Black Gate

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1983. Cover by Thomas Kidd

“Downtown,” a short story by Thomas M. Disch

First published in F&SF, October 1983
Read the story in the original magazine here

A waitress notices a very strange customer: a woman who orders the same pancakes and wears the same pantsuit every day. She never gets to know the enigmatic customer, until one day, the stranger appears to collapse and die in her booth. The waitress flees from the restaurant, not wanting to deal with the situation. She enters a department store, where she is summoned to two staff-only upper floors, where she discovers a strange alternate world. The woman in the green pantsuit is there, alive and much younger and more communicative. The story takes place against a backdrop of urban decay and declining business activity in midtown St. Paul, and presents an eerily surreal, but still compellingly readable riddle.

Rating **** (Excellent)

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Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February and November/December 2024.
Cover art by Maurizio Manzieri and John Sumrow

Here’s a look at a few of the finalists for the 2024 Asimov’s Readers Award, voted on by readers and given to the most popular stories from Asimov’s Science Fiction the previous year. (Read each of the stories at the Asimov’s website by clicking on the titles below.)

“Wildest Skies,” a Novella by Sean Monaghan

From Asimov’s Science Fiction, November-December 2024

The title suggests a much wilder adventure than the somewhat cozy, but satisfying, one we get. Ed Linklater is the sole survivor of a missile strike that destroys his ship while surveying the planet Dashell IV. He is able to land safely on the Earth-like planet and is eventually befriended by a ten-eyed alien he calls Casper.

After living with Casper’s tribe for some time, he is led to a strange complex of stone structures, where he meets Barnaby, a fellow human who has survived another crash, sixteen years earlier. Barnaby’s only companion is Erica, who is immobilized and partly merged with an AI.

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Battleborn is an upcoming action-packed sword and sorcery magazine curated by Sean CW Korsgaard and published by IronAge Media. Read this to learn the scope of this supercharged magazine, the crowdfunding campaign needed to make it a reality (Indiegogo Aug 1st!), and learn Black Gate Exclusive scoops!

As an editor at Baen, Sean CW Korsgaard championed the Hanuvar series, and was mentored by the author, the late Howard Andrew Jones.  Sean CW Korsgaard states that Battleborn is emulating Howard’s run on Tales from the Magician’s Skull, both in style and in terms of authors and artists tapped. The magazine will feature a new Hanuvar tale from the late author, and from first issue to last issue, this will be on the masthead: “Howard Andrew Jones – Editor Emeritus.”

Expect:

• Contemporary authors
• Classic reprints
• And, perhaps adding to a Heavy Metal flair, each issue will have a short comic crafted by Schyler Hernstrom.
• If all stretch goals are met, they will have room for 20k words more per issue… which WILL be open to submissions.

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July-August 2025 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science
Fiction. Cover art by GrandeDuc/Shutterstock, and Maurizio Manzieri

Back in February the last surviving print science fiction magazines, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, were sold to Must Read Books, a new publisher backed by a small group of genre fans. I was apprehensive about what that meant for all three magazines, and indeed there were several hiccups, especially related to distribution. I had to wait more than a month after the on-sale dates for the July/August issues of Asimov’s SF and Analog to show up at my local bookstore, for example. But show up they did, and in fact the new September/October issues seem to be arriving more or less on time. Now if only we could see a new issue of F&SF…

The July/August issues are just as enticing as usual, with contributions from Rich Larson, David Gerrold, Suzanne Palmer, Dominica Phetteplace, Stephen Case, Robert Reed, Tobias S. Buckell, Derek Künsken, William Preston, Lavie Tidhar, Mary Soon Lee, Shane Tourtelotte, M. Ian Bell, Sean Monaghan, and many more.

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