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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.
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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.
My initial thought on the series was I wanted to write about a woman dating a vampire. But to make them less frightening, to give them a reason for being out, I had to develop a theory that would let them look less vicious.
I don’t believe that pain is something extrinsic to goodness. I believe there can be goodness in suffering, but that this does not mean suffering itself is good.
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This issue's cover art by
Pugun & Photo Studio / Adobe Stock Image.
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