Quick Sips - Lightspeed #86

The July Lightspeed Magazine offers up a pair each of science fiction and fantasy short stories that balance hope and despair, pain and longing. The stories examine injustice, characters caught in moments that they want to escape, situations that are deeply unsatisfying. For some it’s a humanity that has lost its spark, and for others it’s a world that doesn’t allow them to be themselves. In some the pressure is external, a threat or invasion, and in others it’s the seeming-injustice of chance. Whatever the characters and whatever the stories, though, the pieces all examine what it means to be discontent, to be angry and hurting. To want change. And the stories differ widely in how that hope is portrayed, and how close the characters are allowed to come to it, but all the pieces are certainly interesting, and it makes for a fascinating issue I should just review already.

Art by Reiko Murakami