Little desert witch
not completely dead inside
enough love for one. ( )

To say that Alyssa Wong can write is to say that the desert has dry bones.

What I really mean to say is that she can turn a whole town of the old-west dead into dancing corpses and then make you wonder if it is all in your very imaginative head... or whether you're really one of them, too.

Impossible, you say? Well, Wong has a knack for writing absolutely stunning fantasy that's both flashy (or in this case necromantic) and immense with importance while also writing on an entirely different level at the same time.

I love reading extravagantly fantastic fantasy like this. But wait! It could also easily be a purely psychological tale of grief and psychosis, of anger and coping after a mining accident takes out a whole desert community.

Woah.

Which do you want? Both are awesome. AND YET WE GET BOTH AT THE SAME TIME! YAY! :)

*mind blown*

Totally cool. :)

Nominated for '17 Hugo for best Novella. You might say I'm tempted to vote this way. :) ( )

Another great story from one of my very favorite authors...

In Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands we learn that the world as we know it it’s ending and that the present situation is the direct consequence of a precise chain of events – indeed the words “things have consequences” keep resonating throughout the story, much like an ominous warning. Or a funeral dirge…

The main character, a mother with two teenaged kids, seeks some respite from what we understand is a long journey with little or no hope, and we learn through a series of flashbacks what happened before: the amazing discovery of a portal toward another world, the observation of this alien land where a few robotic probes have been sent in search for life, the encounter with an alien species – and the beginning of the end.

There is a painful dichotomy between the grim present, where people are running from certain death toward the few safe places – as long as they last, of course – and the hopeful, enthusiastic past, when people joked about the portal wanting to call it “the Stargate”, or when they sent the robot probes supplied with “every known human language—including Klingon”, in a giddy reach for contact with other forms of life that could not be disconnected from the number of fictional presentations that used to fire our imagination. There is even some commentary about the fickleness of the human soul, when even the images of an alien world stop making the news, because “..quickly people got over the magnitude of our discovery”.

I’m not going to reveal what the twist in the tale is, of course, but I feel comfortable in saying that it’s a painfully surprising one, and also a warning about the dangers of overconfidence, of putting one’s dreams above all else: “we’d been so busy wallowing in intellectual ideals that we’d never stopped to think”. Despite the grimness, despite the hopelessness, I enjoyed this story very much because no one like McGuire is able to deliver a tale of ultimate doom while keeping her readers engaged, enthralled by the way she weaves her words into a clear, mesmerizing picture.

Not a “happy” story, not by a long shot, but a powerful one that makes you think about the outcome of our choices, and the dangers of taking our customs and thinking processes for granted. Because, in the end

THINGS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
HELLO
( )

A very interesting take on establishing first contact, but there were aspects of it that I guess just didn't gel for me?

Anyway, the writing was amazingly pretty and sad. ( )

Really great issue. Favorites in no particular order:

You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay by Alyssa Wong
Sacrifice and magic in the desert.

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands by Seanan McGuire
First contact and language differences. A stab to the heart.

The Sound of Salt and Sea by Kat Howard
When the dead come to visit the bone horses make sure they go away again. ( )