Black Gate

One thing I dislike about the current crop of digital magazines is their near-exclusive focus on shorter fiction. Are the print mags our only source of novellas these days? No wonder the Best Novella category for this year’s Hugo nominations is thoroughly dominated by Tor.com.

So it was great to see a long novella by Sarah Pinsker in the current issue of Uncanny. Here’s what Charles Payseur had to say about “And Then There Were (N-One)” at Quick Sip Reviews.

Okay wow, this is a rather strange novella that at first glance fills me with all sorts of hesitations. It’s a bit of a meta-piece, after all, casting the author as not just the character in the story, and not just the main character, but pretty much every character in the story, in a cross-dimensional convention of Sarah Pinskers.

For all this could be an adventure in navel-gazing, though, I find it instead to be a deep and complex look at possibility and the pull of diverging realities, the hurt of loss and the wondering what could make it better, wondering what if the loss had never happened to begin with. Oh, and it’s a murder mystery and [SPOILERS] the murder weapon is a Nebula Award. So it’s also a lot of fun…

Read Charles’ complete review here

The March/April issue of Uncanny includes all–new short fiction by JY Yang, by Stephen Graham Jones, Beth Cato, S. Qiouyi Lu, and Sarah Pinsker, and a reprint by Kameron Hurley, plus nonfiction by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Sam J. Miller, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, Paul Booth, Dawn Xiana Moo, and Shveta Thakrar, plus poetry, interviews, and an editorial. All of the content became available for purchase as an eBook (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) on March 7, 2017.

Here’s the complete fiction contents

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Walter Mosley is the author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins series, hard-boiled detective novels featuring a black private investigator in post WWII L.A. But he’s also dabbed successfuly in science fiction, with the novels Blue Light and The Wave, and the collection Futureland. So it wasn’t too much of a surprise to see a brand new Walter Mosley story in the latest issue of Apex. Here’s Stephanie Wexler’s take at Tangent Online.

Marilee Frith-DeGeorgio in “Cut, Cut, Cut” by Walter Mosley gets by creating social media advertising to pay rent, producing bad pottery and spending her days pursuing men on a date site called People for People. Pretty sure her ideal man is not her husband or her first date (body odor challenged) and then she meets Martin, man of mystery and plastic surgeon. It isn’t long before Marilee discovers Martin is too good to be true, when she is interviewed by a Detective Wade. The Detective claims he is still a subject of interest in their missing persons case. What is even stranger is Martin’s version sketches a love affair. Despite Martin’s omission, she continues to act as double agent for Detective Wade. The mystery deepens and her tryst with Martin becomes more than just a nightly romp between the sheets. She even confesses to her sister this double agent role is arousing her even more. Martin is pretty accepting of her questions and isn’t even upset that she is probing. At this point, I am committed to seeing where Marilee’s actions lead her and why Martin is so adamant that Marilee visit his lab…

Read Stephanie’s complete review here.

The April issue of Apex contains new fiction from Walter Mosley, Sheree Renée Thomas, Chesya Burke, and Kendra Fortmeyer, as well as poetry, a podcast, an editorial by guest editor Maurice Broaddus, an article on diversity by Tanya C. DePass, and interviews with Sheree Renée Thomas and cover artist Angelique Shelley.

Here’s the complete TOC, with links to all the free content.

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