My Favourite Online SFF Literary Magazines

What a specific title! Some time in the last few months I became obsessed with digital SFF literary magazines. I’ve made absolutely no secret of my love of science fiction as a genre or my preference for short stories (and my firm belief that they are a greatly under appreciated form of literary genius) and it suddenly clicked for me that there is a wealth of short form fiction that I could subscribe to. Some time ago I backed a kickstarter for a special edition of Uncanny showcasing the work of disabled writers and as part of my reward I received the most recent issue as well. I already regularly buy FIYAH and I started investigating the other options on twitter, gumroad and patreon! Here are six of my favourites!

A note about patreon fee changes: I support many of these magazines on patreon but I understand that the fee changes might put people off [Update! They’ve retracted and aren’t introducing the fees!] Most of the patreon based magazines have, or will be, working on alternatives for supporters who wish to contribute on alternative websites. Please don’t be put off if I have mentioned patreon!

FIYAH

Quarterly. Edited by Justina Ireland and Troy L. Wiggins.

FIYAH is one I’ve been with since the beginning. Every quarter they publish a packed edition with submissions based around a theme exclusively from black writers. I personally love the themed issues (I love a curated themed anthology) and it’s great to see individual interpretations of a themed prompt. The cover artwork is also beautiful (enough that they sell prints of each cover online!)

Buy it or subscribe from their website.

Strange Horizons

Weekly, monthly ebook. Edited by Jane Crowley and Kate Dollarhyde.

Strange Horizons is a lit mag that I’ve subscribed to recently via patreon, every Monday they publish a short story, poem and a review of a speculative book recently published. Monthly, they produce an ebook collating the weekly editions for subscribers in a variety of formats.

Subscribe via their Patreon.

Fireside

Monthly. Edited by Julia Rios.

Fireside publishes stories on their website that lean towards the speculative side but are occasionally ‘off genre’. They’re keen on fair pay for their workers and so pledges on their Patreon go towards paying above standard per word. They also provide content notes for all of their stories- where applicable- on their website.

You can read on their website and support/subscribe via patreon.

Apex

Monthly. Edited by Jason Sizemore.

Apex offers short fiction from a diverse range of SFF writers as well as essays and interviews. Essays revolve around the world of publishing and being a reader, and interviews often link to people featured within the issue. I think Apex has my favourite layout of all of the ‘mixed medium’ magazines I’ve read so far. Rather than having all the fiction, poetry and non fiction together and separate from one another it feels like a more natural flow: an interview with a writer after their story, for example, rather than it being later on in the issue. It’s cleverly done. And the writing is top-notch!

Subscribe via their Patreon.

Luna Station

Quarterly. Edited by Jennifer Lyn Parsons.

Luna Station exists to showcase the talents of speculative writers who identify as female. They’ve recently doubled down on this definition to explicitly include anyone who identifies as a woman in any way. The stories are beautiful, often painful, and their covers are stunning.

You can purchase their quarterly edition on gumroad.

Uncanny

Bimonthly. Edited by Lynne M Thomas, Michael Damien Thomas and Michi Trota.

Uncanny were the first SFF magazine I subscribed to this year, after having had ten brought to my attention by their recent Kickstarter. I subscribe via Amazon, but back issues can be read or purchased on their website through a variety of channels. Each bimonthly issue is jam packed with original stories, reprints, poetry and essays and has accompanying podcasts online.

Read, listen, buy or subscribe on their website.

If anyone has any recommendations then let me know!

#NotYourPrincess ed. by Lisa Charleyboy and Mary Beth Leatherdale

#NotYourPrincess is a collection of stories, essays, poetry, art and photography that aims to show what life is like for Native women living in America. It’s a short book- only 112 pages- but it packs a powerful punch. This was one ARC that I was very excited to be approved for. I have #NotYourPrincess on preorder already (and I really think that reading it on my kindle did not do it the full justice it deserves- I’m very excited to see that art and photography in print proper.) and have heard great things about it already.

The book contains variety of styles, my favourite being the ‘visual scrapbooks’ illustrated by Sierra Edd containing poetry and shorter thoughts about life and childhood as a Native woman. Each piece of writing is interspersed with artwork and photographs; there’s a fantastic number and range of contributors to this book. 

For an Own Voices review of #NotYourPrincess I’d like to point you in the direction of my friend Weezie’s review. I can’t personally speak for the quality of representation for Native woman myself but I trust the opinions of Native reviewers who I have seen applauding it so far.

