Quick Sips - Anathema #10 [part 1]

Art by Cindy Fan

There’s a new issue of Anathema out and for my sake I’m breaking it up into two parts, the first covering the first three stories and poem. The work is stunning, building broken worlds and situations populated by people who have lost and who are in the process of losing. Who are desperate for relief, for comfort, for understanding, and who don’t really get that right away. Who have to wait for it. These are some fairly grim stories, but nothing without a bit of hope to them, a bit of light and warmth. It might not be enough. It might not always sustain. But for most of the characters there is the possibility, the promise, that it might grow into something more, larger--that it will give them something like freedom. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Tor dot com April 2020

Art by Ashley Mackenzie

So I'm used to Tor dot com releasing up to four stories a month, which means this month's six stories represent something of a surge in fiction. Perhaps it's that the venue knows that more people are home right now, and so might be more available to read some great fiction. Whatever the reason, I'm glad, as the stories are a great mix of science fiction and fantasy, featuring portals inside little free libraries, psychic investigators battling malevolent ghost...fish, and a whole cartography of a new and strange world...that's really not all that strange at all. The works are careful and full of quiet longing and intense action, and I'll get right to reviewing this cornucopia of SFF!

Quick Sips - Uncanny #28 [May stuff]

Art by Galen Dara

Given that May contains Mothers’ Day, it’s perhaps rather fitting that a lot of the most recent Uncanny Magazine features mothers in SFF. At the very least, the issue takes a keen look at parenting, loss, trauma, and what healing can look like. The stories show characters dealing with their feelings about their parents, about their mothers, their fathers, their sons. About what to risk, and how to put those relationships in context with a larger identity and world. And it’s a dazzling collection of works, at turns heartbreaking and terrifying and fun, and always gorgeously rendered. There’s quite a bit to get to, though, so I’ll get right to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #146

Art by Helen Ilnytska

A single novelette and four short stories make for a nicely balanced month at Clarkesworld, where the theme as I can find it is ghosts and hauntings. In very different ways, the characters of these stories are being haunted. By guilt and by the past. By their mistakes and by the memories they leave behind. These are stories of people being confronted with the ways their paths differ from how they hoped. Disaster looms. And yet most of them are able to snatch back from the edge of the abyss something to help them move forward and not fall in. It’s an interesting bunch of stories, so let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #132

September brings an interesting mix of stories to Clarkesworld, exploring love and coupling, as well as space and time and sentience. The stories range from cerebral and strange to fun and witty to achingly hopeful and human. There are people who are birds, bots who are heroes, planets who are people, people who are machines, and just people being people, with all their flaws but also all the grace and power to save the world. It's never really a surprise to note that the stories are all science fiction, with perhaps a little hint at sci-fantasy but mostly these are stories that imagine a future where life can be different, and some futures where, for all life could be different, it hasn't really changed. So yeah, let's get to the reviews!

Art by Vladimir Manyukhin

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #128

The stories in this May issue of Clarkesworld all seem to circle around nature and art and technology, drawing the lines of where humanity’s place in the natural world is. And it shows the ways that humans seek to reach beyond the known and comfortable, how people are constantly striving to do more and be more. For some that might mean rewriting their genetic code, and for others it might just mean chilling in a giant floating whale. Whatever floats your boat. But these are stories that mix moments of intense action and terror with softer moments of study, introspection, and thought. They’re rather contemplative stories, and as such deserve some time and consideration. So yeah, to the reviews!

Art by Julie Dillon

Quick Sips - Uncanny #15 [April stuff]

It’s another full month of SFF from Uncanny, and another month full of pieces that look rather specifically at resistance. At least, the three nonfiction pieces all revolve around the idea of resistance and how SFF can be an invaluable tool to bridge between cultures, people, and experiences. There’s a bit of a surprise novella in among the fiction, paired with a flash work, and both look at the profound impact that loss can have, that disaster can have, on a person and their life. How it can make an ambivalent person dedicated. How it can make a peaceful person a killer. And the people it equally beautiful, exploring the boundaries between religion and consent, history and human folly. It’s a well rounded issue, and I’m going to get right to the reviews!

