Quick Sips - Breathe Fiyah

Art by Eli Minaya

A collaboration between Tor and Fiyah Magazine, this special Breathe Fiyah issue features eight short stories (entirely flash fiction) by Black writers exploring race, oppression, resistance, and revolution through a speculative lens. The stories are largely (though not completely) contemporary, both fantasy and science fiction (with some horror elements thrown in as well at times), and they create a framework, one that ends up resembling perhaps a structure of kindling. Each piece a small addition that, when put together and struck, sets off a blaze. The stories are about resisting, about surviving a world that is actively trying to erase, exploit, and exterminate you. And the works do indeed spark and smolder, ending with a bang that, hopefully, will shake things up, weakening the racist and white supremacist structures that marginalize Black writers. To the reviews!

THE SIPPY AWARDS 2019! The "Time to Run Some Red Lights" Sippy for Excellent Action!!! in SFF

If you were around for the first Fast and the Furious movie, you might remember the news articles about how people coming out of the movie were more likely to make risky driving decisions. Not that they were just copying what they saw in the movie, but that it left them amped! Well, rounding out my categories that are primarily about an emotional response (horror=pain, ugly-cry=pain), this category is all about EXCITEMENT! FUCK YEAH!!!! So hold onto your butts and get ready for the...

“Time to Run Some Red Lights” Sippy Awards 

for Excellent Action! in Short SFF

As I said yesterday, I'm a bit of an emotive reader. Which means when a story hurts, it hurts. And when a story scares, it scares. But it also means when a story pumps it up, it makes me want to punch the sun in a mech suit the size of a planet! You know, like a normal person. Heh. But I love stories that really make me want to stand up, to run, to arrive somewhere breathless, alive. And these stories do just that, featuring characters fighting with all they have against what seems like an overwhelming situation. A threat to destroy their city, their world; a tournament where dreams are made or broken; an attempt by the actual devil to take the one person in the world you kinda tolerate--these are stories with some high stakes and some intense action.

As for where they came from...kinda all over. From the sadly-on-hiatus Apex Magazine, and from the always defiant Fireside Magazine. From Fiyah, from Tor, from GigaNotoSaurus (which came back from a bit of a hiatus this year). These are often sources for stories that get the blood pumping, the mind racing, the muscles twitchy and electric. So let's get to the awards already!!!

Quick Sips - Fiyah Literary Magazine #10: Hair

Art by Olivia Stephens

A new issue of Fiyah Literary Magazine brings out four new stories and three new poems, all exploring the theme of Hair. It’s a complicated theme, one that grows out of the ways that black hair has been politicized and policed. But like all hair it’s also a source of identity, expression, and pride. The works explore how hair brings people together, through magic and through care, through defiance and through rebellion. How people suffer when they are dehumanized by those who want to control their hair, restrict and legislate their hair. The works run from contemporary fantasy to second world heroics, and feature characters very much battling against systems of oppression trying to define what beauty, value, and power should be when it comes to hair. To the reviews!