#NotYourPrincess is released on 12th September in the US and 10th October in the UK and I would urge you all to preorder it. It’s a beautiful book that gives a voice to a group of women that have so often found their words ignored.

(TW for suicide, self harm, abuse and death)

Outside the XY edited by Morgan Mann Willis

Outside the XY is one of those books that feels like it should have been around for years- a collection of own Voices essays on why it means to be black or brown and live outside of cis manhood- but given the nature of publishing has arrived now to give a voice to people so comprehensively shunned by the Big Five.

Outside the XY is a powerful anthology; no two entries are alike and they show a real scope of experience. For someone who very much lives in the realm of white cis womanhood the book is clearly not written with me in mind but it remains an educational and thought provoking read. More importantly, for people who see themselves echoed within the writing I can only imagine how important that must be. There are so many viewpoints and topics covered; from black trans men trying to balance masculinity and not upholding the patriarchy to non-binary Native people speaking about the colonial nature of binary genders.

Understandly, there are some portions that are difficult to read (TW for anti-trans behaviour aimed at the writers in their stories, domestic abuse and self harm) but overall it’s an uplifting book about learning to love yourself completely. 

Latin@ Rising edited by Matthew David Goodwin

I got this anthology some time ago on the recommendation of Naz at Read Diverse Books and have been dipping in and out of it for the past few months. Reading The New Voices of Fantasy really put me in the mood for more speculative short stories so I read the final half of it yesterday! 

Matthew David Goodwin has put together a collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories and poems from Latin American writers based in the United States. It’s got great scope as a collection, from more subtle fantasy to magical realism to high science fiction concepts and the stories sort of ebb and flow between different speculative themes. But running through all of them is the idea of what it means to be Latinx in America as both an immigrant or several generations down the line.

It’s a very well thought out collection, beginning and ending with stories about heritage and tradition. The introduction to each story (or author if they have more than one piece of writing) is comprehensive and interesting- I ended up buying quite a few books from th authors included thanks to the descriptions in the anthology- and it’s clearly a labour of love.

So if you’re in to speculative fiction, short stories or Latinx writing and culture then I’d thoroughly recommend this book! 

The New Voices of Fantasy edited by Peter S Beagle

I’m generally not a great lover of fantasy. I find it difficult to get through a long high fantasy novel or series and as a genre it doesn’t have the same pull for me as others do. That being said I do absolutely adore short stories so this collection caught my eye as a sort of gateway drug in to longer fantasy stories. It’s actually the second ARC I’ve finished for ARC August and the first I’m reviewing and I raced through it!

The thing I loved most about this collection is the range of cultural inspiration behind the stories. It wasn’t just your bog-standard Tudors-with-dragons English affair; there were stories drawing inspiration from myths originating everywhere from Ireland to Pakistan. Some of them were stories I recognised (I’m fairly sure that I’ve read the Dictionary of British Folklore referenced in Selkie Stories are for Losers and I’ve certainly been told the tale of the woman with a ribbon around her neck) and for me had a sort of nostalgic feel because they were the kinds of fantasy short stories I read as a child.

There’s no collective theme to these stories other than they’re all beautifully crafted and chosen to represent the best of the genre. And they may have convinced this fantasy-avoider to try out more of the genre!

Letters from Diaspora by Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura

Book number three for my Read the World project and I chose another collection of short stories for Bosnia Herzegovina, in part because I was really excited to read this book when I found it available for preorder. When I was at university part of the politics section of my degree focused on state rebuilding after war and the Bosnian war was one of my focuses. But I feel like it’s not enough to learn cold facts about a place, stories help us to understand a history far better than a textbook could.

So going in to this book I knew it wouldn’t be a happy one. Obviously, stories of displaced survivors of genocide, masquerading as civil war, are never going to be happy. But when you also take in to consideration the failure of the Bosnian government to address the massive inequalities between Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks afterwards, as well as the fact that the Bosnian war resulted in rape being categorised as a war crime for the first time, it was obviously going to be hard-hitting.

Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura writes beautifully and her stories cover an entire spectrum of experiences within the war; survivors, both Muslim and Christian, thinking back on those they lost and the country they’ve had to leave behind. There’s nothing romantic about their stories, as there’s nothing romantic about war itself.

My only minor criticism is a few typos throughout, which us perhaps a danger of self-publishing (but not the end of the world!) Letters from Diaspora is a short but powerful collection of stories.

