” is the story of a woman suffering through a break-up with her boyfriend, or the story of an alien invasion, or both. It’s next to impossible to determine if the first-person narrator of the story is going mad from grief, or whether green-skinned aliens are actually invading New York, an ambivalence that gives the story its power.

Bull Spec, published quarterly from Durham, North Carolina, has a fair bit of local news, features local writers, artists and poets, and apparently gives first priority to publishing local voices (submissions are closed to non-local fiction submissions at the moment, for instance). Not that that’s any hazard to good reading. No, the only hazard I found was that the latest issue in PDF format translated really badly to my Kindle; you might want to use a better e-reader than I did to read its six stories and five poems, together with reviews, interviews, and even a portion of a graphic novel. There is lots of goodness here.

“Freedom Acres” by Andrew Magowan is about a lower-middle class neighborhood in a future not too far away. Much is automated, but peering out the windows to see what your neighbors are up to is still something busybodies do, including the busybody who serves as the narrator of the story. Even more, though, some busybodies can take the initiative and watch what’s going on inside a neighbor’s home. Boy, does that ever open up the possibilities for troublemaking! Using the prototypical science fiction theme of “If this goes on…,” the story explores current trends in childrearing, law enforcement and telecommuting to show us just how ugly the suburbs can get.

Nick Mamatas gives us “O, Harvard Square,” a sly story that subverts expectations as flamboyantly as you’ll ever see. The story is about drugs and homelessness among the young in a place where the favored young are attending perhaps the finest university in the world:  Harvard. Those disenfranchised youth are eager to find what Harvard hides, though, and based on what one of them hears in the filling in her molar, what’s hiding is pretty darned interesting. A hidden tunnel later, the group of kids is minus a member. What happens next? I’m not about to give it away. Mamatas builds a mood with great care, and I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether he fulfills that promise or destroys it with the ending of his story.

David Tallerman’s “The Burning Room” is a ghost story apparently set a few centuries ago in London. A woman who is new to the city finds a room in a widow’s home for a suspiciously reasonable price, and learns why the room was available on her first night, when a specter appears. The new boarder — Miss Taversham, which necessarily gives us echoes of Charles Dickens — neatly unravels the mystery in a way that offers no surprises. It is a nice exercise in setting and mood, though, and Tallerman’s use of 18^th century vernacular seems just right.

“A Mathematician’s Apology” seems especially timely in these few weeks after the IBM computer, Watson, has defeated two of the top Jeopardy! champions at their own game. What does the human mind mean when a computer can solve in days all the problems we’ve bent our own meager resources to for centuries? Don Norum, the author, studied cognitive science, according to his biographical squib at the end of the story, and seems intent on putting himself out of business.

“City of Shadow and Glass” by Erin Hoffman is about a city that becomes essentially virtual as we incorporate computers into our bodies, into our surroundings, into the very air. Why shouldn’t virtual realities become as much a danger as illegal drugs are now? If you can change your perceptions by swallowing a virtual bit or byte, how do you distinguish between the real and the virtual? And how do people form relationships? It’s a very short story, but it manages in just a few pages to pose a lot of interesting questions. One isn’t surprised to learn that Hoffman has designed video games for the last ten years (“but hopes you won’t hold that against her”).

“Tornado of Sparks” by James Maxey is about dragons with complex institutions much like those of humans (from evil kings and wise counselors to bad guys with hearts of gold). I thought I’d read as much about dragons as I’d ever care to, but this unchallenging tale was pleasant enough. I enjoyed the idea of a dragon as conman of other dragons, and I don’t recall ever reading a story of dragons as government before. Really, though, these dragons are merely humans with built-in flamethrowers and unpronounceable names.

I had to go back to the PDF version of my copy of Bull Spec to read the poetry, because my Kindle made the poetry into a complete mishmash, with a line from one poem followed by a line from another. What a mess! The best of the five poems is “Beastwoman’s Snarled Rune” by Rose Lemberg, a fairy tale complete in a few stanzas. The others demonstrate just how difficult it is to write good fantastical poetry; it is hard for the poet not to be too obvious and even trite.  One must commend Bull Spec for running poetry, and it is good to note that it is open to all submissions in this field. I’d love to read more, better, poetry here.

Plenty of other features fill out this issue. I can’t comment on Mark Gallagher’s graphic novel, “Closed System,” as I have not read the first three of the four parts (and again, I had to go to my PDF version of the magazine to read this; the print was so tiny on my Kindle that it was illegible). The interview with Gallagher was interesting, though, and made me want to explore his work.

The magazine contains a second interview, this one of Lou Anders, the editor of Pyr. I’ve been following Pyr ever since it appeared on the scene about five years ago, and have found that the mere fact that it is the publisher of a book is a good indicator of its quality. Anders explains his philosophy in choosing books, and also gives a good explanation of why Pyr started out publishing more SF than fantasy, and now publishes almost all fantasy.

