"Beneath Ceaseless Skies" #59

Online fantasy magazine "Beneath Ceaseless Skies" posted its 59th (FREE) issue a few days ago:
http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

death without a dearth

To once again paraphrase Mark Twain upon hearing of his own demise, the news about the death of the short story have been greatly exaggerated. There were plenty of tales to keep me busy during the Holidays, and many of them of high quality.

Among those I especially liked is a Christmas tale found on Tor.com, “The Trains That Climb The Winter Tree” by Michael Swanwick & Eileen Gunn. Be warned though that it begins with elves coming into a home thru a mirror, arranging an awesome toy train all around the Christmas Tree and then… killing the parents in their sleep before taking their places. One of the family’s kids unwittingly boards the train and it’s up to his sister to follow him up the Tree and rescue him.

Also available for free on Tor.com are Cat Rambo’s “Clockwork Fairies”, in which a man courts – for his own personal gain – a British nobleman’s mulatto daughter who finds joy in building automatons, and Richard Parks’s “Four Horsemen at their Leisure” about what Death and its partners do after wiping Earth’s life thoroughly, all the way down to bacteria.

Asimov’s November 2010 issue offered Sara Genge’s “Sins of the Father”, about a merman condemned away from the Sea by his mother and exiled to live in a very traditional Spanish village. In the January 2011 issue, Gwendolyn Clare’s “Ashes on the Water” shows a future India going thru a severe drought, and how a determined young woman travels across the country, looking for a river where she can scatter her sister's ashes so that they'll find the ocean.

Over at e*publisher Smashwords, I recently acquired Paul Di Filippo’s novella “Wikiworld”, in which a man subverts future America’s wiki-based democracy to become the President long enough to launch a trade war with Argentina, helped by Canada’s withholding of its main export, Zamboni machines. Silly? Of course not. (By the way, if you are interested in its Italian translation, I accidentally also bought the PDF of it, and the author is ok with my donating it.)

And we now come to online magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I read many of their free issues during the Holidays, with many enjoyable stories, but I will limit myself to mentioning issue #52’s “The Guilt Child” by Margaret Ronald, about what happens when Victorian machines built from thaumic ore reach sentience. Issue #53 had two tales of detection. Tony Pi’s “The Curse of Chimère” is set in a Reality where alchemy works, and someone is looking into why the viewing of a new silent-movie trilogy is killing its audience. Richard Paks’s “Lady of the Ghost Willow” is another of his stories of pre-Samurai Japan, in which Lord Yamada has to find what is slowly killing a noble family’s son.

All recommended.

"Blackout" - one fourth

In about one evening, I've already gone thru the first fourth of Connie Willis's "Blackout". Or, to be more accurate, the first eighth of "Blackout - All Clear".