SFReader Discussion Forums : Firebrand Fiction

Firebrand Fiction : Not enough Space and Time

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:31:18 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: Not enough Space and Time
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:31am

Not enough Space and Time, by Robert J. Santa

originally published 4/28/2009

It's fitting I find myself reviewing the Summer 2009 issue of Space and Time while I'm in the middle of my Spring Cleaning. After going through the girls' bedroom and discovering too many clothes and shoes that don't fit, stuffed into drawers and piled on shelves, boxes under the bed overflowing with toys and fuzzy animals things, hats and belts they never wear...I've learned I don't have enough space in my life. And it goes without saying we could all use a little more time, especially the kind needed to pursue my favorite pastime: reading. So with a box of shoes and two bags of clothes bound for the Salvation Army as a footrest, I settle into my favorite chair with issue #107.

First and foremost: love the cover artwork! It's classic pulp science fiction. A bikini-clad girl kneels beside a swimming pool, hand covering mouth, eyes wide with shock. Tentacled skulls the same color as her swimsuit bob in the pool, the nearest grinning and leering. It's all set at a Hitchcockian angle, and it immediately brought to mind the kind of bug-eyed monster, girl-thrown-over-shoulder covers I used to find in the used book stores of my youth.

But there's no throw backs with the writing. Ty Drago starts us off with "Bits and Pieces." The accompanying artwork also shows some cleavage, with a cyborg-like thing embracing a girl in a low-cut top. Don't worry, Sherman, Mr. Peabody didn't set the Wayback Machine to the 1940s. That's all the objectification we're going to get, and it's barely appropriate to the context of Drago's piece. "Fleshy flotsam" is the simple sentence that starts the story of Scavenger Unit 1225, our immediately empathetic protagonist. On a world that is effectively the Bermuda Triangle of interstellar travel, 1225 has eked out survival by grafting bits and pieces of crash victims onto its mostly mechanical body. It turns out, however, something new happens with this latest crash; this bit of flotsam survived. With neatly intertwined conversations between 1225's Logic and Philosophy Methods, he surgically removes the woman's feet, right arm and a portion of her liver to graft onto its body later. She awakens and immediately curses 1225 out in a thoroughly R-rated manner. Yup, I'm still a prude when I write, and I never fully understand why writers resort to adult language in situations that don't need it. It seems Lily, our survivor, is a professional whore on a brothel ship bound for a rendezvous with some military units. I found this aspect one-hundred-percent unnecessary and feel it was only a convenience so Drago could arrange for her specific form of dialog. There's no reason she could not be any other profession and maintain a G-rated conversation with 1225, despite what it had done to her. That aside, "Bits and Pieces" is a remarkable story, especially for the aforementioned empathy with 1225. It is almost from the opening paragraphs I felt for this surviving being in a truly awful environment. I genuinely cared whether it lived or died. Not so much for the crass Lily, which may be what Drago intended. Once the "whammy" (and I love a good "whammy" in a story) was introduced, I felt the ending was destined to happen only one way. Nevertheless, Drago's writing in this piece is as good as it gets.

"The Party" confused me only momentarily in its opening, but that has nothing to do with Diane Arrelle's clean and uncomplicated writing style. My confusion stemmed from trying to put together how the characters were related in the first few paragraphs, which is exactly how Arrelle meant to do it. "Aunt Lisa," who isn't really her aunt (as unnecessarily distracting as the fact that her "Big Brother" is a cousin, but is a nice commentary on how families operate) has wardship of little Tina after her parents are killed. Lisa, living in Tina's house, is putting the finishing touches on a Christmas tradition: Tim and Marcy's holiday party. It's only been a few months since their deaths, yet Lisa is going ahead with the party as a form of honoring their spirit. Yes, the pun was intended, because Tim and Marcy visit Lisa and Tina as ghosts on a regular basis. They also show up to the party, with all the guests obviously more surprised than either Tina or Lisa. This is a lovely tale about family with a bittersweet ending I found hard to take, though it's really the only ending Arrelle could have given this piece.

Scott H. Andrews' "Ebb" is my favorite piece, a true standout. Narrated by an old man in a society where elders simply don't happen, he describes the approaching Convergence when sun, moon and planet align. The people live in a primitive society on a water-dense planet, floating on rafts, living in huts, braiding rope from seaweed. During the Convergence the tides shift for half the year, draining the surrounding land so that harvest can take place and men can travel to the Everest-like peak that juts above the waves. The narrator, lovingly called "Moonpa" by the young boy too small to contribute to the society, was on the logging mission to the mountain during the last Convergence, decades ago. While trying to float a raft of logs back with his brother, a storm struck. The brother stayed with the raft to try to bring it back to the community, every citizen's highest duty. The narrator took one log and used it as a life preserver to save nothing for the community, only his own skin. For forty-four years he has lived with this secret burden, until this day when he is useless to the society and therefore nothing but a burden himself. Andrews gives each piece of this world a rich description, with enough emotion and character to chew on for days. Once again, only a handful of endings were possible, and I would have chosen the same one Andrews did. Yet I smiled as I read his words, they're so powerfully written. I don't feel I could have blended the possibility of the narrator's dementia/imagination with the reality of his offering to the community. One word: superb.

I usually skim the interviews but not so with this one. Part one of a two-part series, Peter S. Beagle shares some interesting thoughts. Favorite for me was his story about winning the Hugo and the Nebula for "Two Hearts" and how he reacted upon hearing his name called. I hope one day to have the same experience, and I can guarantee in the same situation I would react the exact same way.

Okay, I talked about space already, how there's too little of it in my house in lieu of my best efforts to create more. I also talked a bit about time. I'd like to expand on that, if I may. Time is a precious commodity; you're only allotted so much. I used some of it to write this review. You're using some of your valuable time right now to read it. If it gets wasted - that is, you do not reap enough reward for your investment to justify the expenditure - you should get mad. I get furious. The concept of time itself has nothing to do with "Jackpot World" by Larry Hodges. Actually, it has to do with alternate realities. The story opens with Songo, an alien visitor studying alternate reality Earths, on trial by the U.S. military for national security violations. After a full page of back-and-forth with the JAG attorney, Songo asks, "Would you like to hear my side?" The prosecutor says to proceed, and we, the readers, are given three asterisks in a row before Songo narrates.

This would be the wasted-time aspect I mentioned. "Jackpot World" does not begin as a story until after this scene break. Everything before it, and I mean "everything," is useless. What happens after is where the story begins. Songo arrives in this alternate reality and visits a convenience store to study human dietary habits. Introduce Wayne. Wayne is a thug - an armed one, at that - bent on a quick robbery. Getting practically nothing from the register till, he demands the customers, including Songo, empty their pockets. Songo is forced to put the holographic generator that keeps him looking human onto the counter, at which point he transforms into a furry Barney the Dinosaur. My disbelief was totally suspended here as Wayne did not react the way I would think your average, low intelligence thug would: shoot the alien, grab the money, leave in a panic. Instead, a long conversation ensues about dimensional travel in which Wayne discovers there are worlds - many, many worlds - where Wayne is rich and famous. For all the faults with this piece (and I will cover them shortly), the "whammy" is so mind-blowingly delicious I would never dream of ruining it here or in any of the hundreds of millions of alternate realities where I am also typing this review. Suffice it to say, Larry Hodges came up with a clever idea for a story and wrote what turns out to be a pretty good piece about it.

Pretty good, because - and this is a first for me, reviewing someone other than the writer - I feel the editorship of Space and Time let him down. If the entire opening sequence were summed up in literally two or three sentences after the "whammy," the story would be tighter and infinitely more enjoyable. Songo himself is an unnecessary alien, in fact. The story would work better if he were a human dimensional traveler (perhaps even a student working on a Master's thesis, for then his inexperience with dimensional travel would only assist the "whammy"), so that the unbelievable aspect of his revelation to Wayne could be eliminated. The introduction of the "whammy" goes completely unquestioned by Wayne who puts it into action (this last could be speaking volumes about Wayne's intelligence; still, one or two remarks on it would have helped smooth the rough edges). Had this piece received better editing it would be great, from concept to construct. However, it did not, and it is merely good, tainted with the feeling that I will never get back the five minutes I spent reading the opening nor the ten minutes I spent writing about it.

And with a heavy sigh I have to say something similar about David Tallerman's "In the Service of the Guns." The opening scenes could easily be eliminated, as the story doesn't really begin until Pilate arrives on the planet of the Singers. He is a profiler, basically a problem-solver for the interstellar military. The other soldiers are cyborg-like things, programmed to perform and think a certain way. Pilate is fully human, which gives him greater insight into areas too abstract for computational processing. The only other full human is Ballyntine, the xeno-enthographer trying to make sense of the slug-like beings that constantly "sing" on this planet. Pilate and she eventually (and quickly, though understandable) connect as they both try to solve the riddle of these indigenous life forms. How they relate to Pilate's original unsolvable military problem seems a bit forced and problematic. Tallerman establishes a certain way of thinking by one set of aliens then breaks it so offhandedly it's obvious he missed it himself. So, too, did the editorship for it is a crucial mistake in the storytelling that makes the ending impossible. Even without this glaring flaw, I found "In the Service of the Guns" a bit lackluster. It just seemed to take too long to go nowhere.

Not so with "Catted" by J. Michael Shell. This is a two-page doozy of brilliant writing. Take from it what you will, for I have little doubt readers fall into only two categories after experiencing this piece. Either you love it for its concept on the existential nature of love and reality, or you hate it for being overindulgent crap. I could make an argument for both, but I fell into the former group. It's a fast read, so if you're in the latter group, it'll all be over in few minutes.

"Chocolate Kittens from Mars." Pause for a moment to take in the title of Mary A. Turzillo's fantasy piece disguised as science fiction. Ivy falls head over heels for Herschel, a man who frequently travels to Mars on business trips. He gifts her with a heart-shaped box of kittens, three-week-old babies that will sleep forever if left in the box until taken out. Returned to the box, they will sleep again, and they consume so little nutrient - just a sip of MicroMilk (tm) - they would live as kittens indefinitely. Yet Ivy takes them from the box regularly, not just to play with them but to also give them little licks. It turns out they taste like chocolate, each cat with a different flavor. Like the movie "Gremlins," one should heed the warnings when dealing with chocolate kittens from Mars. Solid ending, solid writing, this piece is nice for dessert, which is no doubt why it wraps up issue #107. Good thing, too, because I wasn't feeling the love for my misspent time in the previous few stories.

I've mentioned before how I feel I am as unqualified as a rock to review poetry, having little skill at writing it myself. Poetry by William Blake Vogel III, Gwynne Garfinkle, Gwyn Raven, Tracie McBride, S. C. Virtes and Saint James Harris Wood will go unmentioned here.

Okay, so what's the overall impression? I own a subscription to the venerable Space and Time and will continue to do so as long as they are in print. As a firm believer in supporting writers however I can, this includes, in my opinion, not just offering advice when asked but also making purchases from the markets those writers wish would purchase their stories. A subscription to Space and Time is a mere twenty simoleans, for four issues per year shipped to my house. Do I feel I have the time in my life to read every issue? Not always, but that's what beach days are for when the kids are building sand castles and I'm left to my own devices. The backpack is usually stuffed with magazines that collected dust all year. Do I have the space in my wallet for a subscription? Honestly, it's just five bucks per issue. Is it worth it? Yeah, it's undoubtedly worth it. While there's parts I didn't particularly like about issue #107, Space and Time is quite simply one of those magazines that makes me realize why I'm a writer. I get to take away something from every story, good or bad, and I'm happy to see it in the mailbox every three months.

And while there may not be enough space in my house or enough time in my life to get everything done, if there were no Space and Time at all, it would be heart-breaking.

