Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 07/16/2018 & 07/23/2018

There’s two poems and a short story across these two issues of Strange Horizons. And really, these pieces are very much about revisiting the past. They feature characters and narrators who find themselves revisiting stories and ideas, traditions and actions, in order to find new ways to live and move forward. Because for each of them, retreating into the past and the possible comforts there doesn’t really work. The comforts are hollow, or don’t fit, or can’t be reached. And so they are pushed to make their way forward, into a situation they might not feel ready for. And they meet these challenges with various levels of eagerness, from grim resolve to sad acceptance. So let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Glittership March 2018 [er...part 2]

Okay so I jumped the gun a bit on the March Glittership offerings. Instead of one original story and three reprints, there were an additional two original stories (one very very short) and an original poem as well. Which means that there’s enough for me to do a second review just for the ones I missed. And it’s a wonderful collection of Queer SFF, with a breath of weird and a sense of quiet longing. In many of the pieces, at least, we find characters who find value in a quest that might never really be over. Who realize that the quality of a journey is much more often about who you’re with and what you’re doing than it is about where you’re going. So let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 06/27/2016, 07/04/2016, & 07/11/2016

It's probably no real surprise that in the pieces for the first half of Strange Horizon's Our Queer Planet there is a sense of longing. A hunger. To see and be seen, to comfort and be comforted. To reach out and act on desires that are dangerous, to fly in the face of convention and doubt. These stories and poems and works of nonfiction are affirming and powerful. Beautiful and refined and raw and bleeding and staunched and just so good. These are stories that I as a reader am hungry for, poems that I want to see more of, nonfiction that helps me both think about my reading and writing and also about my queerness. There's so much good here and I'm going to get to those reviews! 

Art by Alex Araiza

Quick Sips - Lackington's #7 - Skins

Seven stories make the latest issue of Lackington's a rather weighty experience, especially with how each challenges and provokes, providing visions tinged with equal parts darkness and hope. Which, of course, means that I quite enjoyed myself while reading, exploring some of the depths the stories had to offer. The theme this issue was Skins, and I think most of the stories do make good use of the idea, the theme. Many feature changing skins, changing form, and it's a powerful metaphor and image. So let's get to the reviews!

Art by Kat Weaver