There is also an excerpt from Mark Van Name’s new book, Children No More. The book is about child soldiers in a science fictional future, but it’s built on a present in which 300,000 children around the globe are in the military.  It’s enough to make me want to read the book, especially when considered in concert with the interview of Van Name.

The book reviews are competently written. Paul Kincaid’s review of Peter Beagle’s The Secret History of Fantasy is especially worth reading, as Kincaid talks a bit about the underlying thesis of the book rather than just about the stories it contains. It’s good to read some real literary criticism in a nonacademic setting.

Bull Spec is an ambitious undertaking. I expect to read more of it — though next time, I’m getting it in hard copy!

Electric Velocipede has intrigued me ever since I heard its name. I had to look up velocipede – it means any human-powered vehicle with one or more wheels, so usually it’s a bicycle. But an electric human-powered vehicle? How do those go together? Does that mean it’s a bicycle ridden by a robot? At any rate, what “Electric Velocipede” means for our purposes is “a quirky print magazine publishing science fiction and fantasy stories and poetry that won the 2009 Hugo for Best Fanzine.” It will go to an entirely electronic format in 2012.

Issue 20 (Winter 2010) of Electric Velocipede is the most recent edition available in print format. It contains a couple of genuinely stunning stories. “Daughters of Fortune” by Cyril Simsa, is such a beautifully written story about falling in love and living happily ever after that it will convert any cynic, and just in time for Valentine’s Day. Set in the 1920s and 1930s in Paris and Prague, “Daughters of Fortune” is about Zora Dienstbier, a poet and model – a sort of “It Girl” among expatriates in Paris who gets fed up with Hemingway and Joyce and Shakespeare & Co. She moves to Prague looking for something else, where she meets Frida Hroznysova, a folklorist, at a showing of Max Schreck’s movie “Nosferatu.” Their acquaintance moves into the realm of the odd quite soon, particularly through the realm of art. The warmth and richness of Simsa’s prose is apparent particularly in his description of the work of Toyen, a Czech surrealist of the period, as well as other photographs and paintings, but it also works to advantage in describing the physical act of love. Whether one of these two women is a vampire is never made explicit, which adds mystery to the lushness of this piece.

“T ME,” by A.H. Jennings, is an excellent story, the theme of which is “What comes after science?” Joan Ellen’s ten-year-old son Patrick is assigned to write an essay on this subject, which is so astonishing in its insight that his teacher wants to immediately put him in an accelerated learning program. But Patrick, it appears, has been learning way too fast ever since he was in the womb and his mother had played him a CD produced by Edutainment Unlimited for their Prenatal Head Start Kit. It sounded like white noise punctuated by bizarre clicks and squeaks to Joan Ellen, but it meant a lot more to Patrick. The precocious child develops strange and frightening abilities at an incredible pace. Where does it all lead? That’s what Patrick wants to know, and he’s going to make sure he finds out.

“Liminal” by Sean Melican is a fine hard science fiction story about an “avant” confronting “throwbacks” who do the dirty work of mining on a planet that is plainly not Earth. On its face, it is about using what one knows of science to survive extremity, but at its heart, it is a story about how humans act under that same extremity. It is also a story about how humans behave toward one another; and as is so often the case, that is not a happy story, especially when sex and violence intermix.

Lyn Battersby’s “The Mikarr Way” is a sad story of an interspecies family. How can two species who react so differently to their children, and approach childrearing so differently, possibly be happy together? What happens to a human father who finds his daughter fully grown only a year after birth? What is the proper way to raise her, with human love or as the Mikarr love their children? What a quandary! The story is a bit too short and even abrupt to fully explore its themes, but it is built on a challenging idea.

“Mile Zero” by Daniel Braum is another story that fails to fulfill the promise of its basic idea, but which nonetheless is intriguing. Set in an America at war with itself, one that seems to have lost its own notions of freedom, it is about a mother-to-be who is determined that her baby be born free.

Ian Shoebridge’s “The Lost Continent” is an odd fantasy involving UFOs, a home built of ice, a troll frolicking in the sunlight, and a dragon who loves the Fibonacci sequenced. It contains enough ideas to power a couple of novels, and reads in the same disjointed way one dreams. I wish there were more to it, that Shoebridge had played out some of his themes and explored some of his ideas in greater detail. It’s promising, and makes me want to read more of his work, but it isn’t an entirely successful story as it stands.

“And to My Wife…” is a short short story by Shira Lipkin that will make you smile. “Sampling the Aspic” is a story with recipes by Penelope O’Shea; I especially want to make the green chicken enchiladas.

Electric Velocipede also contains a fair bit of poetry. This issue contains four poems by Amy Mackiewicz, all about girls or women unable to act upon their environments. The powerlessness at work in these poems is irritating at best and depressing at worst. While Mackiewicz uses some good imagery, her poems ultimately don’t seem to add up to much besides women acted upon rather than acting.

