Quick Sips - Uncanny #16 [June stuff]

Well it’s another busy month at Uncanny Magazine, with three original stories, two poems, and five nonfiction pieces. I was very tempted to just skip the nonfiction, I will admit, because of time concerns, but once I saw it was about Star Trek, food, resistance, and revolution, I kinda had to look at it more in depth. What’s here this month has a great focus on self-determination and strength and stories. About the ways that we write ourselves out of struggles in order to relieve the burden of having to act and the ways that we need to counter that. The stories focus on people being confronted with narratives that don’t leave room for them, where they are often ignored or marginalized, and how they seek to recenter and decolonize these stories to present a more just and more complete vision of the world. And the pieces all do this by subverting tropes and familiar structures and ideas to present wholly new and revolutionary messages. Time travel is revealed as more crutch than cure. Vampirism takes on wholly new levels when crossed with gender and transition. Narrative structure and voice itself is blurred as character and author and reader meet. It’s a lovely collection of works and an amazing call to arms for SFF readers who want to act and fight back against what perhaps is becoming the darkest timeline. So yeah, review time!

Art by Galen Dara

Quick Sips - Uncanny #6 (October Stuff)

In a month that is dominated by the spooky, the dark, Uncanny Magazine presents a nice array of stories, poetry, and nonfiction that are...reaching. Not light, perhaps, but dense rather than dark, yearning rather than scary. Most of the works have a delicious way of not offering closure, not really offering answers. The endings are all lingering promises. Even the nonfiction doesn't offer a solution to everything, more highlights a problem and a possible direction to go and allows the reader to follow onward, to make the steps themself. It makes for a lovely issue that I should just get to reviewing.

Art by Matthew Dow Smith