ISFDB links: #250, #251, #252, #253

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank #250-251, #252-253
Richard Horton, Locus #250
Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews #250, #250, #251, #252, #253
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures #250, #251, #252, #253
Chuck Rothman, Rebecca DeVendra (2), Stephanie Wexler, Tangent Online #250, #251, #252, #253
Various, Goodreads #250, #251, #252, #253

____________________________

Editor-in-Chief, Scott H. Andrews

Fiction:
#250
The Thought That Counts • novelette by Tom Holt [as by K. J. Parker] ∗∗∗
An Account of the Madness of the Magistrate, Chengdhu Village • short story by Richard Parks ∗∗∗
Silence in Blue Glass • novelette by Margaret Ronald ∗∗
Angry Kings • novelette by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam ∗

#251
The Examination Cloth • short story by Jonathan Edelstein ∗
The Root Cellar • short story by Maria Haskins ∗

#252
The Wild Ride of the Untamed Stars • short story by A. J. Fitzwater ∗
The Ghostpotion Games • short story by Christian K. Martinez ∗

#253
A Tale of Woe • novelette by P. Djèlí Clark ∗∗
The Weaver and the Snake • short story by Blaine Vitallo ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
#251
Subscription Drive • editorial
All
Legendary Passage • cover by Jereme Peabody

____________________________

As these four issues use variants of the same cover I’ve combined them together into a single review.
There is a short editorial note (the first I’ve ever seen) at the start of #250 that promotes a Subscription Drive:

From now until May 11, buy a BCS ebook subscription or renew your existing subscription and you’ll help unlock our drive goals. BCS has a very high word-count limit for submissions, 14,000 words—a stretch goal unlocked by you, our subscribers, in our Subscription Drive last year. With your help, we’ll raise it even higher this year. At 50 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 15,000 words. At 100 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 16,000; at 200, we’ll raise it to 18,000; at 250, we’ll raise it to 20,000 words!

I hope they get their 250 subscribers: apart from the fact that this publication deserves support, one of the magazine’s shortcomings is its tendency to publish fragmentary or inconclusive work. This is less of a problem at longer lengths. That said, judging by the quality of the line and copy editing in some of the following stories, they should perhaps use any extra money on that.

Issue #250 is also slightly different in that it is a “special double issue” and so has four stories. The first of these is The Thought That Counts by Tom Holt, which is about a not entirely agreeable mage who is on the run. We first meet him in a coach where he is talking to a seemingly naïve young woman who is going to town to become a portrait painter:

“…wanted me to marry Logo the tanner. He’s got a beautiful home, she said, and you soon get used to the smell. Mother, I said, I don’t want to get used to the smell. I don’t ever want to be the sort of person who doesn’t notice the stink of sheep’s brains. She just looked at me. That’s when I knew I had to leave.”
I decided I didn’t like her mother. Priorities all wrong. Egging her on to marry defenceless tanners when she should have been teaching her not to talk to strange men in stagecoaches. Which raises the incidental question; am I a strange man? I guess, on balance, yes. Decide for yourself.  p. 3

Months pass, and he next sees her in court, accused of causing the deaths of several people whose portrait she has painted. Among the mage’s many skills is his knowledge of legal matters, so he impulsively volunteers to defend her, and she is later acquitted.
The story then flashbacks to the narrator’s student days and the struggles he had coming to terms with his poor academic performance. At one point he stands on a bridge wondering whether to jump when a woman artist who he has seen around the university starts talking to him. He later poses for her, and eventually falls in love, for a while at least.
These two strands cleverly dovetail at the end, where our slightly unpleasant narrator gets his comeuppance. The story is expertly and engagingly told, but the talent at work here masks, I think, a slightly unlikely plot. Still, it is an entertaining piece.
An Account of the Madness of the Magistrate, Chengdhu Village by Richard Parks opens with Mistress Jing and Mei Li, a snake devil in human form, practicing their magic when they are interrupted by the arrival of Jing’s father. He has been sent by the province Governor to assist the local magistrate, but the latter appears insane:

 “He seems a perfectly healthy young man and insists that he is perfectly fine and doesn’t understand what the Governor was talking about. Then he poured a glass of wine over his head and ordered his Chief Eunuch to perform and characterize the Eight Tenets of Kong Fuzi as a peasant work song. The man failed, probably because he didn’t know any peasant work songs.”
“What happened then?” Mei Li asked.
Father sighed. “The magistrate ordered the eunuch to think about what he had done and then sent him to his room. For the eunuch’s sake I hope the Magistrate doesn’t expect a report on his conclusions in the morning.”  p. 47-48

Jing and Mei Li sneak across the rooftops that evening to observe the governor, and when they see him crying they suspect a fox spirit is involved. The next day the father takes the pair to entertain the man, and examine him further. Mei Li concludes he may be not be possessed by a fox spirit but is actually a fox in human form (a problematical situation which will require them to kill him).
They are later invited (spoiler) to a meeting with the fox/magistrate, which they suspect is an ambush, but discover the fox actually wants to die. Being in human form is driving him insane, but he cannot revert to his normal form as he is under a compulsion placed upon him by the man who he replaced, a friend of his who wanted recognition but died prematurely.
The three arrange a funeral to lay the friend’s ghost to rest, and arrange a cover story for the fox’s later disappearance.
A pleasant Chinese fantasy.
Silence in Blue Glass by Margaret Ronald gets off to an intriguing start with the narrator, an injured veteran of a magical war, receiving an invitation to a dinner party from his semi-estranged brother. At the latter’s house he meets a number of guests: Georgina and her brother Quinn, who run a mining business, a kobold called Mieni, who the narrator knows (to the surprise of his brother), and, finally, another couple, Jeremiah and his young wife Anastasia.
Throughout the dinner party various things become clear: this is a business meeting to see how Georgina’s family and Mieki’s people can co-operate in a mining enterprise; Jeremiah and Georgina are old lovers (and flirt throughout the party); and there are also mentions of “episodes” the narrator has that cause him to bleed smoke. During the meal itself Mieni brings out a cobalt blue globe which magically produces various forms of silence, between people, in a certain direction, etc.
Eventually they all retire.
This section is entertaining enough but, after an interesting start, the story begins to drag, something that is brought into even starker relief when Georgina (spoiler) is found dead the next morning. Mieni takes charge, performs a brief investigation (the blue globe of silence was used to cover the sounds of the crime), and soon announces who the culprit is (all this in about half the wordage used to describe the dinner party). This is all rather perfunctory, and I didn’t find the culprit’s motivation credible. The story has some good world-building and characterisation, though.
Noted in passing: there is a printing error in the PDF version of this issue—after the end of this story, most of the previous tale is repeated (p. 114 to p. 147).
Angry Kings by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam is a fantasy about a woman who, having earlier left the cruel king who is her father, returns with his ghost and attempts to reunite it with his body. Most of the story is a flashback to the period between these two points in time.
There is something about Stufflebeam’s style that makes it hard to absorb: I don’t know if I’m just a lazy reader or whether she just produces occasionally muddled prose. Take this passage for example, about the woman’s grandparents:

Take the woman, my mother’s mother, whose king brother loved her more than any brother should love his sister. When their daughter, my mother, came into this world, my grandfather told his kingdom that my mother was born from the leaf of a rose. As she grew, the kingdom compared my mother’s beauty to a rose; she collected roses in her garden, wondering always which one of them was her father, as the king would never lie. He was beloved by all who served him, even the woman who sat each night silent by his side and watched the little girl as a hawk might watch the mouse it both envies and adores and loathes in the same death-swoop of its wings. My mother bloomed like an overnight rose, and when she went to dinner, her true father was so taken with her, he abandoned his place beside the woman who thought she loved him, having known no other love but his for the whole of her life.
“She is a treacherous witch,” my grandmother whispered to her brother in his sleep, to see how it sounded across her tongue. But it hurt her to say so, and she snuck into her daughter’s room and leaned over my mother’s bed and cried across her sleeping form. The next day the king sent my mother into the woods, despite her mother his sister my grandmother’s protestations, despite her insistence that the girl was theirs, not born from the leaf of a rose but born from her own body, even if they convinced themselves there was truth to their lies.  p. 168-169

Is that the simplest and most elegant way to convey that information?
There is also this at the end of the first paragraph of this story: “The top of the palace’s tallest turrets shine tipped in gild.” Is that last part supposed to be “are tipped with shiny gilt”? And later, after a soldier gets shown a transformation spell by a forest witch in exchange for a kiss, he goes to win a princess’s hand:

With his puppy eyes, he won her heart, along with three wishes from the witch’s magic matchbox, a prize the witch traded him for a job in the castle. The soldier used these wishes this matchbox to pay the king riches beyond imagining, though of course the king had so many riches already he barely noticed the extra gold in his stacks.  p. 153

What? I assume, given the “her mother his sister my grandmother” part in the long passage above, the “these wishes this matchbox” part is intentional but, even given that (strange) stylistic choice, the paragraph is still garbled (is that first sentence supposed to be “With his puppy eyes, he won her heart. Later, in exchange for a job in the castle, the witch gave him a magic matchbox with three wishes”?) Am I the only reader of this story that had to periodically stop to try and decipher what the writer was trying to say? Whoever line edits at BCS (if there is anyone) doesn’t do the contributors any favours.
Apart from the jumbled writing, there may also be one or two inconsistencies in the story. (Or maybe I was being less than attentive. What can I say? I probably started skimming after several skirmishes with the prose.) One example: during the period when the king’s daughter is with the witch I thought she lost her ability to perform a card spell, but then she uses it again at the end of the story.
Parts of this are okay, but at the end (spoiler) the reunification scene between father and daughter resolves in such a way that you are left with a piece about the dysfunctional relationship between the two and not much else.

