City Slab #12
The twelfth issue of City Slab opens with “Woman in the Dark” by Tom Piccirilli, a visceral piece of dark urban fiction that skirts a supernatural edge while handing out a well-told tale of redemption. Collie ends up saving a prostitute from a very bad beating. Upon reaching safety, he discovers he knows her, […]
Continue ReadingBlack Static #3
Black Static is a very stylized magazine, with an emphasis strongly put on layout, artwork, and design. On occasion, the white font against black background proves to be too straining on the eyes, but otherwise it’s a well put together product, offering a solid number of dark, edgy short stories that blur genre and subject […]
Continue ReadingCity Slab #11
Though City Slab only offers up four short stories in its latest issue, the quality and treatment of them is both well-handled and fulfilling. The magazine, now in its eleventh issue, bills its fiction as “urban tales of the grotesque.” No argument here. In fact, I’d say that’s the perfect description. The stories, ranging from […]
Continue ReadingDiet Soap #1
Diet Soap is the brainchild of Doug Lain and M.K. Hobson, a simple looking black-and-white zine that bills itself as anarchist and has a goal of themed issues, as well as publishing genre-defying work. Issue #1 is all about surveillance. There’s more variety here than mere rehashes of invasive Big Brother and thoughtcrime, but the […]
Continue ReadingElectric Velocipede #13
Electric Velocipede is an eccentric zine edited by John Klima with work ranging from literary fantasy to slipstream science fiction to the quirky and comical. A host of mostly unknown authors find a home in its pages in issue #13, but several pieces of fiction read as if crafted by pros thirty years past their […]
Continue ReadingThe City Beyond Play by Philip José Farmer and Danny Adams
Being the early labors of Philip José Farmer and the later workings of his grand-nephew, Danny Adams, novella The City Beyond Play is a pristine piece of science fantasy. The fantasy half revolves around a secluded cut of California re-created to represent a pre-17th-century Europe, known to all its accepted inhabitants as Scadia, while […]
Continue ReadingAnalog, December 2007
Analog’s December 2007 issue felt like a hat-tip to the more “golden age” themes of science fiction: eccentric aliens, self-thinking robots, and traveling back through time. These are the sorts of stories that can be fully associated with the genre, but without something to make them special, they can be considered a rather unoriginal […]
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