Quick Sips - Lightspeed #119

Art by grandfailure / fotolia

Only short stories means April's Lightpseed Magazine is a little lighter than normal, but the stories certainly hit above their weight class in many ways. The works tackle choices of all sorts, mostly by characters who are facing either accepting the dominant lean of society or rejected it. And in rejected it taking a chance of being crushed. The works show different outcomes for this, from standing in defiance to giving in to learning how to dance in the face of expectations and pressures to be small and quiet. It's an eclectic issue, and one with a lot of different speculative visions, to let's get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 10/11/2018, 10/15/2018, & 10/22/2018

The Strange Horizons fund drive is in full swing, which means extra fiction and poetry as they reach closer to their goal. Along with two regular issues, that means two novelettes and two poems to look at today, all of them building interesting worlds around hurts, around injustices. That might be the more mundane march of capitalism toward a future defined by its inequality and greed, or it might be a vivid world that has developed in the ocean, where those people who were cast away have built a society for themselves only to find the toxic influences of the very people they hoped they'd escaped lingering and infesting them. It's a dark collection of works but ones with sparks that cannot be completely extinguished, and there's a strong hope to themes on display. So let's get to the reviews!