I enjoyed Shira Lipkin’s poem, “Nine Things About Oracles,” much more. Dragging an oracle from the realm of myth and placing her in the modern age, translating her life from the ancient one of hanging around a cave to haunting darkened clubs, the poem is a wonderful story in nine stanzas that ends with the intriguing words, “Let me tell you a story.”

The issue is rounded out by a good interview with Paolo Bacigalupi; and “Blindfold Taste Test,” a sort of short form interview centered on food, with Laura Anne Gilman.

Electric Velocipede strikes me as a great market for new short story writers, a place for those who want to build a career in the science fiction and fantasy field to get their feet wet. The stories are a trifle amateurish, but that isn’t synonymous with “bad”; one can see potential in most of the stories, and the Simsa and Jennings stories would have been equally at home in more mainstream periodicals. Electric Velocipede is therefore a magazine to watch in order to catch emerging talents early on in their careers.

Apex Magazine is an online journal published on the first Monday of every month, edited by Catherynne M. Valente. Valente’s submission guidelines give you a clear idea of what to expect to read within Apex’s pixels: “What we want is sheer, unvarnished awesomeness.… We want stories full of marrow and passion, stories that are twisted, strange, and beautiful.” The January issue definitely meets those requirements.

“The Itaewon Eschatology Show” by Douglas F. Warrick is a story that cries out to be labeled “New Weird.” It’s about an American in Korea – though why he is there is a complete mystery – who is a “night clown.” This means that every night he, along with his friend Kidu, dresses up and mounts stilts to perform magic for the expatriate crowds in Itaewon. The thing is, they really perform magic; not sleight of hand, no tricks involved, pure magic. At the core of their magic is their ability to show the crowd the End of Days, and they do, every night. What does it mean? Is it a nuclear apocalypse? Is it the attainment of Nirvana? A visit by aliens? A drug that drives us all mad? Read it and decide.

Those who have read Seanan McGuire’s tasty urban fantasies starring October Daye will be surprised at the dark science fiction she serves up in “The Tolling of Pavlov’s Bells.” This excellent story of plague and resistance is as frightening as anything I have ever read, especially because the protagonist – a true anti-hero – has no good reason for what she does except that no one ever listened to her warnings. She is a Cassandra who makes her own predictions of disaster come true. I was unaware that McGuire also writes as Mira Grant, but this story persuaded me that I need to get hold of Feed, the book this 2010 recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer has written under that name.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s contribution to this issue, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” is a complete science fiction murder mystery compressed into about 7500 words. The society Kowal introduces us to is one I would love to see fleshed out into a novel, one where it’s a mark of status to do things by hand, or to hire real humans to do tasks rather than have machines perform them – and the more demeaning the task, the higher the social cachet of paying a human to do it. Tuyet is a professor of philosophy, but she is working as a cleaning woman because that was the only job she could find when she came to Cordova station with her son, hoping to buy him a new pair of lungs. Tuyet’s employers, Cody and Helene, feud constantly, but Cody is a nice man who gives her son massages for free. We never meet Helene, but since she’s the one who seems to work at making Tuyet’s job more difficult, we do not get a good impression of her. It’s a combustible situation, and the explosion, when it comes, is hideous; but the aftermath is even worse.

There are two poems in this issue of Apex, and they are both much better than the usual run of science fiction and fantasy poetry. “The Terminal City” by Preston Grassman is about a city and a sea and a woman, all lost in an apocalypse, all now mere images and imagination. “The Unkindest Kiss” by Mike Allen is a horror poem, a short tale in free verse of a human as a perpetual meal to a monster – which sounds like it should be ugly to read, but it’s beautifully written.

I considered all this a bargain for $2.99 on my Kindle.

The March 2011 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction is packed with good stories – and I’d warrant there’s a future award winner among them. John Kessel’s “Clean” is one of those stories that makes you feel like your heart is a gong that has just been rung, hard and deep. It’s a story about memory and change, and the choices we make about what is most important to us in life, all in the context of a professor of electrical engineering who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. It seems odd, but the story is never told from the engineer’s point of view, but from his wife’s, his daughter’s and one of the people who is attempting to treat him, so we never feel what he feels directly. That means we never quite understand his decision, any more than his wife and daughter do. It hurts to read this story; it is terribly real even as it proposes a solution not available in our world.

Another particularly wonderful story in this issue is “Purple” by Robert Reed. Reed proposes the equivalent of an animal shelter for intelligent species, run by a creature than is, for all intents and purposes, a god – just as we are gods to our own pets. This god snatches humans who have been horribly injured and nurses them back to health, returning those who can survive “to the wild.” But those whom the god deems too injured must stay. What does that mean to an intelligent individual? It’s a disturbing story, particularly because it forces us to question the actions of a benevolent god.

