ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews
Rebecca DeVendra, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editors, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas; Managing Editor, Michi Trota

Fiction:
Henosis • short story by N. K. Jemisin ∗∗
Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand • short story by Fran Wilde
Though She Be But Little • short story by C. S. E. Cooney ∗∗∗
Down and Out in R’lyeh • novelette by Catherynne M. Valente ∗∗
Fandom for Robots • short story by Vina Jie-Min Prasad ∗∗∗∗
At Cooney’s • novelette by Delia Sherman ∗∗
Ghost Town • reprint short story by Malinda Lo ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Ashley Mackenzie
Poetry • by Jo Walton, Brandon O’Brien, Ali Trotta, Gwynne Garfinkle
The Uncanny Valley • editorial by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas
My Voice-Over Life • essay by Sophie Aldred
Let Me Tell You • essay by Cecilia Tan
I’m Not the Only One: Why Wonder Woman Doesn’t Need to Stand Alone in Order to Stand Tall • essay by Sarah Kuhn
Resistance 101: Basics of Community Organizing for SF/F Creators and Consumers— Volume Four: “Don’t Let Him Catch You With Your Work Undone”—Activism for the Long Haul • essay by Sam J. Miller and Jean Rice
Changeable Skins, Consummate Catchphrases • essay by Sabrina Vourvoulias
Interview: C. S. E. Cooney • by Julia Rios
Interview: Delia Sherman • by Julia Rios

_____________________

Henosis by N. K. Jemisin is an initially promising story with a time-sliced narrative (Chapter 4 if followed by 2, then 1, then 5, etc.). It starts with a popular writer on his way to an award ceremony when he realises the doors of the limousine are locked. He then notices that the driver is not his usual one and, after questioning him, the writer realises he is being kidnapped to stop him winning an award.
There follows a discussion about writers’ legacies in general and, specifically, the looting of Vonnegut’s grave for his body parts (which presumably puts the story either in a parallel world or the future).
The resolution (spoiler) has the writer losing the award while the winner is taken away to be dismembered. There are some interesting parts to this but it doesn’t really work.
Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand by Fran Wilde has the narrator leading someone through a strange exhibit:

We’re keeping the lights low. Any brighter hurts our eyes, bounces off the mirrors. You can still see the finer details, if you lean really close. We’ve left the glass off the fronts, just for you. Touch the sutures, the pins, if you like. Try to push aside the velvet skirting to see the workings below. We’re all like dolls here, with some spare parts. Interchangeable. May I take your hand?
That’s right. Good. Let me catalog our alphabet of differences for you. Here are the heads, the horns, the holes where they tried to let out headaches. Here are the spines, curved like serpents. Here, the jars of jellies with heads too big to be human. A pair of burly palms like beetle’s claws, skin tight over bone.
Here are the doubles and triples, the cephalics, their two legs supporting so much thought. The twins, wrapped around one another like trees. Here is the stone baby, we found him in the trash. See his marble skin, worn away where someone had been touching him too much? We’ve been teaching him his letters.  p. 20

I have no idea what the point of this is (and I read it twice), and am amazed that it got through to the Hugo finalists ballot.
Though She Be But Little by C. S. E. Cooney is an original fantasy about what happened to Emma Anne after the sky went silver (although it is a story that takes a little getting in to). We find out about her, and Captain Howard (who was originally her neighbour Margo before the “D’argenting” but is now a pirate), and the scary Loping Man. Emma fears for her safety if the latter finds her, and this plays out in the second half of the story. The passage that follows, where Emma talks to two stuffed animals who are now ‘alive’, will give you a flavour of the story:

When the sky turned silver, Potter Hill became . . . Something else. Just like everything.
She craned her head over her shoulder, glancing back at the smokestack. The entrance to her hideaway was too high to climb to without assistance from the three-legged chair haphazardly stashed in a nearby bush. Both Captious and Bumptious had poked their noses out of the hole to stare at her with their plastic eyes. They never moved when she was looking.
“You really ought to take us with you,” advised Captious with a look of cunning. “You know the Loping Man is lurking.”
“What can you do?” Emma Anne asked.
“Protect you!” Bumptious asserted stoutly. He was good at assertion.
Emma Anne ignored him. “Anyway. He won’t be around right now. The Loping Man’s not into daylight hours. He’s more crap…” She paused. The word she wanted was vanishing at the edges. “Crap…”
“Craptastic?” guessed Captious.
“No, creep… Crep…”
“Creepissimo? Creepilicious! Creepo-mijito?”
“No! Stop! I know it… It’s… He’s… He’s crepuscular!” She paused, grinning. “You know… Like deer? And rabbits?” Weasel and tiger stared as only stuffed animals can stare. They often chose to desert their sentience as a kind of consequence whenever they thought Emma Anne was getting above herself.  p. 26-27

Parts of this read like Peter Pan on acid, but I mean that in a good way.
While we are talking about literary comparisons, Down and Out in R’lyeh by Catherynne M. Valente feels, I think, like William Burroughs channelling H. P. Lovecraft:

Pazuzu was my eerie from the minute I gibbered out of the spawn-sac and into this trashbin world. Out of one bitch, into another. He ate his mom when he was little, so me and Shit pretty much adopted him into the Niggurath brood. Who would notice one more? Even if he was a Ghast and not a whatever-the-fuck-we-are? Mama Shub strangled Zuzu as lovingly as any of us. These days he’s another regular denizen of Shit’s couch. He kind of looks like a walking, talking, noseless scab on kangaroo legs. Straight up fœtid, was Pazuzu. All the squirmy young shubs hungered him. But my man didn’t have a cultist then. Didn’t care about getting off. Mostly what Zuzu slavered after was to get squamous and hunt himself some gloons. Not THE Gloon. Not the guy named Gloon. You don’t hunt that dank little piece of slug-ass. Not that Elgin marble-looking motherfucker. The slug-god Gloon slithers out the eyes of that effulgy Greek statue it rides around in like a john sliding out of a rented prom limo and it hunts you. Naw, Zuzu hunts posers. Barely larval yuppie scum with Old One pedigrees who gibber around trying to look like Gloon and talk like Gloon and corrupt the mortal world like Gloon when they’re nothing but a bunch of shoggo fuckboys who couldn’t corrupt a goddamn gumdrop without daddy’s protective runes. They’re so fucking dun that when we call them gloons, they think it’s a compliment. But I get Pazuzu. Always have. He kicks those kruggy pukes in the face and feels like he’s making a difference in the world. He isn’t, but, you know. Let a scab dream.  p. 43-44

The story as such is about a group of the younger ones out and about in R’yleh one night, before (spoiler) they burn down Cthulhu’s house.
Although I thought this an okay piece it will be impenetrable to some because of its style and Cthulhu Mythos references. It could have initially done with much less of the former, and a more obvious narrative arc (it’s late on in the story before anything much happens). It could also have done with a few more scenes like this one, where the younger ones walk (or slither) past Cthulhu’s house:

We three eeries gawped up at His porch, the columns, the stonework, the yawning height and depth and intellect-shearing ostentation of that naffgoth wedding cake of a house. That neighborhood was so eel even Azathoth and Hastur got priced out in the Neolithic Era. We hissed at the flowers. No one but no one in R’lyeh could afford a garden—but all around the C-Man’s squalor, millions of black lilies and sicksilver roses writhed and runnelled and strangled each other, gibbering up into empty cottages and walk-ups all around the joint, puking out the windows, living rent-free in houses me and mine could only dream of.
A big, blousy fart-bubble belched up from Cthulhu’s veiny chimney. Oily colors wriggled on its surface as it rose up through the oceanic ultramarine night. We watched as it burst into a polluted rainbow beneath the black lozenges of ships moving silently through the airy, idiot mundworld.
“Best squamous going, I heard,” Shax gurgled. I’d almost forgotten she was there. I’m not much of a cultist when you get right down to it. I know that about myself. I’m trying to work on it.
“Iä, me too, I heard that,” Zuzu growled, still stung, pride still snakestomped. “Only you gotta be 100 percent goat. Quiet like a misko in a library. If you disturb the man’s slumber, it’s bad fhtagn news. He’s cranky when he first wakes up.”
So that’s how we ended up on a rickety rooftop huffing Cthulhu’s farts. Highly recommended; would huff again.  p. 55

An interesting, if not quite successful, experiment.
The highlight of the issue is the other Hugo nominee, Fandom for Robots by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. This concerns Computron, a robot who has just discovered a Japanese anime show called Hyperdimension Warp Record:

Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constitutionally incapable of experiencing “excitement,” “hatred,” or “frustration.” It is completely impossible for Computron to experience emotions such as “excitement about the seventh episode of HyperWarp,” “hatred of the anime’s short episode length” or “frustration that Friday is so far away.”
Computron checks his internal chronometer, as well as the countdown page on the streaming website. There are twenty-two hours, five minutes, forty-six seconds, and twelve milliseconds until 2am on Friday (Japanese Standard Time). Logically, he is aware that time is most likely passing at a normal rate. The Simak Robotics Museum is not within close proximity of a black hole, and there is close to no possibility that time is being dilated. His constant checking of the chronometer to compare it with the countdown page serves no scientific purpose whatsoever.
After fifty milliseconds, Computron checks the countdown page again.  p. 62

After binge-watching the entire series, Computron discovers the series’ associated fanfic forums and is sucked into that world:

While “fanfiction” is meant to consist of “fan-written stories about characters or settings from an original work of fiction,” Computron observes that much of the HyperWarp fanfiction bears no resemblance to the actual characters or setting. For instance, the series that claims to be a “spin-off focusing on Powerful!Cyro” seems to involve Cyro installing many large-calibre guns onto his frame and joining the Space Marines, which does not seem relevant to his quest for revenge or the retrieval of the hyperdimensional warp unit. Similarly, the “high school fic” in which Cyro and Ellison study at Hyperdimension High fails to acknowledge the fact that formal education is reserved for the elite class in the HyperWarp universe.
Most of the fanfiction set within the actual series seems particularly inaccurate. The most recent offender is EllisonsWife’s “Rosemary for Remembrance,” which fails to acknowledge the fact that Cyro does not have human facial features, and thus cannot “touch his nose against Ellison’s hair, breathing in the scent of sandalwood, rosemary, and something uniquely him” before “kissing Ellison passionately, needily, hungrily, his tongue slipping into Ellison’s mouth.”
Computron readies his styluses and moves the cursor down to the comment box, prepared to leave anonymous “constructive criticism” for EllisonsWife, when he detects a comment with relevant keywords.

bjornruffian:
Okay, I’ve noticed this in several of your fics and I was trying not to be too harsh, but when it got to the kissing scene I couldn’t take it anymore. Cyro can’t touch his nose against anything, because he doesn’t have a nose! Cyro can’t slip his tongue into anyone’s mouth, because he doesn’t have a tongue! Were we even watching the same series?? Did you skip all the parts where Cyro is a metal robot with a cube-shaped head?!

ellisonsWife:
Who are you, the fandom police?? I’m basing Cyro’s design on this piece of fanart (link here) because it looks better than a freakin metal box!! Anyway, I put DON’T LIKE DON’T READ in the author’s notes!!! If you hate the way I write them so much, why don’t you just write your own????

Computron is incapable of feeling hatred for anything, as that would require Doctor Alquist to have installed emotion circuits during his creation. However, due to Computron’s above-average procedural knowledge, he is capable of following the directions to create an account on fanficarchive.org.  p.65-66

The rest of the story is a really funny, deadpan account about Computron’s further online interactions with other fans, attempts at writing fan fiction, and eventual collaboration with a human on a comic book.
Parts of this are excellent but it comes off the boil a little at the end (and it doesn’t have the ‘knock it out of the park’ ending I was hoping for). Still, it is a very good piece overall, and deserves its place in the Hugo Award finals.
At Cooney’s by Delia Sherman is about a woman who travels in time from 1968 (where she has an unrequited love for another woman) to the prohibition era (where she has an encounter with a cross-dressing woman). This story has some good characterisation and scene-setting but no real plot (she slips back in time and then forward again in a fairly arbitrary way).
Ghost Town by Malinda Lo (Defy the Dark, 2013) is a slightly predictable but effective and atmospheric Halloween ghost story about two young women going to check out a haunted house where two women died. It turns out (spoiler) that McKenzie, the young woman who has invited the narrator, has lured her to a cruel hazing:

The moonlight shines through the window, which is hung with lace curtains. The room has a rusted metal bedframe in it, the mattress long gone. A chipped pitcher and basin rest on a bureau that’s missing half its drawers. A rocking chair is pushed into the corner, the woven seat eaten through in the center. McKenzie trains her flashlight on the wall over the bed. A word is scrawled there, red letters dripping down the peeling wallpaper.
DYKE.
A shock jolts through me, hot and cold all at once. I become aware of a dim buzzing in my ears as I stare at the word. The whole effect is, I have to admit, very well done. The drips look just like blood, and it ties in perfectly with the story McKenzie just told me, although I know that the word isn’t about Ida and her maybe-girlfriend Elsie. It’s for me.  p. 97-98

The next part of the story shows the narrator turning the tables on her tormentor, and the rest of the narrative telescopes back in time to show the set up.
This is an effective piece until the last few paragraphs which are slightly disorientating (spoiler: after the scene above the narrator takes the tormentor down to the basement where the ghost of one of the women who died in the house delivers an effective scare. However, the last paragraphs show two ghosts in the house, one of who appears hostile to the narrator. This last part somewhat muddies the water.)
One other point: this is the second story in a row about a gay person coming out or struggling to come out. Apart from the fact that there are only so many stories about this subject that anyone wants to read (and I’ve read many more of these than I’m interested in¹), why would you put one straight after the other in the magazine?

The Cover by Ashley Mackenzie has a neat idea but is, to me, one of the magazine’s blander offerings.
There is the ususal Poetry. I appreciated the sentiment of Too Much Dystopia? by Jo Walton, but as a poem I found it a little wooden. I didn’t care for the O’Brien or Trotta poems (I didn’t understand the former), but thought the Garfinkle okay.
The Uncanny Valley, the editorial by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, starts with a section about the editors’ family’s imminent house move. This is then followed by a page and a half of award wins and nominations for the magazine and its contents (you can barely move for awards nowadays, so a page and a half is pretty concise). The last section is a page of waffle about the contents, but just before that there is this:

One more thing.
Fuck Nazis. Fuck racism. Fuck misogyny. Fuck antisemitism. Fuck Islamophobia. Fuck homophobia. Fuck ableism. Fuck all of the fascist white supremacist hate groups and the politicians who represent them, especially the American fascist conman president and his entire corrupt, treasonous regime.  p. 8