Art by Julie Dillon

Quick Sips - Glittership February 2017

It's my second month of reviewing Glittership and February brings a pair of original stories that mix caution with wild abandon, curiosity with extinctions. The tones of the stories are quite different, the first piece fun and free and the second more tinged with grief and a suffocating anticipation. And where the first story looks a future where people bound forward with a rush of enthusiasm, the second story holds back, the whole world wincing as people wait for the next shoe to drop. Both stories, though, capture a bit of what makes humanity interesting. Our resolve in the face of adversity, yes, but also our creativity, our curiosity, and our passion. And both stories show that the human spirit resists cages, and yearns to find people to connect to, new adventures to experience. So let's get to the reviews! 

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 01/02/2017 & 01/09/2017

It's the first two issues of the new year and Strange Horizons has certainly kicked things off with a bang, providing two stories and two poems that capture the strange, the nebulous, and the mythic. The stories especially are told with a scarcity of dialogue and more the feel of fairy tales, dark and twisting reflections of our world. And all of the pieces take an interesting look at form and style, pushing the boundaries in their scope and their execution. These are stories that certainly live up to the Strange in Strange Horizons and challenge even as they subvert. And over and on top of all of that, they are also beautiful, lyrical SFF visions that I'm just going to review already! 

THE SIPPY AWARDS 2016! The "There's Something in My Eye" Sippy for Excellent Making Me Ugly-Cry in Short SFF

Welcome back to the Second Annual Sippy Awards! The short SFF awards that no one asked for is here again because I said so, dammit! I've shipped my favorite SFF relationships. I've kept the lights on for my favorite SFF horror. So now it's time to examine yet another dimension of SFF short fiction.

Okay so yes, as a reviewer I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. Part of the joy of engaging with stories is being effected by them. Is following where they lead, intellectually and emotionally. So for me stories that can move to tears are incredibly valuable. They hit and they hit hard. They draw blood.

They also inspire. Each of these stories can be a lesson in empathy. In really trying to understand what the characters are going through. Their grief and their loss and, through it all, their hope. More than anything else, it's the hope that gets me, that moves me, that breaks me and put me back together again. There is despair, yes, and pain. Sometimes far too much pain. Some of these stories are bleak. But none of them are without hope. And so while they all make me a large puddle of feels, when I solidify again I am the stronger for it. And that's why I love these stories, and why I can say without shame that these are the stories that made me cry the most in 2016. Yes, it's time for…

The "There's Something in My Eye" Sippy 

for Excellent Making Me Ugly-Cry in Short SFF

Quick Sips - Uncanny #12 (September Stuff)

What can I say about the September content from Uncanny that will convince you enough to go out and read it now? Star Trek nonfiction? There are two and they are amazing and I would love this month's offerings for that alone but there's also three pieces of fiction that delve into relationships and love and yearning and dysfunction and are definitely worth checking out and there is a poem that has left me desperate for a flavor I've never know, a food that I can almost taste and it is so good. Seriously, everything is good this month and this is just the thing for people looking for some great SFF fiction, poetry, and nonfiction! To the reviews!

Art by Kirbi Fagan

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 07/18/2016 & 07/25/2016

I think Strange Horizons is trying to kill my feels with Our Queer Planet, which keeps right on rolling along with double the poetry, double the nonfiction, and some excellent, amazing fiction. Seriously, I'm pretty sure these works have reduced me to a small puddle of feels that has sunk into the earth, become one with the stone, and then risen as some sort of Geodude of resolve. AND GEODUDES DON'T CRY! <breaks down weeping> Okay, I might not have recovered so well as I implied. But keep a box of tissues nearby and prepare for some reviews!

Art by Slimm Fabert

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #114

Spring might be in the air, but at Clarkesworld this month things aren't quite jubilantly hopeful. Not that the stories are incredibly gloomy, but there is a certain loneliness to the stories this month. A longing and a loss and an isolation that is cut a bit by family and care, but often the losses in these stories are not ones that are recovered or recovered from. The characters in these stories are all alone and trying to figure out what to do with that, trying to figure out how to go on. Their answers are all different, all interesting, and all worth checking out. To the reviews!
 

Art by Waldemar Kazak