Black Gate

Asimov’s continues its 40th anniversary celebration with its March/April issue. Thirteen stories, half a dozen poems, and plenty of little asides about what the magazine means to the various contributors.

It begins with “Soulmates.com” by Will McIntosh, a story about love in the digital age which reads like it was meant to be charming, but came off rather creepy. Both characters behave like vengeful stalkers at different points in the story and it all got tied up far too neatly, with the one of the characters essentially “hacking” all of the problems away.

Next up is “Number Thirty-Nine Skink” by Suzanne Palmer. The story concerns a robot designed to colonize an alien world by producing perfect duplicates of various Earth lifeforms and dispersing them across the planet’s surface. The robot continues with this project, despite most of the colonization crew leaving and the only human who stayed behind dying. On top of the robot coping with the concept of loneliness, there are also some native lifeforms that object to a robot that mass-produces invasive species. This one’s a bit tricky to follow at first as the reader figures out what’s going on. The cover art by Tomislav Tikulin depicts a scene from this story.

Next up is “Three Can Keep a Secret …” by Bill John and Gregory Frost. Strip out the mimic suits and space travel and what you’ve got is a basic caper story in which a professional assassin is hired by two separate clients to kill one another. Like the best capers, the solution is right there in plain sight, but not obvious until the story’s end.

“The Ones Who Know Where They Are Going” by Sarah Pinsker is less of a science fiction piece and more of a thought experiment on the virtues of sacrifice.

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Full disclosure before we start this review: one of the contributing authors is a friend of mine, so take that part of the review with a grain of salt.

The issue starts with “Driverless” by Robert Grossbach, one of those “what if machines came to life” stories told in a near-future where driverless cars dominate the roadways. A few decades back, this would have been nothing but fanciful storytelling, but with recent advances in both artificial intelligence and driverless technology, it might actually be a problem that we have to deal with in the years to come.

“The Toymaker’s Daughter” by Arundhati Hazra takes a common story idea of toys magically coming to life and follows it through the real world consequences.

“Ten Half-Pennies” by Matthew Hughes is the first story in what promises to be an ongoing series about a wizard’s apprentice (the next story is actually advertised as set to appear in the May/June issue). Here we see a bullied child grow into a collection agent and then wizard’s apprentice, all the while maintaining his own moral code. Both the characters and the magic system are well-defined in this piece about honor and debt.

“The Man Who Put the Bomp” by Richard Chwedyk is the next novella in his award-winning Saur series. The basic premise is that miniature talking dinosaurs are designed by a genetic research firm and sold as pets. When problems arise with the saurs, production is discontinued and surviving saurs are relocated to shelters. The series concerns one such shelter and the wonderful assortment of odd characters (both saur and human) who live there. I’ve been listening to Richard Chwedyk read these stories for years and it’s impossible for me not to hear his voice in my head when I’m reading them. Not only do we learn about the man who put the “bomp” in these saurs, but we find out why they should never be placed behind the wheel of an automobile (the cover art by Bryn Barnard should give a hint as to how badly it can go). I’m seriously waiting for a collection of all these stories to appear somewhere and will keep you posted when it happens.

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One of the biggest advantages that digital magazines have over print magazines is that it’s very easy to keep digital editions available indefinitely. So if you discover a magazine starting with, say, issue 52, it’s easy to go back and purchase every back issue at “cover price.” Which is why, during my month-long wait between new issues of Nightmare, I can wile away the hours by reading from their extensive backlist.

My favorite story of the issue just happens to be the first, “I was a Teenage Werewolf” by Dale Bailey. This is part of a series of stories Bailey has written that take the titles of cheesy 1950s sci-fi/horror movies and uses them as springboards for brand new pieces (check out “Invasion of the Saucer Men,” “I Married a Monster from Outer Space,” and “Teenagers from Outer Space“). It’s bit of slow going at first, but we eventually get something that’s not only a story about a werewolf, but about how adults will use any excuse to restrict the freedoms of the young “for their own good,” all while doing almost nothing to actually protect them. If nothing else, read it for a prom scene that beats the prom in Carrie, hands-down.

Next up is “Blood Drip” by Brian Evenson (originally published in Granta), a story that plays nicely with the unreliable narrator trope. Coupled with a vague setting, the story feels timeless in both its themes and its surreal imagery.

“The Dark Edge of Life” by Livia Llewellyn, on the other hand, goes out of its way to define time and place as a “found document” style of story. We know that something terrible has happened and the story fills in enough blanks to scare, but not so much to bore us with detail. The added effect of presenting the story in fragments (suggesting that pieces of an original manuscript were either consumed in a disaster or purposefully destroyed) adds to the mystery.

Finally, “The Opera Singer” by Priya Sridhar (originally published in She Walks in Shadows) is a compelling take on the “deal with the devil” and possession tropes, told from the point of view of an aging woman asserting her will against … well, it’s not exactly a demon.

As always, you can go to www.nightmare-magazine.com and read all of these stories (as well as accompanying author spotlights) for free. But Nightmare is only able to continue showcasing this work with financial support, so why not drop $2.99 and buy an issue? If you like it, they’ll have plenty more back issues to sell you.

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Michael Penkas has been writing horror, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy stories for years. His first mystery novel, Mistress Bunny and the Cancelled Client, is available in print and electronic editions. Learn more about his work at http://www.michaelpenkas.com/.