I suppose the glib response to this is that, yes, moving house can be stressful. More seriously, I find it profoundly depressing to find this kind of partisan political rant in a SF magazine, especially one expressed in such an intemperate and vulgar manner.
The best of the articles is My Voice-Over Life by Sophie Aldred (perhaps best known in the SF field as the seventh Doctor Who companion, Ace), which is an interesting piece about her career as a voice over artist. It starts with this:

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who loved to read stories to her brother. She liked to put on funny voices for all the different characters and found that she was rather good at mimicking accents and odd vocal characteristics. Sometimes her brother would beg her to stop reading as he had had enough; sometimes she listened. The little girl also liked listening to the radio programmes that her Mummy had on in the kitchen while she was making supper for Daddy who came in hungry and tired from the office (it was the 1960’s after all). Although she didn’t understand any of the so-called jokes, she loved a man called Kenneth Williams, whose strangulated vocal gymnastics she tried to imitate, and another one called Derek Nimmo, who you could tell was rather vague and very posh just by the tone of his voice.
There were also some precious LPs for the record player. Johnny Morris read Thomas the Tank Engine stories and made up different distinctive voices for all the engines that sounded somehow just as she’d imagined they’d speak. She and her brother practically wore out a series of brightly coloured Magic Roundabout 45’s, learning every word to replicate the stories as Florence, Brian the snail, and Dougal the dog, for the delight of Auntie Flo (who smoked 60 a day, had fascinating nicotine stained fingers and a raspy laugh) and Uncle Nigel (who wore a three-piece suit and a gold watch on a chain) when they came for Christmas sherry.  p. 112

This shows that, as well as acting, singing, and directing, she can write as well.
The rest of the articles made my eyes glaze over to a greater or lesser extent. Let Me Tell You by Cecilia Tan starts with “show don’t tell” and works its way to imperialism in fiction (I think—with most of these I started skimming); I’m Not the Only One: Why Wonder Woman Doesn’t Need to Stand Alone in Order to Stand Tall by Sarah Kuhn starts with the subject of the title and segues into her Asian American identity. Resistance 101: Basics of Community Organizing for SF/F Creators and Consumers— Volume Four: “Don’t Let Him Catch You With Your Work Undone”—Activism for the Long Haul by Sam J. Miller and Jean Rice has a ridiculously long title which has little to do with the contents (mostly Miller’s interview with another activist, which is little more than a list of political platitudes).
Changeable Skins, Consummate Catchphrases by Sabrina Vourvoulias does not start promisingly:

I usually find outrage columns super easy to write, and as an older woman who didn’t start writing in speculative fiction until 50, I have a deep well of indignities to draw upon.  p. 137

You cannot conceive of the magnitude of the sigh I emitted on reading that.
That said, it turns out to be a piece about ageism that isn’t as bad as those opening lines would suggest, and it was one I could mostly follow, although I’ll have to admit that some of the cultural references (the Overwatch RPG) and the language (“Quiltbag”) lost me (apparently it’s an LGBT+ “co-ordinate term”).
One of the potential problems of us living in our own little echo chambers these days is the development of a specialised vocabulary that outsiders won’t understand, and probably won’t bother to look up.
Interview: C. S. E. Cooney by Julia Rios is a bit off the walls at the start (it’s essentially two friends gibbering at each other) but they eventually calm down and the piece has some useful information about the writer’s other work that encouraged me to seek it out.
Interview: Delia Sherman by Julia Rios goes over the coming out stuff that is in Sherman’s story again.

There is some good fiction in this issue but, as before, the political stuff is a massive turn off (almost to the point of making me avoid further issues—or at least until the temper tantrums are over).  ●

_____________________

1. This comment applies to all solipsistic stories. Everyone has their struggles in this life: I don’t particularly want to read about yours as I am, ironically, more interested in my own.  ●

Uncanny is available from Google Play, Amazon UK/US, and Weightless Books.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews
Anne Crookshanks, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editors, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas;  Managing Editor, Michi Trota

Fiction:
With Cardamom I’ll Bind Their Lips • short story by Beth Cato ∗∗∗
Rising Star • short story by Stephen Graham Jones ∗∗
Auspicium Melioris Aevi • short story by JY Yang ∗∗
And Then There Were (N – One) • novella by Sarah Pinsker ∗∗∗+
An Abundance of Fish • short story by S. Qiouyi Lu
The Red Secretary • reprint novelette by Kameron Hurley ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Julie Dillon
Poetry • by Cassandra Khaw, Brandon O’Brien, Bogi Takács, Lisa M. Bradley
The Uncanny Valley• editorial by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas
Resistance 101: Basics of Community Organizing for SF/F Creators & Consumers, Volume One: Protest Tips and Tricks • essay by Sam J. Miller
Act Up, Rise Up • essay by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
#beautifulresistance • essay by Shveta Thakrar
A Work of Art Is a Refuge and Resistance • essay by Dawn Xiana Moon
Fandom in the Classroom • essay by Paul Booth
Interview: Stephen Graham Jones • by Julia Rios
Interview: Sarah Pinsker • by Julia Rios