The Examination Cloth by Jonathan Edelstein involves a man called Ukeme undergoing a test that involves answering the questions posed by a tapestry woven by one of the egun-wives. One of the questions stumps him, and he cheats by using a spell learned from his mother (also a weaver) to divine the thoughts of the egun-wife who wove the tapestry. He almost immediately regrets his action, and the rest of the story details how he tries to first reverse and then deal with his cheating.
This is pleasant enough as far as it goes but is even more fragmentary than usual for BCS.
The Root Cellar by Maria Haskins is a bizarre tale about a girl talking to her missing brother (or herself) about how she killed her grandmother. This latter event appears to have taken place after the girl herself was dismembered, but had later sewn (most of) herself back together.

The Wild Ride of the Untamed Stars by A. J. Fitzwater has a capybara (a dog-size rodent) and a marmot race stars for the hand of the rat-queen. If that doesn’t work as a description then read this:

Cinrak, calling upon all the practise she’d done with the narwhals, bent low and kissed the mer-hair rope. How would it respond this high up? It was a being of the sea, not the air, pulling stars down with mer song to meet with their sibling celestials in the deep, not to tame them. She didn’t want to force supplication. The stars had travelled too far, shone upon too much, for such brute force.
“Fly, darling star, fly!” Cinrak yelled. She didn’t kick at the star’s sides like others would a beast mount. Stars were too precious for that.
The star leapt ahead like a dolphin racing the Impolite Fortune’s bow. Cinrak almost tumbled off the back, only holding her perch by the sheer force of her thick thighs and quickly looped sailor’s knot.  p. 11

Stylistically pleasant candy floss.
The Ghostpotion Games by Christian K. Martinez is another story about a competition. In this one the narrator, Erina, has to create a ghost to run a maze:

With tool in hand Erinia squeezed up little droplets of liquid and puffs of gas from the leatherwood case in front of her, ferrying them into her carpenter soul with flicks of her wrist and tiny squeezes of the dropper.
First abandon, paired with an anxious need to act. Next the desperate knowledge of something better just over the hill; a lavender breath of smoke, something she’d bargained from a vampire tricked into daylight and cowering beneath a tree. Not hope; hope was malleable. She’d hoped before, she was hoping now; held it clenched between her teeth like a blade of ice. It was a terrible thing.
Her last touch, [an] earnest melancholy, that sort of relentless tapping of apathy on the glass; threatening to sink in claws if one slowed long enough for it to grasp. She’d tested them all together, twice. It’d worked once; the time before…it’d fallen apart.
She mixed both into her beaker with a stick made from mother of pearl and breathed a sigh of relief as she left it spinning there, her ghostly mixture slowly eating it away. The scream in her bottle shifted as the stick dissolved until it was mallets made of pearl and wood thudding away, beating walls into shape, passing nails into planks. No more cutting, no more slicing.  p. 21-22

The prize is a wish granted by the Nine Empresses. If I understood the ending correctly (spoiler), Erinia’s wish is to start the competition again.
Again, there is not much story but there is a lot of writing. And, again, I started to skim.

A Tale of Woe by P. Djèlí Clark is another story that tripped me up at the start:

Rana sat on the cracked granite steps of the prayer pools at the outskirts of the city of Aruth, listening as the old fisherman poured out his sorrow. It flowed from him like a breached dam, flooding the space between them with memories and regrets. She looked past his words, past the lines of grief etched on his worn face, and eyed the woe that clung to him—enough to fill scrolls that amounted to a lifetime. One, larger than the rest, told of a son: a young man with a boy’s face sent off to war, never to return. It wound thick tendrils about the fisherman’s neck, choking away his life.

At the “One” sentence I wasn’t sure if the writer was referring to the scrolls or something else; by the “It” I had no idea what was going on. After unsuccessfully trying to decipher this waffle I moved on and discovered the narrator can “see” the woe or grief that surrounds people (and is able to physically remove it). I would suggest that, if you are presenting something unusual like this to the reader at the very beginning of your story, you make what is happening explicit, e.g.: “Rana sat on the cracked granite steps . . . poured out his sorrow. She saw his grief as thick grey tendrils winding around the man’s neck; in one of them she saw the story of a son, etc.”¹
As for the story, Rana is an acolyte of the Goddess of Sorrow and is in the city on a personal mission when she is kidnapped at the behest of one of the local noblewomen. Rana soon gets the better of her kidnappers (she can give people woe as well as remove it, and an excess of the former incapacitates them) and confronts the lady. Rana discovers the noblewoman is an acolyte of the Goddess of Sorrow and, after removing her woe, Rana gets papers that will admit her to the inner circle, and the Grand Benevolence, the ruler of the city.
We then find (spoiler) that a rogue member of Rama’s order has taken the Grand Benevolence’s place (there are flashbacks to Rana’s friend Lika throughout the story and, sure enough, we find she is the one who has replaced him).
The story ends with a battle between them which is well enough done, but by that point I’d somewhat lost interest due to the slow-moving start (it doesn’t really get going until the kidnap). I suppose it is okay overall.
The Weaver and the Snake by Blaine Vitallo is the best story in the issue, and one told in (other contributors please note) a lucid and readable prose style. The story tells of Reilitas, a woman who transforms animal parts into unique objects:

Reilitas is an old woman. She will turn one-hundred-and-three on the third of next month. Ever since she was a younger and much thinner woman, she has crafted all manner of things from the corpses of beasts that the hunters bring her. She is called “weaver,” though her trade has little to do with weaving. The title is given to all who practice the ancient profession of changing the bodies of beasts into whatever wares the weaver herself, or the hunter, or a client desire.
For decades Reilitas has been famous throughout the desert kingdom for seeing, in each foreign material she is brought, the multitude of new forms it could be made to take. She has changed the ribs of bloated beasts into harps; she has peeled thick hides from the cold bodies of fanged predators and treated them in acids until they are malleable; she has dipped in lacquer distilled from the leaves of hardy desert plants the crystalline eyeballs of monsters made of minerals to be marbles for the children to play with; she has directed the scarred muscular bone cutters as they whittle long sturdy jaws into saw-toothed blades. With the help of young women in flowing white gowns—all of them novice weavers—Reilitas has bound into thick cables the rubbery tentacles of ghoulish leviathans. She sells the goods she has made to merchants who carry them in caravans across the white sand desert that stretches beyond the horizon.
Decade after decade, she has performed this duty for the people of Adamondor, city of marble and alabaster: a thriving metropolis built atop a wide mesa overlooking the white sand desert.  p. 44-45

The citizens of the city then feel a distant earthquake, and later hear stories of a great snake that has appeared in the world. Initially these accounts are treated as little more than rumours, but it soon becomes apparent that they are not, and the bulk of the story tells of the cities the snake consumes and the refugees created. Later, even though Reilatas’s city Adamondor is never attacked, civil society breaks down and gives way to lawlessness.
The final section of the story turns the piece into a meditation on the legacy of artists and perhaps, more generally, what people leave behind when they die. This is an elegiac piece from a writer to watch.

The panoramic cover, Legendary Passage by Jereme Peabody, is a slightly bland landscape (a peril of this kind of illustration) but I liked looking at it nonetheless, and the statue of the woman on the right hand side of the arch provides some interesting detail.

Overall this is a disappointing batch of issues, even given that three of these stories are what I would describe as ‘good.’ The first two of those are professionally competent rather than inspiring and, as for the others, they generally have the usual BCS shortcomings: poor or non-existent structure and/or muddled, ungrammatical prose.  ●

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1. It’s not just me that is picking up this line/copy-edit stuff: Jason McGregor at Featured Futures (its on the last link of the four of his above) says this:

“A Tale of Woe” [.  . .] is rife with grammatical errors, typos, or at least non-optimal expressions (“an inhale of breath,” “beggars and the infirmed,” “sold for so cheap,” “sowed” (for “sewed”), “to kidnap she and her family,” “[p]ulling her scissor,” “had Elder Awan’s voice not rang across her thoughts”).  ●

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ISFDB links: #244, #245, #246

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank, All
Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews, #247, #248, #249
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures, #247, #248, #249
Stephanie Wexler(2), Chuck Rothman, Tangent Online, #247, #248, #249
Various, Goodreads, #247, #248, #249

____________________________

Editor-in-Chief, Scott H. Andrews

Fiction:
#247:
The War of Light and Shadow, in Five Dishes • short story by Siobhan Carroll ∗∗∗+
Braving the Morrow Candle’s Wane • short story by J. W. Alden ∗∗
#248:
She Who Hungers, She Who Waits • short story by Cassandra Khaw ∗∗
Cry of Desire in a Shrouded Land • novelette by Talisen Fray ∗∗∗+
#249:
Weft • short story by Rahul Kanakia ∗
Fireskin • short story by Joanne Rixon ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Island Outpost • cover by Stefan Meisl

____________________________

As these three issues use the same cover art I’ve combined them together into one review.
The War of Light and Shadow, in Five Dishes by Siobhan Carroll tells the story of Leu the chef, who is taken prisoner by the Iron Crusade. He becomes a cook for the army, and we are subsequently told about the five dishes he prepares for Commander Eres:

