Welcome to issue forty-nine of Fantasy! On tap this month… Fiction: “Choose Your Own Adventure” by Kat Howard, “The Woman Who Married the Man in the Moon” by Peter S. Beagle, “House of Gears” by Jonathan L. Howard, “The Hunter’s Ode to His Bait” by Carrie Vaughn. Nonfiction: “Choosing Our Own Adventures” by Molly Tanzer, “Feature Interview: N. K. Jemisin” by Paul Goat Allen, “A Silver Swan” by Genevieve Valentine, “The Unicorn Tapestries and Other Depictions” by Helen Pilinovsky.
At present, when one hears the word “unicorn,” the associations are obvious: a horned white horse, representing purity; a similarly chaste and pristine young woman; a series of single entendres.
You have to constantly ask, what’s being betrayed: the unicorns themselves, or the medieval cultural ideal of them? If the latter, is that a bad thing? Is it betrayal or subversion?
“I’ll take her.” He tossed the pouch of silver at the woman. It landed at her feet, and she hurried to pick it up. Her husband was dead, and she had eight other children to feed.
In recent years, automatons have seen a surge in popularity, from steampunk contraptions to mecha. But this interest is hardly new.
Cabal certainly has a moral set, although it’s unlikely to win him any plaudits. He would argue that his moral scale is simply greater than most people’s and that he does not concern himself with the minutiae.
The notes had referred to a Monsieur Samhet, who lived in a strange house in the hills. They were vague about Samhet’s accomplishments, but he seemed capable of resurrecting with an insolent ease that intrigued Cabal.
So why has Jemisin’s ascension to the fantasy fiction stratosphere been so meteoric? It’s simple—she is a master storyteller.
Connor Cochran asked me to do a book for Conlan Press that would be a set of Schmendrick stories set before The Last Unicorn. I’d never gone back there, so I thought it would be interesting.
Stories never end. We end. If we could but live long enough, we would see how all tales go on and on past the telling
For kids who love to read, there’s something deeply exciting about opening up a book and being absorbed into someone else’s adventures. But sometimes there’s an alternative to simply reading about the protagonist’s derring-do.
