Quick Sips - Tor dot com December 2019

Art by Audrey Benjaminsen

I'm actually surprised that Tor had two stories out in December, as in at least some years past they've taken the month largely off. Not that I'm complaining. The two stories here are interesting and find people coming up against some strange and perhaps-unexplainable things. One woman is facing a broken mirror that has effected all of time, that has rewritten reality itself. Another finds herself working for a government she knows better than to trust in a strange place that will push her to her physical and mental limits. Both deal with alternate realities, with dimensions, and both are haunting and cold, well suited for the winter. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Lightspeed #113

Art by Grandfailure / Fotolia

It’s a rather wrenching bunch of stories at Lightspeed this month, focusing on relationships, from a long term romance on the verge of collapse to one just beginning, from a prince finding her place in the world to a sentient building doing likewise. There are tragedies that run throughout each, death and traumatic injuries, settings full of corruption and stagnation, magic that doesn’t seem to bring justice and justice that loses sight of history. But there’s hope to some of them, as well. That someone out there is the narrative that will fit the characters, and that maybe they’ll be able to defy convention and the pressure of expectation to find what works for them. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Terraform November 2018

Three short stories anchor Terraform's releases in November, as well as a strange video thing on Cyber Monday that I won't be looking at. The fiction, though, looks at identity and disaster and, ultimately, isolation. In all of the stories, characters fight for their lives, or what of their lives they can have any control over. The worlds revealed are ones of narrowing futures, where technology or climate or a combination have made it so only the ultra rich have the freedom to do as they want. For everyone else, life is navigating the thin spaces left to them, trying (and mostly not succeeding) to save what they can to the creeping loss effecting the globe. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Terraform March 2018

Terraform is firing on all cylinders for March, bringing four original stories that reveal futures that…well, that we don’t really want to experience. That show the cost of injustice and conflict and prejudice and war. The stories feature characters who are trying to find ways to cope the various levels of corruption their worlds are riddled with. Some are more successful than others, but the message that becomes clear as the month’s works synergize is that there can be no good outcome from a terrible system. There can be no happy ending when the world is a nightmare. And that’s something to take to heart, that none are spared when the system is corrupt. Even when you’re sure you’ll be the exception. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #138

March brings four short stories and a new novella to Clarkesworld Magazine. Which means for the second month in a row, the publication is bringing an original novella. It certainly continues the trend of including longer works at online (primarily, for there is a print edition) venues. The stories overall are, well, rather dark. To me, they focus a lot on corrupt systems and how sometimes there’s no real fixing them all at once. How what often happens is that people live and die, are crushed and ground to powder, for a long time before a bad system starts to improve. Not that it can’t improve, but that for many vulnerable people it doesn’t improve fast enough. Which makes for a slew of often very difficult stories, but ones that do hold onto a hope that things will get better, even if we don’t all live to see it happen. To the reviews!

Art by Arthur Haas

Quick Sips - Tor dot com June 2017

It's just a bit of a short month for Tor dot com in June, with three original stories offering a nice variety of science fiction and fantasy and horror. The stories examine the damage left behind by abuse of different sorts, whether corporate, societal, or achingly personal. The stories look at loss—of freedom, of life, of security, and show how transformation is possible, how resistance is possible. In all of these stories I see characters who don't know quite what comes next, but who find that they might have access to a power that they didn't have before. That suddenly they are able to change something, even if it's only their own feathers. But it's a great mix of stories and I'll get to reviewing!

Art by Jon Foster

Quick Sips - Terraform February 2017

It's something of a short month from Motherboard's Terraform, though there's still quite a bit to see and experience. It's no surprise that with things the way they are that the first story is about immigration and acceptability and beauty. About how we value people and how we exploit people. About how the world as we're organizing it blames victims and glories tyrants. A bit more of a surprise is the story on the (possible) apocalyptic future of porn. Which...well, Terraform has always had something of an eye on the future of sex, and why should the future of self-sex be excluded? And then a new chapter in the Highwayman series rounds things out. All in all, it's a month of very different pieces unified by a common disillusioned gaze at the future. So yeah, to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Uncanny #12 (October Stuff)

This month's offerings from Uncanny Magazine bring a bit of everything. Two original fiction pieces, two poems, and two works of nonfiction covering fairy tales and AI insurrections and ghosts and desires and distorted realities and lineages of SFF. The fiction is gripping and challenging, difficult and unflinching. The poetry is moving and all about desire and nostalgia and looking back. And the nonfiction is about perception and how it can be changed, either in the brain or by those around you, and how that can effect the inroads to SFF. It's a full month and a nice balance of the strange, the heartbreaking, and the affirming. So yeah, time to review! 

Art by Kirbi Fagan

Quick Sips - Uncanny #5 (July Stuff)

Back again to review this month's offering from Uncanny Magazine, which once more has a nice mix of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. I must say, the more I read the publication the more I feel I get the title, get the vision that unites it. I really dislike that people would see a publication like Uncanny and not see a unified whole. That some people might say "Oh, look, they publish different genres which means there can be NO other way to organize a magazine" is...disappointing to me. Because I do see that Uncanny really does stick to the idea of the Uncanny, of the unexplained and the magical, of the living metaphor, of the slightly twist on the expected. The stories are indeed uncanny, unable to be easily categorized, and I quite like them for that. Anyway, I should probably stop rambling and get to the stories. Onward!

Art by Antonio Javier Caparo