Nancy Fulda’s “Movement” is a short story of exceptional power. It is about Hannah, a girl – very nearly a woman – who has temporal autism. I cannot find any indication that such a condition has been identified in our world, but in the context of the story it means that Hannah experiences time differently from the rest of us. Conversations can take weeks in her brain; a question you asked her on January 5 might receive an answer on January 28, but it takes that long for her to choose the right words to answer your inquiry precisely. The real question Hannah must answer is whether she wants to be “cured.” What would she give up if medical personnel started messing about with her brain? Would it be worth the price? And who should make that decision, Hannah or her parents? The stories in this issue all tend to pose difficult questions.

“God in the Sky” is yet another story that poses questions and refuses to answer them. The author, An Owomoyela, gives us a universe in which a light has appeared in the sky about which our astronomers can tell almost nothing except that it is very, very big. They have seen galaxies pass in front of it, so they know that it is incredibly far away despite its brightness. No one knows what will happen, and no one quite knows what to do with herself as the light approaches, even though it is so far off that it will not be “present” in any real way for a very, very long time. This story reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s own “Nightfall,” which famously asked how people would react if they saw the stars only once every several generations.

Ian Creasey plays with the idea of alternate universes in “’I Was Nearly Your Mother.’” The Marian of the universe in which the story takes place lost her mother some time ago – but look, here on the doorstep is her mother from another universe, one in which she aborted the baby that in this universe became Marian. How, exactly, is a teenager supposed to react to a woman who wants to be a replacement for her real, dead mother?

“The Most Important Thing in the World” is a much lighter story by Steve Bein, about a cabbie who finds a passenger has left a time suit behind in his cab. Sometimes the oddest things can change your life, Ernie discovers – both for the worse and for the better.

Nick Wolven’s “Lost in the Memory Palace, I Found You” didn’t work for me. Yet another tale of memory and loss in an age when we’re so bombarded with information that we can’t keep track of it all, the story has a frenetic feel to it that gets in the way of the plot. Neal Barrett, Jr.’s “Where” also seems a lesser story, so dependent on oddity that it forgets to have a plot.

The best science fictional poem I’ve read in a long time is Geoffrey A. Landis’s “The Spirit Rover Longs to Bask in the Sunshine.” If you’ve been following the Mars Rovers the way we have been in my house, you’ve probably personalized them to, at least to some extent. That’s where the poignancy for this poem comes from.

Weird Tales celebrates “Uncanny Beauty” in the Summer 2010 issue (No. 356, and the most recent issue available as of this writing). The best story in the magazine, though, is one that is off-theme. “How Bria Died,” by Mike Aronovitz, is the tale of an unorthodox teacher who may well have taken his unusual teaching methods a step too far for the universe to abide.  This horror story is fresh, original and written from a position of real authority:  Aronovitz teaches English in a school much like the one in which his story is set.

Kat Howard’s “Beauty and Disappearance” is a surreal tale of disappearing bits of statues, soon followed by the disappearance – at first intentional, and later not so much – of other bits and pieces of other things. The reader is pushed to consider that beauty might lie in absence, and then precisely what that aphorism might really mean.

“A Concise and Ready Guide” is a lovely jest by Ian R. MacLeod. MacLeod’s conceit is that vampirism was already so common by the late 19^th century that a pamphlet on the etiquette of the undead was written in traditional Victorian language and with typical Victorian sensibilities. As you might guess, the portion of the pamphlet “On Obtaining Sustenance” is particularly piquant.

It’s difficult to say anything about “Sisters Under the Skin” by L.L. Hannett that does not give away the point. The short Faustian tale is nicely written, and the specifics of the ending come as a surprise even to the long-time horror reader. This is my first exposure to L.L. Hannett, but I plan to keep an eye out for her in the future – this is good stuff.

Catherynne M. Valente writes with such elegance and panache that one would think that the “Uncanny Beauty” theme was right up her alley. Apparently Dark Scribe Magazine thought so, because it nominated “Secretario” for one of its 2010 Black Quill Awards. (Winners will be announced on February 1.)  I found the story, a mash-up of noir detection with dark fantasy, to be written with Valente’s characteristic lush prose and worth reading for that reason alone. The plot itself did not move me; I found it lacking in suspense or horror. But that writing! How lovely!

Amal El-Mohtar’s “Le Tarot de Gaga” is based on the peculiar concept of a deck of Tarot cards made up of images of Lady Gaga. Yet the life and art of the pop star are entirely irrelevant to the plot, leaving the reader wondering what the point is. Was this an excuse to showcase pictures of the songstress’s odd costumes? Structured as a Tarot reading, the story is less than compelling.

Natania Barron’s trilogy of poems based on myth, “The Wakened Image,” is competent but uninspiring.

