Quick Sips - Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2019

Good news! Strange Horizons has successfully funded for 2020! That means more excellent prose, poetry, artwork, and nonfiction! Wooo! As part of that celebration, they’ve released a special fund drive issue, including two short stories, four poems(!), and some special nonfiction as well. It’s all very much worth checking out, but I’m sticking to the fiction and poetry today, which shines with complex relationships, a few tarot complications, and a whole lot of longing and sex and resilience and family. If you want to know the kind of thing Strange Horizons puts out, this is a great taste! As an added aside, this marks a milestone for me, as well, because with these reviews I’m over 4000 here at Quick Sip Reviews since I began a bit over 4.5 years ago! Thank you all to everyone for making that possible (more to come on that tomorrow)! For now, let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Tor dot com November 2018

Art by Rovina Cai

Well it turns out it's a rather light month from Tor's short fiction, with only a single novelette on offer for November. Luckily for readers, it's a very good one, exploring a magical linguistic academia with shitty advisers, entrenched sexism, and a whole lot of bullshit put up to hamper innovative research in favor of traditional lines of inquiry. The main characters are queer and bring to their studies an entirely new way of approaching the work, in part because it's work that's never cared about including people like them in an official sense. And it shows them hitting the limits of what's expected of them and then blowing past those barriers. So yeah, to the review!

Quick Sips - Tor.com June 2015

Tor has actually been merciful this month! There was no very long story out a day or two before the end of the month. Actually, there are only three original stories this month, though each are on the long side, including one novella. But the quality of the work, which is what Tor is known for, is still high. These story all do excellent jobs with their world building, though in three very very different ways. The first sets things up with video game logic and action, the second leaning on history with some interesting embellishes, and the last gives a fully-realized future on a galactic scale. So let's get to exploring some brave new worlds!

Art by Kathleen Jennings