Commander Eres said. “Make me some eggs.”
(Have you ever cooked an egg as though your life depended on it? The difference between cooked and overcooked is so slight; the seasoning so important. So simple, an egg. And so easy to get wrong.)
Leu stoked the kitchen fire to get an even heat and checked again the simmer on the copper pan. In the background, he could hear a guard whetting the blade on his dagger. Shhr. Shrr.
The egg at least was very fresh. He cracked it and held it close to the water before letting it fall in. Immediately he pushed the white over the yolk with his wooden spoon and held it for a few seconds. Only a small amount of pale liquid fell away from the white.
The plate the guard brought was crusted with old food. Leu wiped it clean—his eyes on the pot—and then, swiftly, like a bird plunging into water, scooped the egg free with a slotted spoon. From the spice pouch around his neck he took a pinch of Fera sea salt to bring out the flavor.
(I always slow my hand as I lower the last flake of salt, to draw out the moment, to make the diners lean forward. When, at the end of your first year of your apprenticeship, you recreate this dish, you must think how you wish to present your egg, what part of the war you wish this dish to tell.)
Eres accepted the plate with a slight frown. With her knife, she cut the egg. It slid apart perfectly, oozing bright orange yolk. The white wobbled lightly on the blade. And the taste—
A perfect egg is a slash of light on a gray day. The yolk tastes of sun-riched earth, the pale chalaza like a slice of raindamp cloud, a taste so mild you might miss it but unmistakably there, lingering, insisting on its presence. p. 7-8

Although the bulk of the narrative is about the preparation of the meals, details in the background provide an account of the ongoing war of Light and Shadow, and the Iron Crusade’s progress. As the meals increase in sophistication, Commander Eres becomes increasingly distracted by the chef’s requirements, and alters her army’s course and actions to accommodate him. Unwittingly, the chef changes the course of the war.
This is a pretty good piece, one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies maybe, but there are one or two parts that could do with a polish (I bounced off the first paragraph a couple of times before I could get into the story, for example).¹
Braving the Morrow Candle’s Wane by J. W. Alden concerns a woman who has taken a girl in off the streets. When there is a knock at the door she tells her to hide. The rest of the piece is taken up by the exchange between the woman and the caller (a young man in armour from the Twice-Risen temple), who is searching the girl. When he comes into the house, the woman distracts him by telling a tale about her own service for the Temple and how she found—and lost—her faith.
This is engaging stuff but it reads like a single scene from a longer work, a common Beneath Ceaseless Skies problem.
She Who Hungers, She Who Waits by Cassandra Khaw opens with a woman taking a man to her room after their meal at an inn. Shortly after his arrival the man passes out:

Mei Huang lays out her client on the sheets. He has been one of her easier ones. Quick to slumber and eager to please, but not eager enough that he would breach etiquette. A smile slits her face at the memory of his clumsy overtures, almost shy, the performance of a boy, for all his musculature would suggest a man. That was never a possibility. Mei Huang prefers to keep pleasure and providence separate; and besides, her heart lies elsewhere, preserved in resin for the devoted to see.
She disinfects her scalpel in a saucer of boiling water. When the blade is hot enough, she applies the tip to his sternum and cuts, slicing along the breastbone, down to his groin. Skin and muscle part into wings, otherwise undamaged. Mei Huang prides herself on her ability to leave minimal scarring.
Under the marble rungs of his ribs, viscera gleam and pulse.
For a moment, she can see how this vision might invite desire. To see someone, man or woman, revealed as such, to witness them so vulnerable, it is a kind of power, compelling in its rarity. But that is not what she is here for.
Gingerly, Mei Huang leans forward to inspect the glyphs inlaid into the man’s bones: government-issue agate, embedded without artistry; the stones dulled by mucus, no enchantment to preserve their shine. A soldier’s markings and a soldier’s future, a tragedy dug into the trenches. Dead before his twenty-third birthday, his eyes consigned to the crows. p. 4-5

She then examines the various alternative possibilities for his life, all of which end in death at a young age. Before she can sew him up (spoiler) he regains consciousness and his guts spill out. At this point she calls on a goddess, ‘She Who Must Wait’ for aid. In return for this the woman agrees to ‘carry’ the goddess (she later looks like a pregnant woman). However, this is a subterfuge to enable the woman get reach her sister—or at least I think that’s what going on. I found it difficult to follow some of the later scenes, partly because it is of one of those stories where anything can happen next, and does.
Cry of Desire in a Shrouded Land by Talisen Fray gets off to an atmospheric start:

Once again it was that horrid time of year when the cashmere silk spiders crept from the bowels of the city of the angels and spun their pale web across its spires and domes, and Lukas the vendor of miracle tea felt a deep shudder begin in his testicles and rise to his dry mouth which had long ago forgotten the taste of kisses. p. 21

Lukas is a seller of an expensive ‘miracle tea’, a brew that purportedly grants the drinker their wish. He is infatuated with the flower girl, Vidita, who visits his house every day: she wants to learn the secret recipe for the tea, and is playing a long game of seduction with him. Her plan once she has the secret is to sell the tea herself, and earn enough money to buy her own and her mother’s freedom.
Both Lucas’s and Vidita’s stories intertwine with those of a slim young man from the Exterminator’s Guild, hired to rid the house of spiders. While he undertakes this task, he also has an affair with Lukas’s wife.
At the end of the story there is (spoiler) a decoupling of those who have drunk the tea, and those who get their wishes.
This novelette (it crams so much in that it feels like a novella but is actually only 10,700 words) unfolds, at times, in languid, moody prose (the style reminds me of another writer but I can’t think who):

With her bare feet making tiny thumps on the broad stone pathway, she would pass through the cool hibiscus-scented air of the gardens and reach the wide antechamber of the house where, with slow and practiced motions, she began the dance of distribution. A bouquet full of rarities and sweet scent for milady’s boudoir (a place Lukas had long lost his fascination for); a large goblet with several coin-shaped brilliants floating—no scent—for the dining room; a ring of posies for the tearoom entrance, never mind that there were no supplicants at this time of year; and a chunky glass vase full of strange pale green leaves for the master’s bedroom. Behind her floated a faint perfume that first brought Lukas a moment of peace and nostalgia and then, over the weeks of mounting tension, an increasingly sexual hunger that disturbed him like the long-gone fascination for miracle tea that had driven him, as a sheltered bookish boy, to undertake the adventure of legends and walk alone through the ghost villages and poison fields and dragon nests that guarded the secret of his obsession. p. 23

In the country, spiders were less a hated obstruction and more a seasonal inconvenience, like calving season or the harsh snow and ice of winter. The young exterminator found he could sense the first spiderweb floating in the breeze and catching on a jutting chimney, and he seemed to hear the subtle clacking of the spider legs on the roof, the walls, the floors. He cried the first time he saw a spider killed and he took the intact abdomen back to his rooms, where he washed the pale insides and the glowing lavender venom from it and then studied it for hours. There was a traced design on the inside—a map, it seemed to him, possibly of the stars, possibly points of importance in a city or a country, inked in subtle glowing red against the pale grey of the carapace. That spider season, when the webs grew so thick that the doors had to be cleared from the outside before they could be pushed open and all outdoor travel ceased, the boy spent his time in his father’s library, reading every book lining the walls and even bringing his father’s distant gaze to bear on the topic. They never found the key to the mystery, but they did spend many still hours in the refuge of the library, and later when the exterminator was far away, he would remember these times with a kind of affection that embarrassed him, even in the silence of his own consciousness. p. 49

Another possibility for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections.
Weft Rahul Kanakia starts off with three people having a meal and talking about a girl, a cook’s assistant, who they are pursuing. They are an odd group: the narrator appears to have a magical power over threads, Rina is an ethereal spirit, and Aakash is a weird creature that can shed his body:

The crack of bones and the slap of flesh against wood.
Aakash was expanding, sloughing off his skin. This was not something he did lightly. With his skin, Aakash is merely an unpleasant sight. Without it, he’s terrifying.
“Don’t need all that,” he said. “Considering all the dead bodies we’re about to make.”
His eyes flickered, and his many mouths snapped open and shut, and I experienced in that moment a sense of terror. I was not made for a life of violence. p. 8-9

The narrator tries to convince the others to let the girl go free and then, after some discussion, an event occurs which was not entirely clear to me, followed by a scene where the narrator finds the girl.
There are elements of this that show promise, but as a story it does not work.
Fireskin by Joanne Rixon is about Aun-ki, the king’s champion, and how her skin catches fire:

In late summer of the fourteenth year of the reign of Feihu the Road-Builder, on a day when the portents suggested peace and prosperity throughout the city and all its territories, the warrior Aun-ki woke up and found that her skin caught fire at the slightest touch. Pale flickers of flame sprouted on her brown arms, almost invisible in the sunlight, then guttered out. Even the light drape of her dressing gown across her shoulders was like the grind of a blade on a whetstone, striking sparks. The fabric browned, and when her apprentice Jin-ho came in to help her bathe, Jin-ho’s fingers left streams of blisters in their wake. p. 16

She seeks the king’s permission to go to Lake of Five Waters, to see if they will cure her. They don’t, and the rest of the story describes other quests she undertakes with her assistant to seek a remedy. Between these journeys she returns to the village and stays with the weaver—their relationship develops.
This is readable, engaging stuff but, unfortunately (spoiler), the story has no ending (at least not for the problem of her skin—she gives up on that and lives with it till she dies, but spends her remaining time with the weaver: an ending of sorts, I suppose).

The cover for these three issues is Island Outpost by Stefan Meisl.

