And it’s time for the last of my four-part look at the wonderful Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales from a World that Wouldn’t Die, edited by dave ring and published by Neon Hemlock. The anthology so far has been incredibly, starting strong and having a lot of fun before in the third quarter dipping into a bit more tragic and heavy elements. And while those aren’t entirely gone, the home stretch builds back up, focusing on healing, on recovery, on love, and on community. On the power of queer people helping queer people survive, and in that survival making sure that no apocalypse, no end of the world, is stronger than the connections we make with each other. There’s so many amazing works, and I’ll get right to reviewing them!
November brings a new issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, with one short story, two novelettes, and one poem. The pieces are well in line with the publication’s title, featuring fantastical daring do, adventures of the magical variety, and a touch of grimness to keep things from getting too boisterous. The works look at people trying to avoid violence by and large, all pulled in all the same, to cycles of death and revenge, all trying to end up on the winning side, many having to be content with a sort of balancing act. There’s a lot of worlds to discover and characters to follow, so without further delay, let’s get to the reviews!
Oops! It has been a while since the last original story from Terraform, so when one dropped at the very end of October, I missed covering it. Well, I’m making up for it now. And while Halloween might be come and gone, this story definitely keeps the blood-chilling atmosphere of the season alive and well. Looking at contagion, at bodies in revolt, and at the failure of humans to regulate and moderate themselves, to deadly and disastrous effect. It’s grim, and it’s rather terrifying, and I’ll get right to my review!
November brings an interesting piece of historical fiction to GigaNotoSaurus. And I say historical fiction but it’s probably in the ways the story diverges from history that it meets its speculative element. Whatever the case, it finds a man sent to judge a situation, and to diffuse it. And those things aren’t always so close together, can’t always go hand in hand. Sometimes to keep the peace, the judgment has to sort of take a back seat, or at least has to fit itself to the moment. To the needs of a moment when there’s a lot more at stake than who might be paying a fine or going to prison. To the review!
The November Uncanny Magazine brings three short stories and three poems to make for a full issue full of advanced technology, ancient incest, and some monsters for good measure. The fiction leans heavily into science fiction, providing three tales of super science and the very quiet, mundane, intimate things that go into big, dramatic, shattering breakthroughs in physics and AI. These are wrenching stories of people struggling and sometimes failing to reach for what they know is right, and the aftermaths that come when the decisions have been made and people have to live with what comes next. It’s an emotional and wonderfully imagined set of stories and poems, and I’ll get right to the reviews!
November opens with two short stories and two poems at Strange Horizons. For the fiction, the sense of apocalypse is strong, as is the focus on relationships. That even as the world is dying, people still hold to each other, to those who give them comfort, even if that comfort is…complicated. The works mix the heavy approach of destruction with the warmth of people reaching out in that space for love, for understanding, whatever else follows. The poetry is also amazing, and together it provides a fabulous one-two punch of SFF goodness. To the reviews!
Seven new stories from Clarkesworld weave a lot around sentience. Intelligence. Beings who are not human. Or not quite. Robots, AI, stars, even altered humans--the stories explore how these beings relate to the people who created them, or imprisoned them, or both. Some find ways to break free. Some find ways to cooperation. Some find ways to domination. Whatever the case, the issue hits on these ideas again and again, building up a rather thematically tight issue that looks at what it means to be alive and sentient, and explores how humans treat those they might not want to recognize as fully “people.” To the reviews!
