I’m beginning to wonder when Interzone will be retitled Jason Sanford’s Interzone; the guy seems to snag the magazine’s featured author slot more times than most. Case in point is the May/June issue  in which Sanford’s “Her Scientification, Far Future, Medieval Fantasy” gets top billing, “plus other new stories” by Suzanne Palmer, Lavie Tidhar, Will McIntosh and Jon Ingold.  I normally find Sanford intriguing, but this is one of those “I’m in an artificial reality, and I find out that I’m not as real (or more than real) as I thought” stories that is okay but doesn’t add much to the trope that hasn’t already been done before. The first paragraph is a real hoot, though, which I felt the rest of the story didn’t really hold up to:

Princess Krisja Jerome stood before her tower’s lone window, listening to the sounds of battle in the courtyard below. Metal clashed on ceramic. rifle shots zinged off the castle’s stone abutments. Lasers buzzed the moat to steam. From Krisja’s viewpoint, it looked like her father’s knights fought valiantly against the invaders from, well, from somewhere outside the kingdom. Where exactly, Kris couldn’t say. But then so few invaders announced their origins. It simply killed the romance, claiming to be a Sir Lancelot hero when you really hailed from a Scranton or Sheboygan nowhere.