Two superior stories in these three editions, which makes this quite a good ‘issue’. ●

____________________________

1. It may be my brain and not Carroll’s writing, but I struggled with the opening:

Leu was in the chicken coop when the wall was breached. At the very moment of which I speak, he was facing down Black Dragon, the largest and most homicidal of the barracks’s surviving hens. She’d bloodied his hands in a frenzied attempt to get at his eyes. Now, as shouts of terror echoed in the distance, the two combatants stared each other down over a mass of trampled reeds. Behind Black Dragon (at this point I usually gesture to the diners, who sit as you do, an expectant plate before them): two eggs, the last ones available for Lord Fio’s breakfast. Behind Leu (at this point I gesture outwards, to the world): the wrath of Lord Fio, a spoiled young man with a penchant for poached eggs and a nasty habit of whipping his servants. p. 2

What do I not like about this? Well, put briefly, it does not flow well, something that the opening paragraph(s) of a story should do. More specifically:
(a) The focus shifts from Leu to the narrator to the chicken in the first three sentences.
(b) “Barracks’s surviving hens” may be orthographically correct² (although Microsoft Word doesn’t think so) but it looks and sounds weird (too many s’s for one thing), and I ended up staring at it for several seconds while I figured out whether or not it was a typo.
(c) The last two parenthetical interjections by the narrator (and the colons) make it harder to read, too.
None of this would be a problem further on, but those of us with a reading age of 12 or thereabouts prefer less complicated beginnings so we can more easily slip into the story, e.g.:

Leu was in the chicken coop when the wall was breached. At that moment he was facing down Black Dragon, the largest and most homicidal of the castle’s surviving hens, and his hands had been bloodied by her frenzied attempt to get at his eyes. Now, as shouts of terror echoed in the distance, the two combatants stared each other down over a mass of trampled reeds. Behind the hen lay two eggs, the last ones available for Lord Fio’s breakfast (at this point in the story I usually gesture to the diners, who sit as you do, with an expectant plate before them). Behind Leu lay the wrath of Lord Fio (at this point I gesture outwards, to the world), a spoiled young man with a penchant for poached eggs and a nasty habit of whipping his servants.

Yes, I know, don’t give up your day job, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks, etc., etc.

2. This is what Wikipedia has to say, in part, about singular noun possession:

If a singular noun ends with an s-sound (spelled with -s, -se, for example), practice varies as to whether to add ’s or the apostrophe alone. A widely accepted practice is to follow whichever spoken form is judged better: the boss’s shoes, Mrs Jones’ hat (or Mrs Jones’s hat, if that spoken form is preferred). In many cases, both spoken and written forms differ between writers.

It is interesting to note that Algis Budrys is quoted in this article (footnote #66). From Galaxy Bookshelf, Galaxy Science Fiction (December 1965), pp. 147–156, there is this:

If you have a name that ends in “s,” or if you will observe home-made signs selling tomatoes or chili-and-beans, you will quickly note what can be done with a possessive apostrophe in reckless hands.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe here. ●

ISFDB links: #244, #245, #246

Editor-in-Chief, Scott H. Andrews

Other Reviews:
Gardner Dozois, ScienceFictionSite, #244, #245
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank , All
Kevin P Hallett, Stephanie Wexler, Tangent Online, #244, #245, #246
Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews, #244, #245, #246
Various, Goodreads, #244, #245, #246

Fiction:
#244:
The Starship and the Temple Cat • short story by Yoon Ha Lee ∗∗
El Is a Spaceship Melody • novelette by Maurice Broaddus
Where the Anchor Lies • short story by Benjamin C. Kinney ∗∗
#245:
Penitents • short story by Rich Larson ∗∗∗
Red Dreams • short story by R. Z. Held ∗∗
The Last Human Child • novelette by Milo James Fowler ∗∗+
Such Were the Faces of the Living Creatures • short story by Josh Pearce ∗
#246:
Do as I Do, Sing as I Sing • novelette by Sarah Pinsker ∗∗
The Emotionless, in Love • novella by Jason Sanford ∗∗∗∗
Gennesaret • short story by Phoenix Alexander ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Ugg • cover by Florent Llamas

As these three issues use the same cover artwork I’ve reviewed them together. These three are also the issues for ‘Science-Fantasy Month 4’.¹

The Starship and the Temple Cat by Yoon Ha Lee gets #244 off to a promising start:

She had been a young cat when the Fleet Lords burned the City of High Bells.
Strictly speaking, the City had been a space station rather than a planet-bound metropolis, jewel-spinning in orbit around one of the gas giants of a system inhabited now by dust and debris and the ever-blanketing dark. While fire had consumed some of the old tapestries, the scrolls of bamboo strips, the altars of wood and bone and beaten bronze, the destruction had started when the Fleet Lords, who could not tolerate the City’s priests, bombarded it with missiles and laser fire. But the cat did not know about such distinctions.
Properly, the cat’s name was Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, along with a number of ceremonial titles that needn’t concern us. But the people who had called her that no longer lived in the station’s ruins. Every day as she made her rounds in what had been the boundaries of the temple, she saw and smelled the artefacts they had left behind, from bloodstains to scorch marks, from decaying books to singed spacesuits, and yowled her grief.
To be precise, the cat no longer lived in the station, either. She did not remember her death with any degree of clarity. The ghosts of cats rarely do, even when the deaths are violent. p. 2-3

One of the starships involved in the attack returns years later. It is now a renegade and is being pursued by the Fleet Lords. While the ship talks to the cat they catch up, and battle commences. The cat (spoiler) summons other ghosts to aid the ship and, after victory, joins it on its journey.
The story does not combine the fantasy and SF elements successfully, and does not suspend disbelief.
El Is a Spaceship Melody by Maurice Broaddus, unlike the Lee, does not get off to a promising start:

The living crystals were displeased. The dissonant chords of a harried melody rocked the starship Arkestra. When Captain LeSony’ra Adisa was a young girl dreaming about one day commanding her own vessel, she had never considered it would be filled with so many day-to-day irritations. She sprang from her seat in the main bridge at the sound of the music. She was not one to be tested today.
“Overseer, we aren’t due for a command performance for another three hours.” On the verge of yelling, she opted to save her anger for the person who deserved it.
“Commander Marshall moved the performance ahead.” The timbre of the Overseer’s voice, emanating from the unseen broadcast units, vacillated somewhere between clearly male and clearly female. Its AI was integrated into every fiber along the length of the Arkestra, its calculations vital to monitoring the ship’s systems, including the harnessing energy from the kheprw crystals that powered the ship. p. 19

The warning flags here are the Star Trek-y beginning, and the weird name for the crystals. And that the starship is powered by crystals, which brings us back to the Star Trek comment. It gets worse as Captain LeSony’ra leaves the bridge with her two guards, apparently in fancy dress:

“Steppers, Chappel, you’re with me.” Cradling a small crystal ball in her hand, LeSony’ra nodded, and the two security officers flanked her. Breastplates covered chrome colored body suits. Each wore a gilded animal mask; Steppers an eagle, the Chappel a dog. They brandished shields, though their charged batons remained at their waist. The trio of women exited the bridge. p. 20

There is more of this as they arrive at the concert that has been started by Commander Marshall to, get this, recharge the kheprw crystals.

She cast a baleful glare in his direction, withdrew opaque citrus-colored glasses, and set the crystal ball on the keyboards at her station, unlocking the vintage Clavioline. Its amplifier fed directly into the kheprw crystals’ containment unit. Her voluminous black caftan whipped about her as she took her seat behind the Clavioline, its iridescent silver overlay interfaced with the keyboards. Her gold chainmail headdress lightly jingled as she began to work the instrument. Her striped platform oxfords—“moon boots” the crew called them, since they were designed for zero gravity situations—found the foot pedals.
Marshall used any opportunity to undermine her authority. Always eager to ingratiate himself to the crew, to prove who ought to be in command. He was in need of a reminder of who was in charge. It was time for a true command performance. p. 21-22

The story engine here is starship Captain LeSony’ra Adisa’s (a young, black, female martinet) conflict with Commander Marshall, her junior officer (he is older, male, white, and a ‘traditionalist’—he also has a facial twitch in case there is any remaining doubt that he is a bad ’un).
The trouble between these one-dimensional characters is telegraphed fairly early on, both in the opening paragraphs above, and in a discussion about Overseer, the ship AI—it is a pity that all the glam-rock stuff at the start disappears so quickly as they could probably have settled matters with a dance-off. As it is, the story continues on its predictable way, with Adisa showing all the emotional intelligence of a teenager who has fallen out with one of her friends. An asteroid strike, a murder and a mutiny are added to the mix, as well as the ship AI, Overseer, trying to find God.
I thought this was awful.
Where the Anchor Lies by Benjamin C. Kinney is a story that feels like an extract from a longer work (a common occurrence in Beneath Ceaseless Skies). This has a woman from the Polity on a pilgrimage to the ruins of a starship she was once bonded with. Once she arrives (spoiler) she will use the starship to warn her fellow citizens of the their leaders’ nefarious intentions. Apart from its structural deficiencies I thought this was okay.
Penitents by Rich Larson leads off #245. This story concerns two characters: Mara, who lives in the habs, and Scout, who lives in the wasteland outside. Mara has hired Scout to help her rescue her friend Io, who left the habs and was taken by an enigmatic black cube controlled by aliens:

Mara doesn’t know where to look, but then all of a sudden there’s an enormous black cube filling up the sky above them. No thunderclap, no sound at all, it just appears. A tremor runs through her whole body, and nausea hits her gut. Her ears are keening, her face is aching. There’s a rough staticky tongue licking her spinal column top to bottom.
The cube is like nothing she’s ever seen, an enormous black box composed of a thousand shifting slivers breaking and melding, rippling, almost liquid. Blinking red sensors swarm around its edges like flies. She can’t tell how close it is—one second it seems right on top of them, the next a mile away. Vertigo swamps her, and she retches.
[. . .]
As she watches, an enormous oily black bubble forms on the underside of the cube, like water beading at the end of a nozzle, then falls. It splashes apart on the slag, revealing its cargo. Mara takes a sharp breath. It’s an old man, scarecrowskinny, naked, with skin so pale it almost glows against the pebbly black rock.
But instead of a head, or perhaps enveloping it, there’s spiny black machinery, with a red sensor pulsing right where the old man’s face should be. p. 4-5

Eventually, (spoiler) they manage to rescue Io and, while they do so, we learn more about the aliens, and why they are make the captives march underneath the cube.
Another solid story from Larson, and one that wouldn’t be out-of-place in, say, Asimov’s SF.
Red Dreams by R. Z. Held has a good hook:

When Tarnish woke from her second red dream, she could deny it no longer—she had to leave, before that dreaming red became the kind of real red that drenched her hands. p. 32

