The December issue of Clarkesworld marks the 75th monthly issue, which is quite an achievement, as I remember from Emerald City days. It will be another couple of years before Neil reaches the magical century mark, but given his reliability to date I’m sure he’ll get there.
This issue seems to be full of people I want to read. The lead story is “Your Final Apocalypse” by Sandra McDonald, which is temptation enough. And the first chapter contains the sentence, “There is no gender in this corner of the future.” Oh ho… As usual, the story is available in audio, read by Kate Baker.
The other two stories are by Australian women writers. Thoraiya Dyer, who contributes “The Wisdom of Ants”, will be well known to listeners to Galactic Suburbia. Given that, in Australia, anything with too many legs or not enough legs is trying to kill you, I’m a bit nervous about this one. Finally we have “Sweet Subtleties” by Lisa L.Hannett, who is actually Canadian by birth but lives in Adelaide. Her latest collection, Bluegrass Symphony, won an Aurealis award, and how can you resist a writer with a PhD in medieval Icelandic literature? As usual, the these two stories will appear in audio in due course.
The non-fiction column sees SJ Chambers (of Steampunk Bible fame) writing about Victorian SF (and in particular mummies). This issue’s interview is with the brilliant artist, Todd Lockwood. And Daniel Abraham deftly puts the boot into a mainstream literary critic. Neil’s editorial is thankfully all good news.
This month’s cover art is “The Lost City” by David Demaret.
And if you want to support Clarkesworld, one option is to buy copies from my bookstore.
In addition I have two issues of Lightspeed new in the store. Issue #30 managed to go AWOL in the chaos that was World Fantasy, but we have it in stock now. It also has original fiction by Sanda McDonald, and from my friend Tom Crosshill. There’s a reprint story by Tobias Buckell that was the cause of a massive comment meltdown a couple of days ago. The new issue, #31, includes a new story by Ken liu, which should make it a must read. As always, the ebook editions of Lightspeed contain bonus material that is not available online, so click those bookstore links.
For the second post in under a week please put them under a LJ cut as you are stretching my friend’s page beyond legibility.
As I said last time, I can’t do that without having to post manually to LJ, which I’m not prepared to do.
Like she said, she’s not hand-posting those things to LJ; it’s an automated cross-post, just like Dreamwidth, etc., and LJ doesn’t recognize other systems’ formatting the way you might like it.
FWIW, lots of the posts on my friends pages (not just crossposts) stretch the screen too widely. It would be nice if LJ was more sensible about this, but it’s certainly not Cheryl’s fault.