Black Gate

I’ve sometimes bought a book without knowing anything about it because it had a cool cover. Similarly, I’ve been drawn to read a story because of a cool title.

Case in point is  “Young Love on the Run from the Federal Alien Administration New Mexico Division (1984)” by Grant Stone over at the May 9 edition of the weekly Strange Horizons webzine. The protagonist has fallen in love with an alien newly escaped from a government holding facility in Rosewell (where else?) during the aforesaid Orwellian year. The pair are on the run from grey-suited, mirrorshaded  agents who want the alien back because the captured extraterrestrials are essential to some sort of Cold War research project; at the very least, the government doesn’t want the Soviets to get ahold of them. To try to get back home, the alien is trying to jerry rig a communications device from television and cassette recorder parts, the nod to ET phoning home no doubt intentional. As you might expect, the scenario is that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you, even if they are trying to protect you. What you might not expect is that a kind heart sometimes comes from the sources you might think the most alien.

Sometimes you can’t judge a book by its cover, or a story by its title. In this case, you can.  A “strange horizon” worth viewing.

Black Static is the horror/dark fantasy counterpart to the largely SF magazine Interzone, published in alternating months by TTA Press. The current April-May 2011 issue features fiction by Alan Wall, Time Lees, Allison J. Littlewood, Steven Pirie and Simon Kurt Unsworth.  The ‘transmissions from beyond’ themed art in every issue is by David Gentry. Peter Tennant and Tony Lee provide book and DVD/BD reviews and interviews, with regular comment supplied by Stephen Volk, Christopher Fowler and Mike O’Driscoll.  What immediately grabbed my attention is the opening paragraph to Fowler’s typically curmudgeon column:

I think I am finally going mad. As I get older, everything that other people find enjoyable, I seem to find awful.  No, beyond awful. Unwatchable, unreadable, uninvolving, stupid beyond belief!

I’m totally sympatico.

You can subscribe to the print version here, or the electronic edition here; there’s also a special discounted rate for a joint subscription to both Interzone and Black Static.

The 19th online issue — and 26th issue overall – of one of the genre’s leading publications, Subterranean Magazine, is now available (at least in part).

Subterranean is published quarterly. It appeared in print for seven issues (some of which are still in print and are available here) before switching to the current online format in Winter 2007. It is presented free online by Subterranean Press, and is edited by William Schafer.

The Summer 2011 issue is guest edited by Gwenda Bond and focuses on young adult fiction. From her introduction:

Enter the fabulous writers whose stories you’ll find here. Each offering showcases a different facet of the many-faceted jewel that is YA. You’ll find Malinda Lo’s first short story publication, “The Fox,” a seductive tale featuring characters from her new YA high fantasy novel Huntress, alongside the best high fantasy zombie story I’ve ever read in Sarah Rees Brennan’s “Queen of Atlantis.” Both these authors–as well as Tiffany Trent (author of the Hallowmere series, and the upcoming The Unnaturalists), and Kelly Link (acclaimed short fiction author, whose YA stories were collected in Pretty Monsters)–will already be familiar to many YA readers, and to plenty of genre readers as well. If Genevieve Valentine’s story about an unusual teen pregnancy, “Demons, Your Body, and You,” is your introduction to her, I envy you; her first novel Mechanique will be out soon. Well-known SFF author Tobias Buckell provides the lone science fiction piece with “Mirror, Mirror,” while newer writer Richard Larson’s “The Ghost Party” tests the friendship of two girls against a backdrop of threats shady and eldritch. Finally, vampires: what YA issue would be complete without them? I promise you that Alaya Dawn Johnson’s hilarious, shockingly irreverent “Their Changing Bodies” is unlike any vampire story you’ve read, and that New York Times’ bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler’s “Younger Women” also opens a different, ahem, vein.

Content is released in weekly installments until the full issue is published.  As of today, Bond’s introduction and “The Fox” are available.

In addition to having the coolest title for a genre fiction magazine,  Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine has reached its 50th issue milestone.  To celebrate, the cover is a reprint of the illustration by Les Petersen for the magazine’s first issue. Stories by Debbie Cowens, Damien Walters Grintalis, Shona Husk, Barry Kirwan, Ian McHugh, Nicole R. Murphy, Dennis J. Pale, Anthony Panegyres, Mark Lee Pearson, Simon Petrie, Natasha Simonova, Robert P. Switzer and Mark D. West.  Print and PDF subscriptions and single issue purchases are available here.

Meanwhile, The Cascadia Subduction Zone (named after the earthquake corridor in the Pacific Northwest that is home base for the publication) has launched its inaugural issue. While its editorial mission is to bring more attention to women writers, and is not a genre publication per se, the women on the masthead may be familiar to genre readers.  Reviews editor Nisi Shawl is a James Triptree Jr. award winner, and features editor L. Timmel Duchamp has published short sf and is, along with arts editor Kath Wilham, a founder of Aqueduct Press.  And the first issue features a poem by Ursula K. LeGuin, as well as reviews of Karen J. Fowler, M. Rickert, and Kathe Koja.  There’s also a review of Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMer.

Print and electronic editions and subscriptions are available at earth-shaking rates here.

In the mail this week is the latest Interzone. The  fiction features a novella by Nina Allan, “The Silver Wand,” and stories by Tim Lees (“Crosstown Traffic”), Chris Butler (“Tell Me Everything”), and Ray Clule (“Tethered to the Cold and the Dying”).

The magazine is the print home for David Lanford’s “Ansible Link,” a miscellany of genre news. I found this item from the regularly featured “As Others See Us” department particularly humorous:

Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone-themed novel Never Let Me Go can’t be sf even though he says it is, because he’s respectable. To clarify: “It isn’t science fiction–indeed its procedures are the very reverse of generic, for there is no analogy at work in the text, which instead labours (sic) to produce its iterative naturalism as a kind of sub-set or derivation of our own.” (Guardian)

That certainly clears things up.