Issue 1
In this issue:
New Fiction
The first story in our inaugural issue, From Sorrow’s Gate by Ian McHugh, is set in a war-torn alternate world in which a man tries to distance himself from his past. | 6000 words
Mirrorball by Jason Helmandollar is both a love story and a cautionary tale describing the impact of well-intentioned technology on the lives of an elderly couple in the not-so-distant future. | 6100 words
The struggling basketball player in Athlete’s Foot by Bill Ferris claims not to believe in karma, although the events of this urban fantasy story would convince many people otherwise. | 4200 words
In the very distant future envisioned in The Wild Hunt Below the Horizon by David John Baker, human technology will have evolved to the point where planets can be created at whim. Yet some things never change, and human nature is one of them. | 4200 words
In nearly every fantasy story, the use of magic inevitably carries consequences. The adolescent boy in The Anything Cloak by Michael Wehunt learns to be careful what you wish for -- and whom you wish from. | 4100 words
A King of Shreds and Patches by Tom Brennan is an alternate-world story about an age-old conflict in which the lines between science and belief have become blurred. | 3900 words
The science fiction story The Garden by Rich Larson transports a familiar myth into the far-flung future. | 1200 words
For many people, life in the suburbs is pleasant. For others, it can be soul-killing. House Hunting by Shannon Fay is a blackly comic suburban fantasy in which things are not always as they seem. | 5100 words
Sometimes the most intriguing heroes and heroines are those who aren’t entirely noble. The epic fantasy novelette Matron Saint of Murder by Alec Austin follows the path of a dark heroine who rediscovers her identity while confronting her past. | 12600 words
Artist Profile: Matty McMullen
Gallery and Interview
Masterwork: Lucius Shepard
Lucius tells us: I wrote Bound for Glory after teaching the Clarion Workshop in Seattle. I slept hardly at all during that week, being up all hours reading student stories, critiquing them, and writing commentary. From Sunday to Saturday I only slept two or three hours each night. I lived in New York at the time and I’d decided to book a sleeping car and take the train back, a three day trip -- I thought I’d see some of country that way. But I was so wiped out the minute I hit the sleeping car I lost consciousness and basically slept the whole way. I woke up a couple of times at night in deserted train stations in Montana and South Dakota with snow on the platform (it was July) and some weird things that looked like rows of ranked bodies wrapped in something. I was so groggy that everything I saw made a kind of surreal sense. Once I woke and saw what I thought to be a huge valley under blazing stars with lakes and sweeps of forest and some men sitting on horseback by the tracks, watching the train roll past. Those sights may have been 75-80% hallucination, but I couldn’t get them out of my head and, a couple of weeks later, I sat down and wrote Bound For Glory. | 15500 words
