Quick Sips - Fireside Magazine #64

Art by Ashanti Fortson

Four stories and a poem make February a rather full month for Fireside Magazine. Though most of the fiction is fairly short, the pieces end up packing a rather palpable emotional punch, from a story about sentient spaceships to a piece about gods and grandmothers to a guide to surviving on Mars. The longest piece, too, is a great exploration of the magical girl idea through a very new lens and split between different perspectives that have some disagreements on What Actually Happened. Throw in a poem full of history and hurt and hope and the issue is a strong one that shows just what makes short SFF so wonderful. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Uncanny #24 Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! [October Fiction]

It’s the second month of Uncanny Magazine’s Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! As before, I’m breaking October’s offerings into two parts, the fiction and the poetry, and starting out with the six new stories exploring futures near and far. This month’s pieces definitely focus on some grim realities—hospitals and universities and families and cities where disabled people are not exactly the priority, or at least not in the ways they want. The stories look at characters trapped by circumstance and (largely) by tragedy, brought to a crisis because their situation is getting worse and worse. And in each case, they must make decisions either to sit down and be quiet or to fight back, to try to follow their own hearts. The works are often dark, often difficult, but ultimately I feel reaching for healing and for peace, for a space that the characters can have as their own, which is much more about freedom than confinement. To the reviews!

Art by Likhain

Quick Sips - Fireside Fiction November 2017

The content continues to pour out from Fireside Fiction, with three flash fiction pieces, a short story, and two more chapters of the serial novella they've been releasing. It's a lot to take in, from pieces that feature a lot of fun but sneak in some incredibly profound and stilling moments as well. These are stories that capture a feeling of people struggling against injustices, against the limitations of their realities, against forces that want to keep people still and controlled. And it's about rebellion and the cost of rebellion. But the reward as well. Some of the pieces feature characters able to fight back, to win openly against injustice. Others must accept a more measured gain, a more incremental victory. And others still find that their victory is tenuous and might be taken from them, leaving them voiceless and abandoned. It's a neat mix of SFF stories, so let's get to the reviews!

Art by Max Cole-Takanikos