Firebrand Fiction : Into the Abyss

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:28:43 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: Into the Abyss
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:28am

Into the Abyss, by Robert J. Sants

originally published 3/20/2009

With the sudden folding of several prominent print magazines (and the dramatic scaling back of others, a sure sign their demise will soon follow), I have been reading more and more of my short fiction online. This is not my favorite medium for reading, but the way things are looking, I'm going to have to get used to it.

So I've decided my Firebrand Fiction reviews are going to be for online markets only from this point forward. Why fight the inevitable?

And why start anywhere but at the apex. Abyss & Apex, that is. This online market for all things speculative has been around for a long time. Issue 29 marks the 1st Quarter edition for 2009, and I see no reason for this market to fold. It's changed editorship, which is usually the sign that somebody wanted out. That previous editor could have simply packed up and gone home. Instead, Wendy S. Delmater took over. That tells me she wants Abyss & Apex to continue.

Her editorial, "Rejectomancy," is a must-read for any writer. In fact, in a recent forum discussion the topic of "what exactly does this form rejection mean?" came up. It just so happens it means something at Abyss & Apex. Read the editorial. It's terrific, especially sprinkled with rejections in haiku form that are hysterical. Following this are the short fiction offerings and some flash, but since this is an online market there's really no reason to read them in order unless you feel, as I do, editor Delmater put them in that order for us to read them that way.

Which gave me pause. Pauline J. Alama starts her story "After the Revolution" with a literal bang. Aurora is the team leader of a hostage rescue force that storms a building in the first few paragraphs. The hostages are alive and well, and the criminals are hauled off. But the hostages are genetically-engineered children, designed to be perfect. One young girl comes under the wing of Aurora, who winds up quasi-adopting her and taking her off-planet. That Aurora is a genetically-engineered adult from the same school as the young girl is supposed to provide some story conflict that never seems to come for me. But what bothered me more than anything else was the "oh, no! It's an asteroid field!" scene. I don't understand why some authors use this device when it is virtually scientifically impossible. The navigation computers fail, or the controls, or some such piece of equipment that makes the ship careen into hundreds of asteroids. Truthfully, the densest part of the field would have asteroids thousands of miles apart. And I thought they had "broken the light barrier" and were traveling in a sort of hyper-space where I presumed a field of asteroids wouldn't pose a problem (if it did, why would you be traveling so quickly you couldn't avoid them?). Bad science in a science fiction story, especially when another plot device could have easily been constructed to make it impossible for Aurora's young ward to pilot the ship, is like putting too much salt in the soup. Had it been left out, the soup would be fine. Since it was put in--along with characters that seemed to provide conflict that was never resolved--the soup was ruined. As the longest offering, too, it was not worth getting through what seemed like a bloated middle to arrive at an ending that told more than it showed. If this was supposed to be the cream of the short fiction, with the coveted first slot, then I was in for a hairy afternoon of reading.

However, hot on the heels of this piece was the brilliantly titled "Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual" by Marie Brennan. It's something of an alternate history piece without the actual history part. The letter in question is a narrative from the titular character to his beloved. No review could go into more detail about the story without revealing too much. Suffice it to say, even though an experienced reader would see what was happening two-thirds of the way through the piece to a predictable ending, Brennan's writing is so lyrical I couldn't wait to get there and see it for myself. The beauty part is how this piece is not very long, so any predictability is over in just a page or two.

I liked the concept of Fraser Sherman's "One Hand Washes the Other," in that a lawyer pining after a lost love seeks the assistance of a witch. The classic gift-for-a-sacrifice ensues. Sherman definitely puts a twist on the idea, but it seemed a bit clumsy to me, involving too many situations that could have been less bizarre. Had he taken a more straightforward approach, one where the protagonist isn't required to perform such complicated tasks to arrive at a conclusion he'd already made early in the story, I feel this could have been a much better piece. As it stands, it seems weighed down with imagery and events that didn't need to be there to make the story work.

Best of the bunch is "Incarnation in the Delta" by Richard Foss. Any story that begins with

'"I think the gods are embarrassed they created me," mused Buddha's twin brother Larry as he walked past the sign that read Welcome to Coahoma County, Mississippi.' is all right in my book. Fortunately, where many stories have a terrific opening hook then fall apart, this one doesn't. Larry is a reincarnated musician who asked the gods if he could remember his previous lives, his brother having chosen to become an enlightened being and teacher. Larry's got great perspective, and his conversation with guitar partner Robert Johnson as they walk the country roads is perfect. Larry meets a young girl, one of thousands upon thousands he has met during his multiple lives, and quickly discovers she's special. Set in an intolerant, early twenty-century South, Foss explores not just love and life but their opposites as well. Truly a spectacular bit of storytelling.

Karl Bunker's "Murder," however, is not. It's a murder investigation piece set on an Arrakis-like world populated by aliens referred to as "squirrels" and the few humans they've rescued from a post-apocalyptic Earth. Detective Harry Keaveny is employed by the squirrels because they have a love of all things artistic: music, sculpture, painting, and apparently detective work. A human has been murdered, though frankly how is beyond me because of all the modifications the aliens have put in the humans so they can survive any situation. The science aspect of this piece, much like with Alama's "After the Revolution" is almost unnecessary. Where the first piece could have used a cult and a regular cop instead of a genetically-engineered populace, at least the science offered a different way to tell the story. In "Murder" there's none of it. Take away the aliens, the body mods, the non-Earth location and it's exactly the same story. There's no need to change any of it. Compound what I feel is a speculative fiction infraction of the highest order with a murder plot that's not very good, and this piece goes nowhere.

The final offering is a bit of flash from Samantha Henderson, "East of Chula Vista." I loved it. Part ghost story, part dissertation on the hazards of illegal immigration in the United States, Henderson creates a setting in the first three-quarters of the story that seems bound to have no story taking place in it. Then kapow! All the pieces fall into place with a story that could have been true flash if it were only the ending, but I wouldn't sacrifice a word of that set up.

I read Abyss & Apex a lot. It's free, after all. What always strikes me about this e-zine, as is the case in Issue 29, is how appropriately named it is. An abyss is a deep, immeasurable chasm, while an apex is the tip, a highest point. Abyss & Apex lives up to those definitions with these offerings that I found either just that side of wonderful or just this side of awful.

Firebrand Fiction : Into the Abyss

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:26:46 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: Into the Abyss
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:26am

Objectivity's Paradox, by Robert J. Santa

originally published 12/23/2007

Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction has been both entertaining and intellectually stimulating since its inception in the Spring of 2003. As a market devoted almost exclusively to historical fiction and alternate history, it is one of only a few that focuses on this genre. What that says to me, as a reader, is that the caliber of stories within its pages will be the creme de la creme, if only due to the limited availability of output for such stories.

Full disclosure: One of my speculative twists on a mythological tale appeared in the first issue of Paradox, and I've spent the last four years trying to get another publishing credit. I regard editor Christopher M. Cevasco as one of an elite minority who maintain the level of professionalism all good publications should strive for, as I've had nothing but outstanding exchanges with him and heard nothing but similar remarks from writers at the SFReader forum (of which, full disclosure continuing, Chris is also a frequent visitor). Lastly, as an editor myself, I have purchased one of Chris' stories for an upcoming anthology.

Okay, I lied. This is the last remark: Paradox is my favorite fiction magazine, and I devour every copy I get.

Which brings me to one of those reviewing quandaries. Much like coaching little league and watching your own child blow the big game, will I be able to distance myself from my prejudices enough to make critical commentary?

There's only one way to find out: write a review of Paradox, issue 11 and see what happens.

The opening piece is "Love, Blood and Octli" by T. L. Morganfield (more disclosure: she is also a frequenter of the SFReader forum). Even without the magnificent Mesoamerican art covering the first page, I knew this would be a subject matter dear to my heart: the Aztec Empire. My favorite novel is Aztec by Gary Jennings, an historical fiction epic I've read twenty times at least, where I was first introduced to octli (a tequila-like spirit, though that is an inferior description). It is unfair to compare Morganfield's short story with Jennings' masterpiece, and I won't. "Love, Blood and Octli" stands on its own as a fable about the rise of the Aztecs as a people. Ayomichi is given her name by the wind god Ehecatl and told of her future role as dispenser of wisdom. Ehecatl visits her rarely throughout her life, always changing its course and the course of her people (and not always for the better). The pacing of this piece is deliberate (which should not be interpreted as "slow"), as the story of a civilization's infant steps unfolds. I found Morganfield's storytelling outstanding, and her piece deserves the spotlight of first on the table of contents.

"In a Byzantine Garden" is one of three contributions by Darrell Schweitzer (the other two being poetry, of which I am woefully underskilled to critique and will refrain from doing so). This one-page short story about a meeting of lifelong enemies engaged in a discussion of peace could truthfully take place in any time, in any setting. Schweitzer elegantly brings the two characters to life with such simple brevity, all writers who strive for that skill should be jealous (this one included). What could be called the story's twist, upon which everything before pivots, is a single sentence of three words. I couldn't have done it with fifty. This is a curiously haunting, extremely short story that hung with me for far longer than it took me to read it.

Michael Livingston does in his Civil War story "The Angel of Marye's Heights" exactly what I feel Chris Cevasco is looking for in Paradox: taking a documented historical event and examining it from a different perspective. This is not a "What If?" tale, as many Civil War speculations tend to be. The "Angel," from history, is a Southern soldier at the battle of Fredricksburg who risked his life to bring water to the dying strewn about after the massacre. The "Angel" in Livingston's story isn't the water bearer; he's an actual angel masquerading as a Northern soldier, one who knows what's about to happen. This is an interesting story about destiny, though I felt it took a bit too long to set up. Don't get me wrong, the opening is very well written, just a bit more than I would have done given the opportunity to tell the same tale.

"Historical drift" is a great phrase to come out of "I Read the News Today, Oh Boy..." from Richard Mueller. The term refers to a psychosis afflicting the protagonist's friend and many other people around the world. They believe they have traveled to another time period, and from their perspective the modern world does not exist. The narrator meets Jeannie in a coffee house in a thoroughly-modern world plagued by terrorism. Historical drift is at first treated as escapism until Jeannie begins to feel she is affected by it. I liked this story, in spite of its predictable ending.

I can't same the same for "Fort Bliss," a Vietnam-era piece by J. Kenneth Sargeant. American soldiers are not fighting in Vietnam for Democracy; they are there to fight a whole host of mythological creatures such as dragons, harpies and trolls. The truth is being covered up by the U.S. Government, which sends Specialist Dennis Grace to investigate. His conversations with a captured harpy skew his opinions in a way no combat ever had before. I never connected with Grace as a protagonist, and I was never drawn into the environment of the story. One of the reasons for this, surprisingly, is the use of profanity. I'm a prude when I write my own stories and almost never use profanity. There's plenty of it in "Fort Bliss," but I found it in curiously short supply. When one considers a thoroughly profanity-laced story probably wouldn't make it into this kind of market, I still felt the soldiers in this story didn't sound like soldiers would in the Vietnam jungle. As a writer of primarily fantasy, it was not the fantastic elements in this piece that turned me away from it. I simply couldn't empathize with Specialist Grace or his situation, which could just have easily been told with the harpy being replaced by a captured VC woman.

"Letters on Natural Magic" by Matthew Kirby is something of a surprise. Were it not for the illustration of the famous robotic, Turkish chess-machine accompanying the title, I would have thought the narrator a protoge studying chess at the feet of his master. Instead, the narrator is actually a robotic, chess-playing machine engaged in a game against Benjamin Franklin, who it has previously beaten twice before. Alone, Franklin tells the machine a long story about his own role as a spy and dealings years before that would have altered the world on a scale no less grand than the formation of the United States was. As I read the opening pages, Kirby's deliberate - there's that word again - structuring of the story seemed, well, slow. Only after finishing this piece did I understand he was emulating a chess game. Before a vital move can be made, several steps must precede it. The vital move in the story is Franklin's revelation of his "big secret," one that cannot be revealed without an understanding of the events that preceded it. Kirby's writing is engaging during the opening pages, enough so that a typical reader's attention shouldn't wander. Where many times I have written a "whammy" into a story, something to give the reader an aha! moment, it is the writing of the story itself that provided the whammy for me. I applaud Kirby's technique. While this may not be the best story in this issue, the technique clearly is.

