Quick Sips - Uncanny #34 [June stuff]

Art by Julie Dillon

The June original content at Uncanny Magazine is out and features two short stories, one novelette, and two poems, as well as a wealth of excellent nonfiction that I won’t be covering here. The works showcase a variety of genres and styles, though there is a distinct fantastical lean to these works. There are superheroes and sirens, magical communing over dresses, ghosts and memories that go deeper than the skin, deeper than the consciousness. The works show people reaching for expression, trying to push back against the forces trying to silence and co-opt them. It’s a wonderful collection of SFF this month, and I’ll dive right into the reviews!

Quick Sips - Nightmare #88

Art by Ddraw / Fotolia

The two stories in the first Nightmare Magazine of the year both build up some nicely strange and haunting situations. Situations where there’s a mystery to solve. Who murdered a woman? What happens in the forest outside the city? Death is very present in these pieces, and the characters all have to decide what to do and how to approach that death. Will they run from it, or be driven to despair by it? Or will they face it, resolved and ready, and in forcing that confrontation, do something about it? These are some haunting reads, walking a line between triumph and destruction, and I’ll get right to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Terraform June 2019

There’s four new speculations on possible futures in June’s offerings from Terraform. As always, the pieces cover a range, unified by their focus on the future, mostly the near-future, and what might be in store for humanity. It’s…well, it’s not always bleak picture. Some, indeed, seem to focus on what might be considered accidents. Some happy, some not-so-happy, and all of them leading the characters in unexpected directions where they have to make a choice of what to do, where to go, and how to balance survival and living. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Lightspeed #104

Art by Reiko Murakami

A new year brings some familiar faces to Lightspeed Magazine, including two new stories from larger works that have appeared before at the publication. More than that, though, the stories have a certain focus on them, of growth and cycles and family. Of people in situations where they are questioning the givens in their lives—the rules and the goals that they’ve always thought they were working towards. For some of them, this moment of crisis and examination causes their outlooks and their motivations to crack. For others, though, it allows them to remember what they are doing and why they are doing it. The stories look at cycles, at the ways that people fall into patterns of harm and isolation, and how they can seek to break through that and forge into uncharted territory, toward a future made better by their efforts. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Shimmer #44 [August stuff]

Shimmer brings a pair of stories this month that deal with memory and time. In two very different ways, the stories feature characters looking back on their lives and what they’ve accomplished. For one of them, the view is a rather idyllic one, where their art has touched lives and continues to touch lives. Where they can feel the warmth they inspire in others. For the other, though, the reverse is true, and they are trapped in a sort of hell rather than a sort of heaven, transfixed by the gazes of those they have wronged or allowed to be wronged. The stories look at age and justice, on the rewards of what people do in life. And before I give too much away, let’s get to the reviews!

Art by Sandro Castelli

Quick Sips - Terraform November 2017

There are two new short stories from Terraform this month and they both offer very chilling glimpses of the future. These are stories that reveal incredibly suffocating settings, where people struggle to get even the freedom to breathe. Everything here has progressed technologically, but the stories ask what good technology is when legislation does not keep up to protect people against exploitation, against abuse from the systems of industry and government. The result is stories about people ground under the wheels of corporation and bureaucracy, forced to endure what they can't and then pushed further, into a realm where there is no safety, and no way out. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Terraform January 2016

So I've been reviewing Terraform for a year now, and I must say that I think it does a nice job of collecting science fiction stories that provide a mix of social commentary and tech idolatry. Not that these stories are especially different or necessarily more innovative than anything else being published in short SFF, but as a publication Terraform has a vision and does a good job of delivering on it. Not so much on sticking to its published guidelines (namely the under 2k bit), and I might personally not care for the practices of any place that doesn't actually respond to all submissions with at least a form rejection, but I'm here to look at the stories and I continue to find myself digging the directions these visions of the future take. So yeah, here's to another year of looking forward!