Weird Tales contains a surprisingly strong mix of nonfiction. I was particularly taken by Theodora Goss’s “Strange Faces,” in which the writer reveals her opinion of her face: “strange,” she calls it, “all bones.” Her opinion seems odd to me, because I remember when I first saw Goss in person a few years ago, and thinking what a strikingly beautiful woman she is. I guess we all think that we’re unattractive, somehow, no matter the truth of it. Goss’s meditation on what beauty means to women, and especially this society’s image of the horrific woman, is fine reading. Other nonfiction includes book reviews, an exploration of Margaret Brundage’s 1930s Weird Tales cover paintings, a sculpture of a mascot for the issue, so to speak, by Callie Badorrek, and a nice bit of memoir by Rae Bryant about how she grew from an ugly duckling into a swan, and just what that meant to her.

Subterranean Online offers a special treat this week: a new Majipoor story by Robert Silverberg, “The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn.” The massive planet that was originally home to the Metamorphs now has a human-based civilization more than 12,000 years old, at least twice as old as human civilization. Two young scholars – Simmilgord, an historian, and Lutiel, an archaeologist – are given the opportunity to travel to Kesmakuran, where the tomb of the first Pontifex, Dvorn, is said to be. The only evidence for this, though, is an epic poem written 5,000 years after Dvorn allegedly unified the planet under his rule, so no one is entirely sure whether it is myth or truth.

The scholars make amazing discoveries at the site, discoveries that should be the foundation of wonderful careers for both of them. But Hawid Zakayil, the Superintendent of Antiquities for the region, gets wind of the find and descends on the site with plans of his own. I hope it doesn’t give too much away to say that the story had me thinking about the management of the cave paintings at Lescaux in France, and the philosophical questions that arise from the treatment of that historical site on our own planet. Apparently some things never change, no matter what planet you’re on in what epoch.

“The Melusine (1898)” by Caitlin R. Kiernan is this week’s offering by Subterranean Online. It is a wonderful story, written with an unearthly beauty. Kiernan imagines a steampunk circus that comes to town advertising its name in letters five-stories high, “shaped from out of nothing but the billowing clouds of red dust raised by those rolling broad steel and vulcanized rims.” The circus is made of automaton mastodonts and living elephants, and no one can tell if the acrobats are mechanical or real. It promises miracles.

Cala Monroe Weatherall is “a learned woman of industry and science” who comes to the circus in answer to a secret cry, “a dream so vivid and bizarre that she might almost name it a nightmare.” She has been summoned – somehow, some way – to the sideshow, and when she appears before the placard reading “Poseidon’s Abyss Revealed!” the man at the door whispers, “She’ll be glad to see you’ve come.” Once inside, she finds that everything is fake, everything manufactured, everything disappointing, all embarrassingly bad, until… But that would be telling.

Kiernan’s writing is getting better and better. This story is written with such beautiful and compelling language that you’ll be happy you’ve read it just for the poetry of it. And if you’re like me, you’ll puzzle about how it all works, because if the circus is all a fake, how did it manage to manipulate her dreams? How did the barkers know her inmost thoughts? How did they…? It’s an amazing story, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it nominated for all manner of prizes in 2012.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is published by Small Beer Press, a lively little press that has been publishing odd and wonderful fiction for a little more than a decade. LCRW is published twice a year, in June and November, and usually contains some of the oddest fiction that you could hope to find, often by new authors who are just testing their wings. Issue 26 seems determinedly weird, with several quite nice stories and a few others that seem to be trying just a bit too hard to be strange and instead winding up merely incomprehensible.

“The Other Realms Were Built With Trash” by Rahul Kanakia is a bit of apocalyptic fiction as seen from the world that inherits our trash. For eons, that trash has come in mighty handy, from the human bodies used by faeries to reincorporate themselves when their current body gets too old to the cloth used by the mages. The Recycling Tower makes use of all of it, and Aldram is the changeling in charge of the Tower.  When humans manage to finally exterminate themselves, everything starts falling through, and it’s clear that soon there will be no more. The story is of Aldram’s transformation when the world ends, and it’s a fairy tale like no other you’ve ever read.

“Three Hats” by Jenny Terpsichore Abeles is a fairy tale that reads like a mash-up of “Rip Van Winkle” and “Briar Rose,” but it is something entirely new and different from either of those classics. Filled with curses and chili paste, it is an entertaining tale of a man’s metamorphosis in the wake of his sister’s death.

Sean Melican’s “Absence of Water” is the most straightforward tale in this issue, a muscular reimagining of the South’s attempts to use submarines against the North during America’s Civil War in the 19^th century. It is based on actual events, amazingly enough, and is as riveting as any modern epic of submarine warfare.

Steampunk is J.M. McDermott’s theme in “Death’s Shed,” the story of a boy and his father mourning the death of their mother and wife. The boy meets a bum who is living in the shed behind his new home – or has he met Death incarnated? The fellow, whoever he is, has terrible teeth and gives the boy cigarettes and bad advice when the boy can’t get his father to do anything but play with his model trains and their complex layout, complete with robot men and women and airships that fly above – a clockwork fantasy of a world. What does the man in the shed do with the girl who has been pestering – even torturing the boy? How much of this is real, and how much the sad imaginings of a child who has lost his mother and, at the same time, somehow managed to also lose his father? It’s an intricate story that makes me very eager to read McDermott’s novels.