The premise behind Tom Doyle's "The Wizard of Macatawa" is that the Land of Oz is less fiction than documentary, observed through a time- and dimension-traveling device by both Frank Baum and the story's young narrator many years later. This piece also holds a whammy, one so well done I wouldn't dare spoil it here, one that made this writer laugh out loud with envy. It seems the residents of Oz didn't take too kindly to Baum telling about their lives and came to this world to do some not-so-nice things. As a great fan of the musical Wicked for its ability to tell a well-known story from a view-point that is both contrary to the accepted norm and highly-entertaining, I also enjoyed Doyle's concept as much as his prose.

So, I've gotten through the whole magazine and shared my opinions of it. Was this a glowing review filled with fawning praise? Hardly. Did I enjoy it? No doubt. Would I recommend Paradox, issue 11 to a friend or family member? Absolutely. This issue contained more speculative elements than I was accustomed to seeing in previous issues, but it is still a solid home for historical fiction. As I've said dozens of times, any collection of stories is going to be hit or miss. That this one was almost exclusively hits is not surprising to a subscription holder; Paradox always hits. If you do not have a subscription to magazine, I can't imagine why. Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction is a twice-yearly reason to run to the mailbox.

Firebrand Fiction : Commonality

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:21:01 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: Commonality
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:21am

Commonality, by Robert J. Santa

originally published 11/13/2006

A Firebrand Fiction Review by Robert J. Santa

As I move into a second career in the writing industry - that of editor - I find myself looking at collections with a new-found perspective. It is not only an editor's role to select the stories he or she feels is best for a publication; another decision needs to be made regarding the bond that's going to hold those stories together. For some it may be as simple as a themed anthology. But for the editors who choose to open their doors to unthemed stories, finding a commonality may prove daunting.

In an effort to bring the Firebrand Fiction column onto a regular schedule (stolen at gunpoint, I might add, from Daniel Blackston who can surely have his soapbox back as soon as I'm done pontificating), I will be reading and reviewing one market in each column. With any luck, this will help turn FF back into a monthly gig.

Commonality did not seem to be present at first when I flipped through the pages of ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS Spring 2007, which also happens to be the debut issue. Editor Jason Champion put together a mix of speculative fiction that runs the gamut of settings and situations. Yet after reading these stories, a theme did, in fact, jump out at me and slap me about a bit.

Before we can even talk about the stories the issue of cover art begs (nay, demands) to be addressed. Ryan Durney's masterful illustration of a dimetrodon fleeing the crashing of a space station perfectly captures the idea that ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS is (as the subtitle states) "a magazine of science fiction and fantasy stories." The back cover is also illustrated with his digital art rendition of a scene from "A Snowball's Chance." It is obvious Jason (who does not prefer to be called Mr. Champion) is as much a disbeliever of the proverb "don't judge a book by its cover" as I am. Many times I have purchased a book or magazine based solely on its cover art, and in truth is the reason I purchased this copy of ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS.

The opening piece is "Save a Dance for the Plowman" by Justin Stanchfield. His poignant story about plowman Mark Reynolds who pines with an unspoken love for a coworker deepens as he finds himself in the midst of rescuing stranded travelers. His coworker is leaving, and he is missing the opportunity to tell her of his true feelings. This piece could be taking place anywhere there is deep snow; that it is set on the frozen moon of a gas giant planet is what makes this piece appropriate for the magazine. It is an outstanding bit of storytelling, and my only concern is the element of science fiction. This story could indeed be taking place in the heart of Alaska, as the science element is not terribly important to the advancement of the plot. To be fair, however, this is nitpicking. Stanchfield has created a marvelous tale deserving of the lead-in status of a new magazine.

Less impressive for me was the following piece: "Sleep Magic" by Daniel Ausema. That is not to say his story was bad; it was merely adequate in the telling of a shaman whose most powerful skill is to make others fall asleep. After preventing an all out war, I wondered how the shaman protagonist was responsible for affecting change. This is a very short piece, so if you are left scratching your head over the same question, no matter how well written the prose is, at least you reached the end rapidly.

John N. Baker did not just compose "Nithhad: The Lonely Valley," he illustrated it as well with ten small sketches that blend well with the flavor of the piece. This is a folktale type of story, reminiscent of the long narratives found in Native American oratories of the American West. The novella format, however, does a disservice to this account of the titular hero, for his coming of age and transformation seems to wander. It is a good story which I feel would have been better if it was shorter.

I'm a sucker for Twilight Zone-esque stories, but they need to be well done for I feel Rod Serling and Company told them all decades ago. Enter "High Concept" by John B. Rosenman, whose protagonist in Herbert Einhorn is a bit of a schlump. Bullied at his marketing job, repressed in his extended family home, Herbert engages in the imagining of his own high concept: creating the successful, intelligent and supportive older brother he never had. Robby guides him through the next several weeks, advising and congradulating him, until Herbert gains the self-confidence he always lacked. Right about now is when the Twilight Zone homage tends to fall apart, but Rosenman succeeds with admirable simplicity. I could all but envision Mr. Serling standing in the wings gritting his teeth through the closing monologue.

"A Snowball's Chance" is Kurt Kirchmeier's contribution of either modern fantasy or science fiction, depending on your viewpoint. Gifted student Casey just can't seem to stop creating universes, even though he's not supposed to do it until he graduates to advanced classes. Add some jealous classmates to the mix and a well-thrown snowball, and this piece succeeds despite its heavy-handed (and yes, irreligious) message.

I didn't like Greg Jenkins' very short piece "Iron Man" about a rampaging colossus in modern suburbia. Perhaps it's because it followed the not-too-subtle philosophy of Kirchmeier's story. Back to back messages took the wind of entertainment from my sails, and I felt I was being lectured to through the pages.

A pleasant change came with "Penny Royalty for the Pound Mob" by Gene Stewarts. Written with the outstanding narrative voice of an off-world piano player who happens to translate the speech patterns of a fearful alien race, I regretted seeing the story come to an end.

"Prizes" by Edward Muller suffered for me from what I see as a common failing in science fiction: bad science. In the tradition of the early years of SF, this piece focuses too tightly on the story and treats the science as the setting. With the educated readers of today's SF, I don't believe writers can cut corners the way they used to. This story of a rescue attempt after a crash on the Venusian surface fell short because of this despite its solid, dialogue-delivered ending. Still, in the context of the stories it was trying to emulate, it's a good piece.

Bruce Golden wrote a very good fantasy in "The Apocryphist," where the unnecessarily alien protagonist becomes the apprentice to the tribal sage. That the sage rewrites history to suit his needs is another not-so-subtle message, but it works as well here as it does with Kirchmeier's "Snowball."

Finishing this issue is Michael A. Pignatella's "Whitening." Henpecked Arnie greets his wife's two week vacation with glee, as it gives him the opportunity to bleech his teeth with Opal Extra White, a vanity his wife never would have allowed. Without the twist-within-a-twist found in all Twilight Zone tales, I still imagine this one could have fit right in with "High Concept" for Rod Serling's attention. Of course, the Opal Extra White changes more than Arnie's tooth color, and while there isn't much closure for this piece, it is still well done.

So what's the commonality? Virtually all of these stories feature a beaten-down protagonist rising against the oppression of his environment. With the exception of "Nithhad," none of these pieces has a protagonist who starts out as a hero; check that, most of them would have to struggle just to get to average. That they succeed provides an uplifting common thread refreshing in today's speculative fiction world where too many unhappy or tragic endings seem the norm.

If the premier issue of ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS is any indicator of what the magazine is going to be like (and in all honesty, why should I suspect otherwise?) then I'm glad I purchased a subscription. Any collection is bound to be hit or miss; with the exception of one piece, these all hit the dartboard somewhere, with a couple of bulls-eyes. I look forward to the next collection of good, and sometimes great, fantasy and science fiction stories.

Firebrand Fiction : Byzarium Swords

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:17:24 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: Byzarium Swords
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:17am

Byzarium Swords, by Daniel Blackston

originally published 2/16/2006

Byzarium Swords!

It's no accident that the title of this month's column is reminiscent of a catch-phrase you might hear around a medieval-fantasy marketplace. With the lineup of excellent fiction profiled this month, there's no more appropriate way to start things off. Within this installment, you'll find everything from goblin thugs to far-future apocalypses. And every bit of the fiction this month is free for the taking!

But before you scroll down to the reviews, please take a moment to click through the following link for info on a very special collection of short-fiction, one which I recommend quite highly but am not at liberty to review:

Pitch Black Books

Our first stop this month is The Sword Review an e-zine published by Double-Edged Publishing. The layout of the e-zine is standard-utilitarian with a click-thru Photoshop-ed cover for each issue and an annotated table of contents with links to the individual pieces. I found TSR's html option for navigation somewhat frustrating in that when one clicks on a link to a story, article, or review, one is then routed to an excerpt of the piece, (I'm not a fan of this particular online practice), and then another link takes you to the complete work. However, when this last click is made, one is routed to a page where the cover image of the issue is repeated, with the body of text (not immediately visible) below, and this threatened to put me in an "infinite loop."

TSR touts an expressed interest in "quality fiction, valuable reviews, and meaningful exposition, all in a means that respects traditional values and Christian principles." While I possess something rather short of a thorough familiarity with the content at TSR, the content I have read has impressed me as being in keeping with the editorial mandate without allowing said mandate to become in any way obtrusive. This, alone, is a commendable accomplishment for any pub with such a specific and yet sparsely defined Prime Directive.

Issue #11, the February 2006 issue, leads off with a fantasy story, "The Stains of the Past," by J. Kathleen Cheney. While enjoyable on many levels, particularly for its emotional depth and juxtaposition of erotic power and empathy, this story bogs down a bit during its rising action due to a preponderance of dialogue. While the romantic and philosophical dynamic between the story's narrator: a courtesan-empath, and her unlikely suitor: a clairvoyant nobleman, is both poignant and intriguing, I never felt the stakes were high enough in this story to adequately identify with either of the primary characters. However, I rather suspect this had more to do with the story's slow pace, which seemed intensified by Cheney's imaginative central conceit. An inspired, but only partially successful, tale.

"The Engines of Peace" by Douglas Kolacki is a real showstopper of a science-fiction story and one that is so well-crafted that its baroque plotting and complex back-story seemed only negligibly distractive. More distractive are the frequent leaps from one character's point of view to another's -- and this with many of the characters being, at root, hard to tell apart. Granted, this can be a serious liability, especially in a story which attempts so much, but in the long run, Kolacki's narrative skills are up to the task and the result is a thought-provoking blend of social-religious irony, hard sci-fi, alternate history, morality fiction, and bracing satire. Prepare yourself for the coming of the Messiah, (or at least something close enough for rock and roll!) and beware. This time he's not offering parables and aphorisms -- he's giving away wonder-technologies and nobody is looking to crucify him. Kolacki's vision of 1905 Ohio, swarming with flying machines, "telectroscopes," horseless carriages, and universal power-sourcing is a wonder to behold and experience. This inspired piece gains my enthusiastic thumbs-up; however, Kolacki earns a regrettable thumb's-down for his stiff and largely forgettable characters.

