>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Acapella Zoo is a web and print ‘zine of slipstream/magic realist fiction based in the US – its editor is based in Seattle but its staff hail from across the States – and has been publishing since 2008. This, its fifth issue, features fifteen stories and poetry by twelve contributors; there is no non-fiction component, which is a shame, but the magazine does not need it. Its issues are not themed and there is no stated editorial intention to contextualise its stories. Instead it focuses on providing quality stories and poetry for fans of strange and cross-genre works, with a healthy mix of male and female contributors who are mostly but not exclusively US residents. I’ll focus chiefly upon the fiction, since as I am not a great reader of poetry I do not feel qualified to do more than passingly comment upon it.

The opening tale is Nancy Gold’s ‘Showtime’. This focuses on three children or young men who work as part of a travelling circus, performing simple morality plays which portray the classic conflict between good and evil. One of the trio wears wings made of collected feathers, playing the role of an angel; another, facially disfigured, plays the opposing part. The equilibrium of their triumvirate is broken when a young woman appears, a strange girl who collects wings but is drawn to the scarred ‘Gash’ rather than the boy who likes to play at being an angel. Ultimately, the strangeness of desire trumps the appeal of earning a buck through crude showmanship. The story touches upon themes of alienation, and highlights how an alliance built upon convenience and lack of alternatives is no match for equality between partners.

After a brief break for Feng Sun Chen’s poem ‘Eclipse’ – which, alas, I am unsure what to make of – there is Hayes Greenwood Moore’s ‘The Creature from the Lake’. At its heart this story is also about desire. A couple find an odd creature, wounded, near a lake, and nurse it back to health. The story is written from a woman’s perspective, and her partner soon becomes besotted with the beast they are caring for. As for the creature itself, it appears capable of singing, although more often it merely cries out in pain, and how much of the former is a misinterpretation of the latter is left to the reader to decide. The story ends with an unmade decision that, intended or not, functions as a metaphor for how easily relationships can be thrown askew by a variety of factors; children, marriage, affairs. Both of these initial stories have a strangeness about them that dissuades simple interpretation, a characteristic shared by many other offerings in this issue.

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Apparently I’ve never written about Interzone here on Nostalgia For Infinity, which honestly surprises me a bit as it’s the magazine I’ve been subscribed to longest (about six years now, since Andy Cox took over as editor). It’s the only SF magazine I read regularly, thanks to a mix of factors: its persistently cool design and artwork makes it something I’m rarely ashamed to be seen reading (unlike, say, fishboobs), its fiction tends to be an alluring mix of strange, characterful, thought-provoking and oddball whether the stories themselves are brilliant and mediocre, and it has some great non-fiction writers (Nick Lowe and David Langford contributing since the early days). There are issues I care less for, but it’s not for lack of effort of the part of IZ’s writers, editors, artists and other contributors.

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So here’s a post I wrote half of last October (Hub is now up to #108). The fact that I didn’t find the time or inclination to finish a short and simple review of a short weekly SF e-zine for three months pretty much sums up the creative death that was Q4 2009 for me. Thanks a fucking bunch, my life last year.

But it wasn’t all bad, particularly if you’re not me, because British SF & fantasy e-zine Hub Magazine published its hundredth issue. If you’re not in the know about the general life expectancy of magazines built around genre fiction it may not be clear what an achievement this is, particularly given that Hub boasts 10,000 subscribers (or, at least, is sent to 10,000 email addresses, which is not quite the same thing) and thanks to sponsorship deals with publishers is both solvent and a paying market for writers.

I’ve written about Hub before (#12-18 here, and #35-38 for The Fix Online) and have generally found it an entertaining if hit and miss read since then. So, as a landmark issue what does #100 exemplify about its run to date and what does it indicate for the future?

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(This is the second in a series of posts retrieved from NFI’s predecessor, the short-lived Neverscapes. The third and final post will be appearing on Friday.)

I’ve found the British Fantasy Society publications I’ve received during my first year of membership to be of a disappointingly low standard. Prism, for example, is less impressive than most fanzines I’ve seen, and is mostly composed of news that’s already aging by the time it hits the doormat. What’s the point of carrying news in a quarterly ‘zine in the age of instant online content delivery? Then there are the reviews of small press publications written by the publishers and authors of other small press publications, also reviewed in the same issue. I suppose the coverage is nice, but it’s all a bit navel-gazing, isn’t it? Still, I’m told the BFS do good conventions, which must go some way to making up for the annual membership fee.

