Quick Sips - Uncanny #35 [August stuff]

Art by Kirbi Fagan

It’s a fairly big month from Uncanny Magazine in terms of words, with two short stories and one novelette that’s almost a novella. Plus two poems! The works trace ideas of various courts--pre-Revolutionary France, the courts of angels, and the courts of seasons and their rulers. Amidst these structures, characters deal with the rules, the personalities, and the dangers of those spaces. There’s a sense of wealth, of power...and of loss, as the characters also must face those courts crumbling or breaking in some ways. And it’s a wonderful bunch of works that I’ll get right to reviewing!

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #269

Art by Tyler Edlin

The latest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies has a lot to do with transformations, with the threat of revenge, and with the need for freedom. It finds characters who are caught in circumstances of waiting to be punished. To be found out. And trying to find a way free of the things hanging over them. Now, some of those things are no fault of their own and some of them...well, the characters aren't always quite so innocent. But the piece looks at freedom and who can hope for it, and what it might cost. The stories deal with the weight of revenge and the feelings that can come when that weight is lifted and set down. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Fantasy Scroll #9

Well October is really trying to kill me, though perhaps with kindness if the new issue of Fantasy Scroll Magazine is anything to go by. The publication normally puts out a pretty stacked ToC, but this issue has not a single reprint so far as I can tell, which means nine original short stories (only one of them flash) and a graphic story. I'd mind more if everything wasn't so good, once again proving that Fantasy Scroll knows how to satisfy regardless of speculative genre. Horror makes a bit more of a statement this month, perhaps because the issue releases so close to Halloween, but otherwise there is just about everything a person could ask for, from swashbuckling fantasy adventures to more ponderous and emotionally devastating science fiction. So without further ado, to the reviews!

Art by Jessica Tung Chi