Ray Bradbury has died, chronologically at age 91, though he managed throughout his career to maintain the awe and wonder of a 12-year old. Here is a picture of him surrounded by one of the many anachronisms he loved, something called printed books. And here’s something I wrote a while ago about his influence on me.
Okay, I don’t really know anything about Cosmic Crimes Stories. I’d never even heard about it until today. But I know it’s cool. And let’s be honest — that should be good enough for you. What is Cosmic Crimes Stories? I’m operating a little on faith here, since I’ve never actually seen a copy. But according to the website, it’s “a biannual digest of science fiction and fantasy crimes and criminals.” Um, what? A little more digging reveals that it’s a magazine…
The River of Shadows (Book III of the Chathrand Voyage Series) Robert V.S. Redick Del Ray (592 pages,$16.00, April 2011) Reviewed by David Soyka My purpose here is simply a warning. If you are part of that infinitesimally small [and ever smaller] band of dissidents with the wealth, time and inclination to set your hands on the printed word, I suggest you consider the arguments against the current volume. To wit: the tale is morbid, the persons depicted are clumsy…
The theme of our massive 15th issue, captured beautifully by Donato Giancola’s striking cover, is Warrior Women. Eight authors — Jonathan L. Howard, Maria V. Snyder, Frederic S. Durbin, Sarah Avery, Paula R. Stiles, Emily Mah, S. Hutson Blount, and Brian Dolton — contribute delightful tales of female warriors, wizards, weather witches, thieves, and other brave women as they face deadly tombs, sinister gods, unquiet ghosts, and much more. Frederic S. Durbin takes us to a far land where two dueling gods pit their champions against…
The March 2011 issue (#48) of the excellent Fantasy magazine is now online. This issue includes original fiction from George R. R. Martin, Tanith Lee, Holly Black, and Genevieve Valentine. It is the first issue assembled by the new editor, John Joseph Adams. Nonfiction includes author spotlights, and the articles “Three Real Historical Figures Who Embarked Upon the Hero’s Journey,” by Graeme McMillan, “Five Fantasy Worlds That You Wouldn’t Want to Visit,” by Te Jefferson & J. Corbeau, “From Story…
I’ve contributed book reviews to the SF Site since 1998 (wow, that’s a long time); in fact, it was the first on-line “publication” I wrote for (and, yes, you can end a sentence with a proposition, though, technically, I haven’t). That’s where I “met” John O’Neill, which explains how I wound up here (for those of you wondering how that could possibly have happened). You can see a list of all my SF Site reviews here. My latest review in the…
Over at Ecstatic Days, Jeff VanderMeer has announced that the annual anthology series he founded with Ann VanderMeer, Sean Wallace, and Matthew Cheney, Best American Fantasy, has wrapped up after three volumes. The first, published in 2007 by Sean Wallace at Prime Books and edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, was an eclectic and delightful mixture of fantasy assembled from Zoetrope: All-Story, Analog, McSweeney’s, Zahir, Strange Horizons, The New Yorker and others sources, featuring nearly two dozen writers I’d never heard of. The second offered…
Apex publisher Jason Sizemore has announced that the magazine has re-opened to submissions. This is great news for fans, since the magazine announced last May that it was temporarily suspending publication. It began as print edition Apex Digest in 2005, swtiching names to Apex Magazine when it became online-only in 2008. It resumed online publication in June 2009 and has published monthly since. Note that Apex has new Submission Guidelines. The pay rate is five cents a word, and the new fiction editor is…
The Spring 2009 issue of Conjunctions (yeah, I know, my reading is way behind) edited by Bradford Morrow and Brian Evenson, the twice yearly literary magazine published by Bard College, is a follow-up to its New Wave Fabulists issue of about eight years ago. This time around there’s less effort expended in attempting to define a “new” subgenre. Instead, there’s a simple page-and-a-half introduction and a title, Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realism, that I find more concisely descriptive of this type…
I don’t know whether the third edition of Best American Fantasy, which has found a new home with Underland Press, represents the “best” fantasy, or why it matters whether it’s “American” (meaning, presumably, the United States). Of course, it’s a cliché for any anthology to proclaim its contents represent a “best of,” and the editors who’ve been doing it for a number of years frequently rely on stories from the usual suspects of authors who mostly all publish in the…