Quick Sips - Lightspeed #111

Art by Grandfailure / Fotolia

The stories in the August issue of Lightspeed for me deal with sudden and huge changes. Moments when characters are confronted with things that force them to either suppress what they've seen or completely alter their way of seeing the world. Even so, their reactions are quite different. Some are left rather broken by the experience, while others just sort of shrug and get on with it. Some are pushed past a wall of trauma so that they can't seem to feel at all, while others find their lives changed and wonder at how it all went pear shaped. Whatever the case, the pieces look at ways that lives can change, at what is powerful enough to really impact a person. Maybe AI are more advanced you thought and your employer is lying to you. Maybe a woman shows up claiming to be your husband's daughter...but not yours. Maybe your whole village is destroyed by raiders. Or maybe you see something you shouldn't have. The stories bring a nice breadth of styles and stories, and I'll get right to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Lightspeed #84

The May issue of Lightspeed Magazine brings its share of strange journeys, showing characters transported from their familiar surroundings to...someplace else. People find themselves in the past, or in a painting, or in a different body, or in Heaven. These stories also very much deal with violence and consent. Most of them directly tackle themes that ooze violation, that show characters either taking people against their will or characters taken against their will and put somewhere they don't really want to be (though they might start off okay with that). The issue as a whole is a dark one, without an awful lot of hope (save for one story). By and large they map injustice, expose it some, but do not try to tear it down (again, save for the one story). It's a somewhat conflicting month of stories for me, too, so let's get to the reviews.

Art by Sam Schechter

Quick Sips - Apex #95

It’s a special guest-edited issue of Apex Magazine this month, with Maurice Broaddus in the driver’s seat. And people, poetry is back for this special occasion! It’s a full issue with four stories (three shorts and a novelette) and two poems. And the pieces all seem to center on narrative and voice. These are stories that look at how we pass along roles and expectations. How we prepare people to accept being abused and tortured, and how people still manage to find ways to stand up and take back their names and their voices and their skins. These are stories that center acts of violence and pain and fear, and seek for ways to bring justice and healing and hope back to people who have little reason to feel them. It’s a wonderful and challenging issue of dark fiction and poetry, and I’ll get right to the reviews!

Art by Angelique Shelley