It is a post-holocaust story that has two characters travelling across the country to deliver mail. One of them, Tarnish, starts having the ‘red dreams’ alluded to above, which have previously have led to violent blood-letting sprees in the afflicted. Although Tarnish feels it would be best to leave her partner Sol, the latter dissents, and they stay together. Later, when they come upon the remains of old tech, Tarnish finds her affliction is actually a need for rust not blood.
There is the seed of a good idea here but the story is another one with the feel of an extract. It also feels rather over written and consequently drags.
The Last Human Child by Milo James Fowler is another post-apocalyptic future, this time one where humans are dying out and are in conflict with the ‘spliced,’ humans produced from a mix of convict and animal DNA. Dahlia is (supposedly) the last human child, and she is fleeing through the jungle with Brawnstone, a troll ogre, while the spliced Enya, a ‘shapeshifter’ who is part of a patrol of humans, pursues her.
Just before Dahlia is caught (spoiler) she meets a man in the jungle. The acid rains do not affect him as he has as force shield, and he tells her he is part of a human community that is separate from the Elders Dahlia is trying to escape from. The resolution plays out when all the parties meet.
I enjoyed this, but it is slightly spoiled by a crude data dump start that synopsises what I presumed were earlier stories.² This could have been more elegantly done, either as a proper prologue, or with the material worked more gradually into the story.
Such Were the Faces of the Living Creatures by Josh Pearce is yet another post-holocaust story, this time one with a hillbilly mutant vibe. A father takes one of his daughters to get medical attention but the autonomous train they attach themselves to is hijacked by humans that have a metallic skin. After they escape they end up in a convent, where the mother superior extracts genetic material from the father (in the traditional way) before explaining where he can find a group who can help the daughter. These turn out to be insect-like creatures who agree to cure one of them in exchange for the other . . . .
Although parts of this are interesting enough, it feels rather like something made up as the writer went along. I also think that it doesn’t quite get the tone right (it sometimes feels as if it is unintentionally teetering on the edge of humour).
Do as I Do, Sing as I Sing by Sarah Pinsker leads off #246. This story’s narrator is a girl called a Guerre who lives in a strange agrarian community. It seems that they only grow one main crop, koh, and this requires a ‘cropsinger.’ One day she and her brother return to the village after they finish playing and see a silver air car arrive, something that Guerre has never seen before. The occupants of the vehicle tell the villagers that the child they had sent train as a replacement cropsinger (their current one is failing) has died.
Guerre is chosen as a replacement; her brother is not impressed when he cannot go too. She leaves the village for the long trip to the training farm.
Several years later, Guerre completes the final test to become a cropsinger and returns to her village. She discovers that, after she had left, her brother went to the city. He then returns to the village with a machine he claims can do the job of a cropsinger, and proceeds to set up a demonstration for the villagers. As the machine works, Guerre and Kirren, the old cropsinger, discuss the effects the machine may have on the delicate societal system that has the lowlanders produce koh crops, and the highlanders breed goats. Later, matters take a turn for the worse when Guerre detects abnormalities in the test crop and feels compelled to act.
I liked this piece well enough but it suffers from three problems. To start with, it is obviously the first part of a longer work or series as the ending leaves matters largely unresolved; second, Guerre’s training is covered in a scant few pages when this section should have been a much longer one where, and this is the third deficiency, the strange ecology and society should have been at least partly fleshed out. No doubt we will learn more in future stories.
The highlight of the three issues is The Emotionless, in Love by Jason Sanford, a 28,000 word novella which is a sequel to the Nebula Award finalist Blood Grains Speak Through Memories (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #195, March 17^th 2016). That story had as its central character Frere-Jones, who was the ‘anchor’ for her land, and this story concerns her ‘day-tripper’ son Colton. (The story takes place in a depopulated future that has ‘day-fellows’—itinerant humans—whose caravans are more or less constantly on the move across the land. The resident anchors are infected with ‘grains’—militant ecological nanotechnology which permeates the environment—and the anchors are used by the grains as environmental wardens. Should day-trippers overstay their welcome, or damage the environment, the grains are capable of swarming anchors from adjoining areas to deal with the problem and, more significantly, of transforming them into monstrous beasts to mete out anything up to lethal punishment.)
The story opens with Colton’s caravan, which is going to an area where an upcoming ‘Veil’ is expected, a rare occurrence where the grains in the land malfunction and die, allowing travellers to exploit the land for a short period without fear of attack. They come upon a tree that has been cut down with a laser, and realise that this is something that will enrage the local grains. When they catch up with the caravan responsible for this act it is being attacked by a number of anchors:

Elder Vácha and Colton watched the anchors attack the three wagons ahead. Like their caravan, these other wagons were armored boxes riding wheels two yards tall. But the other caravan’s wagons weren’t hardened ceramic like theirs. Instead, Colton saw rusty metal armor with actual rivets. The wagons looked cobbled together from previously destroyed ones, as if the people driving them hadn’t bothered to create anything better.
Only the strongest wagons could withstand an anchor’s onslaught, and the other caravan wasn’t close to that. The attacking anchors no longer looked human, their bodies rippling to massive muscles and height, to silvered fangs and claws. One of the anchors stood twice as tall as the others and towered over the wagons, her long red hair burning actual fire through the rain and her body swollen on the power and fury of her grains. Colton had never seen an anchor this big—even his mother, who’d been incredibly powerful when angry, wouldn’t have come close. p. 49

The second and third acts are a wild ride that involve, among other things: renegade grains, and Sri Sa’s resultant abilities; Ae’s neural connector; the last human city that fell in the war with the grains, which is partially buried on the site of the Veil.
Along the way, Sri Sa gives Colton grain injections that will enable him to feel individual emotions (he lost this ability when his mother killed off the grains in his body, and changed him from an anchor to a day-traveller):

“You want another emotion?” Sri Sa asked. “You can’t understand what I’m about to share without it.”
Colton nodded.
Sri Sa jumped into the stream beside Colton and grabbed his arm. “Emotions are like colors,” she whispered. “Only a few primary colors, combined, create all the others you see. It’s the same with emotions.”
A single claw grew from Sri Sa’s right index finger. She ran it from Colton’s elbow to wrist, stopping to tap the red dot there. “You need happiness this time,” she said with a grin. “Fear and happiness mix to create duty. You can’t understand why I’m angry without experiencing duty.”
Sri Sa stabbed the claw into Colton’s wrist.
Memories flooded him. He saw people laughing and loving and playing and dancing, each memory wrapping pure bliss through his body and mind. He held a newborn baby to his chest for the first time—his baby, a baby born of him and Sri Sa. He imagined kissing Sri Sa on the cheek as she whispered her love back to him.
“I created those two memories just for you,” Sri Sa said as she tapped his lips with a claw. “The next memories, though, are real. They’re my favorites.”
Colton laughed as he felt Sri Sa’s most precious memories, which came from a woman who’d lived in this city before its destruction. Colton experienced her life in the nano-built city among buildings gleaming to absolute whiteness or lost to perfect darkness. He played among gardens bursting with gene-altered flowers and cool-mist fountains. He learned in vast libraries containing all of humanity’s knowledge. He listened to innovative music flow from performance halls and theaters. He watched children play in beautiful parks and lovers hug as they walked warm-lit streets at night.
Colton grinned. He saw why Sri Sa loved these memories. p. 123-124

This all builds to an exciting climax, and one which has a fitting final line.
Although this is a very good piece overall, it does have a few minor weaknesses: it is perhaps a little too long, which causes pacing problems in the story (the section at the start of part two, for instance, drags a little); I also think that it could do with another draft as it feels a little unpolished. Notwithstanding this, those that enjoyed the previous story will love this one (and I strongly recommend you read it first): apart from the fact that we learn so much more about this world, it is a gripping story. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies, and I will be interested to see how it does in the Nebula Awards.
Gennesaret by Phoenix Alexander is an evocative story that tells of a woman and her son who are fleeing a conflict:

When there is nothing left in her, when the air boils in her throat and the muscles of her limbs scream and her toes, crushed together unnaturally in thick leather boots, throb with pain: then there is sand, and the sound of the sea.
Too exhausted for relief, she lowers the child from her shoulders and sinks, herself, down. She is on her back. The sand holds her. She claws at her bindings blindly, face-up and drinking in starlight. Her fingers are blocks beating against fabric, and then, and then, the shocking bliss of cool air on her feet, of sea air ruffling the sail-like skin that connects her long delicate dactyls. The flesh is pinched red, the soft lines of scales raw highlights. She weeps tearlessly as she raises her legs, feet forming a fan of flesh above her. The sky is far too alive. Stars show through the translucent film of her toes; galaxies blink between the digits.
The child mewls.
“Umma, I’m hungry.”
Blunt, vestigial claws fumble at her cheek, walking along the flesh to her jawline. She closes her eyes. Instinct directs his hands. As he paws the sack of skin around her gullet, her mouth falls open, and her child pushes his own eagerly into it. She feels the little darting of his forked tongue about the soft flesh of her cheeks, slipping further, sliding longer, and her esophagus spasms, bringing half-digested food up to him.
There is not much. The remains of a small dustrat; the slimed husks of insects. The fires and chemicals destroyed most of the fauna from the grasslands or forced them to flee.
Theirs is a time of running.
When the child has had his fill and slides from her — only then does she swallow the meager remains. Her breath is quick and repulses her: wretched meat. p. 176-77

They plan to cross to the country that is visible on the other side of the water but, before they can do this, her husband, his friends, and their tracking animals catch up with her, and try to take her back. She manages to escape them, and runs across the water in a trance, her webbed feet and speed keeping her and the child above the surface.
When she reaches the opposite side she finds a hostile reception.
This is a promising piece but the ending didn’t work for me (spoiler: her son dies and she is taken away by the crowd. This is followed by an awkward coda that has two of the crowd stand over the boy’s body before cutting off his mutilated crest.) A pity—if the narrative arc was as strong as the writing this would be pretty good.

