Welcome to issue fifty-seven of Fantasy! Here’s what we’ve got on tap this month … Fiction: “Her Lover’s Golden Hair ” by Nike Sulway, “Torn Away” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage” by Seanan Maguire, “Vici” by Naomi Novik. Nonfiction: “Feature Interview: Chris Miller” by Andrew Penn Romine, “The Deathly Shadows in Our Lives” by Veronica Schanoes, “Falling With Style” by Alasdair Stuart, “”Three Dragons” by Genevieve Valentine.
The natural connection between pen and sword is solidified by the language of fencing, wherein the fencer’s repertoire of movements is called a conversation of blades, or a judge will “read the phrase” of the action before awarding a touch.
It’s the book we all loved in high school (or college), the one we weren’t sure we should admit to our friends we loved—until we found out they loved it, too. It’s the one with the trashy cover that turns out to be amazingly great.
Curious, he had asked the wounded man, “Did you slam into me on purpose?” People did sometimes, to provoke a fight with Richard St. Vier, the master swordsman who wouldn’t take challenges from just anyone.
The Weird West goes back to the earliest days of the Western: to the dime novels and serial stories in weekly gazettes that turned the American west into a mythic land even before it stopped being a place you could move to
In a way, of course, I’m appropriating everything. I’m borrowing this very American mode—the Western—and Niven’s magic system, and I’m setting it in a sort of Victorian-era China dealing with foreign incursions.
The boy felt a tingling at the tip of his fingers. He saw with his inner eye: The leader rode unarmed because his power was great. The aura of Qi around him was unmistakable.
Alasdair Stuart was born on a small rock in the middle of the Irish Sea and knows one day he must return there so they can sacrifice him and choose a new king. He’s the host Pseudopod, the weekly horror podcast, has written for everything from the Fortean Times to The Guardian and enjoys pop [...]
Veronica Schanoes is an assistant professor in the department of English at Queens College-CUNY, where she is at work on a book about fairy tales and feminist theory. Her fiction has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 21 edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Strange Horizons. She has published scholarship on [...]
Naomi Novik was born in New York in 1973, a first-generation American, and raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. She studied English Literature at Brown University and did graduate work in Computer Science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows [...]
