Category: links

There is a new online magazine in town, and this one focuses exclusively on science fiction.

Lightspeed Magazine, launched in June, is helmed by Fantasy Magazine and Prime Books publisher and award-winning editor Sean Wallace, with editorial support from John Joseph Adams (Fiction), Andrea Kail (Nonfiction), Stefan Rudnicki (Audio), and Jordan Hamessley and Christie Yant (assistant editors). A glance at the magazine’s impressive staff box shows that aside from showcasing fiction, Lightspeed also publishes nonfiction pieces, which can be read as companion pieces to its fiction offerings, and serves up a podcast, featuring one or two stories each month in audio format.

A fiction and a nonfiction piece is posted online for free every week, but readers have the option to buy the complete issue in ebook form at any time, even if there’s only one story for that month available on the website. The magazine’s regular monthly publication schedule (following this debut issue) will include two pieces of original fiction and two fiction reprints, along with four nonfiction articles. Fiction (and podcasts, when applicable) will go live on Tuesdays, nonfiction on Thursdays.

According to Adams, “Here you can expect to see all types of science fiction, from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and we encourage our writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.”

It was a promise delivered in Lightspeed’s maiden issue, which features four all-new, never-before-published stories from Vylar Kaftan, Jack McDevitt, David Barr Kirtley, and Carrie Vaughn. The magazine as a whole has been well received–see a review at Tor.com and the Secret Lair, even at SF Signal though the reviewer felt let down by the non-fiction; Locus doesn’t so much as review the entire magazine as each individual story.

Read more.

OK, before I begin, let me state this up front: I have never read an H.P. Lovecraft story. Or perhaps I have, but have just forgotten. (And yet for some reason I know how to pronounce “Cthulhu”.)

Give me a few minutes to wipe off the tomato stains from my shirt.

Now that the understandable outrage is out of the way: while I have never read an H.P. Lovecraft story, the Mythos he has created is so pervasive that I had a good idea of what to expect from the fourth issue of Innsmouth Free Press (a webzine which acts as “a fictional newspaper publishing faux news pieces – lovingly called Monster Bytes – in a Lovecraftian/Cthulhu Mythos universe, as well as original short fiction stories”): monsters and old gods and weird horror… and, because of the particular focus of this issue, a multiethnic slant.

In the Editorial by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Publisher) and Paula R. Stiles (Editor-in-Chief), they describe the origin of this issue’s focus in this way: “When we first devised the special Multiethnic issue, we thought the approach would be simple: take the New England out of Lovecraft. Our reasoning? Lovecraft’s fiction focuses on the alien experience and we sought to define what was alien in an interesting way, by travelling to different locations and using different characters than he would have used to tell a story. Lovecraft’s troubles with race and gender have been made famous in his very writing. But by raising them, he also asked questions with a variety of possible answers far beyond what he himself might have tolerated. The mark of a great writer is the universal application of his/her work and we wanted to find writers who could ask Lovecraft’s questions in new cultural contexts.”

There’s also a good interview with Moreno-Garcia and Stiles up on Tor.com, where they talk about how they first discovered Lovecraft, and the different interpretations they’ve seen, and the means by which the Lovecraftian tradition is being expanded.

Now what did Moreno-Garcia and Stiles mean by “Lovecraft’s troubles with race and gender”? Let’s turn to Professor Wikipedia: Lovecraft lived at a time when the eugenics movement, anti-Catholicism, Antisemitism, nativism, and strict racial segregation and miscegenation laws were all widespread in the United States, and his writings reflect that social and intellectual environment. A common dramatic device in Lovecraft’s work is to associate virtue, intellect, civilization, and rationality with upper class White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These are often posed in contrast to the corrupt, intellectually inferior, uncivilized and irrational attributes which he associated with both the lower classes in general and those of non-Anglo Saxon ethnicity, especially those who have dark skin. He held English culture to be the comparative pinnacle of civilization, with the descendants of the English in America as something of a second-class offshoot, and everyone else below. Or, of course, you can simply read this short, simple, and completely racist poem by Lovecraft (with some context provided here.)