The cover, Ugg, is an attractively done if unfortunately named piece by Florent Llamas.³

This issue is a mixed bag, just like the previous ones I’ve read. There is some good or very good reading (the Larson and Sanders) and some of the rest is also of interest (the Fowler and Alexander, etc.). More generally I would note that the magazine has something of a writers’ workshop vibe: a number of the stories feel as if they aren’t entirely finished products, and this is amplified by a number of clumsy sentences and typos. ●

_____________________

1. There is more wordage than usual in these three issues: at just over 90,000 words there is more here than in an issue of F&SF (82k in the 9/10-2017 issue) but not Asimov’s SF (112k in the  9/10-2017 issue).

2. I had a look at Milo James Fowler’s website and ISFDB page for more information about this series but neither is much use. I eventually came upon Dahlia and the Ronin at Amazon and, as  it was only 99p, I bought and read it.

The ebook has four stories that form a prelude to the tale in this magazine (which will presumably be included once BCS’s exclusivity period expires). I say ‘stories’ but they are really four fragments, or the first four parts in a five-part novelette. They are:

While She Sleeps, Mountains Tremble (Triangulation: Morning After, 2012), 1000 words
Stone for Brains (The Fifth Dimension, 2013), 1000 words
Dahlia’s Feast (Aoife’s Kiss #44, March 2013), 3800 words
Dahlia and the Ronin (Perihelion Science Fiction, 2014), 4100 words

It would be helpful for the writer to put these details on his website (or the editor in the after-story material) for those who want to read the series from the start.

3. The full-size cover image is here. You can find more of Llamas’s work at Deviant Art. ●

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe here.

ISFDB links: #218, #219

Editor-in-Chief, Scott H. Andrews

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Dave Truesdale, Anne Crookshanks, Tangent Online (#218, #219)
Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews (#218, 219)
Various, Goodreads (#218, #219)

Fiction:
#218
Out of the Woods • short story by Marissa Lingen ∗
Men of the Ashen Morrow • short story by Margaret Killjoy ∗∗∗
#219
Gravity’s Exile • novelette by Grace Seybold ∗∗
The Last Dinosaur Rider of Benessa County • short story by Jeremy Sim ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Source • cover by Florent Llamas

These two issues actually have different covers for a change (a panoramic work has been split in two) but I’ve covered them together; even so it makes for a short ‘issue.’

Out of the Woods by Marissa Lingen is a story about a small group of rebels who wait for the return of their King, and the pardon they hope he will grant them. When he does arrive back in his kingdom it is on his pyre, and his despised brother continues to rule.
After watching four of their number hanged, the central character, Lovis, comes up with a ruse that gets her near to the brother. Then (spoiler) she kills him with a finger-snap spell, a minor fantasy device used earlier in the text. This rather arbitrary event brings to end a tale that consists mostly of talk between the rebels. While this is occasionally interesting, it doesn’t add up what I would call a story.
Men of the Ashen Morrow by Margaret Killjoy has a group of hunters sacrifice a deer to the God Hulokk. The hunters want to bring summer to an end, to prevent the ‘bright monsters’ flooding into the valley:

He would come. Not for the sacrifice—what’s a deer to the god of all rivers and roots and everything on the ground and beneath it—but for the hunters. Hulokk would come when summoned by His people. As like as not, He’d take someone with Him.
Sal didn’t want to die, and she assumed none of her companions did either. But Hulokk must freeze the earth to end the summer, and winter must come for the snows to settle onto the hills, and the snows must come to keep the creatures from the West at bay. Risk was necessary to life, always.
[. . .]
The doe’s blood melted and burned the earth. The smell of old rot poured into the forest. The ground collapsed, pulling the saplings and ferns down into the underworld, and Sal and her company stepped back.
A single segmented leg, infinitely thin and long, crept out from the hole. First one, then another. Then another, another, another. Slower than the setting of the summer sun, His fat, round worm body of flesh and stone rose into the air. His belly was awash with eyes. He looked at Sal, and Sal borrowed the breath of the other hunters. She spoke, in the tongue of the gods:
“I ask you, Hulokk, to bring an end to summer.”
“I will not.” Hulokk’s voice was a thousand voices, across and below the audible.
“I ask you, Hulokk, to bring an end to summer.”
“I will not.” Ancient trees trembled and fell, and Sal felt her heart quiver in her chest from the physical force of the voice.
“I ask you, Hulokk, to bring an end to summer.”
“I will.”
Four legs shot out and wrapped around Lelein, and she screamed, hoarse and angry.
“I ask you, Hulokk,” Sal started, but it took more magic than she could summon to keep her voice in the tongue of the gods. She finished her sentence meekly, in a human language.
“To spare our lives.”
The god dragged Sal’s lover into the depths of the earth. At the last moment, the eldest among the hunters put a quarrel through Lelein’s throat, silencing her forever. As the world grew silent, Sal collapsed at the edge of the of sinkhole and clawed at the dirt in lieu of weeping.
Hulokk froze the earth, and autumn came, then winter. p. 21-23

The story then flashes forward to the end of Sal’s life, when she is in her seventies. In the intervening time she has conducted fifteen sacrifices, and lost nine people, a better performance than any other collective has managed. However, when a horseman arrives requesting her to perform another, she refuses: she has lost enough people . . . . Later, she changes her mind, and attempts the summoning herself.
A good traditional fantasy.

Gravity’s Exile by Grace Seybold gets off to a pretty good start with its protagonist fighting a lizard on the wall of rock that is her world:

Woman and monster hung motionless against the rockface for an endless moment, eyes locked together. Then, abruptly, the lizard clacked its teeth shut, spun on two feet, and skittered away. Despite its dragging rear leg it was unnervingly fast, and in a few heartbeats it had disappeared around a knob of rock and was gone.
Jeone let out a long, shuddering breath, the exhilaration of the fight draining away all at once. With exaggerated care, she tucked the sandal into her belt and pulled herself into a more secure two-handed hold, resting her cheek against the cool stone. Her skin was beaded with sweat. The sun was coming up out of the downclouds now, the day well started. She should get moving, retrieve her pitons and hammock and whatever of her worldly goods the lizard’s sudden attack hadn’t scattered into the cloudy void. Jeone smiled bitterly, picturing some far-down kingdom surprised by a sudden rain of camping equipment. It was the sort of thing that just happened every so often, no matter where on the worldwall you lived: rains of tools, fish, bodies, stranger things. One day Jeone herself would no doubt run out of luck, and her falling body would startle someone far below— p. 4-5

Later she makes her way downwards and comes upon a village. A sentry meets her and she is taken into their cave system. Here she discovers that there are no men, something that unsettles her. After two of the villagers feed and question her she is told to stay where she is while they go to a meeting. Needless to say she follows them, and sees the villagers and nine huge birds, larger than humans and stinking of carrion, watch a pregnant woman give birth to a partly formed human-bird hybrid. She is discovered and captured by the birds, who fly her to what appears to be a series of tunnels and cells in a flying rock. The rest of the story tells of her attempt to escape.
The main problem this story has is its unconvincing world setting. The wallworld is fine, but when it goes beyond this to the monstrous birds and their flying rock it starts reading like a modern and well-written version of some 1930s weird pulp story. Also, as with a lot of the stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, there is a lot that remains unexplained, and so it reads like an extract from a longer work.
The Last Dinosaur Rider of Benessa County by Jeremy Sim should have been titled The Last Dinosaur-Riding Gunslinger of Benessa County, and then I wouldn’t have to add much more. This one has Black Jonas returning to a town twenty years after he killed a number of people. The thing that is unusual about this western is that he rides in via the canal system on a pleesaur (plesiosaur presumably). Apart from the strange background of ocean prospecting, pleiosaur riding cowboys, it is a fairly standard story. He goes looking for a man named Doone to get his money (why he waited all this time isn’t explained), and trouble from the past comes looking for him; eventually he leaves town. An vivid piece but, again, it has the feel of a middle story in a long series, or novel extract.

Source is the cover by Florent Llamas. There doesn’t seem to much going on here apart from the bird flying away from the rock and the two figures, but if you look closely there are giant circles carved into the rock and there are two flocks of birds in the distance. An atmospheric landscape piece.

The story by Margaret Killjoy is the best of these four. As for the rest, in media res¹ sums it up I think.

1. Wikipedia’s in media res page.

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ISFDB links: #214, #215, #216, #217

Editor-in-Chief, Scott H. Andrews

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Jody Dorsett (x2), Nicky Magus, Michelle Ristuccia, Tangent Online (#214, #215, #216, #217)
Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews (#214, #215, #216, #217)
Various, Goodreads (#214, #215, #216, #217)

Fiction:
#214:
The Orangery • novelette by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam ∗∗
The Jeweled Nawab Jungle Retreat • short story by Priya Sridhar ∗∗∗
#215
Where She Went • short story by Linden A. Lewis
The True and Otherworldly Origins of the Name ‘Calamity Jane’ • short story by Jordan Kurella ∗
#216
Wooden Boxes Lined with the Tongues of Doves • short story by Claire Humphrey ∗∗
Think of Winter • short story by Eleanna Castroianni ∗∗+
#217
Proteus Lost • short story by Tony Pi ∗∗∗+
Requiem for the Unchained • short story by Cae Hawksmoor ∗∗

Non-fiction:
The Sacred Flames • cover by Jinxu Du

As with my earlier review of this title I’ve combined four issues that have the same cover art to (a) avoid confusion in my Gallery page and (b) to give a ‘standard’ magazine’s worth of review material (Beneath Ceaseless Skies posts two stories online every fortnight: these eight come to around 47,000 words in total).

