Black Gate

Summer 2025 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the
November/December issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and
Asimov’s Science Fiction. Cover art by John Jennings, Eldar Zakirov, and Shutterstock

It’s a bittersweet month for fans of print SF magazines. First the good news. For the first time since September 2024, there’s a full complement of science fiction magazines on the shelves. The Summer 2025 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is at last available, six months late and with an 18 month-gap since the last issue, but it’s here and we’re delighted to see it. Yes, the magazines that accompany it, Asimov’s SF and Analog, are also more than two months late, cover-dated November-December 2025 but not available until last week, but at this point we know better than to complain. We’re just grateful they’re here at all.

Now the bad news. And unfortunately, it’s bad indeed. Yesterday, January 12, the news spread that Sheila Williams, the brilliant and tireless editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, had been hospitalized with a brain aneurysm. She is reportedly conscious, and communicating with family, and we hope and pray for her speedy recovery. In my opinion Sheila is the most important editor currently at work in genre magazines, and without her the field will be enormously diminished.

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For this installment, we look at a selection of tales from The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (1985), edited by Edward L. Ferman.

“Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal,” a novelette by Robert Aickman

First published in F&SF, February 1973
Read the story in the original magazine here

A young girl records her travels in Italy, where she and her family are hosted by a Contessa. At a soirée she meets a hauntingly enchanting suitor, and after a nocturnal encounter, she begins to experience a strange transformation. This vampire tale was the first winner of a World Fantasy Award for short fiction. The prose is elegant and seemed convincingly of its intended 1830s setting.

Rating: *** (Good)
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September-October 2025 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and
Asimov’s Science Fiction. Cover art by Tithi Luadthong/Shutterstock

It’s the 500th issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction! That explains why I had to start stacking them sideways in 2004. Sheila Williams celebrates this incredible milestone in her editorial, touching on just a sampling of the truly extraordinary fiction to appear in the magazine over the past 48 years. Here’s an excerpt.

Under our first editor, George H. Scithers, we published great tales by writers like Barry Longyear, Roger Zelazny, and Somtow Sucharitkul. Kathleen Moloney’s tenure lasted less than a year, but during that time we published Connie Willis’s earliest award-winning stories — “A Letter from the Cleary’s” and “Fire Watch,” as well as David Brin’s “The Postman.” Important work published by Shawna include Octavia Butler’s “Blood Child,” Greg Bear’s “Hardfought,” George R.R. Martin’s “Portraits of his Children,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Green Mars,” and Robert Silverberg’s “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Gardner Dozois’s years at the helm brought us James Patrick Kelly’s “Think Like a Dinosaur,” Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love,” Neal Barrett, Jr.’s “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus,” Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire,” Allen M. Steele’s “The Death of Captain Future,” Michael Swanwick’s “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” Charles Stross’s “Lobsters,” and much more.

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This is a 50^th Anniversary double issue… why did it have to be a double issue? I hate to start the review with a petty observation like that, but honestly, this was a bigger task than I was hoping for, especially because the November ’99 Asimov’s SF was also a double issue!

Right inside the cover is an ad for Frank M. Robinson’s Science Fiction of the 20^th Century:  An illustrated History.  Really pulling the nostalgia strings for the older sf!  Another item to put on my ‘to buy’ list.

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