The February 2012 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine.

This issue features fiction by Mari Ness (“And the Hollow Space Inside”), Xia Jia (“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight”) and Helena Bell (“All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions”), interviews with Lev Rosen and Lisa Hannett, an article on food in science fiction and fantasy by Matthew Johnson and the results of our annual reader’s poll.

Icarus

What else is on sale? Check here. You can also re-order the whole site by lowest price.

We also added a few more Lethe Press titles, including Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (with stories by Georgina Bruce, Jewelle Gomez, Michelle Labbé, Steve Berman, Rachel Swirsky, Ellen Kushner, Zen Cho, Csilla Kleinheincz, Catherine Lundoff, Nora Olsen, N. K. Jemisin, & more):

. . . tales—from new voices as well as award-winning authors—that celebrate the spirit of Russ’s fiction: stories of sorceresses and spectral women, lost daughters and sisters of myth. The transformative power of the written word becomes magic and tests the boundaries of gender, identity, and a woman’s dreams.

Tachyon got off to a great start last week with Eileen Gunn’s Stable Strategies and Others being the most popular.

And we added a new Small Beer title: Three Messages and a Warning—34 newly translated Mexican SF&F stories. Irresistible! And it includes two stories translated by none other than Weightless’s own Michael J. DeLuca! We’ll have a couple of the stories on the Small Beer podcast (and two more will be on Podcastle) and yYou can get a taste of the book here:

Claudia Guillén, The Drop
Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Photophobia

This week it will also be all about new issues of magazines. We’ll post them as soon as we get them. Here are the mags already released:

• Something Wicked Issue 18 (February 2012)
• Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #87 Rajan Khanna et al.
• Lightspeed Magazine Issue 21 John Joseph Adams et al.

Heiresses of Russ offers readers in one volume the best lesbian-themed tales of the fantastical and otherworldly published during the prior year.

Editors JoSelle Vanderhooft and Steve Berman read countless books, periodicals, and webzines to collect a range of tales—from new voices as well as award-winning authors—that celebrate the spirit of Russ’s fiction: stories of sorceresses and spectral women, lost daughters and sisters of myth. The transformative power of the written word becomes magic and tests the boundaries of gender, identity, and a woman’s dreams.

Stories by: Georgina Bruce, Jewelle Gomez, Michelle Labbé, Steve Berman, Rachel Swirsky, Ellen Kushner, Zen Cho, Csilla Kleinheincz, Catherine Lundoff, Nora Olsen, N. K. Jemisin, & more.

This huge anthology of more than thirty all-original Mexican science fiction and fantasy features ghost stories, supernatural folktales, alien incursions, and apocalyptic narratives, as well as science-based chronicles of highly unusual mental states in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity. Stereotypes of Mexican identity are explored and transcended by the thoroughly cosmopolitan consciousnesses underlying these works. It is a landmark of contemporary North American fiction that deserves a wide readership.

“South of the Border Speculation” by Robert Ontiveros @ the Austin Chronicle

Video: Alberto Chimal of Mexico City reads his story “Variation on a Theme of Coleridge.”

Book Notes @ largeheartedboy.com by the editors, Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown.

“To read these stories in translation is to experience a quite different way to tell about the fantastic; it is to experience the Mexican way of understanding the function of fantasy in present day literature.”
—Literal: Latin American Voices / La Prensa, San Antonio

“By turns creepy, self-consciously literary, and engagingly inventive, these 34 stories selected by translator-scholar Jiménez Mayo and writer-critic Brown offer some excellent and ghastly surprises. . . . These are punchy, ghoulish selections by south-of-the-border writers unafraid of the dark.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Encompassing a definition of fantasy that includes the extraterrestrial, the supernatural, the macabre, and the spectral, these stories are set in unusual locales and deal with bizarre characters. All are very short (some just two pages), and most offer a surprise twist at the end.”
—Library Journal

“Langorous, edgy, sumptuously beautiful by turns, Three Messages expands our understanding of contemporary Mexican literary production, collapsing high-low boundaries and pre-established ideas about national identity.”
—Debra Castillo, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Spanish Literature, Cornell University

“When one talks to Mexican science fiction writers, the subject of ‘Mexican national content’ commonly comes up. Mexican science fiction writers all know what that is, or they claim to know, anyway. They commonly proclaim that their work needs more national flavor.This book has got that. Plenty. The interesting part is that this ‘Mexican national content’ bears so little resemblance to content that most Americans would consider ‘Mexican.’”
—from the introduction by Bruce Sterling

More about the book.

James, an Asian boy who likes video games and romantic comedies, realizes he’s gay while attending college in Boston. He begins a whirlwind exploration of the gay world, negotiating its many pitfalls, including the first kiss, his first love and the first drugs. At the same time, he has to manage his insecurities and the constant pressure from his tiger mom. After Stan, a charismatic young man, dumps him, James schemes with his calculating MIT brain to get Stan back, but loses himself along the way. Will he get what he’s after?

