Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 46

Fanzine Spotlight: Star Trek Quarterly

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines featured by clicking here.

Today’s featured fanzine is Star Trek Quarterly, which – as the title indicates – is all about Star Trek.

And now I’d like to welcome Sarah Gulde of Star Trek Quarterly. Sarah was a Hugo finalist for Journey Planet in 2019.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

Trekkies! Specifically, people involved in Star Trek fandom either IRL or online. I want anyone who loves Star Trek to feel welcome to send in submissions, from articles to art to fanfic to reviews to whatever shows their love of Trek!

I’ve also been very lucky to be introduced to folks like Karen Roberson, who created the new logo and does the covers now, and Sue Kisenwether, who created the website. Personally, I edit the submissions, lay them out, post the finished fanzines online, and advertise them on social media.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

I’ve been a Trekkie since TNG started in 1987, so when Chris Garcia and James Bacon asked me to guest edit an issue of Journey Planet, I did a whole Star Trek-themed issue. I reached out to people I know in the Trek community and asked them to write about how Star Trek had impacted their lives. I ended up receiving some really impactful stories, from a friend who had immigrated to the US finding a family, to another friend finding the courage to come out of the closet, all through Star Trek.

It was a game-changing experience for me to edit other people’s stories. Everyone has a story to tell, but everyone is at a different writing level. Some pieces I didn’t have to touch, while I spent hours editing others. I loved helping people tell their stories, and making sure those stories were heard.

I loved it so much I didn’t want to stop with one issue! After some careful thought, I decided to create my own Star Trek-themed fanzine. Monthly was too much for me to take on by myself, so I went with quarterly. I asked Women At Warp, a feminist Trek podcast, to write a regular column. (Since then I’ve joined the show as a co-host.) I passed out flyers at the big annual convention in Las Vegas soliciting submissions for the first issue. And I posted to various Star Trek Facebook groups looking for more.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I got a lot of great submissions from people who are passionate about Star Trek. And it’s continued ever since!

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

I originally started Star Trek Quarterly as a JPEG zine on Facebook only. It gave me a free, ready-to-go infrastructure for posting and advertising my fanzine. I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to create a website, but recently my Women At Warp co-host Sue Kisenwether created a WordPress site for me, so now folks can access Star Trek Quarterly as a PDF outside of Facebook.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

I don’t worry about whether my fanzine is “important”. I make it because Star Trek is important to me, and because my fanzine makes my (and others’) love of Star Trek a bigger part of my life. You don’t make art because it’s important, you make art because you have something you want to express and get out into the world. If it becomes important to other people and they want to give it an award, that’s just icing.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

I wouldn’t tell anyone else how to distribute their fanzine, but personally I can’t imagine taking on the costs of sending a physical product. I have no expenses now but time and effort, and I intend to keep it that way. It would stop being fun for me if I had to fundraise or charge to keep it going.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

First of all (and self-servingly), the Women At Warp podcast! We’re on a mission to explore “intersectional diversity in infinite combinations”, meaning we discuss Star Trek from an intersectional feminist perspective. We’re a part of the Roddenberry Podcast Network and will be hitting a million downloads sometime in mid-2021. You can find us online at womenatwarp.com, and @womenatwarp on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I’d also like to specifically recommend a fanfic writer who is a regular contributor to Star Trek Quarterly. They go by Curator on AO3, and @curatoronAO3 on Twitter. I’m not a part of the fanfic community, but I LOVE reading Curator’s submissions each quarter. They’re well written and give you little pieces of the Star Trek story you didn’t know you were missing.

Where can people find you?

Website: https://startrekquarterly.wordpress.com/
Facebook: @startrekquarterly
Twitter: @StarTrekQtrly

The next submission deadline is February 28 – I hope any Trekkies reading this will think about sending something in! Just email it to startrekquarterly@gmail.com.

Thanks, Sarah, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Star Trek Quarterly, cause it’s a great zine.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Fanzine Spotlight: Speculative Fiction in Translation

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines featured by clicking here.

But first of all, I also want to point you to my latest article at Galactic Journey, where I talk about the Lufthansa flight 005 crash which happened at Bremen airport on January 28, 1966, only approximately five kilometres from where I live. All 46 people aboard Lufthansa flight 005 died, the worst disaster to befall the Lufthansa until then and still the second worst today.

Today’s featured fanzine is Speculative Fiction in Translation, which made the longlist for the Hugo for Best Fanzine in 2019 and 2020. Since I’m a translator myself (though rarely of fiction except for my own), the mission of this site is near and dear to my heart.

Therefore, I’m thrilled to welcome Rachel Cordasco of Speculative Fiction in Translation.

Tell us about your site or zine.

I started SFinTranslation.com in 2016 when I couldn’t find any websites that focused on   tracking speculative fiction in English translation. Having reviewed a few works of SFT for SF Signal (before it closed a few years ago), I decided to learn more about the science fiction, fantasy, and horror that was being written around the world and then translated for Anglophone  readers. Since 2016, I’ve reviewed several dozen works of short- and long-form SFT (both for my site and for World Literature Today, Strange Horizons, and other publications), written  essays spotlighting regional SFT, and used social media to bring SFT to the attention of more readers. Among other things, I publish a regular “Out this Month” post to help readers find new SFT releases and I update a linked list of SFT that’s freely-available on the web.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

I created SFinTranslation.com and regularly update it with content, but I also welcome guest posts, which often come in the form of reviews. Daniel Haeusser, my co-host on the 16-episode   SFT podcast (2018-19), frequently sends me reviews to post on the site. I’ve also welcomed reviews from Andrea Johnson, Graham Oliver, Emily Balistrieri, and others.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

I use WordPress for my site because it’s easy to use and my site looks good whether you’re looking at it on your desktop, laptop, or cell phone. I’m thinking of adding an email newsletter in the future when my kids are older and I have more time to devote to SFT work!

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

Fanzines and fansites are important because they’re often created and maintained by people who (like myself) do the work purely for the love of it. We maintain these publications because we want other people to share our love for a particular kind of art or medium. Several people have told me that they always wanted to read more in translation but didn’t know where to look and my site helped them find what they were looking for. It’s comments like that that help fuel SFinTranslation.com.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

Like the whole “print books are dead!” canard of the early 2000s when ebooks became popular, I think print fanzines will always exist, even though many have migrated online. In some ways, it’s easier to maintain a fanzine online because you don’t have to deal with having it printed and mailed, though you do have to pay to use certain content management systems. Perhaps we’ll see a resurgence of print zines in the coming years, since many people still crave the physical and tangible. I myself print out an SFT catalog (in color) each year to bring to WisCon, which I hand out freely to anyone who comes to one of my SFT panels.

Where can people find you?

SFinTranslation.com
@Rcordas on Twitter
https://www.facebook.com/sfintranslation
rachel@sfintranslation.com

Thanks, Rachel, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Speculative Fiction in Translation, cause it’s a great blog.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

First Monday Free Fiction: A Valentine for the Silencer

Welcome to the February 2021 edition of First Monday Free Fiction, which is also posted on the first day of the month this time around.

To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on every first Monday of the month.

February is both the month of Carnival and of Valentine’s Day. Over the years, I have written three Valentine’s Day stories, Valentine’s Day on Iago Prime, Ballroom Blitz and this month’s free story, A Valentine for the Silencer.

As the title indicates, this story is part of my Silencer series of pulp style adventures. So travel back in time to New York City in the year 1938, where Richard Blakemore, hardworking pulp writer by day and the masked vigilante known only as the Silencer by night, is planning a romantic dinner with his fiancée Constance Allen. However, his alter ego still has work to do first.

So follow Richard Blakemore, as he deals with…

 

A Valentine for the Silencer

It was February 14, 1938, half past five in the afternoon. The winter sun was still up, if only barely, but the light sucking bulk of the Equitable Building already cast its long shadow down on Nassau Street.

Two blocks from the Equitable Building, Thomas Walden, twenty-five years of age, junior accountant at the Sinclair Oil Corporation, walked out of the gilded revolving door of the gothic extravaganza that was the Sinclair Oil Building on the corner of Liberty and Nassau. He had curly brown hair, open blue eyes and a sprinkle of freckles on his nose. He also had a spring in his step and a whistle on his lips and it seemed to him as if even the dome of the Singer Building a block up Liberty Street smiled down on him on this wonderful day. With a wide grin on his face, he rounded the corner and headed for the unremarkable brownstone building that sat right next to the soaring white terracotta tower where he worked.

On the ground floor of this unremarkable brownstone was a small, equally unremarkable shop. “Abraham Bernstein & Sons — Diamonds and Fine Jewellery,” a sign above the door announced in discreet gilded lettering.

A chime jingled, as Thomas Walden pushed open the door and stepped into the shop. Behind the counter, an elderly man with curled silver sidelocks and a matching beard laid down a magnifying glass as well as the ring he’d been examining and looked up.

“Ah, Mr. Walden,” Abraham Bernstein exclaimed. If he noticed the class ring of gilded pot metal on the young man’s hand and the modest gilded watch on his wrist, he gave no indication of it. “It’s a pleasure, as always. And right on time, too.”

“Do you have it?” Thomas Walden asked, completely forgetting his manners, “Is it finished?”

In response, Abraham Bernstein gave the young man a benign smile. “Of course, it is finished. I promised you that it would be, did I not?”

“And…?” Thomas Walden asked, near bursting with suspense.

Abraham Bernstein’s smile widened. “It is magnificent, if I may say so. A ring to win the heart of even the most icy of maidens. But see for yourself.”

With great ceremony, Bernstein unlocked the counter, picked up a ring from the display and held it under a desk lamp for Thomas to examine.

“A 0.75 carat emerald cut diamond flanked by smaller baguette cut diamonds and sapphires, all set in platinum…”

The technical terms meant little to Thomas, but he squinted at the ring, dazzled by the shimmer of the diamonds and sapphires.

“It… it’s beautiful,” he stammered.

“A true beauty for a beautiful lady,” Bernstein agreed, “The sapphires will match her eyes.”

“Her eyes?” Thomas exclaimed, utterly confused

“Your bride,” Bernstein clarified, “You told me she had blue eyes and blonde hair. The ring will match her eyes and hair and complexion.”

Thomas wasn’t entirely sure why engagement rings had to match a lady’s complexion. His own mother wore a plain gold band that certainly did not match her ruddy cheeks. But things were different now and Daisy was the daughter of a Wall Street banker, accustomed only to the very best. And this ring was the very best, or at least the very best Thomas could afford on a junior accountant’s salary.

“She will love it,” Abraham Bernstein assured him, “Young ladies always do.”

“Yes, I… I think she will.”

Bernstein placed the ring into a velvet lined box, while Thomas pulled out his chequebook and wrote a cheque with higher numbers than he had ever written, at least as far as he could recall.

“When is the proposal, if I may ask?” Bernstein wanted to know.

“Tonight,” Thomas blurted out, his hand shaking ever so slightly, “I’m meeting her at the fountain in City Hall Park in…” He checked his watch, his very modest watch, gilded instead of gold, 3.45 at Montgomery Ward’s. “…fifteen minutes.”

“But surely you won’t propose in the park,” Bernstein said.

“No, I have a table reserved at Zuccotti’s for tonight. Dinners, music, champagne, the whole works. And that’s where… where I’ll ask her.”

Thomas slipped the ring box into a pocket of his coat and smiled at old Mr. Bernstein. “Wish me luck.”

“I’m sure she will accept,” Bernstein said indulgently, “Mazel und brucha for both of you.”

