Quick Sips - PodCastle #614

One story rounds out the originals from PodCastle this month, and it’s a weird Western...or maybe closer to a kind of Yukon fantasy about a trio of sisters. The piece reveals a world that is strange and haunting, dominated by Light and Dark. Cycles of daylight and night that last weeks at a time. And people, both human and troll, who try to make their way through a harsh and often unforgiving landscape. It’s a story of burying the past, of grief and loss, and also of choice. The choice of how to handle the weight of legacy, and how to navigate a way forward through treacherous terrain. To the review!

Quick Sips - Translunar Travelers Lounge #1 [part 1: Fizzy Mixers]

I wasn’t actually meaning to pick up any more things to review but I am apparently a glutton for short SFF and couldn’t resist this new project, Translunar Travelers Lounge, that promises some fun short fiction with speculative awesomeness. Today I’m looking at the first section of the magazine, which has conveniently (and topically where this blog is concerned) organized itself as a tasting menu. So these are the Fizzy Mixers, which are meant to be light and great for whetting the appetite. They are also delightful, fun, and funny, brash and wicked and very, very good. So buckle up and loosen up your smilin’ muscles, and let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Questions - Aidan Doyle of Sword and Sonnet

Hello and welcome to a new Quick Questions, my interview series where I sit down with people in short SFF and talk stories! Today I'm joined by Aidan Doyle, co-editor of Sword and Sonnet, a new anthology of short fiction featuring battle poets. But don't take my word for it! Here's what the anthology's website has to say:

Sword & Sonnet is an anthology of stories devoted to the union of battle and poetry. We successfully funded in December 2017 through Kickstarter; the book features genre stories about women and non-binary battle poets. Lyrical, shimmery sonnet-slingers. Grizzled, gritty poetpunks. Word nerds battling eldritch evil. Haiku-wielding heroines.

Art by Vlada Monakhova

And before we get into the questions, first a little about my guest:

Aidan Doyle is an Australian writer and computer programmer. His short stories have been published in places such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Fireside. He has been shortlisted for the Aurealis, Ditmar, and XYZZY awards. He has visited more than 100 countries and his experiences include teaching English in Japan, interviewing ninjas in Bolivia, and going ten-pin bowling in North Korea. He co-edited Sword and Sonnet, along with Rachael K. Jones and E. Catherine Tobler.

And now, the interview:

Quick Sips - Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #31

With the giant novella-length epic poem done with, this latest issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly brings things back to basics with four original stories and two poems (of much more modest length). The stories build up worlds filled with magic and darkness, where there are things lurking at the periphery, at the edges of the world, in the blank space of maps. The stories look at characters who are seeking something. Themselves or a much-deserved rest or gold or even escape from certain death. And none of the characters find the situation easy. The stories embrace their magic and their mayhem as the character work against the monsters and circumstances arrayed against them and attempt to wrestle some sort of victory from the jaws of defeat. These are fun, sometimes thrilling pieces that build very different world, especially once the poetry gets added in, but it's also a strong issue that does a lot right. So yeah, to the reviews! 

Art by Jereme Peabody

Quick Sips - Lightspeed #67

With the end of the year looming, things are getting...weird with the stories coming out, and Lightspeed Magazine keeps that trend going with four original stories steeped in the strange. Mad Hatters stand beside visions of humans among the stars so odd they're barely recognizable, and grief and loss and guilt become a tangible thing following the loss of a parent. From epic revenge tales to the dissolution of relationships, the stories this month are not the cheeriest of adventures, but most offer a bit of hope through it all, and a healthy spoonful of weird. To the reviews!

Art by James Ng