Another enjoyable science-fiction story from issue #11 is Mirta Ana Schultz's "Voices from the Void." This story, the winner of TSR's 2005 fiction contest, also falls victim to a nebulous back-story and the inclusion of too much direct exposition via a 1st person narrator. By the third paragraph of this story I was convinced I was reading a possible gem -- by the story's close, however, I felt a twinge of disappointment at Schultz's inability to articulate the events of her story through engaging action, rather than relying purely on her admittedly fluent imagination to hold reader-interest. The story's characters: a "holoflik producer," a "young monk,"a politician's daughter, an "exobotanist," a "missionarian" and the narrator are together on an intergalactic journey under the auspices of a cosmic "Matcher." The characters function allegorically, creating a social-microcosm. Some of the philosophical exchanges between the characters are quite inventive and thought-provoking, not to mention exceedingly well suited to Schultz's thematic thrust.

Also interesting is Schultz's fusion of satirical pop-psychology with the conception of deep space as a medium for cosmic catharsis. If this story and "The Engines of Peace" are any indication of where TSR plans to take Christian-inspired science-fiction, I think we may all be due for a big surprise -- in that the stories for all their avowed ties to "traditional values"-- are startlingly original, and run on complex, "big" ideas, something encountered too rarely in short science fiction these days.

My favorite story from issue #11 is Sean T. M. Stiennon's "Old Steelfist." I haven't made much of a secret of my strong support of young Mr. Stiennon's fiction. I firmly believe he is a writer of significant talent and remarkable self-discipline. "Old Steelfist" was Runner Up in the TSR 2005 fiction contest, but to my mind, it is the best and most well-crafted story from issue #11.

Featuring yet another "unreliable" 1st person narrator, (a common thread throughout issue #8's fiction selections), Stiennon's witty and dramatic tale of goblins and "gang" loyalty easily steals the show. Of the 1st person narrators featured in this issue of TSR, Stiennon's "Klor" is the most fully realized and memorable. "Old Steelfist" is also the only story in TSR #11 that actually fulfills the zine's titular manifesto, featuring some deftly-scribed sword-slinging, as well as colorful dialogue and humor. There is a campy, "Clockwork Orange-ish" feeling to the whole story, with Klan and his gang of "slashers" trekking to their married-with-children mate's farm to convince him to go out on another raid and finding he has more interest in growing vegetables. What sets this piece above the others in the issue is Stiennon's absolute understanding of his characters, plot, and narrative pace. While "Old Steelfist" may, on the surface, seem to lack the big ideas associated with issue #8's other stories, this is purely an illusion generated by the skill of the author, whose gift for writing engaging scenes and dialogue all but sugarcoats the poignant themes and sub-text of the story's action. To those who have opined their belief that nothing original, deep, or satisfying can come from "Dungeons and Dragons" style fantasy, "Old Steelfist" is like a polite kick in the teeth. That is, Stiennon's tale refutes mediocrity, as well as blind-obedience to literary fashion, and does so with enviable technical aplomb and imagination. A must-read story by a must-read author of notable skill and talent.

TSR also features speculative poetry, articles, and reviews, as well as a running blog/column on writerly subjects in left-hand navigation on the table of contents page. This latter feature is particularly fun and informative. TSR is a pleasurable place to surf and a good source of entertaining speculative fiction. Click over right away and sample some of what's on offer; I have the feeling TSR is just getting started.

I'm quite enthusiastic about the next pub up for review, Byzarium, an e-zine edited and published by Aileen McAleer and Leigh Dragoon. This pub is smartly constructed, streamlined, and infused with a palpable matriarchal magic which, if it straddles the dark side from time to time, is fecund with creativity and energy. The format of the e-zine is no-frills (along the lines of Ideomancer) and is easy to surf. The January 2006 issue provides cool icons beside each of the featured pieces to indicate genre: horror, science-fiction, fantasy, or non-fiction article. The fiction selections diverge wildly not only in style and subject but in overall quality as well.

The lead-off piece, "Job Interview," by Philip Roberts, failed to make a lasting impression on me, but it's premise: that of a man being interviewed for a mysterious job, where the interview questions insinuate nasty things about the interviewee is bound to send tingles down a few spines. Much depends upon the twist-ending, which to many readers, will simply feel inevitable and therefore is bound to lose a bit of its sting.

"Anything Like Her Photo,"by Jarrah Moore, is a spirited romance-fantasy told in fugue form. Setting the classic knight-rescues-princess theme against the backdrop of Internet Spam and online dating, Moore manages to wrest tragedy out of her enviably compressed narrative and thereby accomplish a memorable irony with sanguine intimations for the present-day.

"Sunsets and Hamburgers," by Gareth Lyn Powell is an excellent far-future apocalypse with an immediately grabbing opening and a grandly successful denouement. Told episodically in numbered diary entries, the story combines a hatful of familiar SF-nal conceits such as: suspended animation, galactic "drift," the end of the universe, the extinction of the human race, genetic engineering, forced breeding. That all of this and more is accomplished in a short-short -- without sacrificing character depth or world-building -- is just amazing. Powell's narrative voice is precise, giving needed details, sparing superfluous digressions, lengthy exposition, or wooden dialogue. In fact, "Sunsets and Hamburgers" moves so quickly and so effectively toward its profound and unforgettable climax that it is easy to forget that this little gem of a science-fiction story has more concepts invested in it than many door-stopper sci-fi novels. Simply a magnificent short-short, one which I wholeheartedly give my highest recommendation.

Byzarium offers compelling articles for writers, as well. I personally found Leigh Dragoon's article, "Writer's Block," exceptionally cathartic and would like to thank her for the inclusion of the link to the coolest online Tarot program I've yet encountered. Edward O' Toole's article "Trolls and Critics" should be mandatory reading for self-published or first-time published novelists who may have a hankering to Spam. If you'd like some good alternatives to getting run off of discussion boards for self-promotion, take a good look at this very informative and useful article.

Byzarium is a dynamic, modern, entertaining and creatively rich pub. The stories and articles are exactly the right length and depth for online fare and -- if venues like SCI FICTION -- are going to continue to close down, I hope more venues like Byzarium will emerge to fill the gap. I can only imagine what these two editors could pull-off if they had funding to offer a SCI FICTION comparable pay-rate to their authors. As it is, this is definitely an e-zine to watch.

Last in line for review this month is Dreams and Nightmares 73, which happens to be the twentieth anniversary issue for this desk-top-published SF poetry zine. Edited by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, the pub has a definite garage-days feel to it and within the erratically formatted pages lies a wide-range of SF poetry, most of which seems to represent the poets at their most loose and fun-loving. The standout poems from the issue were Leah Bobet's "Into Salt Sea-Foam," Bruce Boston's "Stray Vegetable Lads," and Jessica Langer's "Dirge."

Bobet's poem, while suffering from arbitrary (largely missing) punctuation, boasts some memorable lines:

"The alarm is raised; the prince is dead
Thick outrage stains the morning sky"

or

"It is too late to go back for your childhood toys
It is too late to steal one last cold kiss."

And the poem's theme: of a princess longing to be a mermaid, is forceful enough to merit the poem's majestic, fairy-tale diction.

Bruce Boston's "Stray Vegetable Lads" is a deeply imaginative offering, wherein the poet envisions anthropomorphic field-plants by moonlight that uproot themselves to perform hermetic occupations. Graceful, yet sinister lines, bring Boston's Dali-esque conception to fruition:

"Once dusk is complete, one by one, they tear themselves
free from the soil. With tendrils trailing patches of
loam, they traipse off into the dark. We don't know
where they go or what they do in the breadth of the
night, but we are not without imagination."

Of note in the above stanza is the wonderful break into dynamic syllabalism at the stanza's close where "imagination" subsumes the primarily monosyllabic body of the stanza, devoted to describing the uprooted plants' unknown doing's, whilst the complex and dynamic word "imagination" states clearly the narrator's occupations, but infers they are more manifold and mysterious than those unknown occupations of the plant-men.

"Dirge," by Jessica Langer, is dreamy and romantic with a vision of the afterlife of bones. Solid lines such as:

"Bones, broken like masts in a storm
groan and sway in the vast soil sea."

help this rather one-dimensional piece attain a greater complexity than its theme would overtly admit. Langer's diction is quite in keeping with the sound of sea, of rats, of rotting bones. A nicely turned lyric, which deserves special commendation for its restraint and tasteful scansion, given what could be, in the hands of a lesser poet, simply a maudlin and stereotypical effort.

All in all, the 20th anniversary issue of Dreams and Nightmares 73 seems a fitting celebration of the endurance of this intrepid pub. I encourage you to support the proliferation of SF poetry by ordering a copy or subscription today.

This month's Great Fiction Brand Award goes to Gareth Lyn Powell for "Sunsets and Hamburgers." Congratulations Gareth! We hope to encounter more of your fiction soon!

I sure hope you will stop by our discussion forums to keep up on the latest SF happenings and offer your own thoughts, questions, and views!

Until Next Time,

Daniel E. Blackston

Firebrand Fiction : New Resolutions

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:15:45 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: New Resolutions
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:15am

New Resolutions, by Daniel Blackston

originally published 1/5/2006

New Resolutions

Happy New Year Firebrand Fiction fans! Yes, there hasn't been a new column here since May of last year, which would normally demonstrate the implosion of yet another 4 the luv speculative reviews venue. However, we have no intention of joining the bloodied corpses in our wake and will fight on, even as ghosts or zombies, should such a time come as this is needed -- perhaps nearer to Halloween, rather than New Year's when it is better to think in terms of rebirth and determination. Our first stop of the year is Ralan Conley's Spectravaganza an e-zine which features winners and honorable mentions from Ralan.com's annual contest. Previously, the contest had been themed as a "Grabber" competition where the winners were selected based on the first 500 words of their speculative fiction entries. This year, Ralan shifted the focus to writers' end-games, that is, the contest was dubbed the "Clincher Contest," and entrants were judged by the closing 500 words of their story. This year's judges were: Sheila Williams, Stanley Schmidt, Eric M. Witchey, Robert J. Santa, and Ralan.

The winners of the contest present a mixed lot, both in terms of concept and execution. I definitely felt the format of the Clincher contest weighing on each of the stories and it seemed that while the closing 500 words sections of each of the winners were strong and compelling, the balance of each of the stories (the beginnings and middles) suffered by contrast. Ralan himself has posted some comments on the difficulty of judging stories by their ends, as it were, and I agree with the statements contained therein.

Lethality, by J. Alan Brown won 1st place in the Clincher contest. From the opening paragraphs, its clear that, had the contest been a Grabber contest rather than a Clincher contest, Brown may have found himself left out of the prize money. Lethality starts with a big block of 1st person exposition, which sets up a Hemingwayesque scene of a Great White Hunter type protagonist illegally hunting alien big-game. With uneven diction, the narrator seems to hover somewhere between a Viet Nam era veteran We set up camp a few clicks outside their camp and a British adventurer, He blundered around a bush and froze, staring into the glassy eyes of a krillion having lunch. In a flash, the krillion sprung for the kill. Tipotl fell back and raised his long knife, scoring the beast across the stomach just as the animal plunged its claws into his face and throat.

Add to this that the aforementioned flashback within the exposition resolves itself in yet another flashback, and these factors nearly stifled my interest in finishing the story. On the other hand, I wanted to read the clincher section, the 500 word close that had impressed the contest judges, so I read on. Im afraid nothing I encountered radically altered my original impression of the story, although the closing 500 words of Lethality were certainly the best segment and it is not hard to understand how judges reading only these closing paragraphs might have been convinced by Browns close. Unfortunately, Lethality, when all is said and done, seemed little better than a spirited sketch of off-planet hunting (with a last minute twist). Out of the Box, by Susan Wing took 2nd place in the contest. This story, making use of the familiar restless dead trope, attempts to mix surrealism, fantasy, horror, black comedy/satire, and lyrical writing in a 1st person narrative. The climactic scenes in the story are more or less delivered through dialogue. Reading over this tale, I kept hoping the narrator would reveal something of herself worthy of my attention or concern, but it never happened. This is, of course, a purely subjective response. The writing in this story is lyrical and honestly rendered again, the closing paragraphs of the piece hint at a greater range of theme and plot than the story delivers as a whole.