And so Thomas Walden left Abraham Bernstein & Sons some ten minutes after he’d entered the shop, the ring box heavy in his pocket and his bank account lighter by several hundred dollars. With a spring in his step and a whistle on his lips, he walked north along Nassau Street towards City Hall Park where Daisy and his future were waiting for him.

He did not even notice the icy wind that blew down Nassau Street or the snowflakes that it drove into his face. And he certainly never noticed the man who was loitering in the doorway of a shuttered tobacconist shop across the street. Nor did he notice that the man emerged from the shadowed doorway and followed him, making sure to always stay about five steps behind.

***

At around the same time, Richard Blakemore, pulp writer by day and the steel-masked crimefighter known only as the Silencer by night, was walking up Nassau Street at a brisk pace.

For though the sun was still up — in theory at least, for that blasted Equitable Building was plunging all of lower Manhattan into shadow — the Silencer had already completed his mission for the day and has spent the afternoon putting the fear of God into a crooked banker who had cheated sweet little old ladies out of their life savings.

The banker had promised to pay back his ill-gotten gains — all of them — and donate the rest to the Littlest Angels Home for Orphans in Hell’s Kitchen. And just to make sure that the man kept his promise, Richard had personally watched him write the respective cheques, while he kept the Silencer’s silver-plated twin .45 automatics trained on the banker all the time.

He’d left the twin .45 automatics along with the Silencer’s steel mask locked in the trunk of his Maybach Zeppelin that was parked in the shadow of the Singer Building a few blocks away. And now he was just Richard Blakemore, pulp writer and man about town, on his way to a romantic dinner with his beautiful fiancée.

In his hand, he held a heart-shaped box of fine chocolates he’d picked up at a chocolatier on Maiden Lane. And in one of the many pockets of his swirling black coat — the same swirling black coat the Silencer wore — was a jewellery box holding a slender bracelet studded with diamonds and emeralds that matched Constance’s green eyes.

An icy wind whistled down Nassau Street, blowing snowflakes into his face, so Richard turned up the collar of his coat, tightened his blood-red silk scarf and pulled the brim of his fedora — the same fedora the Silencer always wore — deeper into his face.

Tomorrow he would start typing up the latest Silencer adventure, the one with the crooked banker. Though he would have to come up with a better title than that. Hmm, what about The Werewolf of Wall Street? Or maybe The Vampire of Wall Street?

He’d ask Constance which one she liked better. After all, he’d meet her soon. Most likely, she was already waiting for him at The Edgar, a restaurant in the atrium of the Temple Court Building, named after Edgar Allan Poe who’d once lived at that address, long before even there was a Temple Court Building, supposedly New York City’s first skyscraper, on the corner of Nassau and Beekman Street.

Richard smiled. He’d always liked The Edgar with its cosy mahogany and burgundy leather interior. And besides, as a writer of mysteries and crime fiction, Edgar Allan Poe was his patron saint of sorts. Hell, considering that Poe had not just invented the murder mystery, but also wrote adventure stories, satire, fantasy, horror and science fiction, he was the patron saint of all pulp writers everywhere. And so it was only appropriate to pay his respects to old Edgar and raise a glass in his honour once in a while.

The red brick façade and twin pyramidal peaks of the Temple Court Building were already in view, when Richard noticed a young man with curly hair walking maybe fifteen yards ahead of him. He seemed nervous, his right hand constantly fingering something in the pocket of his tweed coat. The young man stopped, glanced at his wrist watch, and abruptly turned into an alley that ran from Nassau Street to Park Row.

A few seconds later, another man in baggy pants and a herringbone newsboy cap, followed. Something gleamed in his hand, struck by a stray ray of light from a streetlamp. A switchblade knife.

Richard swore. He pulled his silk scarf over his face in lieu of a mask and set off in pursuit.

***

Thomas Walden was lost in his own thoughts as he walked along Nassau Street. In his mind, he formulated and reformulated his proposal, while his hand patted the pocket in which the ring box rested with every other step.

He did not notice the man in the herringbone newsboy cap who’d shadowed him ever since he’d left Abraham Bernstein & Sons, always careful to keep at least five steps behind. And he certainly did not notice the man in the long black coat and the fedora who walked maybe fifteen yards behind both of them.

Thomas passed the pharmacy on the corner of Nassau and Ann Street. Light spilled out of the windows onto the gloomy street, so Thomas took the opportunity to check his wristwatch, for 3.45 at Montgomery Ward’s did not buy you a fancy glow-in-the-dark dial. Almost six. Daisy would already be waiting for him by the fountain in City Hall Park. The most important date of his life and he was late. And wasn’t that just his luck?

But maybe he could still make it on time. Initially, Thomas had planned to turn onto Beekman Street and walk on to Park Row and City Hall Park. But there was a shortcut, an alley running behind the Temple Court Building all the way to Park Row, where it ended directly across from the entrance to City Hall Park. If he walked through that alley, he could save a few minutes and still make it to the fountain and Daisy on time.

Without hesitation, he turned into the alley, still unaware that he was being followed.

Nassau Street had been gloomy, but this nameless alley was almost pitch black. The cobble stones were slick with a mixture of wet snow and other, less palatable substances. Garbage leaked out of the trash cans behind The Edgar and occasionally, an enterprising rat scurried across the alley.

Thomas wrinkled his nose in disgust. He stepped into a puddle and soaked the hem of his trousers. He just hoped it was water and not something worse, cause he had no idea how to explain that to Daisy. Proposing while smelling of rat piss, wouldn’t that be just his luck?

He paused briefly to shake off whatever he’d stepped into and finally became aware of the footsteps behind him. It was probably nothing, just someone else taking the same shortcut he’d taken, but nonetheless Thomas decided to quicken his steps. And besides, Daisy was waiting.

“Where you going so fast?”

The voice echoed through the alley, hollow and mocking. Thomas did not answer. He just quickened his steps.

“Hey, I’m talking to you.”

In response, Thomas quickened his steps even further, almost running now, only to slip on a patch of black ice and fall flat on his face.

Proposing with a black eye and a bloody nose. And wasn’t that just his luck?

He barely had time to catch his breath, before he was roughly hauled to his feet again and slammed against the rear wall of the Temple Court Building.

A figure loomed before him, a shadowy figure wearing a newsboy cap.

“Didn’t your momma never tell you not to run?” the figure asked, his voice sneering, “And didn’t your momma never teach you no manners? Cause it’s not nice, running away when someone’s talking to you.”

“I… I’m sorry,” Thomas stammered, aware that a trickle of blood was running down his nose.

“Well, it’s nice that you’re sorry, but I can’t eat sorry,” the figure with the newsboy cap said, “And besides, this is a toll road and you…”

The figure poked a finger into Thomas’ chest.

“…you ain’t paid up yet.”

Something bright flashed in front of Thomas’ face. A knife.

“And now give me your money or I’ll slit your throat.”

The heroes of the pulp magazines Thomas sometimes read on the elevated during his commute to Brooklyn would have launched themselves at the mugger and seized the knife. But Thomas wasn’t a hero. He was just a junior accountant at Sinclair Oil and so he reached into his coat with trembling fingers to withdraw his wallet.

He had twenty-five dollars in there — to pay for the dinner, the champagne, the Hungarian violin player who would accompany his proposal with a rendition of “Gloomy Sunday”, which just happened to be Daisy’s favourite song. And if he was lucky, there would be enough for a cab ride home as well.

None of that would happen now — unless Zuccotti’s was understanding enough to let him put the dinner on tab and pay at the end of the week, when his next wage came in.

“And now the watch and the ring, quick.”

With trembling fingers, Thomas opened the leather band of his modest gilded watch, 3.45 at Montgomery Ward’s. He tugged on the class ring on his finger — Riverside High School, class of 1930. It took him a few tries, but then it came off, taking some of his skin with it.

Shaking, he handed the ring and the watch to the mugger, who unfortunately was more of a jewellery connoisseur than one would assume, given his chosen profession.

“This is junk,” the mugger spat, “Just junk.”

He flashed his knife in front of Thomas’ face again.

“I saw you coming out of Bernstein’s. And Abe Bernstein, he don’t sell no junk. He sells gold, diamonds, the good stuff. So what did you get at Bernstein’s?”

“N…nothing,” Thomas stammered, “I… I just made an inquiry.”

“Bullshit!”

The knife was at his throat again, very close now, so close that Thomas could feel the cold kiss of steel on his skin.

“You got something at Bernstein’s, something good. It’s in your pocket, the pocket you’re always fingering. And now hand it over or…”

The mugger did not elaborate. Not that there was any need.

“Please, no,” Thomas stammered, “It… it’s a ring, for my girl. Not the ring, please.”

But the mugger knew no mercy. “Give me the ring!”

***

Barely fifteen yards away, in the cosy mahogany and leather dining room of The Edgar, Constance Allen set alone at a table under a framed portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, patron saint of pulp writers everywhere. At least that’s what Richard said, for Constance sincerely doubted that Poe had ever been officially canonised.

She sipped on a glass of sherry and nibbled on some bread with beurre Maître d’Hôtel, steadfastly ignoring the pitying looks of the waiters in their frock coats and the other couples in their elegant clothes.

Though at least with regard to fashion, Constance and her gown of rose crêpe de chine that perfectly matched her auburn curls could keep up with any other woman in The Edgar tonight. There was only one problem. Everybody else was with their respective partners, while Constance was all alone.

She cast a surreptitious glance at her diamond studded Cartier watch. Richard was late. Again.

She should be used to this by now. Should be used to the waiting, the worry, the pitying looks from waiters and other diners. But nonetheless, she’d hoped that at least this once he’d be on time. After all, it was Valentine’s Day.

Constance knew that the Silencer was on a mission today. Nothing overly dangerous, Richard had assured her. All he had to do was put the fear of God into some crooked banker who’d swindled his clients out of their life savings. The banker was in his fifties, balding, pot-bellied. Not the sort to fight back. Most likely, he’d fold as soon as he laid eye on the Silencer. Quite possibly, Richard wouldn’t even need to draw his guns, let alone use them.

But sometimes, even balding and pot-bellied bankers kept a pistol in their desks. And sometimes, they even knew how to use it.

What if something had gone wrong? What if Richard was wounded, hurt, on the run? Or what if the banker had called the police? What if they’d come too soon and caught the Silencer red-handed? After all, Justin O’Grady’s favourite watering hole, The Beekman Pub, was just around the corner. What if Richard was languishing in a cell even now, facing the sort of trial that usually ended with a one way trip to the electric chair?

Constance took another sip of sherry to calm her nerves. Most likely, it was nothing. Richard was just late, that was all.

Like a ghost, a waiter appeared next to her table. “Is there anything else I can bring you, Miss?”

Constance forced herself to smile. “Not at the moment, thank you.”

The waiter gave her a sympathetic nod. “Is the gentleman late?”

“It would seem so.” Constance emitted a quick laugh that sounded fake even to her own ears. “He always forgets the time.”

“That’s typical of those Wall Street boys,” the waiter said, “Always so focussed on chasing after profit that they even forget a date with a lovely young lady.”

“Oh, my fiancé is not a banker,” Constance said, “He’s a writer.”

“Oh, a newspaper man then,” the waiter said, “Those reporters are even worse, so busy chasing down a story that they forget about everything else.”

“Quite so,” Constance said, her forced smile almost cracking her face.

