The Armature of Flight by Sharon Mock (podcast)
Sharon Mock
This month’s audio fiction is The Armature of Flight written by Sharon Mock and read by Mark Bukovec
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The Armature of Flight
Sharon Mock
Monday, February 8, 2010
They shared an apartment where William knew the landlord, where nobody asked questions. Leo learned to ignore the strange bumps and creases of his neighbors' clothes. He was safe among the modified; their crimes, their sins, were so much greater than his own. And in that safety he could forget, as l [...]
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The Winners of the Best Fantasy Story of 2009 Poll and Contest
The Staff
Monday, February 1, 2010
Congratulations to Jessica J Lee, our winner of the Best Fantasy Story of 2009 Poll and Contest, and well done to Camille Alexa, Aidan Doyle, Cate Gardner, and Aliette de Bodard for their talented, to [...]
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Stranger
Patricia Russo
Since the season of the stinging rains struck only every three or four years, plans to enlarge and improve the below-ground nests always wriggled to the back of people’s minds as soon as the sun returned and the stink of burning faded from the air.
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After the Dragon
Sarah Monette
Monday, January 25, 2010
Sightseers come to Dragon's Beach, but they don't stay long. The rough glass of the beach is too dangerous to walk on, the earth crumbles horribly beneath your feet, and besides, there isn't anything to see. Just a weird rock formation and some holes in the ground.
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my mother, the ghost
Willow Fagan
Monday, January 18, 2010
I was eleven years old when I realized that my mother was a ghost. I can remember the exact moment of this realization, but I wish I could better explain how it came about. It was like I had all these broken pieces of the truth, like shards of a white bowl, and in one moment, the pieces flew togethe [...]
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latest nonfiction
Worldforge #3: A Faceted Jewel
Logan Masterson
As creators of worlds for fiction and gaming, we must see the big picture. It is our duty to paint the landscapes of our settings with enough detail to engage and fascinate. We may find ourselves responsible for entire cultures and continents. Truly epic works may find us bearing the weight of galaxy-spanning civilizations.
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Goodbye to Kage Baker
Cat Rambo
Fantasy and science fiction writer Kage Baker died of uterine cancer on January 31, 2010. Her final message to her readers appears on her website: “I want you to tell all these people that I wanted more time to spend with them. Tell them I meant to, tell them I wanted to hear what they said and tell them what was on my mind.”
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The Line Starts Here
William T. Vandemark
It looks to be a banner year for fantasy and science fiction films, at least in terms of quantity, if not quality. In the first month of 2010 we’ve seen the release of Daybreaker vampires, a post apocalyptic Book of Eli, and a Legion of killer angels, not counting The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnasus, the latest Terry Gillium film to tank at the box office.
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Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 2008 Download, edited by Rich Horton
Paula Guran
Editor Horton packages fourteen stories originally published online during 2008 into an anthology that confirms the obvious: good short sf/f can be found on the Web. It is, perhaps, more bounteous than in the days when OMNI magazine went online in late 1996 (”Get a Grip” by Paul Park, published by OMNI in March 1997, became the first fiction originally published on the Internet to be nominated for a World Fantasy Award), but the amount of less-than-good fiction is even more abundant. Unplugged serves two purposes: to point out examples of outstanding fiction and to direct the reader to the online sources that publish it.
It also provides proof of the variety of speculative fiction available. Most importantly Unplugged does what any good “best of” anthology does:
showcase highly readable, enjoyable fiction.
The Winners of the Best Fantasy Story of 2009 Poll and Contest
The Staff
Congratulations to Jessica J Lee, our winner of the Best Fantasy Story of 2009 Poll and Contest, and well done to Camille Alexa, Aidan Doyle, Cate Gardner, and Aliette de Bodard for their talented, top four stories!
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Steampunk Links for January 29, 2010
The Editors
This week’s links includes steampunked cell phones, Abraham Lincoln, Neosteam, pictures of squids, French steampunk, H.G. Wells on Fritz Lang, raptor masks, and a steampunk superhero.
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The Dragon is a Dragon: Sarah Monette
T.J. McIntyre
The other side of the story–Megan’s recovery from the dragon–comes from something I’ve realized recently is a theme in my work (and dude, you have no idea how weird it is to be saying that: “one of the principal thematic elements in Monette’s work is …”), namely what happens to heroes after they save the world.
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Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
Rich Horton
Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan is a thoroughly delightful Young Adult novel, the first in a series based on an alternate history World War I. In this history Charles Darwin discovered the genetic basis for evolution, and how to manipulate it. As a result the United Kingdom and its allies have a society based on biotechnology, an example of which is the airship Leviathan, a huge beast (or colony of organisms) based on whale DNA and much more. By contrast the Germans, Austrians, and their allies, called Clankers, use steampunk-flavored machinery: airplanes and zeppelins, but also great walking land war machines.
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