Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Howdy, partner.

This is an SFF literature blog that’ll tackle science fiction, fantasy, and horror published in the magazines—print, digital, you name it. No books, only zines. We won’t be reviewing whole novels except when I say so at a time but novel serials. Partly this is because I more often love SFF writing in shorter bursts, and partly I’m acknowledging my limitations; I’m not that fast or thorough a reader. My eyesight is incredibly poor and I have a bad back, which may sound surprising given I’m not even thirty years old yet.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Why start a blog about fiction from SFF magazines, specifically? Why dedicate a blog to SFF magazines and not books? Surely more people read books: novels, anthologies, single-author collections, and so on. You’re certainly right, but I have my reasons.

Time to lay down some ground rules, which admittedly are subject to change. Here’s how it’ll all work:

1. On the first day of each month, I’ll post a short editorial about stories I’ll be reviewing for the rest of that month, called Things Beyond. I’ll alternate between short story and novella reviews starting on the 3rd and continuing weekly (so the 10th, 17th, etc.), while serials will be covered part by part starting on the 6th, and again continuing weekly. If I haven’t finished the last part of a serial on the 27th, I continue it on the 6th. If I’m set to review a novella on the 31st of the month, that novella gets replaced with a COMPLETE NOVEL, i.e., a story running 40,000 words or longer—with the necessary educated guesses.
2. Each review will be an in-depth look at the given story, regardless of the story’s length. I’ll try to get all I can out of each experience, for the sake of improving my reading comprehension skills (which are not great, honestly), and giving these stories the time I think they deserve. Writing fiction, even trash (and we will sometimes be reading trash), takes a lot of time and effort. You won’t get a post from me saying, “Yeah I thought this short story was just fine, okay bye bye now.”
3. If a story has never been published in a magazine, it’s not eligible for this blog, sorrrrrrry. Preferably I want to cover magazine originals, but if a story was originally published in book form (or in a magazine that doesn’t seem to be available digitally anywhere) and then reprinted in an available genre magazine at any point, that’s eligible as well. Novels that have never seen print in the zines are, naturally, excluded.
4. What is a magazine, anyway? Basically we’re talking about periodicals that go issue by issue, be it professional, semi-pro, or even fanzines that happen to publish fiction. Print and online magazines are equally valid (except, of course, serials are a thing of the past, and thus are mostly relegated to the print magazines). “Bookazines” like Destinies are an odd breed that blur the line between books and zines, but I’m ultimately counting those as magazines too. Some webzines are clearly modeled after magazines while some, like Tor.com, function more like blogs, with content being dished out one at a time as individual posts rather than in issues or volumes; as such I’m excluding the latter model of webzine from review (again sorry).

That’s it, I think.

If you want to reach me at my Twitter, here it is. I took a break from it for a few months but now I’m back. Also my Mastodon, although I have to admit I don’t look at it nearly as often and it’ll mostly just be posts I would be making for Twitter. Finally I made a Bluesky account, which despite still being in beta has given me more traffic than Mastodon. Sad!

“What about SFF movies? Won’t you ever review those?” Maybe, but probably not. If you really want you can read about my dumb movie and TV thoughts on my Letterboxd page.