***

“Maybe it’s nothing,” Richard told himself, as he followed the nervous young man and the sinister fellow with the newsboy cap into the alley behind the Temple Court Building. Maybe it was just a coincidence, perfectly harmless. Or maybe it was the sort of clandestine meeting that might be illegal, but was hardly a crime.

The alley was almost pitch dark and Richard fervently wished for the Silencer’s mask with its inbuilt nightvision gadget. But the mask was locked in the trunk of the Maybach, parked in the shadow of the Singer Building a few blocks away. So were his twin .45 automatics, which meant that Richard would have to make do without.

Though he was not entirely without weapons. He still had a set of brass knuckles he kept in a pocket of his coat — the Silencer’s coat — for emergencies. And so he ducked behind a trash can and slipped them over the fingers of his right hand. He also set the box of chocolates down on top of the trash can. He just hoped that the rats wouldn’t get to it, before this business had been dealt with.

“Where you going so fast?” the would-be mugger’s voice echoed through the alley. In response, the footsteps, which up to now had been regular, quickened.

“Hey, I’m talking to you.”

The footsteps became even quicker, as the young man finally realised the danger he was in. And then, the steps suddenly stopped with a splashing, crashing sound, as the young man slipped and fell.

He never had a chance to get up, before the mugger hauled him to his feet and slammed him back against the wall. The mugger’s knife gleamed in his hand, when a stray ray of light falling from a rear window of the Temple Court Building struck it.

Without a single sound, Richard crept closer, sticking to the shadows. Though it was unlikely that either the mugger or his victim would have noticed him anyway. The mugger was way too focussed on his loot and the victim was simply too terrified.

Richard watched as the young man handed over his valuables — wallet, watch, ring. And if the mugger had stopped there and made a run for it, he might still have gotten away. But he didn’t.

Instead, he flashed his knife and demanded that the young man hand something else over, something purchased at a shop called Bernstein’s. Richard wasn’t familiar with the shop, but then he didn’t have to be. After all, the area around Nassau Street, Fulton Street and Maiden Lane was Manhattan’s diamond district. So it wasn’t difficult to imagine just what it was that the mugger wanted.

Richard was close now, very close. Close enough to hear the mugger demand, “Give me the ring or I swear I’ll slit your throat from ear to ear!”

“No, please, it’s for my fiancée. I…”

The easiest way to deal with the situation would be to just knock out the mugger from behind. Not very honourable, true, but then muggers who attacked their victims in dark alleys didn’t deserve to be treated honourably.

There was just one problem. The mugger had his knife at the throat of the young man. The blade was close, too close. So close that the young man might be injured, when Richard knocked out the mugger from behind.

He sighed under his breath. Time for some showmanship then.

And so Richard readjusted his scarf, so it covered his mouth and nose, and stepped out of the shadows.

“Let the man go,” he thundered, his voice somewhat muffled by the scarf.

The mugger, however, did not let the young man go. “Get lost and mind your own business. This is my alley. Go find one of your own.”

“I am the Silencer,” Richard thundered, “Scourge of crime and protector of the innocent….”

Damn, that always sounded so much better in the pulps.

“And now let the man go or face the consequences!”

Now the mugger finally did let his victim go. The young man plunged to the ground, landing on his butt in a puddle of molten snow.

But Richard couldn’t worry about him now, because the mugger whirled around to face him, the knife still flashing in his hand.

“You really want to get slashed up, don’t you?”

The mugger launched himself at Richard, knife raised. But Richard sidestepped the attack. He grabbed the mugger by the wrist and slammed his knife hand against the wall, again and again, until the knife finally clattered to the ground.

Richard kicked the blade away, sending it skidding across the alley, well out of reach. But in the process, he dropped his defence and left himself open to a counter attack. And the mugger took that chance and punched Richard in the face.

He was wearing a ring and so the mugger drew blood. Not much, just a cut on the cheek and a split lip, but it was enough to knock Richard off balance, at least for a split second.

The mugger followed up with a second punch, but this time Richard managed to jump aside at the last second and the mugger’s punch hit the wall instead, breaking at least one of his knuckles with a satisfying crunch.

The mugger howled in pain and rage and whirled around to launch himself at the Silencer once more. But this time, Richard was ready for him. He raised his own fist, reinforced by brass knuckles, and knocked the mugger out. The man fell to the ground, out cold, and landed in a pile of wet snow and frozen trash.

Richard put the brass knuckles back into his pocket and pulled up his scarf, which had slipped during the fight.

“Are you all right?” he asked the victim, who was watching him with wide, terrified eyes.

The young man nodded. “I… I…” he stammered, clearly in shock. Once more, he patted the pocket of his coat. He pulled out a handkerchief, pressed it to his bleeding nose and cast a glance at the downed mugger. “Is he…?”

“It’s okay, he’s out cold,” Richard said, nodding at the mugger, “He can’t hurt you anymore.”

To make sure of that, Richard pulled a pair of handcuffs from one of the many pockets of his coat and snapped them around the mugger’s wrists. Then he searched the man’s pockets and found three wallets, two wristwatches, one pocket watch and one ring.

He handed the loot to the young man. “Here. See what’s yours and hand the rest over to the police. I’m sure you’re not his only victim.”

The young man, meanwhile, was still stammering. “I… I… I can’t see. It’s too dark.”

Richard sighed. He reached into yet another pocket of his coat and produced a compact but powerful flashlight. He switched it on and handed it to the young man.

“Here. That should help.”

The young man took the flashlight, but instead of examining the loot, he directed the beam upwards, at Richard’s face.

“Hey, I… I know you.”

Uh-oh, that was not good.

“You’re that guy from the magazine, the Shadow.”

Behind his red silk scarf, Richard breathed a sigh of relief. “The Silencer, actually.”

Although the young man had a point. With the scarf covering the lower half of his face, Richard did look a little like the Shadow. Though he’d better not tell Walt Gibson about this or he’d never live it down.

“I’m Thomas Walden, by the way,” the young man said, “And I thank you.”

Richard nodded. “Pleased to meet you. And now check what is yours.”

Thomas Walden riffled through the mugger’s loot and picked out one of the wallets, one of the wristwatches and the ring.

“Those are mine.” He opened the wallet and quickly counted the bills. “The money’s still there, too.” The young man looked up. “What about the rest?”

“Hand it over to the police. You may have to go to the police building on Centre Street or the first precinct stationhouse on South Street, though you’ll probably see a patrolman before then. Or try The Beekman Pub just around the corner and ask for Captain O’Grady. He’s usually there, when his shift ends. Let him know where he can pick up the mugger.”

“But I… I can’t go to the police,” Thomas Walden exclaimed, “Not now, at any rate. I… I’m meeting my girl in City Hall Park and I’m already late…” He glanced at his wristwatch. “…much too late, so I really have to go…”

Walden jumped to his feet, swaying only a little, and would have dashed off, if Richard hadn’t caught him by the arm.

“Easy. You’ve had quite a shock. And I’m sure your girl will understand, once you explain what happened.”

“But I… I’m proposing tonight,” Thomas exclaimed. Once more, he patted the pocket of his coat, where — so Richard now understood — he carried the ring. “And I can’t be late.”

Behind his makeshift mask, Richard smiled. “All right. Go and meet your girl in City Hall Park, explain what happened and then find a police officer.”

Thomas shone the beam of the flashlight down at himself, taking in his soiled trousers and a tear in one leg. “But I look like crap,” he said crestfallen and handed the flashlight back.

“Trust me, if she really loves you, she won’t mind. Though she may just fuss over you.” Constance would, at any rate. “And now go.”

“But… what about you?” Thomas wanted to know.

“I have a date of my own to keep.”

Richard cast a quick glance at his own wristwatch. The radium glow told him that he was already late. Fortunately, Constance was used to it by now, though she’d still worry.

“Oh yes, and I would appreciate it, if you could downplay my part in all this. The NYPD and I are not exactly friends.”

Well, Richard was friends with Justin O’Grady of the NYPD, but unfortunately, Justin was no friend of the Silencer’s.

“Farewell and good luck.”

Richard spun around, swirling his coat for theatrical effect, and walked back the way he’d come, towards Nassau Street. He even remembered to pick up the box of chocolates, checking first that the rats hadn’t gotten to it.

The pharmacy on the corner of Nassau and Ann Street was still open, its lights spilling out onto the sidewalk. Richard stopped and pulled down his scarf to check his reflection in the window. He had a split lip, a scratch on his right cheek and the beginnings of a black eye. Nothing that Constance hadn’t seen before, but nonetheless, she’d worry. And so Richard walked into the pharmacy to make himself a little more presentable.

“Good evening. I’d like some gauze, alum, iodine solution and adhesive bandages, please,” he told the clerk behind the counter, “An ice pack would be nice as well. And if I might borrow a mirror.”

The man shot him a look of sympathy. “Rough night, huh?”

Richard nodded. “I stumbled upon a mugging.”

“Oh dear. Should I call the police?”

Richard shook his head. “Already being taken care of. Now I just need to make myself presentable for my date, especially since I’m already late.”

***

A few minutes after his encounter with the mugger and the Silencer, Thomas Walden stumbled out of the alley onto Park Row. The Woolworth Building loomed before him, its gothic revival terracotta façade lit up for the evening. Once the tallest building in the world, it was still a striking cathedral of commerce, even though it was now only the sixth tallest skyscraper in the city — and how had that happened?

At the foot of the Woolworth Building lay City Hall Park, where Daisy was waiting for him by the fountain. And so, Thomas dashed across Park Row, nearly getting run down by honking cab in the process.

But Thomas did not slow down. He dashed through the wrought iron gates and past the bare trees, dashed towards the fountain at the centre of the park, the fountain where Daisy was waiting for him.

And then he spotted her in the swirling snow, dressed in a smart blue coat, a blue felt hat pressed onto her golden curls. The colour perfectly matched her eyes. It also, so Thomas couldn’t help but notice, matched the diamond and sapphire ring that still sat in his pocket. The ring he wanted to give her right now, rather than later at Zuccotti’s. Provided Zuccotti’s even still had a table for them, considering they were already late.

Daisy spotted him the moment he saw her and dashed towards him through the falling snow.

“Oh my God, Thomas, I was so worried.” She flung her arms around him and only now noticed his rather bedraggled appearance, the torn trousers and bloody nose. “What happened?”

“I was mugged,” Thomas panted, “Only a few yards away, in an alley off Nassau Street…”

“Oh my God,” Daisy repeated, pressing a gloved hand to her mouth, “We must call the police. I think I saw a patrolman only a few minutes ago.”

“And we will,” Thomas assured her, “Later. But first, there is something I have to ask you, something important…”

He dropped to his knees in the snow, right there and then. His trousers were already ruined anyway, so what did it matter? He’d ask Daisy right here, right now.

And so Thomas reached into his pocket, the very pocket he’d been patting every other minute, and pulled out the ring box. He even managed to open it, on the second try.

“Daisy Van Camp, will you marry me?”

For maybe half a second, Daisy was too stunned — or maybe too dazzled by the ring glittering in the light of the lanterns in the park — to respond. But then she reached out and pulled Thomas to his feet.

“Yes,” she said, “Yes, I will.”

And then she flung her arms around him and kissed him in the swirling snow.

***

At around the same time that Thomas proposed to Daisy in City Hall Park, Richard Blakemore finally walked into The Edgar and was met by a waiter who did his best to ignore the split lip, the swelling eye and the cut on his cheek, now covered by an adhesive bandage.

“A shaving accident,” Richard replied to the waiter’s unspoken question.

