Nov. 27th, 2005 01:29 pm
Fantasy Magazine #1
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klwardA few weeks ago I acquired a copy of the first issue of Fantasy Magazine, a new publication by Wildside Press under the Prime Books imprint. Having now made some headway into it, I thought I'd share my impressions.
Fantasy Magazine, is edited by Sean Wallace, the luminary of Prime Books among several other imprints and also current editor of Weird Tales and HPL's Magazine of Horror. It is A4 sized with a glossy colour cover and pulpy, b&w insides. It will be coming out quarterly and, if this issue is anything to go by, features the usual mixture of original fiction, book reviews and interviews for this kind of pop-literary publication. On most reproductions of the cover, you probably cannot make out what the dreamy nymphette, painted by Canadian artist Socar Myles, is holding in her hand. It's a little manikin, talisman or fetish, hung from a ribbon round its neck. And that, I think, is a fairly good summary of the overall tone -- if the list of authors including Jeff Vandermeer and Jeffrey Ford hasn't clued you in already.
The opening story, "The Tyrant in Love" is a quite wonderful little piece by Tim Pratt. It drew me effortlessly onward into the longer offerings: "To Make the Dead Speak" by Margaret Ronald, "The Finer Points of Destruction" by Richard Parks. There is an extract from Jeff Vandermeer's new Ambergris novel Shriek: An Afterword and, along with his interview, Jeffrey Ford contributes "In the House of Four Seasons". Special mention should also be made of "The Bunny of Vengeance and the Bear of Death" by Eugine Foster. These and the many others -- at 112 interior pages it is a substantial read -- run the gamut of magic realism, artistic horror, reworked fairytales and unobtrusively other-worldly settings. Everything, in fact, except the obvious and the overt.
Paula Guran, of Horror Garage magazine and the much-missed DarkEcho newsletter is the Review Editor. The reviews are succinct and gathered together in a 5 page section. The interior design is by John Klima, who knows how to lay out a magazine. Every page is both readable and attractive. The artwork is mostly pleasant greyscale photographs and he is not afraid of a little transparency or even blank space when the situation merits it. Even the advertisements fit in with the general scheme, and are mainly for bookshops, publishers (including Prime, Nightshade, Subterranean -- you get the idea), new novels and the Science Fiction Poetry Association, which I for one hadn’t heard of before. Just by the way, the full page Prime ad includes their reissue of The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt.
In short, it seems like a pretty good magazine if your taste lie in its nebulous yet exclusive field. The only problem is that getting this copy cost me AU$27.00 all up and if it does turn up at Borders or one of the specialists who import such as Galaxy Bookshop, is unlikely to cost less. Sigh. The price that we pay.
Fantasy Magazine, is edited by Sean Wallace, the luminary of Prime Books among several other imprints and also current editor of Weird Tales and HPL's Magazine of Horror. It is A4 sized with a glossy colour cover and pulpy, b&w insides. It will be coming out quarterly and, if this issue is anything to go by, features the usual mixture of original fiction, book reviews and interviews for this kind of pop-literary publication. On most reproductions of the cover, you probably cannot make out what the dreamy nymphette, painted by Canadian artist Socar Myles, is holding in her hand. It's a little manikin, talisman or fetish, hung from a ribbon round its neck. And that, I think, is a fairly good summary of the overall tone -- if the list of authors including Jeff Vandermeer and Jeffrey Ford hasn't clued you in already.
The opening story, "The Tyrant in Love" is a quite wonderful little piece by Tim Pratt. It drew me effortlessly onward into the longer offerings: "To Make the Dead Speak" by Margaret Ronald, "The Finer Points of Destruction" by Richard Parks. There is an extract from Jeff Vandermeer's new Ambergris novel Shriek: An Afterword and, along with his interview, Jeffrey Ford contributes "In the House of Four Seasons". Special mention should also be made of "The Bunny of Vengeance and the Bear of Death" by Eugine Foster. These and the many others -- at 112 interior pages it is a substantial read -- run the gamut of magic realism, artistic horror, reworked fairytales and unobtrusively other-worldly settings. Everything, in fact, except the obvious and the overt.
Paula Guran, of Horror Garage magazine and the much-missed DarkEcho newsletter is the Review Editor. The reviews are succinct and gathered together in a 5 page section. The interior design is by John Klima, who knows how to lay out a magazine. Every page is both readable and attractive. The artwork is mostly pleasant greyscale photographs and he is not afraid of a little transparency or even blank space when the situation merits it. Even the advertisements fit in with the general scheme, and are mainly for bookshops, publishers (including Prime, Nightshade, Subterranean -- you get the idea), new novels and the Science Fiction Poetry Association, which I for one hadn’t heard of before. Just by the way, the full page Prime ad includes their reissue of The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt.
In short, it seems like a pretty good magazine if your taste lie in its nebulous yet exclusive field. The only problem is that getting this copy cost me AU$27.00 all up and if it does turn up at Borders or one of the specialists who import such as Galaxy Bookshop, is unlikely to cost less. Sigh. The price that we pay.
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