ISFDB link

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

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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

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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).  ●

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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.  ●

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