“The Cruel Ship’s Captain” by Harvey Welles and Philip Raines is a pirate tale gone awry. It is very difficult to tell what’s going on here; and while that dreaminess works for stories like McDermott’s, here it is just frustrating and confusing. Between treasure, a living figurehead, the deaths of all women onboard except Settle, and the ship’s secrets, the reader is lost, unable to hold onto the thread of a plot. As much as one might love weird tales, this story takes the surreal so far past Kafka that it is incomprehensible.

Patty Houston’s “Elite Institute for the Study of Arc Welders’ Flash Fever” comes very near that same border between “enough” and “too much.” It’s the second tale of extreme medical experimentation I’ve read in recent weeks, a variation on George Saunders’s theme in “Escape from Spiderhead,” which appeared in the December 20, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. In Houston’s story the question is when the experimentation can begin – when a welder is ill enough to allow the surgeons to wield their knives to “repair” brain injury. Howard isn’t particularly eager to have them cut away at him, but he needs the money he gets for participating in the study. And so he spends his days welding automobiles – muscle cars – without any ventilation, and lies on his medical forms day after day as he succumbs to the poison. Howard solves his dilemma about another member of the study very differently from the way Saunders’s hero does.  Reading them together makes each a bit richer.

Veronica Schanoes’s “Alice:  A Fantasia” and Carlea Holl-Jensen’s “Sleep” are essentially meditations, the first on the theme of the girl on whom Lewis Carroll based “Alice in Wonderland,” the second on death. Poetry in the magazine by Lindsay Vella – three in verse and two prose poems – seem strange for the sake of strangeness, with the notable exception of “The Seamstress,” which is a lovely paragraph-long fairy tale of love and loss. Darrell Schweitzer’s “Dueling Trilogies” is an amusing pair of limericks.

Ted Chiang’s essay, “Reasoning about the Body,” originally delivered as the Guest of Honor speech of Congrés Boréal in Quebec City in May 2010, is about “folk biology” – a term he explains as “naïve ideas about the biological world.” The notion that a whale is a giant fish is an example, as is the categorization of spiders as insects instead of arachnids. These ideas vary from culture to culture, and help anthropologists learn about these cultures.  The bit of folk biology Chiang is particularly concerned with is the idea that a human brain is like a computer. Chiang dissects this notion so completely that you’ll never again be able to read a science fiction story about the Singularity without very deliberately suspending your disbelief. Indeed, like Chiang, you may find that you’ve grown weary of the notion, and want something new.

In 2009, fans of Realms of Fantasy, a full-size slick magazine, were dismayed to learn that its publisher, Sovereign Media, was shutting it down. Just not enough subscribers, Sovereign said; we can’t afford to keep going. But a savior came along in the form of Publisher Warren Lapine of Tir Na Nog Press, who purchased the magazine and kept it going with the same wonderful staff (including long-time editor Shawna McCarthy). Readers were delighted. Magazines are hardly ever saved, and even if they’re revived years later, they’re normally only shadows of their former selves. It was great to know that Realms of Fantasy would continue publishing. I’m sure I wasn’t the only hopeful who started writing stories in the sincere belief that someday I’d see my name on the Realms of Fantasy cover.

But things started looking shaky in mid-2010 or so, when Lapine issued a letter to subscribers begging them to renew in order to insert some cash into the venture. And no one was too surprised when in October 2010, Lapine announced that Realms would, after all, be closing down. Lapine announced: “As things stand, I would need to invest another large amount of money simply to continue publishing the magazine at its current level — an investment that I do not believe would have any chance of ever repaying itself…. Should there be any interest in purchasing the magazine I will gladly sell Realms to a responsible party for $1.00 and give them the finished files for the December issue.” As one of the subscribers who had gladly renewed my subscription long before a renewal was due in response to Lapine’s plea, I waved goodbye to my hard-earned dollars.

But Realms of Fantasy simply won’t stay dead. In November 2010, Damnation Books LLC announced that it had purchased Realms of Fantasy, which would keep publishing, both digitally and in hard copy. Plans are already in place for a festive 100th issue in June 2011. It’s incredible – Realms of Fantasy just keeps coming back, continuously publishing even after the wake was held and the coffin lowered into the ground. Here’s to its continued health!

