Featured in Hub #63, gun-for-hire Ivy Flowers travels back in time to recover a hijacked train in Alasdair Stuart’s “Ivy and the Pirate Queen.” It gets more colorful: the train is a time machine on a sightseeing trip on the Moon 4,000 years ago, and the hijacker is a holographic AI of Ivy’s notorious grandmother [...]

Fool’s Gold by Hank Quense is a novella that blends space opera, Cthulhu mythos, and Norse mythology with a satiric flavor. Fafner, an immortal alien criminal sentenced to a postapocalyptic Earth for crimes committed in several galaxies, is bored. Mime is another alien criminal, whose brother, Albrich, has found the lost Rhinegold, which he is working [...]

October is traditionally the month for horror, culminating in Halloween, and Pseudopod serves up a suitably ghoulish set this month, beginning with Michael Savastano’s science-fictional “Spurling’s Virus” read by Ben Phillips. On a station where they are trying to find how to counter a deadly virus deriving from alien creatures, and which kills [...]

An eerie glow has crept across South Africa’s bookshelves with the publication of a quarterly short fiction magazine specialising in horror and science fiction—the first of its kind in South Africa. I try never to judge a book by its cover. I really do. But the editor of Something Wicked walked straight past me when [...]

Something Wicked out of South Africa is new to me, and very welcome it is too, with its mix of familiar genre tropes and more edgy, even slipstreamish material. Not all the stories in issue #8 work, and a couple are very poor indeed. But the best of them indicate a willingness to stray outside [...]

When I first started teaching a college creative writing class, I had a long meeting with a veteran in the department about how he taught the class. He’d had a strangle hold on creative writing since the Eisenhower administration, and his ideas, as he said, had “stood the test of time.” He was particularly proud [...]

In the Fourth Quarter 2008 issue of Abyss & Apex, #28, editor Wendy S. Delmater describes her ideal or what she calls a “yummy” story: “I love circularity…distinctive voice…unforgettable characters…[and] an ‘inevitable surprise.’” Luckily for readers, Delmater and her staff deliver these “yummy” tales, from a virtuoso of authors, straight to the screen, no [...]

The January 2009 Asimov’s offerings promise an interesting new year, and it’s a nice change after December’s ho-hum selection. There are three memorable pieces here and a few others that, although not as outstanding, are quite a fun ride. I’ve never read something by Will McIntosh I didn’t like; sometimes I don’t get his work, certainly, [...]

Issue #219 of Interzone opens with “Everything That Matters” by Jeff Spock. The story kicks off with the viewpoint character being devoured by an immense, alien shark—an opening that’s right up there with exploding volcanoes on the list of “Tough Acts to Follow.” Russo escapes, alive but badly mutilated. We learn he’s scavenging for an [...]

The introduction to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s new anthology, Fast Ships, Black Sails, says it all: From Caribbean intrigue to pirate cooks, from unlikely romance to blood-thirsty attacks, Fast Ships, Black Sails has something for everyone. And indeed they have. The book opens with “Boojum” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, a space pirates story. [...]

Craig Laurance Gidney loves words…sensually, sexually, omnivorously. He streams out floods of them in his stories so that you, too, can taste their deliciousness. He wields them with abandon and precision to create little worlds that rise off the page and engulf you in snow globes of sparkling beauty and perceptiveness. Each story in his [...]

I concluded my review of last month’s issue by observing that Clarkesworld Magazine seemed to have “shifted away from more boundary-pushing work, with less emphasis on technique and more on conventional story.” The trend continues, at least partway, in issue #26, November 2008. Mike Resnick and Lezli Robyn bring us “Idle Roomer,” which feels like [...]

The meat of Analog’s November issue is the first episode of Robert J. Sawyer’s four-part serial, “Wake.” Rather than reviewing part of the whole, we’ll merely note its presence and pass on to the first of two novelettes. Carl Frederick’s “Greenwich Nasty Time” starts out on the Isle of Wight. Paul is a physics [...]

Don’t let the first story in Fran Friel’s collection, Mama’s Boy and Other Dark Tales, deceive you into thinking this is some sort of “Horror Lite” book. The first story, “Beach of Dreams,” is a surreal, exotic tale of a man visiting a native tribe who is one day privy to examining strange things that [...]

Part 8: Animalia of Farrago’s Wainscot contains six stories, one novella, three poems, and an experimental wordform. Because I love to explore new things, I chose to read “Geographical Curiosities” by A. Ross Eckler first. Eckler’s experimental wordform is interesting and engaging. It also put me in the mood to read the rest of [...]

The Enigma of Departure by Nicholas Royle is a contemplation on death, the “departure” of the title. The narrator, whose name I didn’t catch, is asked by a magazine editor to travel to Venice and write about the British presence at an art show. On the way and in the city, he recalls his grandfather’s [...]

My first glimpse of Paul Meloy’s fiction was a sparkler published in The Third Alternative—”Dying in the Arms of Jean Harlow,” a blue-collar urban horror-fantasy sharp as a crack on the back of the head with a bottle of lager. The story impressed me with its deliciously nasty sense of humor and its roller coaster [...]

A theme of obsession threads its way through Fantasy Magazine’s October stories: from a woman with an all-consuming passion for palindromes to another hoarding wishes, and from a king “greedy for flesh” to a man drawn far too deeply into a twisting plot. In the surreal “Yell Alley” by Nicole Kornher-Stace, Anna is engaged in a [...]

Jonathan Strahan’s introduction does a good job of setting the right expectations for Eclipse Two, quite different in flavor from the first volume in the series. How so? “I deliberately nudged this Eclipse installment towards science fiction,” he explains, “dropping some of the balance that had characterized Eclipse One.” This leads to less variety in [...]

Since selling her first story in 1993, Kaaron Warren has had her work appear in a variety of publications, including, Paper Cities, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007, Fantasy Magazine, Aurealis, and AGOG! She has stories upcoming in Canterbury 2100, Ellen Datlow’s Poe Anthology, and Datlow and Nick Mamatas’s Haunted Legends anthology. Her story, [...]