Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 08/17/2020 & 08/24/2020

Today I’m looking at two recent issues of Strange Horizons, which have put out one story and two poems (and a bunch of reviews and nonfiction that I won’t be looking at here but that I recommend people check out). The story looks at extinction and profession, secrets and power. It finds a scientist kind of trying to fit in, and then finding that she doesn’t really have to. The issues also feature poems that wrap around powerlessness and transformation, dominated by settings that define the work and growth that they contain. That shape the paths people can take, limiting them in some profound and unsettling ways. It’s a great two issues, and I’ll get right to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #305

Art by Anton Ninov

The latest Beneath Ceaseless Skies brings two stories of women dealing with systemic issues separating them from their happiness. Intent on punishing them for taking strides toward embracing their own desires and needs. In both instances, the idea of justice is perverted in order to try and destroy the freedom of women who only want to protect themselves, and each time that idea of justice is wielded by a man to try and silence them. It’s not a super happy issue, but there is a a rising sense of breaking cages, and reaching for freedom, that makes it exhilarating at the same. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Uncanny #34 [May stuff]

Art by Julie Dillon

May brings three short stories and two poems to Uncanny Magazine, and there’s plenty of strangeness to go around. Now, I’ve seen it said that the publication lacks a central guiding aesthetic, and to a point I agree that it is eclectic and shows a wide range of the genre, but I also think that the title gives a lot away. There is a general feeling of the uncanny that I think the publication maintains, and this month is a great showcase of that, with three stories that are very different, but that carry along visions of the uncanny, worlds and people who are almost like our own, but different in some ineffable way that leads to a kind of disquiet and tension through which we can examine those strange new worlds as well as the reflection they cast back on our own. So yeah, to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Lightspeed #97

June brings four original stories to Lightspeed Magazine (one novelette and three short stories), many of which deal with oppression and voice. With characters who have survived something, or who are trying to survive something systemic and violent and difficult. Who don’t know how they can keep going, or what their struggles matter in the face of larger tyrannies. And yet each of these stories is hopeful in their own ways, where characters are able to find some way to move forward, to keep going, to stay alive even when everything around them seems to be hungry for their deaths. It’s a fairly difficult and dark set of stories this month, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t very good. So let’s get to the reviews!

Art by Reiko Murakami

Quick Sips - Uncanny #21 [March stuff]

March brings a bit of spring to Uncanny Magazine, with three stories and three poems that feature music and rebirth and love and hope. These are also stories and poems that look at places, though. At haunted houses and magnificent cities and hometowns. That look just as closely at relationships. At the way that interactions build. How in big cities inspiration can seem to grow out of the creativity concentrated in one spot, synergize into something bigger and bigger. How in smaller towns isolation can give way to resentment and fear and depression, but where single gestures can come to mean the universe. These are stories of friends and family, poems of art and love and prayer. And without further delay, the reviews!

Art by Nilah Magruder