The 3rd place winner Set in Stone by Kim Zimring also challenged my capacity (slightly) to deal with cliche, but a special compliment should be paid to Zimring for her excellent prose style and for her depth of characterization. Catalyn, an American in Paris, who suffers from Neurofibromatosis (Elephant Mans disease) and has come to the Cathedral at Notre Dame to be healed through the intervention of angels, specifically, the angel Gabriel. This was the only Clincher story that I felt had a weaker close than opening. The first 3/4ths of Set in Stone are moody, exotic, and a bit sinister feeling, which is very effective. This is a very well-written story with creative transpositions of traditional Christian imagery and morality; however, its pop-gothic close falls a bit flat.

Two honorable mentions round out the Clincher edition of the Spectravaganza. The Doll Queen by Maggie Della Rocca manages to breathe a bit of life into yet another permutation of the Talkie Tina(see the collected works of Rod Serling) plot, but nothing about this Day of the Living Dolls story stands out enough for especial praise. The opening scenes of Night Train by Robert Moriyama seemed eerily reminiscent of the opening scenes of Stephen Kings The Shiningwith a protag named Jack suffering through a job interview with an interviewer who is obviously biased against him. This unsettling sense of allusion continues as Jack boards a train and heads out through a snowstorm, hoping to reach London but instead, finds himself in a remote place where even cell phones wont work. From there, a romantic apparition infuses the story with genuine fantasy and genuine pain. The close of this story is wonderful and, sadly, an all too accurate vision of the real world as it manifests to those who have grazed epiphany but never embraced it. A nice story, quite deserving of its HM.

All in all, the Clincher stories were a bit of a let down from previous editions of the Spectravaganza but this obviously has more to do with the structure of the contest rules and parameters than it does with the creative or narrative abilities of the authors in question. Perhaps it is bad medicine to write from the end toward the beginning in precisely this way or perhaps this form confused or interfered with the judges ability to appraise the works thoroughly. The fare at the Spectravaganza is free for the taking and each of the stories is accompanied by excellent original art. I highly recommend that you stop over to read this years issue or check out previous years issues. Support of Ralan.com translated directly into support for the entire speculative fiction field as Ralan.com continues to be the most popular and comprehensive site for SF market listings on the World Wide Web. I highly recommend not only the Spectravaganza but the entire website to you and hope you will visit both soon and often.

We go next into the world of print where Paradox: the Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction marks issue #8 with a fiction, poetry, speculative and historical non-fiction, book and movie reviews, and the most creative and respectful use of common domain art (meaning classic works by historical masters) I've encountered anywhere in the SF field. Cevasco has certainly created a unique publication and one which stands prettily by contrast for both content, form, and layout alongside other prominent print publications like F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, or Asimov's.

The peculiar problem with Paradox's fiction continues to be one of speciality. That is, if you are not well-read in history, or at least an avid viewer of the History channel, you are liable to lose the thread of one or more of the stories in any given issue. Walking a tightrope between story elements what will appeal to a wide readership and those elements which will satisfy history-buffs and scholars would appear to be Paradoxs special task.

Issue #8 leads off with the winning entry in Paradox's Historical Fiction contest, "Anezka" by Bruce Durham. This is a poignant and excellently written piece featuring Hannibal in his old age, hiding from the Romans in Bithynia, circa 183 B.C. (Bithynia being the ancient Kingdom in what is present day Turkey). As per the contest guidelines, "Anezka" is a straight historical piece sans speculative elements, inspired by a detail from Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's 1871 painting, "A Roman Emperor." Durham's winning entry is a potently sequenced and inspired story with a solid tie between the piece's wonderfully restrained emotion and its themes of personal dignity and national or racial loyalty.

The story's protagonist, Anezka, is a respected lead-slave in the palace of Bithynia's King Prusias during the fated time when Hannibal has come to the palace seeking harborage from his enemies. Staying true to history, but diverging wildly from the Alma-Tadema painting (the whole of which was never displayed to contest entrants) Durham's superbly characterized tale accomplishes both thematic resonance (having to do with the inter-twined destinies of nations) and emotional catharsis based in the relationship of the slave-crone Anezka and the great military genius Hannibal, both in their elder years and rooted in an evidently decaying sense of self-nobility and self-reliance. That Durham's prose is honest and without needless flourish or obvious flaw adds to the impact of both the characterizations and themes of the story. That the characters in such a swiftly penned tale accomplish such an indelible bond and expressive sense of mutual understanding is a testament to something far beyond technical precision at work in Durham's fiction. A first-rate story, quite worthy of your attention.

"O, Pioneer" by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is next in line and, while it is a creative piece, it is less successful overall than Durham's lead-off. The problem with "O, Pioneer" is the fragmentation of the narrative into multiple character PoV's and the subsequent gaps in the plot that the jumping PoV's occasion. Not that Bohnhoff fails to successfully tie the various, intricate strands of her story together in the end but that these strands are so disparate to begin with, that one is either duly impressed by her narrative expertise in tying them together, or is left wondering what all the fuss was about. In the end, the disparate strands are justified by the "global" consciousness symbolized by an imagined harmonious mingling of East and West as contrasted with the more cruel and destructive interrelations we know to be historical fact.

The story concerns a Chinese slave -- Wei Lei -- steward to the Chinese Imperial Family at the time Chingas Khan comes along. Fleeing across the sea to "a new land to the West," Wei Lei christens himself We Tai, lands amid a strange people in a strange land with six hundred other Chinese exiles, and then cuts out until the end of the story. The next narrative thread is taken up with Admiral Cristobel Colon, better known as Christopher Columbus, on his way, also, to a "new land" only in his mind for a passage to the East. The ensuing story generates a theological "farce" with dramatic overtones as the familiar story of greed, ambition, gold, and bloodthirsty Christians under Columbus's fanatical and ignorant sense of religion and conquest grinds through various loosely grouped scenes. The "indios" in the story, the native population cross-pollinated with Chinese refugees, are of course portrayed sympathetically, if not almost idealistically. However, it was interesting to note that while the "indios" were described in the story as living under a matriarchy (further evidence to the Spaniards of their savagery), there are no women featured in the story whatsoever. It is a stag scene throughout. This "missed avenue of exploration may have dampened my overall enthusiasm for this energetically conceived story. Still, Bohnhoff deserves praise for creating such an intricate story, which attempts quite a lot, and for revealing, like Bruce Durham, a highly polished prose style that avoids excess and promotes reader interest.

A great interview with Weird Tales editor and popular SF author Darrell Schweitzer followed "O, Pioneer." Interviews with Darrell Schweitzer (there is one posted right here in the interview archives of SFReader.com) are always interesting. I found this particular interview, conducted by Chris Cevasco at World Fantasy Convention in Madison, to be outstanding. Schweitzer is erudite and warm, as well as deceptively simple in his appraisal of SF poetry and prose.

Paradox #8 also offers a spirited and competent pair of movie reviews: Jeremy Goldberg's thoughtful and incisive review of "Good Night, and Good Luck," and Andrea Kail's informed review of "Capote." Add to these reviews, Greg Beatty's article "The Sidewise Award Winners: a Retrospective," five selections of speculative poetry by the likes of Schweitzer and Jane Yolen, plus book reviews by Cevasco and Lisa Jensen and Paradox functions as an all-purpose pub for historical fiction enthusiasts.

My favorite story from issue #8, Power Play by Jack Whyte, is a penetrating and profound inquiry into the nature of power and posits a classical philosophical dialectic as represented by the tales primary characters, Solomon Levi, a venerable Hebrew scholar and Caius Tullius, a powerful Roman who has come to extort from Levi. The two men soon launch into a discussion on the nature of power throughout which Whyte demonstrates with gusto his understanding of philosophical and moral concepts that have their roots in, respectively, the ancient and modern worlds. Obviously, Tullius stands for the modern worlds vision of power, which is largely materialistic, whereas Solomon Levi represents the ancient traditions of wisdom, springing from mystical traditions such as the Kabbalah. For sheer force of ideas, Ive read little in the way of short stories to compete with this tale in the recent past; however, a the preponderance of the story is by far dialogue and some of the exchanges between the characters are lengthy and complex. So, not really on-the-go fare, but a story so well conceived and executed that it deserves a quiet moment or two for perusal and understanding.

Three additional stories, by Carrie Vaughn, D.J. Cockburn, and Tom Welch round out the issue. The stories are solidly written and cover a range of historical settings and themes. Paradox, is a professionally edited magazine with pleasing art and thoughtful arrangement and attention to detail. While the stories weigh heavily toward a historically literate audience, each of the featured works of fiction are well-written and creatively conceived. The price for a subscription is quite affordable and I encourage you to visit the Paradox website to order a subscription today.

Though the column has run too long to thoroughly review Fantastic Stories of the Imagination as I had intended, two stories from the Winter 2005 issue should suffice as an abbreviated sampling of the overall (dynamic and interesting) fiction content of the pub.

Butterfly Bones by Sue Storm seemed most readily understood as a Christmas/New Year allegory in Jungian tones. The story begins within the sentient, desert house of the Bone Woman and ends at a modern hospitals maternity ward. Along the way, Strom brandishes her symbol of butterfly bones with aplomb, but so many myths and iconographies, both Christian and pagan, alongside the storys multifaceted settings may confuse some readers. The resolution is resonant and allegorically rich. The storys progression recalls everything from Jungs Undiscovered Selfto the Major Arcana of Waites Tarot pack. A sound and intellectually compelling story and one that makes a pretzled detour from Dickens should you be seeking something different for your holiday reading.

The Syncretic Priests Confession by Charles M. Saplak is a science fiction adventure with some great old-fashioned off-world violence and struggle, as well as some good old fashioned giant man-eating bugs! Or should I say, the characters in the story, a batch of shipwrecked colonists and their vessels pilot and crew, should be so lucky. The bugs, in this case atropic beetles actually have more on their bug-minds than merely eating and their methods of ritually killing humans are at once terrifying and ironically expressive of humanitys own brutality and religious corruption. The ensuing story, recounted in 1st person narrative, is both suspenseful and fun. Not to mention politically loaded. Saplak seems to have so mastered the nuts and bolts of telling a rippin good off-world story that hes decided to spice things up by interweaving crucial sociological, political, and religious themes into the fabric of this winning tale. One of the themes here seems to be that political convictions and religious urges are both symbiotic and universal. Even to giant bugs. And it is the combination of political belief and faith that produces a variety of monsters, whether insect or human. This is one excellent science-fiction tale and I heartily recommend that you read it as soon as you can.

In a nutshell, these two stories hint at the range of Fantastic Stories from psychoanalytical/allegorical fantasy to off-world adventure science fiction, the pub is geared toward intelligent and sensitive readers who value both traditional story elements and experimental forms. We look forward to reviewing future issues with more column space reserved for this pub.

This months GF Award for Great Fiction goes to Jack Whyte for his excellent story Power Play. Congratulations Mr. Whyte we hope to be read and review more fiction under your byline in the future.

Until Next Time,

Daniel E. Blackston

Firebrand Fiction : Firebrand Fiction #2

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:14:35 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: Firebrand Fiction #2
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:14am

Firebrand Fiction #2, by Daniel Blackston

originally published 1/4/2004

Firebrand Fiction #2, by Greg Beatty

Welcome, Firebrand Fiction readers, and Happy New Year! I trust your holidays went well, and you're all exhausted and ready to settle in for some reading? As per past columns, this month I'll look at three publications: one established professional publication, one brand new semi-professional publication, and an electronic venue (not a magazine per se).

