Quick Sips - Tor dot com May 2020

Art by Max Loeffler

2020 continues to be a rather busy one for Tor dot com, and May is no exception, with three new short stories and a novelette that's almost a novella. The pieces take on some interesting SFF contents, from the superpowered world of Wild Cards to trying to bring back extinct animals to wars that span planets and galaxies. They feature characters mostly just trying to do their jobs, and finding that those jobs are complicated by the need to please bosses who can be at times a bit authoritarian, and a bit unreasonable. But the job still needs doing, and these works find ways to keep that moving and tense. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - PodCastle #625 & 627

PodCastle’s May originals bring an interesting look at romantic relationships and loss. Both deal with characters who have lost and who are hurting. People who find it difficult to be vulnerable, though for very different reasons. One has been hurt too badly, betrayed too intimately, for trust to come easy. The other is physically incapable of being vulnerable because...well, because they’re dead, and beyond that. Kind of. Sort of. What remains for both characters, though, is the need to move on. To maybe heal and to maybe heal by helping others to heal. By holding to love and trying to express something fragile and wonderful and magic. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Fireside Magazine #79

Art by David Plunkert

So first thing first, these reviews are no longer neatly meeting up with the issues as listed on the Fireside Magazine site. I first noticed that last month, where there were more stories in the issue than were released on the website. The spill-over from last issue appears in this issue, and so I'm assuming that the spill-over this issue will appear next issue, and on until it's all caught up. Just an FYI, but I go off the online releases typically when reviewing Fireside so that I can get approximate word counts. So. The good news is that the fiction is still sharp and punchy, the stories short enough to be very quick reads but still hitting above their weight. There are some fun pieces and some harrowing ones, and all in all it's another wonderful month from the publication. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 05/18/2020 & 05/25/2020

Strange Horizons closes out May with its regular number of fiction and poetry offerings, and they are as wonderful as they are challenging. The poetry takes on some very difficult content, from the fear and violence people react to snakes with to the harrowing experiences on both ends of an alien abduction. The fiction doesn't offer any lighter revelations, keeping things heavy and intimate, looking at the way that violence and toxicity can take hold and manifest in something truly terrifying. Let's get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #304

Art by Anton Ninov

It’s another wonderfully paired issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies with two tales of people doing their best to save their loves. To risk deals with fairies and gods to try and win back a person who has fallen into darkness, who is in danger of losing themselves to death and enchantment. And in both cases the characters find that there is a way forward, a way back, as long as they hold to their love, as long as they are willing to keep reaching. This might seem to put a rather uneven balance to the relationships revealed, where one person has to do more of the emotional labor, but I think it’s a bit more about how sometimes someone does need to be saved, and how that act can be both selfless and selfish, both freeing and bonding. It’s a beautiful issue, and I’ll get right to my reviews!

Quick Sips - Nightmare #92

Art by Alexandra Petruk / Adobe Stock Images

There are two new speculative horror stories in this month's Nightmare Magazine, both of them in some ways dealing with rooms. It's the natures of the rooms that make them both interesting and terrifying, building off of traditions in horror that stretch far back into fable and myth. The pieces are visceral, revealing women who have been deeply hurt by intimate partner abuse, who have survived despite the crushing weight of it and the lack of support they've gotten, and they both move in very different directions around their themes. As an added bit of news from the publication, it sounds like an editorial shift is on the horizon, with Wendy Wagner taking over editorial duties in 2021 while John Joseph Adams So yeah, let's get right to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Diabolical Plots #63

Art by Joey Jordan

May brings two new stories to Diabolical Plots, and they're an interesting mix of feels and genres. The first work is a contemporary fantasy exploring abuse and grief, while the second is, well, a second world fantasy about revolution...and skateboarding. Both works find characters dealing with rather oppressive situations, though, and abuses that are intimate and pervasive. Both deal with the traumas of having to live in those situations, and the violence often required to get out of them, to avoid being destroyed. They aren't overly happy tales, but they are both moving and careful and, in many ways, hopeful. 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 - Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #44

