Strange Horizons closes out its November issues with a novelette and two poems, revealing settings rife with conflict and division. The pieces look at prejudice and pain, violence and intolerance. Characters are put in positions where they have been hated and hunted, where they have done their best to make lives free and fulfilling but other people keep seeking them out to take what they have. To punish them for flourishing. It’s a rather difficult pair of issues, but the works are careful and wonderful and I’ll get right to the reviews!
Four poems close out Uncanny Magazine’s Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! And most of the poems share a theme of expectations and recovery. Featuring characters who are being pushed in certain directions because of their bodies, because of their injuries, because of what other people want. And who, in defiance, decide to embrace what they want. And they do show the rather revolutionary act that self care and affirmation can be for disabled characters, when everyone wants to control the narrative of what being disabled is, to make it into something broken and wrong in need of fixing. These are some wonderful pieces, and I’ll just get right to the reviews!