“Of course, sir. The lady is already waiting.”

The waiter escorted Richard to his table and there was Constance, a vision of loveliness in a dusty rose gown. A flicker of concern crossed her face, as she took in his injuries.

Richard bent down to kiss her on the cheek. “Sorry I’m late, dear.”

“What happened?” Constance wanted to know, once the waiter was out of earshot, “Did the banker fight back?”

Richard shook his head. “Not the banker. I came across a mugging in the alley right behind this building and had to intervene.” He smiled. “I rescued a young man and the engagement ring in his pocket. He’s probably proposing to his sweetheart right now. Which reminds me that I bought you chocolate from that shop on Maiden Lane you like so much…”

Richard handed her the heart-shaped box that was only a little battered.

“…and I also brought you this.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the jewellery box with the diamond and emerald bracelet.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, my love.”

The End

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new free story will be posted.

WandaVision Takes a Detour into the Real World in “We Interrupt This Program”

It’s time for the latest installment of my episode by episode reviews of WandaVision, Marvel’s new sitcom parody/Dickian faux reality paranoia. Previous installments (well, just two) may be found here. Also, may I remind you that Disney is still not paying Alan Dean Foster and others.

Warning: Spoilers and pretty significant ones at that behind the cut!

After last episode, I probably wasn’t the only one who wondered where WandaVision, Marvel’s time and reality-hopping, Philip K. Dickian sitcom, would go next. Would we put in a stop in the late 1970s or go straight into the 1980s? But once again, WandaVision surprised us by…

…transforming into a regular Marvel movie for an episode, complete with regular widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio.

“We Interrupt This Program” begins on the day that everybody who was snapped out of existence by Thanos comes back all at the same time. We’re in a hospital, where Monica Rambeau (played by Teyonah Parris, whom we previously met as Geraldine) is reassembled and wakes up in a chair beside an empty bed in a hospital that has been plunged into chaos, because doctors, patients and visitors are suddenly reappearing in droves after five years of non-existence.

Avengers: Endgame focussed on those who were not snapped out of existence by Thanos and the trauma they suffered, but it largely ignored the experience of the people who suddenly came back to life after five years with no idea of what had happened and that the world had moved on (literally in many cases) without them. Due to the pandemic, there haven’t really been a lot of Marvel movies set after Endgame – only Spider-Man: Far From Home, which kind of glossed over the whole thing.

However, the brief early scenes with Monica Rambeau blipping back into existence give us an excellent insight into the traumatic experiences of those who came back after five years. For Monica not only had no idea what happened, she’s also frantic because the person at whose hospital bed she was sitting – her mother Maria Rambeau, last seen in Captain Marvel – is gone and the bed is empty. So Monica runs through a hospital that’s in utter chaos, asking for her mother, until a doctor recognises her. However, this doctor has bad news for Monica. Not only was Monica gone for five years, her mother has also died in the meantime.

Yes, those bastards killed Maria Rambeau off screen!

Now Lashana Lynch*, the actress who played Maria Rambeau, left for what probably seemed like the greener pastures of the James Bond franchise at the time to appear in No Time to Die, a Bond film that has been repeatedly delayed to the point that no one is sure whether it will ever come out at all or whether anybody will care at that point. Not that I can’t understand Lashana Lynch’s decision. The Bond films, though I’m over them and have been for almost twenty years now, are still a big deal, particularly in the UK. And a part in a Bond film, particularly since it appears to be a recurring role, is still a plum job and joining the ranks of Bond girls is still a nigh guarantee of cinematic immortality.

Nonetheless, I’m pissed at Marvel for killing off Maria Rambeau off-screen, because Maria was awesome. Killing Maria in her fifties (based on Captain Marvel being set in 1994 and Lashana Lynch being 31, when she made that movie) via cancer is doubly unfair. Of course, no one is ever really dead in the Marvel universe (ask Phil Coulson or Vision, for that matter, for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and pretty much every character but particularly Jean Grey for the Marvel Comics universe), so we may well see Maria again. I certainly hope so.

In the course of the episode, we also learn that Maria went from ex-fighter pilot and single mom living alone somewhere in the South in Captain Marvel to director of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s sister organisation S.W.O.R.D. We suspect Nick Fury, whom she met in Captain Marvel, may have pulled some strings there. That said, I think it’s awesome that both S.H.I.E.L.D. and S.W.O.R.D. were founded and run by women and POC in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even if Maria’s successor as director is a white dude. Talking of which, has this fellow appeared somewhere in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before? Cause he didn’t seem familiar. The actor Josh Stamberg has been in pretty much everything, but I can’t find anything Marvel releated in .

Monica Rambeau also works for S.W.O.R.D. and swiftly reports back for duty, only to be told that she’s grounded for now, because no one yet knows what the psychological and physical repercussions of being blipped out of and back into existence will be. So instead of going into space, Monica is sent to New Jersey to help the FBI with a missing person case.

Once in New Jersey, Monica meets another familiar face from the Marvel movies, namely FBI agent Jimmy Woo (played by Randall Park) whom we last saw getting caught up in same very weird events in Ant-Man and the Wasp. James Pyles pointed out on Twitter that Jimmy Woo actually has a long history in the Marvel Universe and first appeared in a 1956 comic called The Yellow Claw as one of the first sympathetic Asian characters (the comic otherwise seems to have been typical yellow peril/red scare fare). It seems weirdness is following Agent Woo around (well, he lives in the Marvel Universe), because when trying to contact a person who’s in the witness protection program, Agent Woo found that not only that person had seemingly vanished, but the entire town of Westview, New Jersey, had vanished as well. And anybody who knew either the missing witness or anybody else in Westview, New Jersey, is suddenly struck by anmesia. It seems as if Westview, New Jersey, never existed.

Monica finds that Westview is surrounded by some kind of forcefield. When she tries to send in a S.W.O.R.D. drone, the drone promptly vanishes. A bit later, Monica herself approaches the forcefield herself and is promptly sucked in. Most likely, Agent Woo immediately contacted S.W.O.R.D. to report that he has not only lost a witness and a whole town, but also a S.W.O.R.D. agent, because the next time we see the quiet little town of Westview, it is surrounded by a temporary base.

The scene now shifts to a transporter full of scientists who are brought in to help with the investigation. One of these scientists is another familiar face we haven’t seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a while now, namely Darcy Lewis, now Dr. Darcy Lewis, Jane Foster’s intern and friend in the two first Thor movies. Darcy is played by Kat Dennings, who also has significant sitcom experience via her roles in Two Broke Girls and Raising Dad, where she played the sister of Brie Larson, i.e. none other than Captain Marvel herself.

Via her equipment, Darcy detects that the barrier around Westview is emitting huge amounts of cosmic radiation of the type that occurred shortly after the Big Bang. But there is also another type of longer wave radiation, which turns out to be some kind of broadcast signal. “Get me a really old TV”, Darcy asks someone, “And with really old, I mean not flat.”

Once Darcy has been hooked up with a TV, we next see her watching the first episode of WandaVision, which we already saw two weeks ago. “What is this?” someone asks. “It’s a sitcom”, Darcy replies, “A 1950s sitcom.” “But why would someone make a sitcom starring two Avengers?” Agent Park wants to know, expressing the thoughts of pretty much everybody when WandaVision was first announced. And indeed, Camestros Felapton points out in his review that the discussions among the characters in this episode mirror the discussions the viewers had after the last three episodes.

We now get to see snippets of the episodes we already saw, viewed on Darcy’s TV and later on a whole bunch of other ancient TVs. The bit about the difficulties of getting these very old TVs to work rang very true, because old tube TVs are becoming an endangered species, because they were mostly thrown away, after they were no longer useful.

Meanwhile, Darcy, Agent Woo and the others try to identify the people in the sitcom and gradually match the characters to inhabitants of Westview. They also wonder how Vision can be there, when he’s supposed to be dead. Though I wonder how they can recognise Vision in his human disguise. Yes, the Avengers are celebrities, but I imagine that Vision would be in his original form during official appearances. Interestingly, Wanda’s nosy neighbour Agnes has not yet been identified and neither has the missing witness. Eventually, Darcy and Agent Woo also spot Monica in her role as Westview inhabitant “Geraldine”, though they have no idea if Monica knows what’s going on and is playing along or if she has been taken over by the sitcom reality.

We now also get explanations for many of the weird breaks and blips in the sitcom reality we saw in the past three episodes. The red toy helicopter Wanda found in her garden was one of the drones S.W.O.R.D. keeps sending into Westview. The sinister fellow in the beekeeper’s outfit who emerged from a manhole was a S.W.O.R.D. agent in a hazmat suit who tried to infiltrate Westview via the sewers. And the voice from the radio in episode 2 was Agent Woo trying to get through to Wanda via the broadcast signal. However, Darcy also notes that anytime the sitcom illusion threatens to crack, the broadcast seems to be censored (via Wanda rewinding reality, as we’ve seen her do twice before).

It’s also facinating how both Darcy and Agent Woo do become invested in the sitcom world and Wanda’s and Vision’s life, even though they know it’s all a fake. In many ways, this mirrors how we become caught up in fictional narratives to the point that if a character dies in a longrunning soap opera, people start applying for the now empty apartment, even though the whole thing is wholly fictional.

Eventually, the episode gets to the point where episode 3 ended. Monica unwisely mentions Pietro and Ultron and Wanda ejects her from Westview. Monica lands on the grass just outside the forcefield. “Wanda”, she stammers, once she comes to again, “It’s all Wanda”, expressing what we already suspected. Wanda has created the sitcom reality and kidnapped a whole town full of people, likely in response to the massive trauma of losing pretty much everybody who ever mattered to her (not to mention being killed and brought back to life herself).

In the sitcom world, Wanda also gets a shocking reminder of the truth when she sees Vision grey and dead with the mind stone torn out of his forehead by Thanos. But once again, Wanda magicks everything away and the episode ends with her playing family with Vision and the twins.

There was a hint of the sinister behind the cheery suburban facade and canned laughter of WandaVision from the beginning, but in this episode it comes fully to the fore, once we see both the trauma Wanda and everybody else brought back to life after five years away underwent, but also the horror of what Wanda is doing, namely roping real people with real lives into her personal little fake reality. Nonetheless, I can’t bring myself to see Wanda as the villain here, at least not a witting villain, no more than I did in the comics. Because the Wanda we see in WandaVision is the Wanda that comic readers have known for years now, a young woman who’s deeply traumatised, highly unstable, very powerful and very dangerous.

It’s also interesting that at least in the comics, the children of the frenemies Magneto and Professor Xavier, namely Wanda and Legion, are the ones who keep breaking reality and messing up whole universe, in response to parental neglect and their traumatic upbringing. Throw in Jean Grey, whose transformation into Dark Phoenix occurred due to the massive trauma of dying (for the first time – by now Jean is an old hand at dying) as well as to being mind-raped (since confirmed by writer Chris Claremont to have been a stand-in for a physical rape he couldn’t portray within the strictures of the Comics Code) and it becomes clear that the most powerful and dangerous superbeing who did some of the worst damage to the Marvel Universe were all born of massive trauma. Okay, there’s also Jim Jaspers who breaks universes without any PTSD excuse, but then Jaspers is frequently forgotten, probably because he originated with Marvel UK, in spite of being one of the scariest Marvel characters ever.

