Imagine 2200 Short Story Winners locusmag.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from locusmag.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sam J. Miller‘s “
Tyrannosaurus Hex” posits a future in which alternative realities can be all too real. The story is particularly chilling (and resonates as true) with children as the “early adaptors.” “
A House Full of Voices Is Never Empty” by
Miyuki Jane Pinckard also deals with reality of a sort. Two sisters flee the chaos of Vietnam as the US withdraws. The elder is consoled by familiar objects that speak to her; the younger does not have that comfort but is also “free to imagine a new life.” As time passes, Pinckard offers a beautiful perspective on the solace and burden of memories. The children in
Magazines Received, February 2021 locusmag.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from locusmag.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
I’ll start with a story from the November-December
Asimov’s that doesn’t really qualify as SF or fantasy, but that will appeal to many of our readers. This is
Connie Willis‘s latest Christmas story, “
Take a Look at the Five and Ten“. Ori is telling about her Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with her ex-stepfather, who has a habit of inviting almost everyone in his widely extended family (extended particularly by his half-dozen or so marriages). The latest Thanksgiving dinner is hosted by Dave’s latest wife, Jillian, who has a stuck-up blond daughter, Sloane, about Ori’s age. Sloane brings her latest boyfriend to the dinner, and among the other guests are cranky Aunt Mildred and boring Grandma Elving. Why is Grandma Elving boring? Because she has just one story to tell, and tells it again and again, about her time working at Woolworths in Denver one Christmas decades in the past, in interminable detail. This time Grandma Elving is telling her story again and, o
Paula Guran started her
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series in 2010 with Prime Books. After working as a senior editor for Prime for seven years, Guran parted ways with the company and published the final installment in that series in 2019. Guran returns in 2020 with no time to spare, restarting the series at volume one with new publisher Pyr – a company which, coincidentally, had also seen some major changes: they were sold by Prometheus Books in 2018 and picked up by Start Media. Despite being slightly trimmer than previous volumes,
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume One stays true to form, presenting an excellent assortment of work, drawing from best-selling and award-winning authors established outside of dark fantasy and horror, such as Pat Cadigan, Maria Dahvana Headley, Ellen Klages, Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado, Joyce Carol Oates, Sarah Pinsker, and Fran Wilde; as well as authors who will excite the horror and dark fantasy fans, such as Mariss