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We knew that we were going to have the fairy tale world as a backdrop in Puss in Boots, we wanted to make sure we didn’t end up just parodying them. We wanted to take the original stories and put a new spin on them.
You can’t hope to get a whole person on the page—other people are always the biggest mystery, the great unknowable in life—but you can sometimes get down in words that thing that makes them strange and alluring.
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.
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.
We’d like to ask our readers to participate in our reader survey, in order to get a better idea of who you all are, what you enjoy most about our content, and how you tend to access it, along with general demographic information. It should take about 5-10 minutes to complete. You can access the survey here. To thank our readers for taking the time to fill out our survey, one respondent (chosen at random) will win a free one-year subscription to Lightspeed or Fantasy from Weightless Books. The survey ends December 15, 2011. We look forward to hearing from you!
Stories require a common consensus to become popular and to spread: When the stories in question concern the restless dead, the possibility of an angry past haunting us, what, precisely, does that say?
I struggled at first, because I couldn’t find the right voice to write it in. But then I thought of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, that sort of nostalgic tone, and I wrote in that sort of voice.
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