The four stories in the December 2010 issue – the one intended to be its last – are of sufficient quality to warrant the resurrection of the magazine. Two of the stories are so good that it’s hard to say which is my favorite. “The Banjo Singer” by Dennis Danvers is a sort of fairy tale set in the last century, when radios and wax cylinders still represented the epitome of technology. Marie, the heroine, wants to sing, but her father insists that she learn to play an instrument instead, and gives her a banjo with mother-of-pearl hummingbirds inlaid on the fret board and headboard. She soon becomes sufficiently proficient that her teacher, Garver Williams, puts her in a band with six other of his students. The band is mildly successful until one day Garver (who had once heard Marie singing when she thought she was alone) decides Marie should sing while the others play. The result is a sensation, but Marie’s father objects violently, and forbids her to sing another note. But Marie finds a way – she must sing – and with the help of the hummingbirds, who turn out to be magical, she fights her father over the years and throughout the world. The plot is perfectly tuned to the story, and the writing has exactly the right tone. My only complaint is that Marie is not very likable – no Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty innocent, but as cruel to her father, in her way, as he is to her, and unspeakably cruel to her husband. But perhaps it is really Marie’s voice that is the protagonist here, using her and her father equally. Indeed, I’m even tempted to say that the hummingbirds use all the humans in the story to their advantage. Certainly, it’s a story that is worth reading – and I’d love to know what you think about it.

The second story I most enjoyed was “Maiden, Mother, Crone” by Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky. This story, of a time when witches are being hunted by the priests of the Solitary God, is not set on our world, but certainly on a close analog. The tale is of a witch, Marjan, who has hidden her nature for all her life – something fairly difficult to do, as a physical mark sets her apart. Now that she is pregnant with a daughter, she is in even greater danger – and, indeed, so is that daughter. The desperation of the woman, alone in a harsh environment when she goes into labor, is written so well that one can feel the cold, the pain, and the loneliness. The story is written with immediacy and yet is also elegantly told.

Also worth reading is “Tools of the Devil” by Jerry Oltion, a “deal with the devil” story. We’ve all read so many of those that you have to know that this wouldn’t be publishable unless there was a twist – and this particular twist is one that brought a big grin to my face, as well as a wince to my muscles. There’s a reason that Dante’s Paradiso isn’t nearly as interesting as The Inferno, and why Satan is a much more interesting character than God in Milton’s epic. Oltion plays a nice change on this classic trope.

“Queen of the Kanguellas” by Scott Dalrymple is the longest story in this issue, and the weakest. While the protagonist’s exploration of Portuguese West Africa is told brightly, with great detail and wonderful dialogue, little happens for a very long time. And when the protagonist’s secret is revealed, it comes as no shock – not because it is expected, but because we never knew that there was a mystery that had to be resolved. I wanted to like this story because of its dark setting, but it is ultimately not successful on its own terms.

No print magazine these days contains only fiction. Resa Nelson’s report on the last two Harry Potter movies is old news by now, and the article seems mere filler. Karen Haber’s interview of Terese Nielsen, a fantasy artist, is interesting enough to make me happy that this is a regular feature of the magazine. The book reviews, by Paul Witcover and Elizabeth Bear, are well-written and thoughtful, and caused an extra few books to make their way onto my “to be read” list – which, given the present length of that list, is something of an accomplishment. These features round out the magazine nicely. If you don’t subscribe to Realms of Fantasy yet, you should do it now. And yes, a PDF version is now available.

Subterranean Online publishes an online-only magazine each month, a few stories at a time. As far as I can tell, this is a separate venture from Subterranean Magazine, which has thus far published eight issues in hardcover ($80) and softcover ($6) both. The first two issues are sold out entirely. Were I rich, I’d probably want to collect these in hardcover, but alas, I’m not. So I make do with Subterranean Online, which presently has two stories up for the opening salvo of its Winter 2011 issue.

“A Long Walk Home” by Jay Lake is a superior science fiction story. While it deals with a venerable story line – the last man on earth – it makes it new in that it doesn’t take place on earth, and the protagonist isn’t exactly a man. Aeschylus Sforza is an entity known as a “Howard,” a human who has been altered in a way not explicitly detailed, but explicitly so that he has an enormously long lifespan; he is nearly 800 years old when the story opens. He is apparently equipped with some form of brain technology as well: “He consulted his telemetry. One advantage of being a Howard was all the hardware you could carry in your head. Literally as well as figuratively.” Wow, I want to know more about this! But Lake is something of a tease; he doesn’t give us much more about how Ask (as he is known to his friends) has been altered, or why.

While Ask is exploring a cave system in the Fayerweather Mountains on the planet Redghost, every bit of technology on the planet is fried except for what Ask carries in his brain, apparently missing him only because he was far underground. Ask is the only living human – or sort of human – left on the planet. Humans have been spirited away; there are no bodies, no blood, no sign of conflict. The only bodies Ask finds are those of people who have been in some way caged or confined, as, for instance, a prisoner on a transport plane owned by the judicial system. Prisons, though, have open doors and no bodies; someone, or something, freed them in the apocalypse (if indeed, “apocalypse” is an appropriate term to use).