Another thing I really liked about this episode of WandaVision is that it’s second-stringers and supporting characters like Jimmy Woo, Darcy Lewis and Monica Rambeau (whom we’ve only seen as an approximately ten-year-old supporting character in Captain Marvel so far) rather than the Avengers, Nick Fury or other major characters who are trying to stop/save Wanda and rescue the people of Westview. And come to think of it, both Wanda and Vision were very much second-string characters themselves up to this point. Wanda does play a decent enough role in Age of Ultron, but was very much in the background in Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. And Vision’s biggest scenes were his “birth” and his death. Neither of them ever had a solo movie. So WandaVision is finally giving the supporting characters and second-stringers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe their due. Furthermore, WandaVision finally portrays Wanda as the character we know from the comics, where she is one of the most powerful and potentially dangerous characters in the whole Marvel Universe, rather than as a goth girl with glowy hands and telekinetic powers.

I was initially sceptical about WandaVision, but after a few minutes of adjustment, I have been enjoying the first three episodes quite a bit. “We Interrupt This Program”, however, kicks the entire series into a higher gear and also links it to the regular Marvel Cinematic Universe rather than leaving the series as some weird side project.

I can’t wait to see what Wanda and S.W.O.R.D. will do next.

*Talking of Lashana Lynch, I recently spotted her in a rerun of Death in Paradise together with Dominique Tipper, who plays Naomi Nagata in The Expanse. Now British crime dramas like Midsomer Murders or Death in Paradise quite often feature future stars before they were famous, but two future stars in a single episode is unusual.

Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for January 2021

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie and small press authors (as well as the occasional Big 5 book) newly published this month, though some December books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, urban fantasy, historical fantasy, gaslamp fantasy, sword and sorcery, paranormal mysteries, supernatural thrillers, technothrillers, science fiction thrillers, space opera, military science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, Cyberpunk, Steampunk, horror, LitRPG, speculative poetry, vampires, demons, goblins, muses, goddesses, haunted houses, mechas, first contact, interstellar wars, superheroes, dread worms, dark gods, barbarian kings, crime-busting witches, crime-busting ghosts, murderous artificial intelligences, death retired and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Speculate: A Collection by Microlit by Eugen Bacon and Dominique Hecq:

From what began as a dialog between two adventurous writers curious about the shape-shifter called a prose poem comes a stunning collection that is a disruption of language-a provocation. Speculate is a hybrid of speculative poetry and flash fiction, thrumming in a pulse of jouissance and intensity that chases the impossible.

One might describe some pieces as complex, relentless, but above all, speculating or crossing borders in the fantastic playground of language. We invite you to leap onto the stage of your own imaginings, plunge into what Henry James called the house of fiction.

This is how we envision ours:

A single detached house tossed out of Speculate settles across your dreams. Skin, paper-thin, desiccated and scripted like a collage, covers the absence of doors, thresholds, verandas, stairways and footpaths. But there are windows and louvers that look out to rain-licked grasslands. This is a house unsealed, with the sky art and earth art washed or rolled into each other on adjacent floors and walls. The roof, unlettered, is made of two sliding suns of creamed panels, foundation-like. Round the back is a rope ladder that will win you over. Up, up you go. Enter with care as you would any fiction that blurs the boundaries of genre, mode or form, that goes beyond the written and borrows from the unwritten. Together we can interweave art with language and watch it shape itself anew in an endless process of spontaneity and play because we can be here and there and away, all at once.

-Dominique Hecq and Eugen Bacon

The Plains of Shadow by Richard Blakemore and Cora Buhlert:

Long before Kurval became King of Azakoria, he was a guard captain in service to the tyrannical King Talgat of the land Temirzhan beyond the sea.

One day, Talgat orders Kurval to escort the condemned witch Aelisia to the Plains of Shadow and behead her, so her blood may feed the dark gods who dwell there.

However, Kurval does not want to execute the sentence, once he learns that Aelisia is innocent of the crimes of which she has been accused.

But if he lets Aelisia go free, Kurval will not only have to face the wrath of Talgat but also the fury of the dark gods who dwell upon the Plains of Shadow.

This is a novelette of 9800 words or approx. 33 print pages in the Kurval sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

Worm Fodder by Richard Blakemore and Cora Buhlert:

After a hunt, King Kurval of Azakoria and his entourage make camp at the village of Ogwall. However, something is not right in the village. All men of fighting age are away at a mysterious ritual and the remaining villagers are clearly afraid of something.

Kurval investigates and learns that the mysterious ritual in the woods involves sacrificing the young Celisa to the dread worm Thibunoth.

Kurval is furious, for he outlawed human sacrifice in the kingdom of Azakoria. And so he sets out to save Celisa, deal with the monster and punish those who would violate the ban on human sacrifice.

This is a novelette of 9600 words or approx. 32 print pages in the Kurval sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

Blind Date with a Supervillain by H.L. Burke:

Juggling life as a superhero with college and a social life is hard, but Shawn Park, AKA Surge, feels he’s killing it. Things look even brighter when he makes a connection with the sweet but shy new barista at his favorite coffee shop. Maybe a guy really can have it all … but appearances can be deceiving.

Apparition just wants her supervillain father to be proud of her, and she’ll do anything to accomplish that: even disguise herself as mild-mannered coffee shop employee Nikki to get close to the superhero he’s stalking. However, between his charming smile and kind words, she finds herself hopelessly drawn tp the good natured Shawn.

As the chemistry between Shawn and Nikki sizzles, the tension between Surge and Apparition grows. If he finds out the truth, they could be headed for something far more explosive than the average breakup.

Wherever Seeds May Fall by Peter Cawdron:

The Prince of Darkness is coming. Comet Anduru skimmed the clouds of Saturn. Rather than being drawn into the gas giant, it skipped back out into space. With the comet heading for Jupiter, speculation is mounting it’s an alien spacecraft making its way to Earth. Lieutenant Colonel Nolan Landis and Dr. Kath McKenzie are caught between an angry public and an anxious President as they grapple with the scientific, social, and political implications of First Contact.

FIRST CONTACT is a series of stand-alone novels that explore the concept of humanity’s first interaction with extraterrestrial life. Like BLACK MIRROR or THE TWILIGHT ZONE, the series is based on a common theme rather than common characters, allowing these books to be read in any order. Technically, they’re all first as they all deal with how we might initially respond to contact with aliens, exploring the social, political, religious, and scientific aspects of First Contact.

The Brass Queen by Elizabeth Chatsworth:

She knows a liar when she sees one.
He knows a fraud when he meets one.

In a steam-powered world, Miss Constance Haltwhistle is the last in a line of blue-blooded rogues. Selling firearms under her alias, the “Brass Queen,” she has kept her baronial estate’s coffers full. But when US spy J. F. Trusdale saves her from assassins, she’s pulled into a search for a scientist with an invisibility serum. As royal foes create an invisible army to start a global war, Constance and Trusdale must learn to trust each other. If they don’t, the world as they know it will disappear before their eyes.

If you like the Parasol Protectorate or the Invisible Library series, you’ll love this gaslamp fantasy—a rambunctious romantic romp that will have you both laughing out loud and wishing you owned all of Miss Haltwhistle’s armaments.

The Fury of Angels by Julian M. Coleman:

It’s the late 1800s, and Sara’s mother is a witch. It’s the 21st century, and Sammy is trapped in prep school hell. The identical besties are doomed to immortality. It’s their lethal rage that makes them efficient killers.

 

 

 

 

Scions of Humanity by M.D. Cooper:

The Orion War is over and new peace is spreading…

It will take centuries for the legacy of the prior conflict to fade away, conflicts spurred on by diasporas and resource restrictions that will ripple through the Perseus, Orion, and Sagittarius arms of the galaxy.

Yet in the wake of those final battles comes a reprieve, a new peace maintained by the knowledge that total war is too devastating to even contemplate, that the weapons employed–should they come into common use–would lay waste to the galaxy.

Admiral Tanis Richards, the former Field Marshal, wishes nothing more than to retire to her lakehouse and stare out over the rippling waters for a year or two, but knows she cannot. For the greatest enemy that humanity and free AIs have ever faced waits for her at the galactic core. Epsilon, a powerful AI, his nodes filling an entire world, is has his mind bent on remaking the universe, and organic life is not in the blueprint.

Though they yearn to enjoy the fruits of their labors, Tanis and her allies must prepare for one final battle against the scions of the human race. They must prepare to fight The Ascension War.

The Cemetery Ghost by Amy Cross:

As she explores a snowy cemetery, Elizabeth Shaw is shocked to come across a strange little boy. Although he remembers his name, Patrick has no idea where he comes from, and a moment later he vanishes into thin air.

Meanwhile, a mysterious man moves into the nearby rectory. Determined to recover a dangerous book, Jerome Shand starts by torturing the spirits of a family who died many years ago. When that approach fails, however, Shand realizes that he only has one option left. He needs to find the last remaining ghost of the Munce family, a young boy named Patrick who disappeared after he and his family were murdered seventy years earlier…

Soon, Elizabeth and Patrick discover that leaving the past behind isn’t as easy as they’d hoped. Dark forces are waiting in the shadows of the rectory, and an evil force is desperate to break free. Can Patrick stop Shand, or will the ancient Lochdale Book finally spill its evil secrets into the world?

Dawn Breaker by Pippa DaCosta:

With Rafe missing, demons claiming half the night station, and the vampire queen closing in, Lynher and Kensey are left with nowhere to hide. Backed into a corner, they must fight.

But can two human orphans harness the magic of the night station to stand against the vampire queen?

 

 

California Demon by Debra Dunbar:

In New Hell, only the monsters survive.

Eden Alvaro is a licensed Vulture, picking through the aftermath of violence in demon-plagued LA, and fencing her finds to help support her family. But when a crooked cop reports her for a salvage she didn’t take, all hell breaks loose.

Stripped of her license, Eden finds herself with a price on her head. When the mercenaries hunting her raid her home, brutalize her family and abduct one of her sisters, Eden turns to the enigmatic Bishop—a man with a reputation for violence who, for the right price, can find just about anything or anyone.

With time running out to find her sister before she’s sold into slavery, Eden is determined to get her back—even if she has to slaughter her way through a gang affiliated with the traffickers and face down one of the powerful demons in control of the city.

She’ll need every bit of her burgeoning magical powers to bring her sister back alive—and she’ll need to put herself in debt to Bishop. But when it comes to her family, no price is too high for Eden to pay.

Muse Delusion by T.K. Flor:

A lost manuscript. A woman determined to find it. A man who finds her irresistible.

In NYC, freelance consultant Jack Ellis – still grieving after the death of his beloved grandmother – finally starts to put his life back together. But his attempts to leave the past behind unravel when he meets Lisa, a storybook-beautiful woman who claims she came for a manuscript that Jack’s grandmother promised her. A manuscript Jack has never heard of.

Allured by her beauty and drawn to her impetuous personality, Jack joins Lisa in a search that takes them on an unexpected journey, casting the people he thought he knew in a whole new light.

There’s no doubt Lisa is a disruptive force, yet Jack cannot disentangle himself from her quirky and potentially dangerous intrusion. Lisa is all charm when it suits her, but can Jack accept her mysterious mental powers and embrace a woman who believes she is actually a muse from Mount Olympus?

Jotnar Snare by Rachel Ford:

A reclusive mountain race. A paradise under siege. A problem magic cannot solve.

When the Jotnar’s mountain paradise is attacked by a seemingly all-powerful enemy, the race of giants must break their age-old rule and seek help from outsiders. They turn to the mage’s university to understand the threat.