Art by Rengin Tumer

There’s a new Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and this issue brings three short stories (two just shy of novelettes) and two poems. Each of them explores a different world, even if those worlds are also kind of our own. They also deal a lot with religion, with faith in the face of prejudice and the threat of violence. The characters are caught at times between what they’ve been taught or are expected to believe and the reality that they observe. But as the publication promises, these are largely fantasy stories that deal with heroics, or perhaps anti-heroics, as people fight, love, and make sweet art amidst danger, intrigue, and betrayal. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 05/04/2020 & 05/11/2020

Art by Nina Satie

May opens Strange Horizons with two new issues including (among a bunch of nonfiction I definitely recommend you check out) two new short stories and two new poems. The work, as might be obvious, is full of strangeness, with eateries serving magical fare, children on Mars making their own entertainment, and poetry that challenges and delights. The pieces are often heavy but carry a certain whimsy as well, that weaves into the hardships and injustices and tastes a bit like hope, a bit like heartbreak. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #303

Art by Flavio Bolla

It’s a new nicely paired issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies to look at, with two new short stories that both lean a bit on the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Not in ways that might seem obvious, either, both of the stories wandering rather far afield when building their versions of events. One is fairly faithful but extends far beyond that story, to the magical repercussions of what happened. The other completely changes things, creating an entirely new world of myth and magic for the action to play out in, and ditching a girl bringing her grandmother a basket of goodies to a new mother bringing home her child through a moonlit wood. Both stories are filled with darkness, external and internal, and both feature women trying to reach safety through a deadly dangerous situation. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #164

Art by Thomas Chamberlain-Keen

Clarkesworld comes with three short stories and three novelettes this month, which is about average for the publication but does mean a heck of a lot to cover. Luckily the works are interesting and varied, offering up pretty much entirely science fictional visions of futures that revolve around loss and destruction. Invasion and exploitation. And characters trying to get by, trying to survive, and trying to save the world. It’s a neat mix of near future, far future, humor, apocalyptic, and giant robot stories that hopefully has something for every fan of the genre. So let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Flash Fiction Online May 2020

Flash Fiction Online is celebrating Mother’s Day with an issue full of SFF stories dealing with motherhood. Now, not all of them are precisely happy, but they show the many ways that mothers give for their children, and sometimes how those children give in return. The pieces move from near future science fiction to dark contemporary fantasy, all of them dealing in some ways with sacrifice and care. In each, there is a person who is sick or otherwise trapped, and it’s down to their family to try and free them, or at least be there with them to make what’s happening a bit more bearable. There’s a mix of light and shadow, hope and grimness, and it’s a great way to complicate and interrogate a topical holiday! To the reviews!

Quick Sips - GigaNotoSaurus May 2020

May brings a new short story to GigaNotoSaurus, and while that’s on the short side where the publication is concerned, the story brings ideas and themes more than big enough to make up for it. This is an ambitiously built world, one where hair is magic, and where most people live in fear of that fact because of how easy it is to get a hold of someone’s hair...and use it against them. From there the story branches out, building mystery and danger and a budding friendship that might make the difference between tragedy and triumph. Let’s get to the review!

Quick Sips - The Dark #60

Art by denissimonov

The two original stories in the May The Dark Magazine have some pretty heavy content warnings to them (perhaps to be expected given the publication). They both also find women dealing with abusive relationships and having to navigate their own shame and feelings of culpability for their pain and harassment, their oppression and fear. The situations they find themselves in are wrenching, dangerous, and dehumanizing, and the women are left having to make some impossible decisions. Accept the course that the men around them have laid out, even when it contains their own annihilation...or stand against them, and take whatever power is possible to smash the walls threatening to box them in. It’s not an easy month of stories, but it’s some moving and powerful horror. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Lightspeed #110

Art by Galen Dara

I kick off my May reviews with this look at Lightspeed, where again it's all short stories. And it marks a return to a few ongoing projects, both in the form of a new work set in the same universe as Ada Hoffmann's The Outside, as well as a new excerpt from Alex Weinstein's Lost Travelers' Tour Guide. Throw in a pair of wholly original stories that deal with romance and love amidst fear, uncertainty, and shame, and it makes for a very interesting issue, one grounded very much in love and communication, and the fragile lines between people. There are some stunning visuals and deep character moments, and if you don't believe me yet let's get to the reviews!