Ask spends years, then decades, then centuries exploring his barren world, confirming that there is no other living soul. What he does find, though, is ultimately even more interesting, and more curiosity-provoking. When you reach the end of this story, you will either sit back with a satisfied smile or fling your laptop across the room. I did both. I would be utterly delighted to find that this is but a fragment of a forthcoming novel, but one never knows exactly what Lake has up his sleeve. Clever guy.

Marc Laidlaw’s “The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft” is nicely told, but it’s not science fiction, fantasy or horror; it is biographical fiction of a sort, telling us something about Lovecraft that we may not have known before. It is told through the eyes of Douglas, a young boy who adores his collection of Weird Tales despite the disapproval of the aunts who are raising him – and who especially loves the stories written by Lovecraft. It’s hard to believe that a child who measures his age in single digits would actually be attracted to Lovecraft’s turgid fiction. But there are mysteries in this child’s upbringing that even he can’t solve, and so he is attracted to tales of the unknown and unknowable. Then one day Douglas discovers that he and Lovecraft live in the same town, and tries to meet his idol. All idols have clay feet, though, and the way Douglas discovers this about his own is sad, scarring – and, I fear, trite.

Subterranean Online is entirely free. Check it out sometime.

Many years ago, I cornered John Kessel at a fantasy conference just because I wanted to be able to say that I’d had a conversation with a writer and scholar I admired.  Unfortunately for poor Kessel, I ran out of things to say to him right after, “I love your work!”  I still have a reverence for writers that renders me tongue-tied in no time at all.  Don’t they seem like the most magical beings, writers?  People who can come up with all that weird stuff right out of their heads?

Anyway, Kessel took pity on me and started talking about how much he loves short fiction.  He named authors and stories and magazines, filling my brain with notebooks full of mental jottings.  Once I got home, I immediately started pulling out my back issues of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, subscribing to Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and looking for online gems like Clarkesworld.

And all this time since I’ve been reading short fiction, and coming to the conclusion that novellas, novelets, and short stories are really where it’s happening.  Can I persuade you the way Kessel persuaded me?  I’m going to give it a shot as we discuss this topic in my new regular column, Magazine Monday, which will post regularly on, you guessed it, Mondays.

Unfortunately, my starting point isn’t the best way of making my case, because the November/December 2010 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is surprisingly flabby. I’ve long counted F&SF as my favorite among the digest-sized genre magazines, and have rarely been disappointed by an issue, but this one showed scant evidence to support my thesis about short fiction.  Still, there were a couple of gems.

The best story in the issue is “Crumbs” by Michaela Roessner. This beautiful bit of writing is an updated fairy tale immediately recognized as “Hansel and Gretel” for an urban age. Roesnner’s writing about gingerbread houses shows the immense amount of research she did to give this story its veracity.  Witches who have new identities prepared for after they consummate their crimes are witches for whom one must have a grudging respect. This is a fine tale indeed.

Second best by only a small margin is the novelet “Death Must Die” by Albert E. Cowdrey. I’m not usually a fan of funny science fiction or fantasy, but this was a clever bit of work:  the tale of a psychic investigator called upon to rid a house of the ghost of a hangman. The story is framed as an entry in the Journal of Psychical Research, a nice conceit especially in light of the fact that a paper about ESP appears in the current of issue of the real world’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The cover story, on the other hand, the novella “Dead Man’s Run” by Robert Reed, was a dead bore.  The motif of long distance running that permeates the story of the murder of a particular runner seems entirely artificial and unnecessary to the plot – and it’s not at all interesting to a non-runner. While I like the notion of being able to speak with the “back-up” of someone who has died, especially to try to solve his murder, the execution of this story leaves much to be desired.

It seems ghosts were intended as the theme for this issue, as Alexander Jablokov’s opening story, “Plinth Without Figure,” also features one. Jablokov has hold of a good idea in this novelet:  the architecture of the future, a way of molding an environment to encourage comfort in ways both seen and unseen. I wish there were more about this in the story and less about the protagonist’s relationship with a former girlfriend.

Jerry Oltion’s very short story about a hoarder facing the idea of immortality is a good little joke. Alan Dean Foster’s western ghost story, “Free Elections:  A Mad Amos Malone Story,” is a fairly traditional tall tale. Bruce Sterling’s “The Exterminator’s Want Ad” is a slight piece about prisons of the future and life after release. Richard Bowes’s “Venues” is an insider tale for those who write science fiction and fantasy and those who hang around with those that do; taken on that level, it’s rather amusing, but I suspect it would be almost indecipherable for anyone who just reads the stuff and avoids the social aspect of being an SF reader. “Ware of the Worlds” by Michael Alexander is a first contact story about Earth’s encounter with some really very sweet aliens – and the danger of such friendliness. I expected more from John Kessel’s “The Closet” than I got out of this very short story about a seemingly typical young man. Alexandra Duncan’s “Swamp City Lament” is a novelet about a future in which few women are fertile, and what that means for their children.

My January/February 2011 issue of F&SF hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m hoping for something better in that issue than I got in this one…