Magazines coming and going
I've been really out of touch with much of the online world lately. Which, among other things, meant that it wasn't until several weeks after the fact that I saw Cheryl's announcement that Emerald City is ceasing publication.
I'm sorry to see it go. Cheryl's been doing this for eleven years now; that's pretty remarkable. But at least there'll be a couple more issues before it ends. In the latest issue, I particularly liked Cheryl's review of the Tiptree biography.
Unrelatedly, except inasmuch as it's about sf and you can read it online: a week or so ago, Cheryl's Emerald City Blog pointed to an online Finnish magazine called Usva. Their English page says:
Usva (The Mist) is a webzine publishing speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror stories, mainstream prose with a speculative twist) - short stories, poetry, articles, photos and illustrations.
They've just released, in PDF format, an issue in English. Among other things, the issue features a poem by Hannu Rajaniemi (a Finnish grad student currently living in Scotland), who's been getting a lot of attention lately for his Stross-esque story "Deus Ex Homine" in last year's Scottish anthology Nova Scotia, a story that's now been reprinted in a couple of Year's Bests. I haven't read anything in Usva yet, but I plan to; it seems like another nice convenient way for me to begin to get a better sense of world sf without even leaving home.
(Irrelevant aside, because that's what my blog's all about: Rajaniemi's blog points to, among other things, a cute YouTube video: Day of the Longtail, which manages to both parody the opening of War of the Worlds and provide a brief introduction to the idea behind the Long Tail.)
And speaking of world literature online for free, DesiLit Magazine has just launched. It's "a biannual online magazine, [. . .] committed to creating a forum for exceptional contemporary writing and art focused on South Asia and the diaspora." This one isn't an sf magazine, but of course that doesn't mean all of its fiction is naturalistic per se. The only story there I've read so far includes this paragraph:
Rudra is a popular repeat customer, an original Rubber Band Girl who spends her time expanding, contracting, and escaping. Just a few weeks ago, she was crowned Super Queen after conclusively proving that she will expand and contract until she finally snaps.
--from "Welcome to Barium," by Kuzhali Manickavel
Good story. Hoping to go back and read the rest of the issue soon.