Timothy Wang has lived in Utah, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai and Beijing, and still hasn’t set down his roots anywhere. He’s ethnically Chinese with an American passport, but he thinks himself a citizen of the world. Slant is his first novel. He’s currently working on his second book

A breakneck tale of kick-ass, wise-ass, sexy-ass lesbians and ZOMBIES, Eat Your Heart Out opens on what promises to be another tediously annoying day at Ashbee’s Furniture Outlet. Then the strip-mall calm of Nowhere, Ohio, is shattered by the sudden, simultaneous appearance of Renni Ramirez – hyper-competent star of the beloved Rising Evil B-movie franchise – and actual ZOMBIES, leaving Ashbee’s hapless staff and Renni trapped behind an automatic door they can’t lock.

Can failed creative-writing student/apprentice store manager/eagle-eyed markswoman Devin escape the besieged furniture store to rescue her girlfriend? Will Renni’s experience slaughtering motion-captured CGI monsters save the day before the army bombs the town? Once bitten, how many zombies can a person expect to take out before succumbing to infection? Who is the mysterious Deus Ex Machina, and what is he doing with that bone saw?

All of these questions and more whisper behind the scream of the single most important thing Devin needs to know in order to survive: is Renni a top or a bottom?

In Issue 18 of Something Wicked we have some astounding stories for you.
First up is a bit of dark humour in Summer Hanford’s extremely wry and funny “The Death of Satan and The Imprisonment of God”.
Next is a fantastic piece of near-future SF-noir in Thomas Carl Sweterlitsch’s “The Disposable Man”.
We follow that with our reprint for this issue, Nick Wood’s “Of Hearts and Monkeys”, an African post-apocalyptic story set in Cape Town.
And we close off the issue with a tale by David McCool about an old man recollecting the story of “Billy Bogroll”, the town paedophile.

We introduce a new book reviewer with this issue; Deon van Heerden, who starts off his tenure with us with a review of The Recollection by Gareth L Powell, and the graphic novel, Mazeworld by Alan Grant & Arthur Ranson.
In expectation of the release of Blue Remembered Earth next month we’ve decided to reprint our Issue 7 interview with Alastair Reynolds.
All in all an awesome issue, as I hope you’ll agree.

In Issue 19 expect some more great fiction with SF from RWW Greene and some horror from Chris Stevens, Nick Scorza and Peter Damien.
Thanks, as usual, to our lovely subscribers without whom, well, let’s not go there…
Til next month.

This esubscription is for 12 months/12 issues of Something Wicked SF and Horror Magazine in the format of your choice beginning with the current issue.

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Something Wicked is a monthly online and electronic-download science fiction and horror magazine.
Something Wicked was founded in 2006 as a print magazine and ran for ten issues before moving to online in May of 2011.

We publish science fiction and horror fiction from around the world and have featured several award-winning authors including Arthur C Clarke Award winner Lauren Beukes, Sarah Lotz and Abigail Godsell.
Published monthly, we feature some of the best new voices in horror and science fiction from around the world.

Our monthly publication schedule consists of three pieces of short fiction and one novella, along with nonfiction articles. Content is posted weekly from the first Tuesday of every month. Ebook editions and editorials are available from the 1st of each month.

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Lightspeed is an online science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales.

In our February 2012 issue, we have original fantasy by new writer Brooke Bolander (“Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring”) and Fantasy-favorite Genevieve Valentine (“The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring”), and fantasy reprints by Chris Willrich (“The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing”) and the legendary Robert Silverberg (“Not Our Brother”).

Plus, we have original science fiction by Keith Brooke (“War 3.01″) and bestselling author Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil”), plus SF reprints by award-winning authors Gregory Benford (“Dark Sanctuary”) and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Craters”).

All that plus our artist showcase, our usual assortment of author spotlights, and feature interviews with bestselling authors Chuck Palahniuk and Daniel H. Wilson.

And, for our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella this month is the dark, brutal tour de force “Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?” by Lucius Shepard.

We also added a dozen or so new titles from Less Than Three Press—we now have 60+ of their books! Dance in the Dark is the most popular so far.

Two Marshall Moore titles, The Concrete Sky and Black Shapes in a Darkened Room are on sale at 99 cents each as a promotion until his new book, The Infernal Republic, releases in February.

Next week we have sale coming on all Steve Berman’s books and then it will be time for the February magazines to begin dropping—always the busiest time of the month around here.

I am heading (with Kelly) for Australia and New Zealand next month—can’t wait to say hello to Brisbane, Adelaide, Wellington!—which will mean Michael will be holding up 100% of the sky. He’s done it before and will do it again, at least until the end of the world later this year.

Over in Small Beer land, we have a new email newsletter (shiny, tidy!) which will sometimes feature Weightless stuff and the second paper printing of Maureen McHugh’s Philip K. Dick Award finalist After the Apocalypse is now in stock. Fortunately it was never out of stock here. Ha.

Ebooks are apparently going to make up 214% of all book sales by this time next month.* As long as people are reading and people running interesting indie presses, we’re happy.

Ciao!

* Statistic brought to you by some analyst whose mother received a Kindle for Christmas.