So how are things going in “The World’s Leading Mystery Magazine?” Quite well, as it turns out, despite some significant format changes that began in the January/February 2017 issue. To save on printing and shipping costs, they’ve made the switch from monthly to bi-monthly issues, but made up for it by providing twice as many pages per issue, meaning that long-time subscribers won’t have to sacrifice a single page of mystery goodness. This issue, for example, has seventeen tales of crime and deduction.

It opens with “A Slaying Song Tonight” by Vicki Weisfeld. Honestly, I had trouble keeping track of all the characters in this one, so that the revelation of “whodunnit” kind of turned into “whowuzzthat.” Basically, one of a group of Christmas carolers commits a murder on their caroling route and it’s up to two of those carolers to suss out the guilty party.

“Flowing Waters” by Brendan Dubois was easily my favorite story of the whole bunch, concerning a military veteran who deals with her PTSD by adopting a dog who’s seen her own share of violence. Don’t feel ashamed if you cry by the end of this one.

“The Twelve Days of Dunwich” by Barbara Nadel provides a rare turn into supernatural territory with a crime story in which the narrator is the victim, who is dead … but not quite gone.

“The Children of Espiritu Santo” by David Dean concerns a gang that’s terrorizing a small town, specifically a church where a possible holy relic has recently been discovered.

“After Closing Time” by Nova Lee Maier is another one of those “plot to murder the spouse goes horribly awry” stories, complete with an appropriate O. Henry-style twist at the end.

“Night Terrors” by Owen Leddy is another standard trope story, this time it’s the one about the man who dreams of committing a murder every night, unsure why he’s plagued by the recurring dreams and terrified that those dreams will soon come true.

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This year marks the 40-year anniversary of Asimov’s and this issue not only includes a brief recap of the magazine’s history in an editorial, but also comments from each of the contributing authors about when they first read the magazine and what it means to them.

Check out the cover art by Maurizio Manzieri. That’s a scene from the first story in the magazine, “Crimson Birds of Small Miracles” by Sean Monaghan. On the surface, the story is about a father taking his two daughters to see the beautiful mechanical birds of the title, but there is also a much deeper and more touching story at work here, illustrating the truth that some tragedies will continue to follow us into the future, no matter how many advances we make with technology.

Next is “Tagging Bruno” by Allen M. Steele, a tale set in the future and on another world, yet concerned with current debates on wildlife preservation. Sure, it gets a little preachy, but the characters are all well-defined and the ending has just a tinge of fun irony to it.

“Still Life with Abyss” by Jim Grimsley starts with that old science fiction trope of the parallel universe and reverses the standard story. It’s set in a research station that monitors activities in all of the parallel universes. Of course, there are the usual “What if?” universes (America lost the Revolution, the South won the Civil War, the Nazis won World War II), but also all of the small changes in individual people’s lives. The idea is that we all have alternate paths that our lives might have taken and on some parallel world, we did. But the research team has discovered one man, one solitary man in all the recorded multiverse, whose life NEVER deviates from a single course, no matter what happens around him.

“Fatherbond” by Tim Purdom follows a group of human colonists who arrive on a new world, only to discover that another race of aliens has already arrived and is forbidding anyone to colonize it. The argument against colonizing is an interesting one. While there is no intelligent life native to the planet, intelligent life might naturally evolve there over hundreds of millions of years. So colonization is wrong not because it would displace current inhabitants, but rather because it would interfere with the natural evolution of future inhabitants. Obviously, some of the humans feel differently and the aliens’ motives aren’t as pure as initially stated.

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So I got a late start on this year’s reading, which means that I’ve just finished the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. As with any collection of stories from a variety of writers, I liked some more than others.

Before we even start, check out the cover art by Charles Vess. A little girl is using her blue magic hand to befriend a rat and a cat. You hardly even notice that she’s not so much sitting on a bed as she’s squatting up against it. (Click the image to embiggen.)

And the cover image isn’t just a random design. It’s a scene from the first story of the issue, “Vinegar and Cinnamon” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Nothing too deep here. Just a young witch in training who accidentally turns her brother into a rat, then has to track him down and figure out how to change him back. The writer doesn’t take the predictable route of focusing on the young witch, instead keeping the point of view on her brother and how being a rat alters his perceptions and priorities.

“The Regression Test” by Wole Talabi presents a variation on the Turing Test, as a computer program is designed to simulate the thought processes of a scientific genius. While the scientists can verify how well the program recalls information, they have no way of judging how close the personality is to the original, so they invite the scientist’s daughter to ask the program questions. Of course, there’s more going on here than a simple question-and-answer session.

“A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore” by Gregor Hartmann continues the Franden series. Since I’ve never read any other stories with this character, it was a little rough to get the character and setting straight at first. It’s basically a garden party in which Franden flirts with a botanist and tries to draw out opinions on a pending civil war.

Next is the novelette, “Homecoming” by Rachel Pollack. Again, this was part of a series of stories featuring Jack Shade, a paranormal investigator cursed to take on the case of anyone holding one of his business cards. This time, the case involves retrieving a missing piece of a woman’s soul. Of course, things go bad and Jack eventually has to enlist some supernatural help to prevent the end of the world.

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