Given the way publishing schedules work, I'm writing this on New Year's Day and I'm reviewing the February 2004 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. This issue contains one novella, three novelettes, and two short stories. The issue opens with "Travels With My Cats" by Mike Resnick. Resnick is rightly known for his adventure fiction, and his novels like Santiago, which are full of larger than life characters. In this quiet little story, Resnick looks at things from another perspective, giving us a character slightly smaller than life, one who is haunted by the possibilities of what might have been, and the desires of his youth. Eventually, he is literally haunted, in a nicely handled series of scenes that explore what it means to really live. For my money, this is the best story in the issue: all mood and commonplaces, and deftly handled.

Resnick's story revolves around a much-loved book from childhood; the return of literary precursors is a bit of a theme in this issue, as Tom Purdom includes a future Casanova in his "Romance for Augmented Trio." The editorial notes mention that this is the fourth story involving the same character, and that's worth mentioning here, because this character is both rich with potential and thinly realized. The same might be said of the entire novelette. The combination of concept and situation is rich with possibilities. Purdom's Casanova is a relatively normal human, who is romantically involved with a geneengineered woman who is considerably smarter than he is, and the two of them are heading out into the outer reaches of the solar system, only to be literally space-jacked by a demented cyborg pirate in snazzy red boots. (Okay, Purdom doesn't call him a cyborg pirate, but he is computer-augmented, and does snatch the beautiful woman from her ship after a battle.) The dramatic potential here is immense, but Purdom only intermittently carries any of the ideas to completion. His Casanova figure does a pretty good job of becoming a hero through love, despite his inferior intelligent-but almost all the rest of the story remains in potential. None of his super-intelligent seem especially bright, and I never believed this was a great lover talking.

By contrast, the lead character in William Sander's "At Ten Wolf Lake" is completely believable, even though he isn't human. He is, in fact, a Hominid American, better known as a Bigfoot. Sanders does a great job of making his character's different senses, history, and cultural matrix detailed and credible, and an equally impressive job of integrating this new minority's situation with existing political, ecological, and racial complexities. In fact, it would not being too far to say that I loved every aspect of the characterization and idea play. However, there were two problems with the story. The minor one was that the "surprise" ending is tipped early (and seems obvious enough that I can't even mention it), and the major one is that the story ends before it really gets started. Please bring back this Bigfoot, and give him a story worthy of him.

Bringing characters back is the essence of "Rewind." Jack Skillingstead gives us a vignette in which one character suddenly possesses the ability to rewind reality. There's some discussion of why (due to an accident? for a specific purpose), and some hand waving about what it means, but this never develops beyond a sketch. The same power has been posited in several other more realized stories ("The Second Rat" by David Barr Kirtley, and David Levine's "Rewind," to name two); this story adds little to the genre's understanding of the theme.

Matthew Jarpe's novelette "Language Barrier" is about as crowded with ideas as Purdom's story, but it works much better. It opens with a mysterious ship entering the solar system, and the entire story works around the idea of first contact. However, along the way he sketches elements of a system-wide society into place, and drops interesting possibilities about AIs with mysterious desires, attempts to both keep control over change and escapes from social control, and a few other things. The core story is only a qualified success, as it includes at least one sophomoric conceit (what if language divides us, rather than unifying us?), and at least one Golden Age silliness (what if we had an entire space colony made up of people with a specific portion of their brains cut out?). Wait, make that two or three sillinesses. But that said, there are nice touches of both extrapolation and nostalgia, and the resolution of the first contact situation is nicely poetic.

"Long Voyage Home" by R. Garcia y Robertson is this issue's novella, and it's a pretty good Golden Age adventure yarn. Like Purdom's novelette, "Long Voyage Home" returns to a universe developed in earlier stories, and this universe too is a lively one, ripe for adventure. Despite the care to get the technological and scientific details correct, this reads something like a juvenile, in that the story opens with Student Cadet Rachel Naomi Mohammed-Cohen as the sole survivor of the Amelia Earhart shipwrecked on a hostile alien planet-and then things get dicey. Naomi frees herself, negotiates with SuperCats (human/feline crossbreeds), Greenies (human/plant crossbreeds), and human slavers, crosses wits with robots and alien technology, has her life threatened by falling, being eaten, being tricked, being enslaved, and suffers some minor lurid interspecies titillation, all while making her way safely home. This story is a romp, and, treating it as such, it has only two weaknesses: first, Naomi is threatened so often that it's hard to keep track of how much happens, and second, her life is threatened so casually that I never believed the author was serious.

This isn't the strongest issue of Asimov's, and only Resnick's story, Sander's Bigfoot and Jarpe's poetic touches will stay with me for long.

From one of the leading publications in the genre, I turn to two that SFReaders' readers might not have encountered yet. The first of these is issue #1 of the new small press magazine Flytrap, which is subtitled "a little zine with teeth." I requested it because I respect Tim Pratt's work (Pratt and Heather Shaw edit the zine), and I was curious. Let me start with praise and honesty. This is an attractive little zine. The layout is simple, but functional, the paper high quality, the text itself readable. (Lest these sound basic, I'd rate Flytrap above Asimov's in all of these qualities.) It sometimes takes a new publication some time to develop an editorial vision, but Shaw and Pratt clearly share a mature, unified vision of what they want Flytrap to be. That vision positions Flytrap at the literary slipstream end of the genre continuum.

What does that mean, positively? It means that the writers in this first issue write exceptionally well. Time and again I paused in appreciation of the imagery found here- in Jan Larsen's "A Shifting in Dust," or Gabriel Edson's "Rain, for example, made me smile with the purity of the images, which in their flow seemed close to prose poems than traditional fiction. It means that the editors are open to experiment, and include very short pieces (this 44 page zine contains 10 pieces of fiction, for example), as well as pieces that are more vignettes or fragments, or simply that don't follow traditional plot structures, and aren't limited to traditional genre constraints. For example, the first story in the issue, Greg van Eekhout's "Fishing, I Go Among Them," is written from the perspective of a hangman going among prisoners. It isn't clearly set in any recognizable culture, and it's almost a fable in its simple structure, except that there's a dark mood throughout, as if the isolation came from Kafka. It isn't clearly horror, and there is no specific fantastic element, leaving it suspended as a sort of free-floating weird tale- but it's a pretty good story about the effects of evil and the costs of justice, and I'm glad I read it.

Other stories are more clearly anchored in generic traditions. Jay Lake's "Like Cherries in the Dark" echoes "The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," but grounds it as fully in a richly detailed evocation of American culture as Marquez did with his lost angel in Columbia. The ending is a bit too easy, but the eruption of the fantastic a pure and Americanized magical realism. Barth Anderson's "Scrapbook for an Epidemic" combines satire of American culture with a pure linguistic romp. It goes on a little too long, but each of the individual entries in this log of an attempt to defeat a plague of aphasia is barbed and witty.

"Carving," by Derek James, is a fairly traditional horror story in which Jeb finds that when he whittles a representation of someone, it is uncannily accurate-and the person dies. There are no surprises here- Jeb can't give up his talent even when he promises to do so- but James tells the story clearly and efficiently. By contrast, Michel J. Jasper's "Never, Incorporated" takes a familiar idea, that of dark creatures (in this case, goblins) offering one's heart's desire at too great a price, and gives it an original spin, making the ending at once inevitable and surprising.

Now the negative half of this unified vision. Too often, I felt restless while I was reading these pieces. Even pieces with language lovely enough to be moving (Larsen's, Edson's) often left me feeling vaguely cheated, as if I were expecting all this beauty to add up to more. In other cases, such as Susan Marie Groppi's "Ladybug Summer," were more irritating; I turned the page, searching for the story's end, only to find that it was just that beautifully wrought page. I returned to it, and read it three times, each time finding it lovely but unsatisfying. Too often, it was as if the authors put their energy into crafting the stories on level of the prose, and did not really address the larger story structure- or social structure. And this is where I have to call on the honesty I mentioned: I dislike stories that do this, and found myself repeatedly impatient with the stories contained here, and so I simply may not be an appropriate reviewer for this publication.

At the other end of the spectrum, both in genre and my experience as a reader, one finds the stories that won Ralan's Grabber contest. The Grabber Contest was put on by Ralan Conley, who runs Ralan's Webstravaganza (Ralan.com). Ralan's, for those who aren't familiar with it, is the best online market resource out there. Ralan updates it regularly, making guidelines available for just about all the periodicals and anthologies out there, and providing a great service to aspiring writers like myself.

In any case, Ralan held a contest for "the grabber"-the first 500 words of a story. Ralan received 82 entries, and judged them along with a very impressive panel of judges: Brian Aldiss, Candas Jane Dorsey, Robert Killheffer, and Lucy Sussex. It's also useful to contrast them with the stories in Flytrap. I'd have to say that the line by line prose in the Flytrap stories is much better than the writing in any of these contest winners- but that these five stories are much better at story structure, and are much more satisfying. They are also more traditionally fantastic. In the winner, "Life and Death and Stealing Toads," by Eric M. Witchey, a husband tries to steal a magic toad from his elderly neighbor. He'd suspected she was a witch when he was younger, but it was only with the desperation of a husband deeply in love with a dying wife that he admits it as an adult. The result is bittersweet, and appropriate.

Amy Beth Forbes won second place with "A Communion of Maggots." For the most part, it seemed a bit too familiar-an adaptation of city vs. indigene, and of "rational" world structures vs. the mythic/dream time of the primitive. However, the overall structure was nicely handled, and the grotesque touches (primarily the maggots) darkened the story well, to keep me reading. Samantha Henderson's "The Raven and the Snake" (third place) also adapted tribal myths, and brought them into contact with contemporary society, but more ambitiously, as a contemporary American must travel into the realm of death to help his son's spirit find its appropriate final resting place. I didn't buy the fantasy hand waving about the possible relationship between this world and ours-but I did believe that the father's emotions were easily powerful enough to drive such a trek and sacrifice.

Sarah Prineas won an honorable mention with "Pooka and the Pryanik," but I would have rated the story higher. In my judgment it opens much more evocatively, and in a much more unified fashion; the pooka (a shape-shifting magical creature from Irish folklore) is walking through a richly described and very specific landscape-when his feet suddenly begin to walk him to parts unknown. It eventually turns out that he's going to a witch's, and that she wants the pooka to find her apprentice. He does, but being the trickster that he is, things don't turn out quite as the witch plansdespite her precautions.

The final honorable mention was won by Robert J. Santa for "The Devil and John Bartlett," and here again, I'm afraid I would disagree with the judges. Who can read an opening line like "The Devil and I don't have a very good relationship" and not want to read on? I did, and I'm glad I did. The characterization in the story is minimal, but then, it's supposed to be: the entire story is the wonderful, unexplained situation of a man who has been playing bridge with the devil for years. The bridge descriptions are well done, and both structure and advance the story. And after they've been playing for years, the devil finally does what he's supposed to do: he suggests they play for the man's soul. You knew it had to happen, right? I did, at least, and I'm glad to say that Santa resolved it in a complex and somewhat surprising fashion.

So that's this month's sweeping overview of the speculative fiction genre. Given the wide range of stories examined, it would be even harder than last month to pick a best story, but if I had to, I'd go with Resnick's "Travels With My Cats."

Firebrand Fiction : Virgin Print

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:10:51 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: Virgin Print
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:10am

Virgin print, by Daniel Blackston

originally published 3/14/2003

That's right, even in this Pixeled Age where paper magazines across the board face a harrowing future, the human race is still sacrificing trees for Speculative Fiction.

I love print magazines and have savored the sensual joy of many a promising new pub. When it comes to fiction magazines, I regard new encounters with guarded excitement, much the way one might regard a blind date. Having been burned more times than not, most of us approach blind dates cautiously, fearing the worst. So it is when I find a new print pub in my mailbox, I'm excited and interested, but in the back of my mind is the idea that even at best this may be a one-time fling, you know magazines fail everyday just like relationships and most of them don't let you down easy, they just cut everything off at once and implode.

