Welcome to issue fifty-six of Fantasy Magazine! Here’s what we’ve got on tap this month … Fiction: “Seven Spells to Sever the Heart” by K. M. Ferebee, “Christopher Raven” by Theodora Goss, “Red Dawn: A Chow Mein Western” by Lavie Tidhar, “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” by Ellen Kushner. Nonfiction: Feature Interview: Charlaine Harris by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, “Shades of the Nineteenth Century” by Helen Pilinovsky, “Home on the Strange” by Emma Bull, “The Pen and the Sword” by Kat Howard.
The natural connection between pen and sword is solidified by the language of fencing, wherein the fencer’s repertoire of movements is called a conversation of blades, or a judge will “read the phrase” of the action before awarding a touch.
It’s the book we all loved in high school (or college), the one we weren’t sure we should admit to our friends we loved—until we found out they loved it, too. It’s the one with the trashy cover that turns out to be amazingly great.
Curious, he had asked the wounded man, “Did you slam into me on purpose?” People did sometimes, to provoke a fight with Richard St. Vier, the master swordsman who wouldn’t take challenges from just anyone.
The Weird West goes back to the earliest days of the Western: to the dime novels and serial stories in weekly gazettes that turned the American west into a mythic land even before it stopped being a place you could move to
In a way, of course, I’m appropriating everything. I’m borrowing this very American mode—the Western—and Niven’s magic system, and I’m setting it in a sort of Victorian-era China dealing with foreign incursions.
The boy felt a tingling at the tip of his fingers. He saw with his inner eye: The leader rode unarmed because his power was great. The aura of Qi around him was unmistakable.
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Stories require a common consensus to become popular and to spread: When the stories in question concern the restless dead, the possibility of an angry past haunting us, what, precisely, does that say?
I struggled at first, because I couldn’t find the right voice to write it in. But then I thought of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, that sort of nostalgic tone, and I wrote in that sort of voice.
Why had I come back to Collingswood? That was what I asked myself, standing on the path that led to the main school building, a structure built of gray stone and shadowed by oaks that had stood for a hundred years.