Apprentice Wizard Idun Wintermoon and blade-for-hire Liss Forlatt travel to the wintery mountain stronghold to aid the giantfolk. But to defeat a foe who turns the magic of his victims against them, they’ll need to tap into strengths they didn’t know they had.

To defeat a magic siphoning wizard, sometimes you need a magic-challenged sellsword.

The Dark Lord Bert 2 by Chris Fox:

How Does a 1 Hit Point Dark Lord Save the Real World?

Kit and her friends are gamers, but not the ordinary kind. It seems that Track Jick was right, and that people who play roleplaying games really are wizards and witches. Kit’s game master uses a magical die to transport them to an alternate world where they can really become their characters, and forget all about the real world.

Unfortunately, during a power scuffle the d20 gets knocked into the game world. If they can’t get it out then the game world will explode, and everything in it will die. Worse, to Kit’s mind, their parents will be disbarred, and they’ll never be able to play again.

Enter one tiny goblin with just a single hit point, but a heart large enough to save a fake world…if he can reach the d20 before the Dark Lord White 2.0. Along the way Bert will meet his fellow dark lords, and finally learn magic. Plus Boberton gets very large indeed.

The Valiant by J.J. Green:

King Arthur in outer space?

Endless warfare has ravaged Earth, and billions are desperate to escape. One of them is Taylan Ellis.

Driven from her home in the West Britannic Isles by an invasion and severed from her children, Taylan enlists with the Britannic Alliance, hoping she can help regain her homeland and find her kids.

But decades of internal conflict and terrestrial and space warfare have left the BA on the edge of collapse.

Then its battleship, the Valiant, picks up a distress signal. The rescuers break into a sealed chamber and find the apparently mummified remains of an Iron Age chieftain. Disappointed, they’re about to leave when they discover the ‘mummy’ has a pulse.

Taylan suspects she knows who the mystery man is and what he’s capable of. If she’s right, can she convince her superiors and save the BA, her country, and her children?

The Valiant is book one in J.J. Green’s new space fantasy series, Star Legend.

Ghostly Wedding by Lily Harper Hart:

Harper Harlow and Jared Monroe fell in love fast and hard. Finally, their big day is here.

They just need to solve a murder before they exchange their vows and take the next step to happily ever after.

Peter Humphrey, an insurance salesman from a neighboring town, appeared to be minding his own business when a woman came out of nowhere and struck him down while he was crossing the street. Harper witnessed the accident and vows to solve the murder before it’s time to leave on her honeymoon.

It might take more work than she realizes, though.

Peter was a normal guy, a father who doted on his daughter and was friendly with his ex-wife, and yet somehow he had a secret. His ghost points Harper toward Montgomery Manor, toward a woman who suffered her own tragedy almost two decades before.

On paper, Peter’s murder and the Montgomery tragedy shouldn’t be connected … and yet they are. It’s up to Jared and Harper to figure out how if they want to enjoy their wedding and what comes after … and they’re both determined to do it.

Some things are meant to be. Harper and Jared believe their union is one of those things.

Prepare yourselves, because this is one wedding you’ll never forget.

Alyx: An AI’s Guide to Love and Murder by Brent A. Harris:

Home is where the heart is. It’s where you go to feel safe with your loved ones.

But what if your home wanted you dead?

Tech-loving teen Christine makes fast friends with her home’s AI, Alyx. But when a real-world romance threatens their bond, Alyx turns from friend to foe.

 

So Beckons the Abyss by Joel Jenkins:

The Cataclysm changed the face of the world, swallowing up modern cities and gleaming skyscrapers while vomiting up the ruins of ancient civilizations.Many governments and institutions collapsed, while others survived by reinventing themselves or reforming from the ashes of the old societies.During this time, a new sport of cutthroat cross-country vehicular racing developed and became an international sensation. The racers are worldwide celebrities, but dark and mystical forces are at work to control and use them.

 

On the Street Where Death Lives by Cate Lawley:

Skeletons in the closet

The living have them, but what about ghosts? Geoff’s about to find out! He’s convinced his ghostly neighbor Ginny was murdered. When he starts digging for answers, he unearths more than facts.

Join Geoff, his favorite bobcat Clarence, Sylvie and a gang of supernatural misfits as they investigate murders, both past and present!

 

Cooking for Cannibals by Rich Leder:

Fountain of youth? More like murderous medication!

Carrie Kromer pushes the boundaries of science, not her social life. The brilliant behavioral gerontologist’s idea of a good time is hanging out with her beloved lab rats and taking care of her elderly mother and the other eccentric old folks at the nursing home. So no one is more surprised than Carrie when she steals the lab’s top-secret, experimental medicine for aging in reverse.

Two-time ex-con Johnny Fairfax dreams of culinary greatness. But when his corrupt parole officer tries to drag him from the nursing home kitchen, the suddenly young-again residents spring to his defense and murder the guy—and then request Johnny cook them an evidence-devouring dinner to satisfy their insatiable side-effect appetite.

As their unexpected mutual attraction gets hot, Carrie and Johnny find themselves caught up with the authorities who arrive to investigate the killing. But even more dangerous than the man-eating not-so-senior citizens could be the arrival of death-dealing pharmaceutical hitmen.

Can Carrie and Johnny find true love in all this bloody madness?

Cooking for Cannibals is a dark comic thriller with a heaping helping of romance. If you like fast-paced plots, unconventional characters, and humor that crosses the line, then you’ll have a feast with Rich Leder’s wild ride.

Buy Cooking for Cannibals and dig in to a side-splitting serving today!

Long, Hot, Witchy Summer by Amanda M. Lee:

Life couldn’t be going much better for Hadley Hunter. She’s living the dream on Moonstone Bay with her boyfriend Galen Blackwood, plotting her next move as a witch for hire, and basically basking in happiness.

That all changes when a summer afternoon on the beach turns into a nightmare, an odd creature from the depths of the ocean surfacing and attacking Hadley on the beach. Her friend Lilac, a demon with a few issues, fights it off but it escapes … and becomes a problem for an island that bases its entire economy on tourism.

The all-powerful DDA isn’t happy. Lilac’s hair refuses to stop glowing red. Booker is struggling to help all his friends. Essentially, things turn messy quickly.

On top of that, Hadley’s father drops in out of nowhere and demands she return home. He’s not happy with what he hears about the island and decides it’s too dangerous for her to say. Hadley, of course, has other ideas and is determined to bring her father around to her way of thinking.

Between monsters popping up out of nowhere and her father’s inability to stop freaking out, Hadley has her hands full. The monsters keep popping up in the oddest places, and always their attention is on Hadley.

Monsters are nothing new for Hadley but the ones attacking now seem to be different. It’s up to Moonstone Bay’s newest witch and her motley crew of paranormal colleagues to solve a mystery and save the day. Again.

They just have to survive to do it.

Family Solstice by Kate Maruyama:

The Massey family loves their house. It’s been in the family for generations, and the land on which it sits has been with them even longer. In the summer everyone comes through to visit and the house is alive with family friends, barbecues and lobster boils. But come fall, the mood shifts as all of the kids start training for their turn in the basement.

Shea, the youngest Massey is training extra hard. She’s thirteen and that means this is her year to battle on Solstice. Her older siblings won’t tell her exactly what’s in the basement, you don’t know until you’re fighting it. She’s excited finally to be in the know.

She does know that whatever happens in the basement every December 21 makes it possible for the Masseys to spend the rest of the year enjoying their home and all that it brings. It is her family duty.

But something about this year is different. Mama’s extra quiet this fall, and the house is breathing early.

Maruyama explores the dangers of tradition, inheritance, and the sins of the father in this horror novella.

Disposable Heroes by Gregory Mattix:

Boomer is a pretty simple guy for an alien hybrid. He runs on booze, caffeine, and junk food. He works as a bullet-resistant tank for a crew of street-running mercenaries. If someone needs hurting or something needs blowing up, he’s the guy to do it. It might not be the most glam life in Arutairu Megacity, but it’s his, and he’s rather attached to it.

When Boomer’s team takes on a shady job with the promise of a stellar payday, the proverbial excrement quickly meets the fan, and hit squads come after him and his crew. Normally, a few amateur goons with guns would just make for good target practice, but he suddenly finds himself unable to protect his friends. His rapidly expanding list of problems soon includes double-crosses, femme fatales, a hybrid assassin wielding alien weaponry, and an army of mercs gunning for him and his rapidly dwindling crew. As if that mess wasn’t enough to deal with, he fears he might be losing his sanity as he blunders into the middle of a conspiracy so vast it will shake the foundations of the entire city.

What’s a dumb grunt like him to do? Get some bigger guns and fight back, of course. And make some bastards rue the days they were born.

Steel Rogue by Alex Oakchest:

Rick is destined to become a legend.

But he doesn’t realize that yet. Right now, Rick is a young guy with a secret that will get him into trouble. He inherited forbidden magic from his mother, who disappeared before she could teach him how to use it.

When his father is murdered and Rick is stalked by a deadly bounty hunter, he gets his ass out of town. Searching for a way to use his secret powers, he finds himself in a tough new city where a bunch of thieves become his mentors.

Soon, he’s at the bottom of the ranks of a sect of magic users. Fueled by his wish to grow stronger, he finds ways to exploit his new powers. Tested to his breaking point by his new teachers, he gains abilities that he never knew existed.

With a desire for greatness and magic of infinite potential, so begins Rick’s rise to legend.

Null Identity by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant:

From the bestselling authors of Invasion and Yesterday’s Gone comes Null Identity, a new stand-alone novel written in the world of The Tomorrow Gene. This is a disturbing philosophical exploration of what can happen when our scientific advancement outpaces our ethics.

Cassandra Knight is trying hard to believe that she is safe and sane. Living with an adoring billionaire in his luxurious secluded mansion, she should have everything she needs to recover from the mental breakdown that drove her to attempt suicide.

And yet, she is haunted by vividly recurring nightmares of the moment she tried to take her life and the persistent feeling that something just isn’t right.

What happened on that hazy night when she hit rock bottom, and why does it seem like everything and everyone around her are conspiring to keep her from remembering?

Null Identity is a compelling mix of Ex Machina meets The Invisible Man in the story of one woman’s struggle to unearth the truth and understand her own past.

Grave Mistake by Christine Pope:

When you pull up stakes, make sure you don’t get stabbed in the back.

Self-taught in the arcane arts, hedgewitch Selena Marx is comfortable doing divination for West Los Angeles’ anxiety-ridden housewives, lawyers, and aspiring actresses. Her biggest challenge? Avoiding Lucien Dumond, leader of the Greater Los Angeles Necromancers’ Guild, who views her as fresh meat to add to his harem of slavishly devoted groupies.

Selena’s not interested in the slimy, celebrity-schmoozing sorcerer, but nobody turns Lucien down without consequences. When he threatens to fit her with magical cement shoes and drop her off the Santa Monica Pier, Selena’s Tarot cards point her to Globe, Arizona, for a new home, a new shop, and a cursed pet cat.

Just as she’s settling in and meeting the locals — including Calvin Standingbear, hunky chief of the San Ramon Apache tribal police — Lucien tracks her down…and promptly disappears. When his body turns up on tribal lands, it’s up to Calvin to investigate. Starting with Selena.

And when one of Lucien’s acolytes is killed, traces of dark magic and cryptic warnings from the spirits send Selena and Calvin in a race against time — before a too-close-for-comfort evil cuts her own life short.

At the Gates and Other Stories by Patrick Samphire:

A ghost searches for revenge in ancient Egypt. A boy unearths the bones of a dragon. A girl risks awakening a dark god to save her dog…

He reached out a hand and touched Grace’s cheek. The touch made her shiver. “You can’t save everyone, Grace.”