The Orangery by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam is about the guardian of the eponymous garden, a place where woman who drink a potion change into trees. At the start of the story Apollo breaches the Orangery’s wall looking for his wife Daphne; she has run away from him and transformed. This part of the story tells of the Guardian’s attempts to keep her from him; the other is a flashback that tells of Daphne’s marriage to Apollo.
I enjoyed this but it took me a while to get into it. I also think it doesn’t entirely work as a normal story—it rather has the feel of an unresolved myth.
A minor point, but there are one or two awkward sounding sentences:

Little room in the Orangery meant the guardian’s library was limited. The books on my shelves I had chosen as a young woman: stories of adventure and romance, stories that left me with a pitted longing. p. 2

‘There was little space in the Orangery, so the guardian’s library was limited.’ ‘The books on my shelves were ones I had chosen as a young woman . . .’
The Jeweled Nawab Jungle Retreat by Priya Sridhar is set in a fantastic version of Imperial India. The story is narrated by Ram, a girl who dresses as a boy so she can work, and her story takes her from a farm job to one at a hotel/hunting lodge. This establishment is next to a reserve that contains a number of incredible creatures, such as gigantic butterflies and worms. Ram cleans and labours at the hotel, and is also wheeled out in front of the guests to demonstrate her precocious language abilities by reciting various Shakespearian plays, etc.
At one point a married woman sexually molests her until she discovers that Ram is not a boy. The woman and her husband later depart on an ill-fated hunting trip accompanied by the hotel staff.
This has a fairly straightforward storyline but the local colour is its strength:

Mister Coates, in contrast, was large and rectangular. He reminded me of a brick stove, because his face would often turn red from frustration. His hair was white, and he often snuffled. He often talked about game, and he was fascinated by the game that Papillon’s Jungle offered.
“A knack it is, to catch a Viceroy,” he would repeat. “You want to keep the wings intact, but these large specimens will smother you to death if they get half the chance. They have no patience for silly little nets and chloroform. You have to use a large honey lure, ideally a pit of sticky substance, and wait for them to be trapped. Like seeing buffalos getting trapped in golden tar…”
I was sweeping the dining room that evening, combing the corners with a short brush. My outfit was brown and orange, so that it didn’t appear dirty. Madam Coates followed me with her eyes.
“Oh come now, dear,” she said. “It’s not that much of a knack with the new guns and all. It’s just “bang-bang” these days and the wings can easily be restored.”
I made a strong effort to not shake my head. To go after a large butterfly fresh in its prime was suicide; every local knew that, especially with the legends of extraordinary hunting failures. Their wings were strong, up until they started to lay eggs on large tree leaves and life started to depart the great colorful bodies. Often we would find the dead butterflies at the bottoms of deep gorges, often in piles. p. 46-47

Where She Went by Linden A. Lewis follows a man who is looking for his missing granddaughter. He goes to see a neighbour who lives near the obelisk forest. After he threatens to shoot the neighbour he learns that his granddaughter has been taken by the witch who lives in the centre of the forest.
During the man’s journey to the witch’s house he encounters a group (shoal?) of sirens who appear out of the river. He shoots one and is subsequently pursued by the other four. Later, he fights off three lamiae, shooting two this time, before tumbling into the river and fighting with the last one before finally escaping.
He eventually ends up at the witch’s house and discovers (spoiler) that his granddaughter has been willingly sent off-world by the ‘witch’ so that the granddaughter can return and replace her, and continue with the work of supporting the town and making the planet more habitable.
This SFnal ending to an apparent fantasy quest (although there is a single mention of energy weapons earlier) just does not work. And, apart from that, it raises more questions than it answers. Why does the witch need to hide in the first place? What were the creatures the man unnecessarily killed? Why don’t writers realise that gunplay is a particularly poor way of injecting some drama into your story?
The True and Otherworldly Origins of the Name ‘Calamity Jane’ by Jordan Kurella starts with a fairy-hunter called Jane standing in a street in in a deserted town. She senses that there is a fairy in one of the shops so she goes inside. There she finds two of them who, as part of a proposition to her, produce the body of Earl, an ex-hunting partner. They offer to release his soul and the people of the town if she will come to Fairie with them. She fights her way out.
Aside from the fact this is another story with gunplay (sigh), this reads like an extract from a longer work: no beginning, no ending.
Wooden Boxes Lined with the Tongues of Doves by Claire Humphrey tells of a young man called William who lives with his uncle and works in a bank. When he is not working he undertakes various tasks for the uncle, one of which is feeding the doves and occasionally clipping their tongues. These tongue tips are dried and kept in sealed wooden boxes. This strange practice is never explained and, if it is a metaphor for something else, I don’t know what.
As the story develops William starts a relationship with Lily, a young woman who works in the baker’s shop. Their feelings for each other deepen and they eventually become lovers. He tells his uncle that he is going to marry her but, shortly afterwards, William appears to lose all memory of their love and he ignores her when she later tells him she is pregnant.
At the end of the story the uncle has arranged to marry Lily, and William leaves for the front (there are multiple mentions of soldiers travelling to war throughout the story).
This is, at times, a well written and intriguing story—but is ultimately baffling.
Think of Winter by Eleanna Castroianni is a début story from someone who can write:

Day in, day out, sun up, sun down. Light peeks through the holes on the roof, stretches in long, narrow rays between stained glass. Ivy and clover grow quietly, tangled between the rotting planks of the lectern. When it rains, a puddle as big as a pond forms on the floor. Folu hops over it and gets deeper into the cathedral, where it’s warmer, cosier. A rug to sleep, a cooking pot, a gourd.
Folu walks to the river every day to bring fresh water. Then, after foraging all morning, Folu returns to the cathedral with nettles and dandelion in spring, raspberries and white mushrooms in autumn. Summer is long and food is plenty. But winter looks grim because Folu can’t catch game. The days are still warm with wheat and bran, but the chill is creeping in from the broken windows. Leaves turn orange; now they’re falling fast. Soon it will be winter. Finding mushrooms takes time. Can’t think of winter now. Think of today’s food. p. 19

Folu is a child who is hiding in a ruined cathedral after the Grey Men have killed her mother. She reads her tarot-like cards when she isn’t foraging. They tell her about the Knight.
He arrives during the winter and rescues her from starvation. He hunts game and feeds her, and collects wood for the fire. He asks her to read his cards and, when she does, she sees something that frightens her. Inevitably (spoiler), the Grey Men come for the Knight. Before they enter the building he tries to convince her to escape with him but she refuses. Having wasted vital time he hides her before surrendering.
The end of the story has her drawing three cards, but this scene, like some other parts, leave it a unsatisfyingly enigmatic piece. (Why didn’t she act on the warning the cards gave about the Grey Men? Is the Knight killed when the Grey Men find him in the cathedral? What does the heart card signify? Does she love him?)
I hope we don’t have to wait too long for this writer’s next story.
Proteus Lost by Tony Pi is my favourite story from the four issues. It is a story that features Filippo, or Flea, a spy for Elizabeth I and a shapeshifter. He and Luca, his assistant, are visiting an old colleague called D’Aphide to recover a book that Filippo needs to trade with a member of the Spanish court so he can replace his compromised European spy-ring.
When they arrive at the monastery where D’Aphide is hiding they find his assistant, who gives them the alarming news that he has changed into a form that is half-man, half-wolf. The pair find D’Aphide in his cloister and realise that he has experimented with transformations from the book they seek, the Proteus Codex, and has chosen the wrong sequence. This has blinded as well as changed him, and rendered him unable to undo his mistake.
The rest of the story is a clever account of how Filippo, with the help of Luca, manages to unravel and then reverse the series of transformations that have incapacitated D’Aphide.
This is an engrossing period piece even though it reads like an extract from a longer novel in progress (that said, it is more skilfully self-contained than most series stories).¹

Requiem for the Unchained by Cae Hawksmoor is another atmospheric tale, this time about the captain of an airship called the Requiem, who takes a job from Émile, a rich man who caused the death of her wife. The job requires the captain to escort a larger vessel called Wayward Star, even though the latter has the soul lanterns required to protect her from geiststorms and the unchained (ghosts/spirits):

The Wayward Star is already at mast in the vast green of the airfield by the time I get Requiem’s nose to the wind and start to bring him down. And a grand old lady she is at that. Émile’s pride and joy, and the flagship of his not-insubstantial fleet of luxury cloud liners. Even from a thousand feet in the air she looks like a leviathan—pink and purple sunset melting on her silver flanks, bright as a freshly minted coin.
Rumor has it that Émile’s people are already at work building her replacement. One of those modern monstrosities—all chrome and ego and white paint. The ones the papers like to print big gaudy headlines about. They will never match the Star’s patient and elegant beauty, no matter how well-worn her claret velvet or how tarnished her filigree. She might be almost as old as Requiem, but next to her he is a squat leather bag with a splintering wooden gondola slung underneath and an ugly lantern strapped to his prow—reminding everyone how the unchained are coming for us. How death is coming for us, should we ever drop our guard. p. 35

During a storm (spoiler) all six of the Wayward Star’s lanterns fail, and so does the one belonging to the Requiem. The Wayward Star is destroyed— Émile intends collecting the insurance money to solve his financial problems—but the Requiem survives thanks to the intervention of one of the unchained.
This is a good story as far as it goes but it is too much like an extract from a longer work.

The cover is The Sacred Flames by Jinxu Du. I like the red flags against the winter background.

There are a couple of good stories in these four issues, and another few of interest. Atmosphere and writing style are the predominant strengths of this group; the weaknesses of some are a failure to impose a story structure or other narrative or emotional arcs on their material.