In short, if by some time twisting contrivance, Lovecraft and I would ever meet, we would likely completely and utterly hate each other.

Read more here.

Read Part 2 here.

Strange Horizons is a multi-awarded, US-based online speculative fiction magazine founded in September 2000. A non-profit magazine, Strange Horizons receives financial support via “direct donations (through PayPal or by check), arts grants, corporate sponsorship, and affiliate programs through Amazon.com and Powell’s Books”. Every Monday Strange Horizons uploads a new piece of fiction which is accessible free of charge (they also have various non-fiction pieces, as well as reviews, though these follow a different schedule), although of course readers are encouraged to donate if they have the means to do so.

Here are my thoughts on the stories published by Strange Horizons in the month of May. As always, Spoiler Warning applies, so do check out the stories at the website (older stories can be found in the archives) before reading on.

WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!

I saw the multiple exclamation points in this story’s title, and I knew – I knew – I was in for something terribly terrific.

How can you fail, with a paragraph like this?

George found Bob puzzling over the new Clairol “Tru U!” offerings. It seemed to George that every product aimed at their demographic was missing a significant amount of letters. She understood this came from txting and IM. But George dropped letters because it was faster that way, not because she didn’t like the look of the English language. She was worried that soon she’d pass through a strange teenage Ellis Island where smiling marketing interns, like the kind that messaged you on MySpace back when people used MySpace, would refashion her name and give her a new, de-lettered identity. It would be something terrible, too, like Gorg. Bob—Roberta—would get something cool. Like Ta. Or Ro.

Read more here.

I began reading genre fiction simply to entertain myself. Then, I read it to learn and hone my skills as a fiction writer. You may think that if I’m always on the lookout for new ideas while reading, that it would be impossible for these novels to provide escape. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Good stories give you words, but make you forget the words. All good stories do.

I’ve always enjoyed a good ghost story, whether it be found in a book or via some other medium. I would get terribly sad whenever I missed the Halloween episode of the now defunct Magandang Gabi Bayan (which my siblings and I watched in bed with a blanket around our shoulders – at least the first few iterations of the special, when they were still scary). I also enjoyed reading about different kinds of mental illness, and given my particular affinities, how could I not fall in love with the horror genre, which offered all these and more? I got it into my head that I wanted to write a horror novel, and so I treated every short story and book I read as research, and, more importantly, as a challenge.

Read more here.

In Bob Neihart’s 2007 interview with Stephen King’s son and best-selling horror writer, Joe Hill, Ben Neihart said, “Hill writes in two traditions that he would argue are artificially walled off from each other: genre fiction, with its emphasis on breakneck, often outrageous, plot and metaphor; and literary realism, which values detailed characterization, psychological depth and subtle epiphanies.”

What an excellent description! And what a description that completely escaped me as a child, a young reader who wasn’t aware of these traditions at all, who knew only to categorize stories as either “good” or “boring”. Back then, all I wanted was to get from Point A to Point B–and to get to Point B fast. Who cares about lovely turns of phrases and language and words, who cares about character development? I only cared about one thing: what’s the plot? Is someone going to end up dead? Is there a lot of gore? Is there a twist? Is there a monster in it? During those early years of my life as a reader, nobody told me what to read. Nobody served as a guide, so I read whatever I found amusing, and I read blindly. Reading then was like walking around a dark house during a thunderstorm, and I believed, in my heart of hearts, that I’d be more excited if I reached out a hand and touched a large, slimy creature, than if I came upon a room within which a young woman sat in silence and mourned the sudden end of her youth. (Unless the sudden end of her youth turned her into a large, slimy creature. Then that would be seriously awesome.)

And so I gravitated toward the plot-driven stories, which turned out to belong to the genre fiction tradition.

Read more here.

Part 2 to follow.