“I don’t want to,” Grace whispered. “Just her.”

At the Gates and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen fantasy short stories.

Luck Be a Lady by Chris H. Stevenson:

Mason Hart has just lost his job, fiancé, and car in less than 48-hours. A short time later he accosts a cop and ends up in jail. He finally lands in a hospital as the result of a jailhouse brawl. He’s helpless to quell this downhill slide into calamity. Since he believes all is lost at this point, suicide seems the only alternative left…

Until the figure of Felicity Fortune, the Roman Goddess of Luck, interrupts Mason’s suicidal plans in the nick of time. It seems Felicity Fortune was hampered by the bird flu and few other appointments, so she must apologize for her tardy appearance. She tells Mason that he’s ripe for a cosmic alignment, and that his 15-minutes of fame and wealth are finally at hand. He is allotted six chances via the roll of the golden dice for his deserved share of the “Great Cornucopia.”

Beshaba, the Maid of Misfortune, has ear-marked Mason at the exact same time, to heap upon him the bad luck part of the equation. She is the evil incarnate daughter of Felicity, and now covets Mason for her own devious alignment. Everything that Beshaba represents is in stark contrast to her mother. It is a deliberate ploy to spite the good works of her mother, thus laying down a challenge of cosmic power.

Their simultaneous claim to Mason forces the two Goddesses into a mythological cat fight in hell. When this push and shove reaches a fevered pitch, even the destiny of mankind in called into question. Mason must find the solution and tear away the veil of darkness that could upset the divine balance between good and evil. What he doesn’t know is that the final key to the solution is himself.

Equilibrium by Glynn Stewart:

Peace forged on the edge of civilization
Lies forged in the heart of mankind
A legend rises to the final challenge

Exile to the Syntactic Cluster has been good for Kira Demirci and her friends. Once elite pilots of the Apollo System Defense Force, they now own the most powerful mercenary warship in the entire star cluster. Working with the carrier-for-hire Conviction and her Captain John Estanza, they have helped the King of Redward usher in a new era of hope for the entire Cluster.

That hope is nearly shattered when Estanza’s old enemies in the Equilibrium Institute strike directly at Redward’s king. Revenge and money bring the mercenaries into an allied fleet—one intended to neutralize the last threats to the peace.

But the Institute’s plans for the Syntactic Cluster are intricate and deep. Even as the mercenaries and their employers move against the enemies they see, shadows gather in the Cluster, bearing whispers of a forgotten name: Cobra Squadron.

Necrogarden by Bryon Vaughn:

Death has seeped into The Garden, black and oily.

A sickness is spreading through The Garden threatening to destroy everything that neuro-cognitive genius Brenna Patrick has built at NeuralTech. World domination will have to wait, at least for now.

Adversaries will become allies. New enemies will upset the balance of power. People will die.

In an epic struggle for control of a system that can topple governments, turn peasants into rulers, and make even the darkest, most sadistic miscreant into a god, only the resilient will survive.

NECROGARDEN is a roller-coaster ride of a thriller, one that will have readers pondering the nature of memory, and of reality, long after they’ve read the last page.

Metal Warrior: Hard As Steel by James David Victor:

The only way to save Earth may be to take the fight outside of the solar system.

A military sci-fi adventure from Amazon All-Star author James David Victor

Dane and the mech fighters of the Mechanized Infantry Division have taken the fight to all enemies, alien and human alike. When they discover a portal to other solar systems, they have the means to end the invasion or take the fight across the galaxy. If they can defeat the overwhelming forces defending it. In the end, nothing less than humanity’s place in the galaxy is on the line.

Metal Warrior: Hard as Steel is the fourth book in the Mech Fighter series. If you like fast-paced space adventures with engaging characters and exciting battles, you will definitely want to see how the Metal Warriors save mankind, or if they can.

Download Metal Warrior: Hard as Steel and continue this epic space adventure today!

The Wind in My Heart by Douglas Wynne:

Miles Landry is trying to put violence behind him when he takes up work as a private detective focused on humdrum adultery cases. But when a Tibetan monk hires him to find a missing person, things get weird fast.

Charged with tracking down the reincarnation of a man possessed by a demonic guardian from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Miles is plunged into a world of fortune-tellers, gangsters, and tantric rituals. The year is 1991 and a series of grisly murders has rocked New York City in the run up to a visit from the Dalai Lama.

The police attribute the killings to Chinatown gang warfare. Miles–skeptical of the supernatural–is inclined to agree. But what if the monster he’s hunting is more than a myth?

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for January 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some December books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, historical mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, paranormal mysteries, hardboiled mysteries, police procedurals, crime thrillers, medical thrillers, science fiction thrillers, technothrillers, police officers, amateur sleuths, private investigators, doctors, missing persons, cold cases, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime-busting maids, crime-busting teachers, crime-busting ghosts, murderous AIs, murder and mayhem in Palm Beach, Florida, Galveston, Texas, New York City, Brighton, London, Sicily and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

An Unfortunate Demise by Blythe Baker:

Death stalks the guests at a seaside resort…

While staying at Brighton with the formidable old Mrs. Montford, Anna Fairweather witnesses a drowning. Suspecting the “accident” is something more sinister, Anna begins a search for the truth – and the killer.

Does a belligerent brother-in-law carry an old grudge? Is the victim’s grieving husband a little too quick to move on? With an entire hotel full of suspects, Anna must uncover the secrets, and the motives, the hotel guests and employees are desperate to hide. But with the clock ticking, will Anna get to the bottom of the mystery – or find herself at the bottom of the ocean?

Murder in the Evening by Blythe Baker:

Death comes to dine…

When an elegant dinner party with friends ends in the sudden death of a beautiful young socialite, Alice Beckingham finds herself a witness to murder. Intrigued by a cryptic note in which the victim predicts her own demise, Alice enlists the aid of the cunning but slippery Sherborne Sharp to investigate.

Alice has more than one killer to contend with, however, as her family continues to be plagued by unanswered questions surrounding an older unsolved mystery.

Working together, the lady detective and her jewel thief partner set out to trap a killer. But will the looming shadows of the past leave Alice blind to the dangers of the present?

Dark Waters Inn Mysteries Box Set by Bekah Bancroft and Jaxon Reed:

In 1900 a massive hurricane wiped out Galveston, killing thousands and leveling the island.

One building survived, the Dark Waters Inn. The proprietress made a deal with the angel who watches over Texas . . .

Over the years the island rebuilt. But Dark Waters remains untouched, haunted by a ghost whose successive granddaughters continue running the inn. Macey Davenport shows up late for her grandmother’s funeral and suddenly finds herself the new owner of a very special place.

Cord Dupree is a lonely highway patrol officer in West Texas. One night, he pulls over a werewolf . . .

Suddenly Cord finds himself promoted, handed a silver badge tied to the ghost of an old Texas Ranger. His job now is to serve as the living half of a paranormal law enforcement team stretching back to the 1800s.

When Cord and his partner become guests at the Dark Waters Inn, old ghosts are reunited and romantic sparks fly in the land of the living. But a secret organization keeps tabs on the paranormal in Texas. When guests start showing up dead in Galveston, it will take Cord, Macey, their ghosts and Bogey the dog to figure out whodunit and do something about it.

Grab all five books in the complete Dark Waters Inn series with this box set:
A Bite for Dinner
Paws for Lunch
A Breakfast Tail
A Nosey Brunch
Snacks for Packs

Murder at Midnight by Beth Byers:

January 1927

New Year’s has arrived and Vi has resolutions. Her friends have faced something they never expected, and they’re all a little fragile. Determined to help her family, Vi brings them all together.

No one is even startled when they come across a body. But maybe, for once, something good can come from such an event. Maybe, they’ll find their peace along with a killer.

 

The Reticence by Levi Fuller:

Sisters Margo and Marcia Fleming have always enjoyed investigating cold cases.

Tracking down elusive suspects while giving victims some peace of mind. They get the job done, no matter what’s at stake. Whether local police departments want their help or not.

They will stop at nothing to get to the truth.

For their latest case, a distraught mother requests their help to investigate the unsolved murder of her fourteen-year-old daughter, found naked and tortured on the bank of a river. With the whole town claiming that she was loved by everyone and never caused any trouble, Margo and Marcia will have to work hard to solve a murder that, by all appearances, looks like any other small-town murder. But appearances can be deceiving, as they have learned, and the killer may be far closer than anyone has expected before.

Can Margo and Marcia solve the case before they run out of time?

Figs and a Cadaver by Fiona Grace:

A VILLA IN SICILY: FIGS AND A CADAVER is book #2 in a charming new cozy mystery series by bestselling author Fiona Grace, author of Murder in the Manor, a #1 Bestseller with over 100 five-star reviews (and a free download)!

Audrey Smart, 34, has made a major life change, walking away from her life as a vet (and from a string of failed romance) and moving to Sicily to buy a $1 home—and embark on a mandatory renovation she knows nothing about.

Audrey is busy working to open the town’s new shelter, while also renovating her own problematic home—and dating again. With the help of friends, she begins taking in sick strays. But not everyone in town is grateful for her services, and she soon makes unexpected enemies.

When Audrey gets a tip about an injured dog near the coast and goes to find him—she finds the dead body of a powerful local instead.

Can Audrey, now a suspect, solve the crime and clear her name?

Or will her Sicilian dream fall apart?

Ghostly Wedding by Lily Harper Hart:

Harper Harlow and Jared Monroe fell in love fast and hard. Finally, their big day is here.

They just need to solve a murder before they exchange their vows and take the next step to happily ever after.

Peter Humphrey, an insurance salesman from a neighboring town, appeared to be minding his own business when a woman came out of nowhere and struck him down while he was crossing the street. Harper witnessed the accident and vows to solve the murder before it’s time to leave on her honeymoon.

It might take more work than she realizes, though.

Peter was a normal guy, a father who doted on his daughter and was friendly with his ex-wife, and yet somehow he had a secret. His ghost points Harper toward Montgomery Manor, toward a woman who suffered her own tragedy almost two decades before.

On paper, Peter’s murder and the Montgomery tragedy shouldn’t be connected … and yet they are. It’s up to Jared and Harper to figure out how if they want to enjoy their wedding and what comes after … and they’re both determined to do it.

Some things are meant to be. Harper and Jared believe their union is one of those things.

Prepare yourselves, because this is one wedding you’ll never forget.

Alyx: An AI’s Guide to Love and Murder by Brent A. Harris:

Home is where the heart is. It’s where you go to feel safe with your loved ones.

But what if your home wanted you dead?

Tech-loving teen Christine makes fast friends with her home’s AI, Alyx. But when a real-world romance threatens their bond, Alyx turns from friend to foe.

 

On the Street Where Death Lives by Cate Lawley:

Skeletons in the closet

The living have them, but what about ghosts? Geoff’s about to find out! He’s convinced his ghostly neighbor Ginny was murdered. When he starts digging for answers, he unearths more than facts.

Join Geoff, his favorite bobcat Clarence, Sylvie and a gang of supernatural misfits as they investigate murders, both past and present!

 

Cooking for Cannibals by Rich Leder:

Fountain of youth? More like murderous medication!

Carrie Kromer pushes the boundaries of science, not her social life. The brilliant behavioral gerontologist’s idea of a good time is hanging out with her beloved lab rats and taking care of her elderly mother and the other eccentric old folks at the nursing home. So no one is more surprised than Carrie when she steals the lab’s top-secret, experimental medicine for aging in reverse.

