ISFDB link

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

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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. ●

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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.