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My review of Lone Star Stories issue 26 has been posted over at The Fix Online. It was a good issue of a webzine I’d not read before, and I was particularly taken with Jeremy Adam Smith’s novella ‘The Wreck of the Grampus‘.

GUD magazine is something of a bold venture in the current environment of declining short fiction sales (if not, I’d imagine, readership) – a dual online/print magazine presenting fiction, poetry and art across a swathe of genres, but with obvious literary aspirations alongside its generic focus. At 200 pages GUD is packing in a lot of content. I had intended to keep my review brisk, but at over 2,000 words I think I’ve failed in that. So it goes. Fortunately, it’s an interesting magazine to write about and hopefully to read about too.

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SFnal news-and-gubbins blogsite Futurismic recently announced that it would be returning to the fiction-publishing game; maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can sure as hell get it to recall the old ones. This being a rather clumsy lead-in to their first new story: Eliot Fintushel‘s Uxo, Bomb Dog.

This is not a review. I’m not going to go into too much depth, or get too critical, partly because I think you should just go read the story for yourself, but also because it’s political and satirical and juggles contentious issues like landmines and warfare and the wholesale slaughter of civilians for ideology and profit. You know, the sort of shit that’s only contentious if something’s not wired quite right in your head… and you see where I’m not letting myself go, right? So instead I’m just going to let myself ramble a little about why I like this story, in the hopes that you go and find out if you like it as well.

Anyway, the story’s set in the USA, at an undefined point in the future, or perhaps a little way up a parallel timeline that branched off somewhere in the C20. The country has been torn asunder by conflict, the horrors of war finally brought home to the USian public. The participants hardly matter. They’re just names, with perhaps hints of the ideology that lies beneath: Xians, Neo-Luddites, Anti-atheists, Lefts, Rights. They’re a tragicomic satirical sketch of the bizarre excesses of the USian political landscape, but they’re not what’s really important. For this Fintushel’s narration introduces some real-world statistics:

“Near the start of the twentieth century, ninety percent of war dead were soldiers. At the end it was ten percent. Now, into the twenty first, Nader bless and save us, they say it’s five.”

What’s important is the people, and it’s the people who are getting hurt.

The tale itself is brilliantly written, with a distinctive voice and a playful approach to its arduous subject matter; here and there little public safety announcement-style slogans crop up, like “USE YOUR PATE – CIRCUMNAVIGATE” – minefields, evidently. Fintushel’s tongue is planted firmly in his cheek throughout, as evidenced by the dominant, um, pseudo-religious movement of his USA being Naderism (complete with rubber noses, street parades and general amnesties). Fintushel’s characters are endearing and lovable; they’re not whole, many missing digits or limbs or worse, but they’re not broken. Not least of these memorable names is the eponymous Uxo, the last Bomb Dog – a Colonel in the United States Military and the recipient of a Purple Heart, no less. And they’re what gives the story its heart, its love of the living over dead machines and bombs. It comes down to a contest, too, with the living breathing Uxo put up against a cold de-mining machine under the moniker Volkovoy.

Anyway, I can only hope that this enthusiastic wittering has encouraged you to click the right hyperlink. Whether it’s because the story sounds appealing, or because you think I’m full of shit and want to point out why, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

A conclusion: if this is the shape of things to come, Futurismic will be… well, it’s already in my RSS reader. Is it in yours?

Back in August ’07 I reviewed some of Hub magazine‘s earlier electronic issues – about a baker’s dozen on from the switch away from its dead tree origins. You can read my thoughts here if you so wish. Thanks to The Fix, I’m now returning to “Europe’s most popular free electronic fiction magazine” to see how things have been going. Except that I didn’t link the two reviews, as The Fix probably has a slightly higher readership than this blog (recently upgraded from “man and dog” to “man with several dogs and possibly a small child who wants to be elsewhere”).

You can read this new review here. You can’t comment there, though, so you might want to do that on the forum. Or perhaps you could post comments here! Behold my exclamation mark of desperation.

My review of Clarkesworld Magazine issue #14 has just gone live over at The Fix. It was a tough one to review as both the stories gave me a lot to grapple with, but hopefully I gave them fair and just treatment. Whether or not you read my review I heartily recommend reading the webzine itself.

Revamped short fiction review venue The Fix has just been relaunched, and already there’s a good dose of spec fic reviewage online. Go have a read, bookmark/RSS the site, blog about it, spread the word, and all that promotional jazz.

While you’re there you should have a read of my review of Shiny #1. After all, I wrote it, and you’re reading this blog, so I presume you have some interest in the more coherent jibberish that springs unbidden from my over-chewed fingertips.