_____________________

With the 2018 Hugo Awards voting deadline rushing towards us I thought I had better get on with reading the other finalists.¹ As this magazine has an impressive six stories on the award ballot this year I figured that reading the appropriate issues would be a good place to start catching up and, in any event, I’ve been thinking about having a look at this publication for  while.
This magazine’s stories and articles are, like most of the other online oriented publications, available for free on the magazine website. Nevertheless, I bought a PDF copy of the magazine on Google Play,² both for reviewing ergonomics (note taking, quoting, etc.) and because these magazines need the money to pay their bills.

The fiction leads off with With Cardamom I’ll Bind Their Lips by Beth Cato. This story starts with a girl called Vera helping Lady Magdalena seal the lips of her dead uncle, who has come back as a ghost from the war:

I dipped my pointer and middle fingers into the butter mixture and reached to the face of the apparition before me. My uncle. He looked much as he did in life, though strangely gaunt from a winter in the trenches. He swayed in place, his body transparent, his eyes blank white.
“Saints, please let the bombs miss us, please. Oh no, that one fell close.” He unceasingly repeated his last words from life, as all ghosts do. His voice still trembled with terror. I wanted to sink to the floor and sob, but even more, I wanted to silence him. Mama and I had lived with Uncle Ivan’s mantra and his stumbling presence for days, and it had nearly driven us mad.
“Ivan,” I whispered. Names had power; love had power, too. I pushed months of worry and love and mourning into the word. My fingers met his lips, and encountered bitter cold like I’d touched an icicle. I smeared the butter across his lips as if to prevent them from chapping. His swaying slowed.
I felt the magic then. The tie. His soul was tethered to mine by blessed spice and a solitary word.
“Now guide him aside,” said Magdalena.
Upholding my cardamom-freckled fingers, I led Ivan’s ghost the way I might tease a carthorse with a carrot. I positioned him in the corner of the room where we would not pass through him and be shocked anew by cold and grief. I willed him to remain standing there, quiet. He stayed motionless. Breathless.  p. 13-14

After she performs this ritual satisfactorily, Vera is apprenticed to Lady Magdalena. The rest of the story details her work with Magdalena, and her discovery that the latter’s husband apparently deserted from the army. However, Vera later learns (from talking to the local animals) that this was not the case, and that he was actually killed and eaten by dogs in the town. Vera goes to find his ghost, thinking that she can do her employer a good turn by getting her a war pension. Matters do not turn out as expected as (spoiler) Magdalena was the one who killed him.
This comes off the boil a little at the end but it is a pretty good fantasy until then. I hope this is the first of a series of stories.
Rising Star by Stephen Graham Jones takes the form of an academic proposal, and rather reads rather like an Analog piece. The suggestion is to use a time travel device to send humans back in time, where they would place caches of human bones where palaeontologists could find them today.
Auspicium Melioris Aevi by JY Yang (the title means “omen of a better age”) posits a future business ‘Academy’ that clones various political and business leaders and sells the copies to various companies as advisors:

The hall resonated with the sounds of young people in exertion. Copies sparred, played ball, or swam laps in a gently-warmed pool. These were faces familiar to anyone who had lived through the early twenty-first
century: Leaders and thinkers, a catalogue of genetic excellence carefully curated and propagated by the Administrator himself. Pod-grown like heirloom tomatoes, they were made-to-order for clients, spending years in algorithmically-tailored training programs. Each one came with the Administrator’s mark of quality assurance.
If there was proof of the consistency of their training and genetic integrity, it lay in the patterns which emerged in their interactions. The Suu Kyis and the Hillaries seemed to get along well, for example, but the Modis and Merkels never did. And sometimes there were surprises, like the frequent friendships between the Gateses and the Ahmadis. Harry had an interest in judo, and Volodya was rather good at it. They met three times a week to practice.  p. 36-37

The ‘Harry’ is the passage above is Harry Lee Kuan Yew,³ or rather his fiftieth copy, and he is failing the simulated situation tests he undertakes as part of his training: rather than doing what is expected he has started doing what he thinks is right:

Consider: This copy of Harry Lee had something the original did not—foresight. He knew what awaited the other men at the end of their journey.
He knew about the dirty sand soaked in blood, he knew about the shallow unmarked graves, he knew about the generation lost to war, cut out of the fabric of history.
If the original Harry Lee Kuan Yew had known all this, he would definitely have done something. The fiftieth new Harry Lee understood this with a certainty that filled his gut and filled his blood. And his blood was the same blood that had run in the veins of the original. He knew he was right.
He turned towards the doomed men on the lorries. “They’re going to kill you! It’s a trap.”
The men stared in confusion. Shouting facts at them was pointless. What they needed were instructions. A clear path of action.
“Run,” Harry Lee said. “Run.”
Something grabbed Harry by the shoulder. He saw the soldier’s face and the fish-glint of a blade. Then there was searing pain. He was on the ground, lying in mud-caked filth, and when he looked down he saw rivers running red, the gleaming pink of intestines, his pants drenched and stained. His mouth filled with blood and bile, sour and coppery, and he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t get up. He couldn’t move his arms and legs. The sun was burning his eyes out—
Click.  p. 34