Let's hope this will not be the case with 3SF, a very promising new British pub from the Big Engine Co., edited by Liz Holliday.

Although my date with issue #1 got off to a rocky start with the intro piece of fiction, Jay Lake's, "The Angle of My Dreams",
first-meetings are often strained beneath the burden of making a good first impression. You have to expect a bit of awkwardness or maybe just a clash of expectations. Lake's lyrically-intended coming of age story hit me at absolutely the wrong angle, I'm troubled to say, and kept bringing to mind memories of an old Pink Floyd video coupled with the Fizzy Lifting Drink scenes in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In the end, however, Lake fruitfully twines the tragedy of the first space shuttle disaster, Challenger, to the more personal story of his familiar tot-protagonist and does so with occasional grace and emotion. An unobtrusive, but not necessarily meritorious little story, that initially struck me as a bit too predictable.

My enthusiasm picked up considerably with the next story, "Sweet Waters" , a collaborative effort by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. Blending elements of a tribal/prehistorical epic with the spacewrecked lone-survivor concept, Lee and Miller craft a highly enjoyable and creatively conceived piece that is a heartfelt variation on the theme of "outsider". One especially commendable device in the story is the use of traditional gender roles: males as hunters and women as keepers of knowledge, right alongside some brilliant reversals of gender-typing. The protagonist, Slade, is poignantly drawn with complexities and ambiguities and the story's forward motion is never interrupted by intrusive exposition, despite its elaborate and dynamic world-building. A highly recommended read that reveals as much power in its plot and characters as its premise.

Next up was Marion Pitman's apocalyptic psychodrama, "Sunlight in Spelling", a wry, harsh, wise, and narrowly hopeful tale that merits attention, despite some occasionally rough dialogue and a somewhat wobbly premise. Concerning a sunless near-future earth, Pitman skillfully interweaves the setting of her lightless world to the internal struggle of her proletarian protagonist while refracting the story's central metaphor -- sunlight -- through a bittersweet and ultimately enigmatic love story. There's an awful lot of speculative content in this piece, which seems to hover in a purely metaphorical realm, without ties to probable extrapolation or verisimilitude, but it is a very powerful story nonetheless. Pitman writes evocatively and intelligently -- just be prepared to suspend your disbelief.

If you're looking for tough, imaginative, stylishly written, and intellectually provocative short spec fiction, try issue #1's next offering, "Making Fields", by Mary Soon Lee. This 1st person monologue story plumbs disturbing sociological and socio-ethical depths in less than fifty paragraphs, evoking Margaret Atwood and a spiritual irony worthy of Flannery O' Conner. The skill evidenced in the story's character shadings, narrative pace, and linguistic melody is exquisite and deserves much more detailed explication and praise than can be achieved within the space constraints of this column. From planetary prisons to lesbian innocence to self-sterilization and poetic paradox, "Making Fields", is a finely faceted gem. I read through this one three times in a row becoming more and more astounded at its compression and precision after each read. A spectacular score for 3SF's maiden issue!

Still jazzed from Mary Soon Lee's brilliant story, I turned to the next piece, "The Third Way", by Great Fiction Brand Award winner Darrell Schweitzer. I expect a lot from a Schweitzer story including, but not limited to: lyrical prose, powerful archetypes, emotional resonance, and moral relevancy. "The Third Way" is a moody, maudlin, and magnificent fantasy that sculpts a baroque frieze of familiar symbols in both common and fresh combinations. The story's narrator, Grion, the tenaciously clever and faithful sidekick to the hero Mazantes, spins a richly imagined recollection of a Dream Quest that culminates in a Game With Death and a surprise twist to the Rules of Fate. The imagery and melodic voice in this story form a powerful marriage that is too rarely encountered in speculative prose these days. A masterful tale told with sophistication and confidence.

After this staggering one-two combination, I was a probably a bit too dazed to fully appreciate Lawrence Watt-Evans' story, "Volunteers". I came away with a sort of grudging appreciation for the story -- it was entertaining -- but on technical grounds, this piece is surprisingly clumsy to have been penned by such an experienced pro. The first five paragraphs of the story are straight info-dump, followed by a brief scene where the characters fetch and arrange popcorn and drinks around the TV to wait for the next info dump that arrives in short order courtesy of CNN. This goes on for a considerably long period -- too long considering all Watt-Evans is trying to do is establish one of the most familiar plots in all of SF: that aliens have made contact with our planet and are seeking "volunteers" to join their fleet. The story chugs through some nearly interesting soap operatic subplots and resolves itself with an expository coda. Ironically, "Volunteers", seems to fall short of its own time-honored moral while proving its essential verity -- "nothing ventured, nothing gained".

One of the best things about the debut issue of 3SF was its strong fantasy content. Cherith Baldry's, "The Ring of Ankhar", was especially pleasing to encounter for its strong, traditional fantasy elements and its poignant plot. Riffing on the Fisher King myth, Baldry modulates her near-Arthurian tale by substituting a ring for the Grail -- and a strong, sympathetic heroine in place of Sir Galahad. There's a bit of deception with the reliability of the narrative and various dream states -- however the clean, swift prose and romantic tenor of the tale more than make up for any slight objections regarding the story's resolution. This piece, along with Schweitzer's story, empowers the debut issue of 3SF with a strong, heroic fantasy flavor -- much welcomed by this reader, and many more, I'm sure.

The issue's last tale, "Punishment", by Richard Parks, is an ambitious science fiction story of "virtual psychotherapy" -- where the "social worker" protagonist enters a digitized facsimile of Hell to treat psychotic criminals. I'm not sure I was the best audience for this story, but I liked it anyway. I did have some problems following the set-up and was never sure which thread of the story was the main plot, and which was the subplot. In the end, I decided the ambiguity was intentional and intended to blur the lines between "objective" reality and subjective or self-fulfilling reality. When I started thinking about the story this way, it made a much deeper impact. A successful piece that, like most of 3SF's fiction, packs plenty of plot and thematic power.

In addition to the wide ranging menu of speculative fiction, 3SF offers an equal portion of non-fiction, including book reviews, columns, interviews, and much more. It would be easy to write a full column on the non-fiction content of 3SF and the conclusion would be very similar to the obvious verdict on 3SF's fiction -- this is a very promising magazine in every respect and we should all hope it will be around for some time to come. Now pressing toward their fourth issue -- I encourage all fans of speculative fiction to try this pub. If you want a magazine with spirit, imagination, variety, and a strong emphasis on storytelling, get a subscription right away, you won't be sorry. We've read on through an additional issue of the pub and it only gets better from what we've reviewed here.

Our Great Fiction Brand Award goes this time to Mary Soon Lee for her story, "Making Fields". Congrats Ms. Lee -- if ever your name should appear in our humble column again, the GF Brand will follow it!

Now for free fiction -- take a minute or two to check out S. Evans' story, "Pineapple Girl", from the new speculative ezine ABYSS AND APEX. This is a spirited treatment of the "Golem" theme we've been off-handedly surveying over the past few columns. Evans displays eloquence and tenderness in this highly readable story of tribal intrigue and shamanism, free for your pleasure.

ABYSS AND APEX looks to be a promising site so set your bookmark accordingly! We wish co-editor/publishers Elizabeth Bear and Leah Bobet much luck and will be checking in at the site periodically.

Don't forget to visit the SFReader.com discussion forums for conversation, news, and debate.

Until Next Time,

Daniel E. Blackston

Edited by Dave - Mar-05-2015 at 8:12am

Firebrand Fiction : Fresh Voices

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:07:26 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: Fresh Voices
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:07am

Fresh Voices, by Daniel Blackston

originally published 2/1/2003

Were back! Happily, after a too long hiatus from this column, Lady E. and I have returned with a feast of excellent short fiction for our readers. Though we may have been negligent in posting reviews recently, weve been scaling a veritable mountain of short Speculative Fiction, and were elated to report our personal discovery of some highly talented, exceptionally promising new writers, some of whom we are pleased to review in this installment.

Whether youre skeptical of the big four pubs and worried that short Spec Fiction is on a downward path, or a wild aficionado searching for your next SF fix, youll find much of merit and some pleasing surprises at one of our favorite online venues, Elysian Fiction.

To be sure, Elysian Fiction suffers from some of the annoyances typical of the small press. One can never be sure when or if the latest issue will be posted, there is sometimes an unevenness to the technical prowess of Elysian Fictions contributors, and one wonders whether or not Elysian Fiction is being regarded, at large, with as much interest and enthusiasm as it deserves...

Despite these hurdles, Editor Jim Bailey has created a fiction website well worth bookmarking and perusing on a habitual basis. Two aspects of Elysian Ficion that deserve praise are its accessibility and clean presentation. There are no pop-ups, no ads, no this, that, or the other to distract you from the fiction at Elysian Fiction. In addition, the site is set up so that stories may be custom formatted and easily printed. For issue #3 (which posted last December) Editor Bailey frames his table of contents between two brief, very spirited, editorials -- and offers a selection of ten mostly outstanding stories for your entertainment and sometimes amazement.

Fiction ranges from novella length High Fantasy to short-short humorous, contemporary Fantasy -- and the technical adroitness of the writers displays an equally wide range from highly polished to rough. In the end, the honesty of the writers and the range of imagination offered almost always overcome whatever objections one might have to the occasionally bumpy narrative technique.

A good case in point is The Wish Giver, by E. Catherine Tobler. This is a fine, imaginative piece with stretches of lyrical grace in its narration, though one occasionally feels the roughness of the prose more so than its polish. The story concerns Tam, a medieval-ish juvenile delinquent who has made a habit of stealing coins from the village wish fountain, motivated it seems by equal portions of greed and antisocial angst. When Tam begins to hear the coins speaking, revealing the wishes made by his fellow villagers, a dialogue with his conscience is initiated, leading to some expected and unexpected consequences. The main problem with the storys narration seems to be its ambiguous hovering between a mature and young adult tone. Overall, Tobler seems to be reaching for a lyricism and tenderness that will appeal to the adult reader and tease them toward a sense of communal sacredness and compassion for others; however, there are a good many passages that seem to slip over into a young adult style of narration and these passages distract from the otherwise gently admonishing and instructive fable. Still, a delicately imagined piece, well worth reading.

Another somewhat roughly penned, but intensely satisfying story is Hall of the Spring Wind, by Fiona Avery. This Japanese Fantasy concerns the perennially present last of the Samurai protagonist, this time named Yamaoka Teshu, who, due to Averys expert characterization, attains both credibility and reader-sympathy despite the dangers of clich. In fact, it is Averys handling of her protagonist that elevates this piece from its expected trappings, and, in the end, invigorates the story with the glitter of legend. I found the climax of the story exceptionally potent even though it concerned an expected duel between Teshu and his former Master, Asari Giumei. There is something acutely powerful about Averys handling of action sequences, which seem to explode with color and emotion. It is very difficult for a writer to synchronize a characters internal struggle with outward action, especially in tales of heroic adventure, while achieving a fresh synthesis of motivation and action. Avery, despite some weak sub-plotting, and negligible minor characters like Hope Faerworld, an allegoric persona who represents the influence and dangerous seduction of the West, offers an exciting and emotional synthesis of character struggle and heroic action, with an enticing vision of History and tradition enchantingly in tow.

For standard fantasy fare, James A. Hartleys The Devils Within offers a desert-quest setting with Hawk the swordsman sent into the wasteland to slay devils at the behest of his tribal shaman. A pleasant, escapist read that offers little in the way of innovation or surprise, but does offer some eerie moments around the cookpot of the Dead.

