Ghost Ships, High-tech Farming, and Prospecting the Moon: September/October Print Magazines
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The big news among magazine fans this month is the spectacular 70th Anniversary issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which has one of the most impressive line-ups I’ve seen in many years. It contains fiction by Michael Moorcock, Kelly Link, Maureen McHugh, Michael Swanwick, Ken Liu, Esther Friesner, Paolo Bacigalupi, Elizabeth Bear — and one of Gardner Dozois’ last stories. This one will be snatched off the shelf quickly; if you haven’t secured a copy already, I would move quickly.
In his editorial for the issue, C.C. Finlay talks about what really makes the magazine special.
For the past five years, one of my guiding principles as the editor of F&SF has been to find work that still accomplishes those two goals. I scour the submission queue for stories that are fun to read — entertaining, compelling, and well-crafted — with a narrative that pulls you from paragraph to paragraph, page to page, from the first sentence to the final line. At the same time, I’m also hunting for stories that have at least one additional layer to them beyond the surface, something that makes you think, even if it makes you think by making you laugh, that makes you want to discuss the story, to consider the way it reflects our lives and the world we live in. I believe that it’s this particular combination of qualities that has made the stories in F&SF continually feel fresh and relevant in every decade of its existence.
We have a wonderful collection of those kinds of stories for you in this issue as we celebrate the magazine’s seventy years of publication. In typical F&SF fashion, they span the genre from literary fantasy to wuxia adventure, from the near future on Earth to the far future in outer space, from ridiculous satire to thoughtful speculation, from one of the genre’s Grand Masters and some of its most awarded figures to up-and-coming authors, from the debut story of a brand new writer to the final tale from one of science fiction’s greatest writer/editors. Once you add in a couple poems, a special essay from Robert Silverberg, our usual columns and features, and some cartoons, you have an issue that is both like every other issue of F&SF and also something special.
Asimov’s SF and Analog can’t compete with a line-up like that, but they make a good run at it. This is Asimov’s annual “slightly spooky” issue, which is always one of my favorites. The two magazines contain fiction from Andy Duncan, Sandra McDonald, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Rich Larson, James Sallis, Adam-Troy Castro, Tony Ballantyne, Edward M. Lerner, Norman Spinrad, Brendan DuBois, Michael F . Flynn — and Black Gate blogger Marie Bilodeau! Here’s the complete Tables of Contents for all three.