Iraq + 100 edited by Hassan Blasim

My very first completed book for my Read the World project! I had already preordered Iraq + 100 prior to coming up with the idea for this project so it was a happy coincidence that the book arrived on my doorstep a few days beforehand! I liked the idea of beginning with a short story collection for a country that I had never read fiction from before- particularly short stories by different writers- because it felt like more of a broad scope of writing than one novel to begin with.

One of the things I noticed about the stories as I read them, which was reflected in Hassan Blasim’s introduction- is how different they were as speculative fiction to what I’m used to. For many of the stories I got the distinct impression that that speculation revolved around how the present would directly impact the future- with flashbacks and hallucinogenic techno bugs and godly reincarnation how might the future people cope with what went on in 2003? In the introduction Hassan Blasim notes that western science fiction has been able to track actual scientific progress in a short amount of time which, given the destruction of vital libraries and museums, plus brutal invasions, has been largely denied to Iraqi writers.

The stories still scan a whole spectrum of speculative writing though- speculative because they all pose the question of what Iraq will be like a hundred years after the invasion of 2003. There’s magical realism, decimated wastelands, a future where the question of ‘religious terrorism’ has shifted from the Middle East to right wing America, holographic pilgrimages and big brother-esque dictator adorned with jewels made of the cremated bodies of people who dare to speak another language. Some of the stories are hopeful, others bleak but they all tie in elements of language, culture, religion and imagination. My personal favourite stories were The Worker, Operation Daniel and Najufa.

It’ll be an uncomfortable read for anyone who isn’t used to being confronted by the consequences of America and Britain’s actions (and, given our media, that’s almost all of us). But for me it’s been a great break from the usual negative stories we see in our media about Iraq- a chance to see things from a very different perspective from mine.

For the Love of Short Stories

  

Until fairly recently I’d never fully appreciated how wonderful a short story can be. I hadn’t appreciated, more specifically, that there’s a kind of genius in condensing a whole story into such a small number of words or throwing a reader straight into the lives of fully formed characters without preamble.

I remember, quite vividly, reading short stories as a child. Which makes sense as children have a much lower concentration span. Logically, older people should be reading longer and longer novels, I thought. War and Peace or nothing, I told myself.

I think the first time I really started to appreciate short stories as an adult was reading Kurt Vonnegut collections and finding joy in the midst of essays and letters. Next, PG Wodehouse’s stories about the escapades of young crumpets and eggs from the men’s clubs. They’re two of my favourite authors, so of course they were the gateway drug.

At the beginning of the year I read The Greatest Gift by Phillip Van Doren Stern a story that would later become It’s A Wonderful Life (and therefore one of the greatest stories ever told in my opinion). That, in turn, told me to pick up Ghostly, the collection I won late last year on Twitter, and Stephen King’s Bazaar of Bad Dreams and delve into the short ghost and horror stories there. If there’s a more perfect form for horror and scares than the short story, again in my opinion, I have yet to find it.

Short stories, I think, open up a whole new world of storytelling and story appreciation. I still like the occasional longer novel (as well as novellas, short and long novels- basically I’m  not fussy) but there’s something incredibly satisfying about picking up a book and knowing that you’re going to get a complete tale in the time it takes to have a semi-indulgent bath. 

I like the quickness, to little hit of another world before you go about your day. In his introduction to his collection of Jeeves and Wooster shorts, PG Wodehouse urges the reader not to consume too much in one sitting, rather to read one at breakfast and perhaps one before bed. I like the design in that.

Blog Tour: Hark by Justin Bog

  
A beautifully written collection of short stories from critically acclaimed Pacific Northwest writer Justin Bog, Hark explores the range of emotions surrounding the holidays. From melancholy to madness, loss and despair to hope and forgiveness, these six tales shimmer with feelings, some we’d rather stuff away, that Christmas can evoke.

Set in colorful locations around the United States, from Anacortes, Washington, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Sun Valley, Idaho, each tale focuses on people who struggle to make good choices, learn lessons, and maybe even find peace during the holiday season.

There was something quite lovely about reading a collection of Christmas stories wholly unique to Christmas stories; they weren’t sickly sweet. Don’t get me wrong, I love the romantic, Scrooge redeeming, Wonderful Life, toy making stories that are so common this time of year. But that’s not all that Christmas is about and I think these stories keep in mind the vast number of people for whom Christmas is a complicated time.

There is a warmth in Justin Bog’s writing but, to me, it doesn’t come from a light, humourous tale but more from a desire to portray complicated relationships and feelings that are important to so many people at Christmas time. Each story is different, unique. Some are humourous, some are darker. All of them are a very lovely addition to my Christmas reading.