Five Tuesdays make for a busy April with Fireside Magazine, which released five short stories and a poem this month. The piece run the gamut of emotions, from slow and dark to fast and violent, from fun and sweet to numb and hurt. The connective tissue of the issue seems to me to have more to do with cycles, with systems and how they produce justice or injustice, depending on how they are structured. And what people do when faced with these systems. How they play into them. How they resist them. How they try to ignore them. And by and large the stories are challenging, presenting readers with visions they might wish to look away from, but which we all should see, and examine, and complicate. To the reviews!
Uncanny Magazine lands with four original stories and two poems in its February release. And throughout the works the theme I think I feel plays through is visibility. Is release. In most of the pieces, there are characters who are struggling against a system, against a world and culture, that has erased them. That has covered up uncomfortable pasts. That have demanded that those who are different censor themselves and constrain themselves so as not to offend the dominant. And the stories explore how the characters push back against that, how they are seen, how they are freed. In some, that freedom comes with a heavy price, with the destruction of something, maybe everything. And yet the stories seem to ask if that destruction might actually be necessary, to wipe away the corruption and the abuse. To unravel the mess of hurt and fear and exploitation. It’s an issue that covers science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and does a great job of giving fans of SFF a lot to experience. To the reviews!
Strange Horizons brings a pair of stories and a pair of poems to its early November offerings—pieces that swirl around growing up, danger, and being trapped. These stories feature women trying to navigate waters where they're not really protected from abuse or damage, where they are expected to act as lifeguards of their own bodies but are also essentially stripped of any ability or power to act when bad things happen. A lifeguard without the ability to swim or a floatation device isn't so much a lifeguard any more so much as a witness to drowning. The pieces show how abuse and vulnerability is passed down while keeping a taste of magic alive, in all its beauty and darkness, in all its complexity and tension. It's a lovely two weeks of content, and it's time to get to the reviews!