Elysian Fiction #3 offers three novella length works, which resist detailed discussion in this column due to space constraints: Elaines Isaaks Winning the Gallows Field, Glen Hamiltons Wisdom, and Lawrence M. Schoens, Golem Summer. All three of the novellas are well worth reading, although all three also display some rough patches of narration. We found Golem Summer a quite interesting riff on the golem theme, which has lately been celebrated by many in regard to Jeff Fords story from F&SF May 2002, Creation. Fords story is much smoother in terms of technique and focus of plot. Nevertheless, Schoens golem story plumbs a darker and more difficult task than Fords, laying aside the ambiguity of Creation for an outright mysticism, which teems with excitement and peril. Schoens story (unlike Fords) is slightly marred by repetitiveness and excessive length, but is still well worth perusing.

Levity -- albeit of the dark variety -- leaps in via two contributions to #3 by Charles Langley and Jackie Ramirez respectively. One notable point is that newcomer writers penned both of these stories and both authors achieve their purposes, if perhaps with less aplomb than the most exacting standards of technique might demand. Langleys tale considers Death-as-a-persona coming to claim one Willie Joe Orbis, who unbeknownst to the Grim Reaper has made a tricky pact with Deaths Grandpa, and thus proclaims himself immune to mortal time. There is a good pace and tenderness to this story, but for the most part, nothing unexpected takes place, and the tales denoument is unlikely to surprise all but the most inexperienced readers. Ramirezs tale, Gorillas in Our Midst is an odd little story, bordering on Absurdist fantasy that concerns a womanizing neo-celebrity, Adam Canter, whose claim to fame is the capture of a giant Gorilla, named Kong, of course, from a tropical island. Ramirez turns the tables on her protagonist with humor and wastes no words along the way.

Elysian Fiction distinguishes itself not only by offering a wide-range of Fantasy flavors, but by introducing some welcome new blood into the field. Two of issue #3s contributors, Cory Tamler and M. Bennardo, display not only imaginative gusto and emotional honesty -- but startling and sterling narrative technique, as well.

Hunting Down the Moon, a contribution from Cory Tamler, a high-school junior, offers some of the most pleasing prose weve encountered at Elysian Fiction. Building from an eccentric and unexpected premise, that of a Jeckyl and Hyde-ish canine with a mysterious master, Tamler weaves her tale with astonishingly fresh language, metaphor, description, and dialogue -- all the while steering her protagonist to a coming of age climax that resounds with much more sincerity and emotion than the a good number of these types of tales, which are always available in abundance both in and out the short Spec fiction field. Tamler fires impressively on all cylinders here, from control of language to characterization, through theme and nuances of crisis. However, it is her linguistic creativity and her insight into the use of metaphor that deserve special mention. One could dip into almost any paragraph of Hunting Down the Moon and find something worthy of praise. The following is a short excerpt of a descriptive passage, which is typical of Tamlers wonderful prose, If that day had been damp, the night was a sopping blanket. It seemed as if there was a thunderstorm frozen, hanging midair, so that the droplets of rain smacked you in the face and all over the body when you walked into them, like mist only wetter and stranger. My window was dripping with dark tears, shutting out most of the outside world except the cold smear of the full moon on my window, blurry through the droplets.

Hunting Down the Moon is a debut story that portends much brightness for Tamlers future writing and we sincerely hope to encounter more of her work as soon as possible. Editor Bailey deserves praise for discovering Tamler and making her fiction available for readers. In this regard, Elysian Fiction demonstrates the indispensability of the Small Press, which offers some fine opportunities for talented new writers, while so many of the prestige pubs, preoccupied as they are with featuring proven talent, have precious few spots for introducing new writers.

Another great story from a new writer (at least new to us) is One More Lonesome Bluegrass Album, by M. Bennardo. This tale, written in evocative Bluegrass dialect is a marvel of sound, sight, and emotion. Divided into 13 sections, or tracks, Bennardos account of the Devil in the Bottoms, ghosts and hollows its way through an erotic/demonic landscape, climaxing in thorny and bitter wisdom. The story, admirable not only for its narrative technique, successfully infuses the spirit and flow of Bluegrass music and culture into a Speculative Fantasy setting. One More Lonesome Bluegrass Album may have benefited from some slight pruning as the climax and resolution of the story seemed a long time coming and difficult to discern beneath the gossipy hill-speak of the storys narrator; nevertheless, the meandering telling of the tale is correct for its theme and setting.

Taken as a whole, Issue #3 of Elysian Fiction is a diverse and entertaining collection of short Spec Fiction. Edited with care and consideration for the reader, this e-zine deserves your attention. Best of all, you dont have to spend a penny to read Elysian Fiction, though the quality of the fiction is certainly as strong as much of the fiction youd pay to read.

OurBrand Award for this column goes to Corey Tamler for her story, Hunting Down the Moon. It is not often that we encounter a young writer so full of promise and imagination so it is with genuine pleasure that we bestow our Brand on Ms. Tamler. We wish her much success with her future writing and will stamp our Brand beside her name whenever we should be lucky enough to feature her in this column in the future.

Until Next Time,

Daniel E. Blackston

Edited by Dave - Mar-05-2015 at 8:08am

Firebrand Fiction : First Class Fiction

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:06:21 +0000

Author: SFReader
Subject: First Class Fiction
Posted: Mar-05-2015 at 8:06am

First Class Fiction, by Daniel E. Blackston

originally published 7/2/2002

SciFi.com is an electrifying website resplendent with multi-media menus, topnotch interviews, live chats, discussion boards, SF news, and just about anything else SF related you can imagine. It's a SF fan-friendly extravaganza with rapidly changing, cutting-edge content. A thoroughly fun labyrinth to navigate.

The Sci Fiction section of the site is our focus in this column -- and even here we can do little more than graze the surface. This is, of course, the Cadillac of online Speculative Fiction sites, piloted by a legendary editor, who by all indications is at the height of her substantial influence and creative powers. Simply put, this is a must-bookmark SF source and a likely place to discover some of the best fiction available anywhere, in print or online.

Under Ellen Datlow's expert and intriguing editorship, Sci Fiction shines as brilliantly for the SF constellations as Zoetrope All Story, Francis Ford Coppola's wildly successful venture, does for the Literary field, with fiction of outstanding quality and craftsmanship, and an editorial vision that fruitfully integrates reader ease with creative/aesthetic expression. Week after week, Ellen Datlow presents Speculative Fiction in diverse variations that will haunt and possess readers, scribed by writers of proven quality and vision. Even if you are only a sporadic SF lover or e-pub reader, this is a source you'll want to make time to visit again and again.

Sci Fictions's vast archives boast contributions by such notables as: James Blaylock, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, James Blish, plus many, many more.... Also a regular series, "Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction", plus regular classic reprints, plus SF writers on Sept. 11th, plus a Nebula Award winning novella, plus -- we're just getting started here! This site is an absolute treasure trove of SF and we regret that we only have space to spotlight a trio of the most recent offerings. We urge you to click over explore the superabundance at will!

As for recent fiction, "Jemima" by A.R. Morlan is a stunning satire of commercial marketing and virtual-reality gaming that threads a symbolic needle expertly, while tattooing a tale of the not-too-distant-future on the reader's cerebral cortex. Erc, a hard-ass sociopath with a tattooed bar-code on his forehead, is recruited off his skateboard by a cabal of game designers and promoters to become a living Sim, a flesh embodiment of virtual Spear-Slinger Roe Nudara Aswad, hero of the interactive virtual action-game, "Notker". The transformation of Erc's body through all-over-body tattooing, darkly described by Morlan, ignites Roe Nudara's saffron-skinned, shooting-star celebrity.

As "Notker" goes into promotion for its third edition, "Shadow Blade", Erc-as-Roe-Nudara, works the trade-show circuit where he performs psuedo-choreographed combat exhibitions with down-and-out football players, ex-wrestlers, and others, who masquerade as the luckless villains of the game. Morlan's description of the demo-combat is steeped in ominous satire and there is much sexual cynicism laced into the imagery of clashing spears, bodies, and breasts. The penultimate moment of the story's rising action is the appearance of a black antique peddler in the crowd who whispers a single word to Erc, "Jemima". The permutations of this word and its chilling symbolism of logo-commercialism is a brilliant literary device deployed by Morlan with great sophistication. Connecting the futuristic Sim, transformed through hideous tattoos to be a living logo, to the "antique" pancake and syrup, smiling Negro Aunt used exploitatively in America's racist past and present is a masterful ironic device.

Trouble comes to Erc's paradise when a serial killer uses the "Notker" games to lure child victims. A tsunami of legal and promotional entanglements deluges the virt-game and Erc. Morlan brings the story to a haunting close and shows subtle, yet thematically profound, character development in this brilliant satire of consumerism and Plutocracy. Very highly recommended.

"The Children's Crusade", by Robert Reed, is a mission to Mars theme darkly imagined as one man's personal, familial tragedy. When a child visionary Philippe Rule starts a Crusade among the young to turn their minds and money to the prospect of Mars exploration, the societal fallout hits hard on a teacher and his family. Reed's hapless protag, Wes, seems to watch the generational hypnosis by Rule's virtual Web-Mars game and the general trend of Mars fanaticism a little too passively. His direct involvement with Rule, who ultimately "converts" both his nephew and daughter, threatens to stretch the bounds of verisimilitude. Despite this bit of "stretching" plot-wise, the tale is a powerfully successful epic that reads quickly despite its time span and heroic background. Reed won me over both emotionally and intellectually with his novel-impact short story -- and his predilection for a hostile Mars revives a dark dimension to the Red Planet I am more than happy to re-encounter.

The recent classic reprint is, "Land of the Great Horses", by R. A. Lafferty, a boisterous bit about a mass-gypsy migration and some light-fingered extraterrestrials. Two mineral explorers, Rockwell and Smith, are exploring in the Thar Desert in North India when it begins to rain. They steer their terrain buggy near a legendary mirage, a pinnacle of luscious high ground, called The Land of Great Horses. As they survey on foot closer to the mirage of highland green, Rockwell discovers that their instruments show they are actually gaining altitude. Smith shocks him further by declaring that his real name is "Pettalangro" and that the Land of the Great Horses (his true home) is no longer a mirage.

The tale then thumbs through a series of colorful vignettes, curious and nefarious folk all around the world quit their lives abruptly and pack off to the Land of Great Horses. Later, we learn that the Land of Great Horses was physically taken by the Outer Visitors as a "sliver" for scientific study. The Visitors left a holographic replica as a loaner -- hence the mirage. When the OV's claim a fresh "sliver" (Los Angeles) for a specimen, Lafferty tilts full-speed into a mock encyclopedic entry for the "Angelenos", a race of gypsies who drive "for hours and sometimes days on seldom used cloverleafs and freeways". A terrifically enjoyable piece.

Other great stories from the archives are: "Water Master," a fantasy/fable about drought and the dark animus who controls the flow of water in a post-apocalyptic village, by Carol Emshwiller, "The Disinterred", by Mark W. Tiedmann, a Dantesque descent into 19th century satanic horror, told chillingly through the story of a man and his dialogue with his son's ghost.... but we're really only at the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Given the cornucopia of awe-inspiring and technically adroit fiction at Sci Fiction, we have no choice but to award Ellen Datlow our Brand Award. Congratulations to Ellen Datlow and to all the writers at Sci Fiction, from now on when we mention the site (and you can be sure we'll be visiting again), or Ellen Datlow, the Brand shall immediately follow.

So, once again, we challenge those last two or three remaining e-pub skeptics to spend half an hour at Sci Fiction and try to go on doubting. It's a triumph of Internet publishing that anyone with a browser can click over to fiction of this caliber, offered in a pleasant, highly readable format. We're happy to bring you this appetizer and hope you'll click over for a full-meal. It's not often you find gourmet food and fine wine served in a glittering glass -- all on the house.

Don't lose a minute, link up to free speculative fiction at Sci Fiction.

For a candid and fascinating conversation with Sci Fiction's laurel-crowned editor, Ellen Datlow, see the most recent issue of Science Fiction Chronicle, available through DNA Publications.

Until Next Time.
Daniel E. Blackston