Taken at the American Museum of Natural History. I just love the delicacy of those feathers.
Abyss & Apex has a slew of interesting stories in this issue, including J. Kathleen Cheney’s steampunky Of Ambergris, Blood and Brandy, C. J. Cherryh’s The Last Tower and Vylar Kaftan’s Mind-Diver.
Part I and Part II of Gavin Grant’s Widows in the World, published at Strange Horizons, are both full of interest and awesome. JoSelle Vanderhooft’s Mythpunk Roundtable is also full of sparkling, interesting thoughts from some smart people: Amal El-Mohtar, Rose Lemberg, Alex Dally McFarlane, Shweta Narayan and, of course, Vanderhooft.
Over at Daily Science Fiction, Peter M. Ball’s The Birdcage Heart displayed Ball’s poetic sensibility, which evokes but never enforces a trembling, exquisite realization for the reader. Lurvely. I also really liked Memory Bugs by Alter S. Reiss and Colum Paget’s chilling Imaginary Enemies. Lots of interesting near-future science.
Recent favorites on Tor.com include Kij Johnson’s Ponies and Ken Scholes’s monkey-riffic Making My Entrance Again With My Usual Flair
Crossed Genres included Therese Arkenburg’s The Halcyon in Flight, Corinne Duyvis’s The Rule of Three, and a story from fellow Clarion West 2005 class member, Ada Milenkovic Brown, Nadirah Sends Her Love, which I first heard at Wiscon a couple of years back.
Redstone Science Fiction’s Like a Hawk in its Gyre by Philip Brewer features one of the best bicycle characters I’ve had the pleasure of encountering.
I loved seeing a Tanith Lee story in Lightspeed Magazine. She’s one of my favorite writers, and Black Fire didn’t disappoint. Even though I tend to think of her as a fantasy writer, when she does sf, she does it extraordinarily well (The Silver Metal Lover, for example, and Drinking Sapphire Wine, neither of which are available on the Kindle and one of which is out of print, for the love of God.)