He eventually confronts the Administrator of the Academy.
This is a readable and engaging piece for the most part but there are too many implications that are not addressed: for instance, the copies are essentially slaves who are culled if they do not measure up. What kind of world would allow that? The lack of detail on this and other background questions means it doesn’t really convince. It is also too open-ended.
And Then There Were (N – One) by Sarah Pinsker is, according to the Editorial, the first novella the magazine has published.
The story takes place at a convention of Sarah Pinskers who come from hundreds of parallel worlds, and the Sarah who narrates isn’t the Quantologist who discovered the science that enables this, or the Nebula Award Winning SF writer, but an insurance investigator from another timeline. After some initial convention and hotel setting she is asked to put her skills to work when one of the other Sarahs is found dead in the nightclub area on the top floor of the hotel. The rear of her head has been bashed in (Sarah thinks this was done using a Nebula Award from the display table!). There is a storm raging outside so the authorities cannot get to the island where the hotel is to investigate. She is own her own.
Her initial approach is to begin interviewing the Sarahs who were last seen with the victim before moving on to the convention organising committee. At the end of the story she deduces who the murderer is and confronts her, and discovers the motive for the killing (spoiler: in the killer’s world—as well as that of several other Sarahs—Seattle was destroyed, and a group of her friends killed. In the murdered Sarah’s world they are alive, but that Sarah didn’t keep in touch with them, and was otherwise squandering her life). To be honest, the murder mystery is the weakest part of the story—the solution doesn’t unfold but is presented (I certainly didn’t spot any clues on the way through).
The weak mystery plot won’t spoil it for most readers though as the meat of the story is really the idea of the road not taken, a concept present in other ‘many worlds’ stories but perhaps intensified here given the multiple versions of Sarah present at the convention. This alternative lives idea is particularly emphasised in a long passage that details an incident from Pinsker’s teenage years, and the more positive outcome that occurred in one of the other worlds (as narrated by another Sarah in one of the convention program items):

Part of me wanted more than anything to trade places with this barn manager. To have had sixteen years with a horse I loved, to have made a decision based on gut instead of practicality. I knew that ship had sailed, but I still wanted it. That one change had defined her life. She was happy. I was happy too. I’d left that incident alone as a disappointment but not a defining one, or maybe a defining point but one that had shaped me without tearing me down. The weeping Sarah might argue otherwise. Divergence points. Divergence points were the key to everything.  p. 90

This autobiographical detail (or purported autobiographical detail) is another entertaining aspect of the story. Some of it is quite substantial, as above, some is lighter, amusing stuff:

“So why are you here?” Orange Curls was the chattier of the two [Sarahs].
[. . .]
“I looked back at Orange Curls. “Curiosity. I guess I’m here because I’m curious. And maybe a little because if I stayed home I’d always wonder about it.”
The smokers shot each other a satisfied look.
“She’s asked twenty-one Sarahs that question now,” No Good Deeds said, “and that’s been the answer every time. Even the same phrasing.”  p. 56
.
Tonight featured a keynote speech by the host, followed by a DJ’ed dance. Normally that wouldn’t be my thing, but the thought of a dance with a self-curated song list—I pictured upbeat soul, Bowie, 80s pop—and an entire room full of enthusiastic but uniformly terrible dancers, excited me more than I’d admit. There’d be nobody to watch who wouldn’t understand. Maybe I wouldn’t even be the worst dancer in the room. A girl could dream.  p. 57

It’s fun trying to guess what is real and what isn’t.
All in all, this is an interesting and enjoyable piece, but it is more uneven and less polished than her other Hugo finalist Wind Will Rove.
An Abundance of Fish by S. Qiouyi Lu is the only one of the stories that didn’t work for me at all. It is a short squib that starts with a couple in their apartment before it segues to a scene where a plague of flying fish wreck devastation on the country. During this, (spoiler) one of the couple dies. More prose poem than short story.
The Red Secretary by Kameron Hurley (Paetron, 2016) takes place in a far-future war, and involves a military negotiator called Arkadi arriving at a situation where rogue soldiers have taken an installation called the Red Secretary hostage:

From this distance all that was visible of the Red Secretary were three twining spires jutting into the crimson sky, so high that the tops were not visible. Arkadi’s research on the facility told her those spires were high enough to touch the outer atmosphere. They were pretty things, though the prettiness was a secondary characteristic. The spires had a far deadlier purpose. That was likely why the soldiers had taken the thing. Arkadi flipped through her notebook again to review her notes. By all counts no one had been in contact with the rogue squad yet, or received a list of demands, though all frequencies were being monitored.
Now that the war with the enemy was over, not every soldier embraced their contracted end. Some ran away and tried to blend in and forget their crimes of violence and pray to the gods that history would forget them. The government sent Justicars after those ones. But for the more dangerous ones, the soldiers trying to make a statement by blowing up someone or something in protest of the fate they signed up for when they enlisted, the government called in Arkadi to negotiate.
This was her sixty-first negotiation with rogue soldiers.  p. 101-102

When she arrives at the forward base she is briefed on the situation: there is concern that the soldiers will destroy the facility and the vast quantity of methane underneath it, and that this will imperil the entire province. Arkadi then goes to the Red Secretary with a six-legged dog to talk to the soldiers (she hopes that, while the soldiers may shoot her on sight, they will hold fire if they see the dog, and this calculation proves correct). Once at the door to the facility she begins a conversation with a soldier.
Throughout the story there are intriguing background details: the story is set at the end of a cyclical three hundred year war; the soldiers employed in that war use strange enemy tech; after the fighting ends those who have killed must walk into the Incinerators.
This is a dark but readable piece, and I’ll be interested to see the other stories in this series.⁴

The Cover for this issue is by Julie Dillon: this one is more muted than the brighter dayglow ones the magazine often uses. The cleanly designed “Uncanny” title echoes the comet-tail titling of the 30s and 40s pulps; I don’t like the excessive lettering at the bottom of the cover (they seem to have gone down the Galaxy’s Edge route by shotgunning all the contributors—and in this case, editors—onto the page).
There are four poems in the magazine and, although I didn’t particularly like any of them, I thought time, and time again by Brandon O’Brien and The Axolotl Inquest by Lisa M. Bradley were okay. The Size of a Barleycorn, Encased in Lead by Bogi Takács seems to be a mashup of Jewish history and nuclear weapon management (I think). Protestations Against the Idea of Anglicization by Cassandra Khaw has a lot of swearing and attitude, and reads like something written by an angry sixth-former for an A-level assessment.
I’d add that, on the whole, they all strike me as being closer to what my idea of poetry is than those which appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction (and which I generally dislike).
The editorial that leads off the magazine, The Uncanny Valley by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, starts with a game of “The Exquisite Corpse” from Twitter:

Because Michael was procrastinating about writing this issue’s editorial, he decided to ask Twitter to do it. This section is The Uncanny magazine Exquisite Corpse Editorial. The Exquisite Corpse was an old Surrealist game where you build off of what the previous person created, but you never see the whole. In this case, each writer only read the previous sentence before writing their sentence. Then their sentence and only their sentence was passed to the next person, and so on. On that note, enjoy this editorial by nearly 40 writers!  p. 5

Although the first couple of hundred words isn’t bad it turns into four pages of gibberish, and strikes me as a remarkably lazy and self-indulgent way to open the magazine. If you have nothing to say, say nothing. This section is not helped by what is either (a) poor proof reading after cutting and pasting from Twitter, or (b) deficient typography: there is no or little space after some of the commas and fullstops (a problem present elsewhere in the issue).⁵
What is even more self-indulgent is the political rant that follows:

What matters most of all about the Exquisite Corpse is that it was created by almost 40 writers. I made the joke on Twitter, and people quickly lined up to play. I had to actually cap the participants! You see, the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps is a Community. A glorious community of tens of thousands of people from a tremendous number of backgrounds—people who love fun, art, beauty, and kindness. They are Space Unicorns who appreciate each other, and will fight the fascists together with everything they’ve got.
I’m writing this during the first month of the current regime. The assholes have created a swirling mess of malice and incompetence. Every day, there are dozens of stories that make anybody with basic human empathy upset and angry. It’s easy to despair. It’s easy to be overwhelmed. But we’re here for each other. Collectively, we can fight this.
In early February, I made an open call for essay pitches about how we can fight the current darkness. We received a gigantic number of ideas from so many amazing people, and you’ll be seeing the first batch of political essays in this issue. These essays are filled with passion, strategy, and bold resistance. As we said last issue:
THESE UNICORNS FIGHT FASCISTS.  p. 8-9

The “Space Unicorn Ranger Corps” stuff above (it appears elsewhere as well) struck me as twee, and the “Fascists” is—and I say this as a disinterested foreign observer—just ridiculous (never mind minimizing the experiences of those who have suffered under genuinely fascist regimes).⁶
It gets worse: there are no less than four political essays at the end of the issue, with catchy titles like Resistance 101: Basics of Community Organizing for SF/F Creators & Consumers, Volume One: Protest Tips and Tricks by Sam J. Miller, Act Up, Rise Up by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, #beautifulresistance by Shveta Thakrar, A Work of Art Is a Refuge and Resistance by Dawn Xiana Moon. This ranges from the banal (“Charge your devices before leaving [for marches or demos]. Bring an external battery if possible”) to the emotionally incontinent (“I watch, and my heart hurts”). I can’t recall this level of political belly-aching in any other SF magazine that I’ve ever read.⁷
This all seems curiously self-defeating too: those who agree will want to moan themselves, not listen to others do so; those who do not share this view or are apolitical will be either irritated and/or bored, and will perhaps stop reading the magazine. This is not a problem, I suppose, if you are giving it away anyway, and you have the added bonus that you don’t have to put up with the messiness of actually trying to communicate with those who do not agree with you.
There is a final essay that is worth reading, Fandom in the Classroom by Paul Booth. It starts with this:

When I tell people that I’m a professor who teaches classes on fandom, I’m usually met by one of two reactions. One reaction is disbelief, as if I had just told them I teach classes on juggling, origami, or beer pong. This stems from the perception that the academic classroom is a hallowed space where deep discussions lead to meaningful discoveries (and popular culture, the thinking goes, just doesn’t get us there)—think Mr. Chips, not Mr. Miyagi; epic poetry, not fanfic; Twain, not Twilight. The other reaction is jealousy, usually accompanied by a plaintive sigh and “I wish they had courses like that when I was in college!” For these green-eyed friends, studying fans and fandom is meaningful because popular culture reveals the intricacies of contemporary life and the influence of the media on our cultural (and individual) consciousness. (There is a rare third reaction to my fan studies classroom, as most mechanics ask, “V-belts or serpentine?”)  p. 148

This too is political to an extent but, unlike the others, isn’t a moanfest. It is dispassionate, shows a sense of humour and, crucially, it has something of interest to say.
There are two short interviews. The first is Interview: Stephen Graham Jones by Julia Rios. The author is described as Blackfeet Native American (identity politics is the magazine’s other big thing, played out in the author notes with increasingly reductive minority labelling). I smiled at the author pushback to this (reasonable enough, it must be said) question:

Uncanny Magazine: You’ve said before that you don’t want to be pigeonholed “as an Indian writer,” which is understandable, and which seems to be something you’ve successfully avoided so far. While it’s definitely true that people should be able to write about more than just one facet of their lived experiences, there are also a lot of good arguments for the importance of stories about marginalized people told in their own voices. What are your feelings on that, and how do they manifest in your work?
.
Stephen Graham Jones: I just figure I am Blackfeet, so every story I tell’s going to be Blackfeet. Also, there’s not just one “Blackfeet” story, of course. There’s not a single American Indian narrative. And every single one’s valid. Also, I’m from West Texas, so every story I tell, it’s a West Texas story. You can’t really escape where you come from, and you always inhabit the political space you inhabit. Just, what you have to figure out, it’s what you want to sell, what you don’t want to sell.  p. 171-172

The second is Interview: Sarah Pinsker, again by Julia Rios. This is mostly about her story and it touches on its personal elements:

Sarah Pinsker: There is a bunch of autobiographical information in here, mixed in with stuff that is not true, stuff that I wish was true, and stuff that I most definitely don’t wish was true. I don’t know if it matters which parts are which, other than the stipulation that I have no homicidal intent and I wish Seattle the best of all possible futures.  p. 176

In conclusion: it is notable that nearly all the stories in this magazine have a recognisable plot, or narrative or other arc (something that a number of publications should perhaps emulate) and, if the generally good standard of fiction here is typical, I look forward to reading future issues. ●

_____________________

1. I registered to vote for the Hugo Awards this year as I think some of the selections in recent years have been, ah, ‘interesting’ choices to say the least. I doubt my solitary vote will swing anything but that isn’t really the point, is it?

2. The PDF runs to 181 pages (they are all marked “Digitized by Google”, and before the cover image there is an annoying page of blah from them):

This issue has approx. 43,000 words of fiction (8,200 reprint).
The Google Play ebooks edition is the cheapest, £2.25, compared with Amazon (£2.25-£3.20) and Weightless Books ($3.99, around three quid at the current exchange rates).

3. Lee Kuan Yew is a former prime minister of Singapore. His Wikipedia page is here.

4. According to the ISFDB page for Kameron Hurley’s The Red Secretary, there is at least one other story in this series, The Judgement of Gods and Monsters. ISFDB says in was first published via Patreon.com in July 2016, but it was published earlier than that in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #200, 26^th May 2016. The story has a 2015 copyright notice on the BCS site, so perhaps the ISFDB note has the wrong year.

5. This is what p. 6 looks like (the highlighted commas and fullstops seem to have no space at all between them and the next word, and some of the others are far too close to the following words as well—I suspect the type tracking hasn’t been set up correctly: look at how everything is jammed close together on the fifth line):

6. The Wikpeida page definition of fascism: “Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce.”

7. There has been political comment in SF magazines before though: Campbell wrote a number of editorials about US political events in Analog  in the early 60s (and maybe earlier too); Ted White gave a running commentary on Nixon and Watergate in the editorials and the letter columns of Amazing (and possibly Fantastic, I forget). ●

Uncanny is available from Google Play, Amazon UK/US, and Weightless Books.