Quick Sips - Lightspeed #117

Art by grandfailure / fotolia

February brings the normal amount of fiction to Lightspeed Magazine, without too much of a unifying theme. The stories are stark, often featuring people or beings dealing with complex systems that have been built. The main characters tend to be those set outside of these systems, not centered, their desires and needs expected to be suppressed for the good of the dominant. How they handle that, and how their struggle ends up impacting those systems, varies by piece but gives an overall feeling of defiance even in the face of certain defeat and death. Not the brightest of issues, but some provocative works. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Tor dot com November 2019

Art by Red Nose Studio

I was actually anticipating Tor to start to slow down, given their tendency to take most of the end of the year off of new releases, but November actually saw three original stories from the publication. The stories mix a sense of almost child-like wonder with some grim realities. In each the main character is sheltered in some key way, locked away, and is waiting for their moment to escape. Some of them don't know it yet, are convinced of the completeness of their isolation, their prison, but as time goes on they all find reason to see that their lives are only being partly lived, kept back from exploring the universe and all its secrets and magic. And what they do about that defines their arcs and their stories. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Tor dot com August 2018

Two short stories and a novelette round out the SFF originals from Tor this month, with a definite focus on science fiction, on futures of humanity interacting with the universe and, perhaps more importantly, with the Earth. Whether that means dealing with the touch of climate disaster and change, or working to move beyond the bounds of our terrestrial home through uploading and flight, or gaining a new and non-human presence to co-inhabit the planet with, the pieces look at how humans see the Earth, and how that perspective shifts as the gaze becomes less incorporated in a human body. It's a month full of strangeness and longing, risks and looming dangers, and it makes for a fascinating bunch of stories. To the reviews!

Art by Victo Ngai