1. According to Tony Pi’s website, this is the fourth ‘Flea’ story. The others are Metamorphoses in Amber (Abyss & Apex, 4th Quarter, 2007), The Paragon Lure (Alembical 2, ed. Arthur Dorrance & Lawrence M. Schoen, 2010), and We Who Steal Faces (Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, #22, April 2011, ed. by Edmund R. Schubert).

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Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Eric Kimminau, Tangent Online (#194, #195)
Various, Goodreads (#194, #195)

#194 Fiction:
Foxfire, Foxfire • novelette by Yoon Ha Lee ♥♥♥+
Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest • short story by Cat Rambo ♥♥
The Right Bright Courier • short story by Anaea Lay ♥

#195 Fiction:
A Salvaging of Ghosts • short story by Aliette de Bodard ♥♥♥
The Mountains His Crown • short story by Sarah Pinsker ♥♥♥
Blood Grains Speak Through Memories • novelette by Jason Sanford ♥♥♥+

#194/#195 Non-fiction:
Research Lab • cover by Sung Choi
Contributor Notes

Beneath Ceaseless Skies is, from what I can see, an online fiction site that publishes a couple of pieces of fantasy fiction every two weeks (although these two issues seem to be SF/Science Fantasy specials). Once again, having recognised a few of the names I settled on a specific issue, #195. I would have reviewed that one on its own but I noticed that the site seems to renew their banner or cover art every two or three issues, so I ended up reading both #194 and #195 (which have an identical cover bar the author names) to avoid duplicate covers on the reviews I post here as well as on the gallery page. This also made sense in wordage terms: the fiction in both issues combined runs to about 37,000 words, closer to a ‘normal’ magazine.
As with other sites, the fiction is available free online, and the site also offers issues for download in a number of formats (epub, mobi and PDF). It is also available for purchase at Amazon and Weightless Books.¹

As for the stories themselves, they get off to a good start with Foxfire, Foxfire by Yoon Ha Lee. This is an original story as well as proper science fantasy, i.e. a genuine combination of fantasy and SF. It involves Baekdo, a magical fox who can take human form and who is hunting his hundredth victim in a war-torn city. If the fox is successful he will be able to take human form permanently. As Baekdo is stalking a soldier he hears a cataphract:

I was sauntering toward the delicious-looking soldier when I heard the cataphract’s footsteps. A Jangmi 2-7, judging from the characteristic whine of the servos. Even if I hadn’t heard it coming—and who couldn’t?—the stirring of the small gods of earth and stone would have alerted me to its approach.
They muttered distractingly. My ears would have flattened against my skull if they could have.
Superstitious people called the cataphracts ogres, because of their enormous bipedal frames. Some patriots disliked them because they had to be imported from overseas. Our nation didn’t have the ability to manufacture them, a secret that the foreigners guarded jealously.
This one was crashing through the street. People fled. No one wanted to be around if a firefight broke out, especially with the armaments a typical cataphract was equipped with. It was five times taller than a human, with a stride that would have cratered the street with every step, all that mass crashing down onto surprisingly little feet if not for the bargains the manufacturers had made with the small gods of earth and stone.

Baekdo waits for it to stop and the pilot to leave the machine. When this eventually happens the fox takes human form and creeps up on the pilot and tries to kill her. The pilot wakes up and grabs Baekdo’s human form by the throat. Before he loses consciousness Baekdo reverts to a fox. When he comes back to consciousness he is a prisoner in the cockpit of the cataphract and we learn that the pilot is fleeing to the mountains. She makes a bargain with the fox: he will gain his freedom if he calls on the small gods to mask the cataphract’s infrared signature and help her escape. Baekdo agrees but before he can contact the small gods five other cataphracts flush them out and start pursuing them.
Interweaved with this section is a flashback that recounts how the fox was taken by his mother to a tiger-sage when he was younger, and this also ties into the narrative again at the end.
This is an impressive and entertaining work, and it looks like it may be the first in a series. Here’s hoping.

Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest by Cat Rambo tell us about Cathay, a chaos Mage who stumbles into the city of Serendib. There she plants three seeds and two germinate and grow into a house. Later, she is challenged by a woman called Mariposa to three games. There isn’t much more to this in terms of story—it is perhaps more a descriptive piece, as shown when Cathay surveys the site of the first competition:

Cathay studies the silver cage, thirty feet across, that hangs over a pit of fire. Highbacked arena stands surround it. Faces press forward, shouting, booing, cheering the two lizard people wrestling in the cage, shaking it back and forth.
This is a high-tech quarter. It shows in the decor’s brushed duralite and plasteel lanterns. In the trays that the slim-hipped servers carry back and forth: long crystal rods, and flasks filled with layers of colored liquid, and hallucinogenic pyramids colored grape and tangerine and lemon.

The Right Bright Courier by Anaea Lay is like Cat Rambo’s story in that it is perhaps more a descriptive or mood piece. In this one a courier leaves a spaceship made from parts of her own body and makes her way to the Palace of Abandoned Dreams.

A moment’s hesitation—there was so much I wanted to reassure her of—and then I was through the hatch and into the clear night air of the shores outside the Palace of Abandoned Dreams. A Bright Courier never looks back, never regrets, but when I crested the bank I turned to her. Her scales were gray and shimmering under the golden light of the double moons, her sails reflecting the ether-glow we sailed upon to travel between planets. I’d sacrificed a valve of my heart, a length of my gut, and an impossible desire, all to have her grown for me. From me. It wasn’t looking back, that last glance. You can’t look back at your present self.

Ghosts or visions of two old friends try to stop her picking up the package at the centre of the Palace but she ignores them. I liked the writing and invention well enough but the rather arbitrary ending didn’t work for me.

A Salvaging of Ghosts by Aliette de Bodard is about a woman, Thuy, who dives to mindships that gave been destroyed during their journeys through unreality. On this particular dive she intends to retrieve the remains of her daughter who died on a previous expedition. However, one of the side effects of unreality is that human bodies are transformed into gemstones that can be dissolved and drunk to give a ‘high’ making them a valuable commodity.
When she dives on this mission, Thuy encounters the ghost of her daughter (whether this is an actual ghost or just in Thuy’s mind is unclear) and also discovers that one of the mindships is still alive….
Although this sounds like an unlikely mixture of elements it has a haunting quality that makes it compelling.

The Mountains His Crown by Sarah Pinsker is set in a feudal agrarian society ruled over by an Emperor who wants all the farmers to plant crops that will make a giant portrait of him when viewed from the air.
After a visit from an airship that contains the Royal Surveyors, and an order to grow sunflowers whenever possible for the yellow colour of the Emperor’s robe, the husband of one family decides to try and speak with his ruler as that instruction will cause starvation throughout the land.
There is a further plot twist (spoiler) when one of the surveyors surreptitiously slips him a handful of lava flower seeds which bloom red…. Although I enjoyed this, I wondered if there was a way of structuring the story so that this twist provides more of a payoff in the final paragraphs, rather than being somewhat squandered earlier on.

Blood Grains Speak Through Memories is a long (12,000 words) and original novelette by Jason Sanford that tells of Frere-Jones who is the ‘anchor’ for her land. This is a person who the ‘grains’—militant ecological nanotechnology which permeates the environment—use as a warden. She is currently hosting a caravan of day-fellows: these are normal humans who can only stay on the land a few days before moving on—the result of previous ecological insults to the planet is not only the grains but that humans are not allowed to settle in one place. Day-fellows who overstay their few days on any single anchor’s land, or harm the environment, are attacked and killed by transformed anchors who swarm from surrounding areas to deal with them:

The wagon stood small, barely containing the single family inside, built not of ceramic but of a reinforced lattice of ancient metal armor. Instead of bright ribbons to honor old battles, a faded maroon paint flaked and peeled from the walls. Large impact craters shown on one side of the wagon. Long scratches surrounded the back door from superhard claws assaulting the wagon’s armored shutters.
An ugly, ugly wagon. Still, it had bent under its last attack instead of breaking. The caravan’s leader had told Frere-Jones that this family’s previous caravan had been attacked a few months ago. All that caravan’s ceramic wagons shattered, but this wagon survived.

It materialises that the daughter of one of the day-fellows is infected by the grains and needs to be treated by Frere-Jones. The grains are displeased at the resultant overstay of the day-fellows but Frere-Jones ignores them.
We subsequently learn that when she was initially made an anchor Frere-Jones accepted her role and safeguarded the land from those who might harm it. However, as a result of a subsequent attack against a day-fellow caravan, and information that later came to light, the scales have fallen from her eyes and she is now openly hostile to the grains.
The treatment of the daughter (in secret, to avoid the neighbouring anchors finding out and swarming) plays out against a backstory of her marriage to another anchor who had revolutionary ideas. After his death Frere-Jones killed the grains in her son so he would not in turn have to become an anchor, and he then left to become a day-fellow.
This is original and vivid stuff but I don’t think it entirely works. To give one example, the (spoiler) failure of the girl’s treatment seems to break the rules that have been established about how the grains work; another is that Frere-Jones’s grains replay memories of her husband but we never find out to what end. So this an interesting piece, but not an entirely successful one.

There is no non-fiction to speak of in this magazine bar brief contributor notes at the end of the stories. I liked Research Lab, the cover by Sung Choi, but the cover design is a bit of an afterthought.² The type is too big and the colours won’t necessarily complement all artwork.

Overall, I was quite impressed by these two issues. Four stories that are good or better out of six is pretty good going and if this was a single issue it would rival or surpass a good issue of Asimov’s SF or F&SF.

1. Before I started reading I did wonder about the fact that if you can get a free epub, mobi or PDF from the site, why would you bother buying them from Weightless Books or Amazon (UK/USA)? After reading these two issues I think the answer is that is it worth $15.99 of my money to support the magazine by subscribing to it for a year, which I’m going to do.
2. The artwork seems to be more oriented towards a website banner rather than a magazine cover, but they could make a better job of what part they use:
   Sung Choi’s website is worth a look.

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