Quick Sips - Nightmare #83

Art by Dominick / Adobe Stock Image

The stories from August’s Nightmare Magazine are all about growing up. About rituals that come at the dawn of adulthood, during those awkward teen years. When people aren’t children but don’t know how to be adults yet, and are still dealing with all their shit, with the expectations and realities that they don’t want or need but have to deal with anyway. The stories are dark but carry with them a certain beauty, as well, and a yearning for things to be better. Most of all, they carry with them the knowledge that things should be better, and that tradition is no reason to pass along abuse and damage generation after generation. It’s a great dark issue, and I’ll get right to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Lightspeed #110

Art by Sam Schechter

Two short stories and two novelettes make for a fairly substantive issue of Lightspeed, with a return to some old friends and a focus on tricksters of various sorts. For some this means literal trickster gods part of a great diaspora. In others this means people just trying to get by with a little graft and gumption. For others still it means meeting a vast and strange universe with energy and a true neutral outlook on morality. Whatever the case, these feature characters trying to make it in environments maybe not designed for them, but where they can make a home for themselves all the same. And before I give too much away, let's get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Uncanny #26 [January stuff]

Art by Julie Dillon

The new year brings a new month of short stories and poetry to Uncanny Magazine, with a fresh focus on broken worlds, battered families, and audacious hope. The pieces here outline pathways of resistance, of fighting back against oppression, of refusing to bend under the weight of damage that has been done to the world. It finds characters struggling against their expected roles and finding ways of living true to themselves even in situations where they can't fully escape the touch of injustice or the lingering scars of devastation. Through it all, though, they find moments of tenderness, compassion, and love, and armed with those they go out into a world they can make better. Not whole, perhaps. Not fixed. But soothed a bit under their careful administrations. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 01/15/2018 & 01/22/2018

The new year keeps rolling on with two more weeks from Strange Horizons, featuring a story and two poems. There’s a very nice global feel to the pieces overall, a sense of violence and flight, a yearning reach toward freedom and the difficulties and fragility of that reach. Featuring characters pushed to make choices that they hope will lead to something better, to something freer. But that don’t always. Not when the world is not organized to allow and encourage justice. Not when it acts as a giant mill wheel grinding people into money and power for those in charge. It’s a great two weeks of content that I’m going to get to reviewing...now!

Art by Sam Guay