Two-time ex-con Johnny Fairfax dreams of culinary greatness. But when his corrupt parole officer tries to drag him from the nursing home kitchen, the suddenly young-again residents spring to his defense and murder the guy—and then request Johnny cook them an evidence-devouring dinner to satisfy their insatiable side-effect appetite.

As their unexpected mutual attraction gets hot, Carrie and Johnny find themselves caught up with the authorities who arrive to investigate the killing. But even more dangerous than the man-eating not-so-senior citizens could be the arrival of death-dealing pharmaceutical hitmen.

Can Carrie and Johnny find true love in all this bloody madness?

Cooking for Cannibals is a dark comic thriller with a heaping helping of romance. If you like fast-paced plots, unconventional characters, and humor that crosses the line, then you’ll have a feast with Rich Leder’s wild ride.

Buy Cooking for Cannibals and dig in to a side-splitting serving today!

Long, Hot, Witchy Summer by Amanda M. Lee:

Life couldn’t be going much better for Hadley Hunter. She’s living the dream on Moonstone Bay with her boyfriend Galen Blackwood, plotting her next move as a witch for hire, and basically basking in happiness.

That all changes when a summer afternoon on the beach turns into a nightmare, an odd creature from the depths of the ocean surfacing and attacking Hadley on the beach. Her friend Lilac, a demon with a few issues, fights it off but it escapes … and becomes a problem for an island that bases its entire economy on tourism.

The all-powerful DDA isn’t happy. Lilac’s hair refuses to stop glowing red. Booker is struggling to help all his friends. Essentially, things turn messy quickly.

On top of that, Hadley’s father drops in out of nowhere and demands she return home. He’s not happy with what he hears about the island and decides it’s too dangerous for her to say. Hadley, of course, has other ideas and is determined to bring her father around to her way of thinking.

Between monsters popping up out of nowhere and her father’s inability to stop freaking out, Hadley has her hands full. The monsters keep popping up in the oddest places, and always their attention is on Hadley.

Monsters are nothing new for Hadley but the ones attacking now seem to be different. It’s up to Moonstone Bay’s newest witch and her motley crew of paranormal colleagues to solve a mystery and save the day. Again.

They just have to survive to do it.

Factor-7 by J.D. May:

Factor-7 presents a terrifying scenario that’s ripped from the headlines. You think it could never happen. Factor-7 will make you think twice!

The life of Dr. Sam Hawkins, the head trauma surgeon at Galveston’s St. Peter’s Memorial Hospital, is changed forever by the cryptic words of his dying friend, Dr. Bill Roberts, and a string of murders and blatant cover-ups that follow his demise. Sam reluctantly teams up with Dr. Rainee Arienzo, an Italian infectious disease specialist, and together they uncover the terrifying truth about Factor-7, a bio-weapon with a 98% mortality rate.

Dr. Roberts’s journal tips them off that a clandestine plot for using the virus is about to be unleashed by a secret society, the Keepers Collegium. The Collegium, an international group of rogue intelligence agents, ex-military, and government officials, has a demonic plan to use the pathogen to destroy anyone who threatens their twisted ideology.

Sam and Rainee can’t trust anyone. Danger and deceit are around every corner as they travel the world. They soon realize that public exposure of the evil plot would be as dangerous to the world’s security as the bio-weapon itself. The fallout could lead to World War III. Therefore, they must not only shut down the plans of the Collegium, but also keep the top-secret information from ever being revealed. But as they work to stop the plot, Sam and Rainee are kidnapped by the largest Mexican drug cartel. The kingpin, who financed much of the Collegium’s plot, wants Dr. Roberts’s journal because it lists the names of the major players in the Collegium who had double-crossed him. He plans to carry out his special revenge. And he also has his own plans for Sam and Rainee. In order to survive, Sam and Rainee have no choice…they must play with one of two devils or be burned by both.

Factor-7 is a bucking bronco ride of bio-weaponry, secrets, terror, betrayal, infidelity, raw human emotions and redeeming love. It’s a gripping suspense thriller that will keep the reader up all night turning the pages.

Null Identity by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant:

From the bestselling authors of Invasion and Yesterday’s Gone comes Null Identity, a new stand-alone novel written in the world of The Tomorrow Gene. This is a disturbing philosophical exploration of what can happen when our scientific advancement outpaces our ethics.

Cassandra Knight is trying hard to believe that she is safe and sane. Living with an adoring billionaire in his luxurious secluded mansion, she should have everything she needs to recover from the mental breakdown that drove her to attempt suicide.

And yet, she is haunted by vividly recurring nightmares of the moment she tried to take her life and the persistent feeling that something just isn’t right.

What happened on that hazy night when she hit rock bottom, and why does it seem like everything and everyone around her are conspiring to keep her from remembering?

Null Identity is a compelling mix of Ex Machina meets The Invisible Man in the story of one woman’s struggle to unearth the truth and understand her own past.

Grave Mistake by Christine Pope:

When you pull up stakes, make sure you don’t get stabbed in the back.

Self-taught in the arcane arts, hedgewitch Selena Marx is comfortable doing divination for West Los Angeles’ anxiety-ridden housewives, lawyers, and aspiring actresses. Her biggest challenge? Avoiding Lucien Dumond, leader of the Greater Los Angeles Necromancers’ Guild, who views her as fresh meat to add to his harem of slavishly devoted groupies.

Selena’s not interested in the slimy, celebrity-schmoozing sorcerer, but nobody turns Lucien down without consequences. When he threatens to fit her with magical cement shoes and drop her off the Santa Monica Pier, Selena’s Tarot cards point her to Globe, Arizona, for a new home, a new shop, and a cursed pet cat.

Just as she’s settling in and meeting the locals — including Calvin Standingbear, hunky chief of the San Ramon Apache tribal police — Lucien tracks her down…and promptly disappears. When his body turns up on tribal lands, it’s up to Calvin to investigate. Starting with Selena.

And when one of Lucien’s acolytes is killed, traces of dark magic and cryptic warnings from the spirits send Selena and Calvin in a race against time — before a too-close-for-comfort evil cuts her own life short.

A Murder of Principal by Saralyn Richard:

When a maverick principal comes in with a student-centered agenda, there’s no more business as usual at Lincoln High School. And killing the principal is just the beginning…

When someone sets fire to Lincoln High and kills the new principal, chaos threatens to overtake the urban school. Assistant Principal Sally Pearce, originally hired to help the deceased principal revamp the culture, vows to carry on the mission. In so doing, she locks horns with fellow assistant principal, Wally Welburton, and gets caught up in gang threats, racial tensions, grievances, sexual harassment complaints, and murder.

Sally never dreamed she’d be faced with solving a mystery and returning the school to order. The odds are against her—a woman in a man’s job, a minority in a tough position. Her strong moral compass and commitment to students bolster her as she meets challenge after challenge. When a second murder happens on campus, Sally realizes she’s trapped in a cycle of violence that must be stopped—now.

Palm Beach Taboo by Tom Turner

There’s a dangerous cult in Palm Beach.

All about philanthropy and altruism, they say. All about sex and money, Crawford and Ott say.
Then there’s a brutal stabbing…make that sex and money and MURDER!

Suspects? Well, there’s a billionaire heiress, an ex-movie star, a former member of Skull and Bones, a Blackwater psychopath…and the bizarre thing, they’re members of the Mensa society!

She Told a Lie by P.D. Workman:

A missing girl.

Her confused family and friends don’t know what to think about her disappearance.

The police will only put so many resources into the search for a missing teen. They don’t have time and money to spend on runaways and voluntaries. But that doesn’t mean no one cares.

Zachary Goldman is on the case, and he is determined to find out what happened to Madison Miller and to bring her home safely.

If she’s still alive, he’s going to find her.

No matter what danger he might face personally.

The Wind in My Heart by Douglas Wynne:

Miles Landry is trying to put violence behind him when he takes up work as a private detective focused on humdrum adultery cases. But when a Tibetan monk hires him to find a missing person, things get weird fast.

Charged with tracking down the reincarnation of a man possessed by a demonic guardian from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Miles is plunged into a world of fortune-tellers, gangsters, and tantric rituals. The year is 1991 and a series of grisly murders has rocked New York City in the run up to a visit from the Dalai Lama.

The police attribute the killings to Chinatown gang warfare. Miles–skeptical of the supernatural–is inclined to agree. But what if the monster he’s hunting is more than a myth?

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.

Not-a-Fanzine Spotlight: Simultaneous Times

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines featured by clicking here.

Not every worthy project that deserves more exposure is a fanzine. And even though this series focusses on fanzines, I have decided to feature some non-fanzines that deserve a boost as well. So today’s featured not-a-fanzine is the Space Cowboy Books Presents: Simultaneous Times podcast, which for Hugo-purposes counts as a semiprozine, since it’s a paying fiction market.

But whatever category it fits in, it’s a great podcast and I’m not just saying that, because they produced a lovely audio version of one of my stories, “Patient X-5”, last year.

So I’m happy to welcome Jean-Paul Garnier of Space Cowboy Books, a great SFF specialty bookstore in Joshua Tree, California, as well as producer and narrator of the Simultaneous Times podcast.

Tell us about your site or zine.

Space Cowboy Books Presents: Simultaneous Times is actually three different projects that operate under the same name. It started, and continues, as a science fiction anthology podcast (semiprozine) with cast readings and original soundtracks. Then I started our fancast – Simultaneous Times Supplementary Log, which features interviews with the authors and composers of the podcast. Lastly, we also produce a monthly print fanzine newsletter that features interviews with authors and editors, small press new releases, artist spotlights, articles, speculative poetry and more. We have also released an anthology of stories from the podcast called Simultaneous Times Vol.1, with Vol.2 scheduled to be released in spring of 2021.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

Zara Kand is the co-founder of Space Cowboy Books, she also does all of our visual art, proof-reading and a lot of voice acting. Our music department for the podcasts is: RedBlueBlackSilver, Phog Machine, and Field Collapse. And I (Jean-Paul L. Garnier) serve as the editor of the newsletter, producer of the podcast and voice actor, and anything else that might need to get done. And of course our work would be nothing without all of the wonderful authors that contribute their work and take the time to be interviewed. We are also ever grateful to our audience.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

I started the podcasts because I grew up listening to radio dramas, such as X Minus One, and always wanted to produce one of my own. I have a background in audio production and am friends with some amazing composers, so when I re-listened to one of my favorite programs Mind Webs, I said to myself, I’ve got to make a show like this.

The Simultaneous Times Newsletter started when the pandemic lockdowns started. Usually I’m at my bookstore six days a week, and since we specialize in science fiction, most of my conversations center around the genre. Immediately I began to miss the conversations and my customers, so I started the newsletter as a way to stay connected with science fiction fans. Since then it has just grown. But we still give free subscriptions. I thought people would prefer to get a letter in the mail over receiving an email.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

Several members of my team, including myself, have a background in radio. When we all started talking about starting a podcast we decided that we wanted to produce the program the way that radio shows were produced in the past. Really take the radio arts approach instead of going with modern trends in podcasting. Since then we’ve even teamed up with the radio station KZZH 96.7 in Northern California, so our program did end up on the air.

The Newsletter is print because I wanted to put something physical in people’s hands, especially during this time of not being able to see each other. That being said, I have started to put the back issues on our website, so the archive is available to everyone.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

I believe that they are important because they are a gateway into the genre, and one that is not provided by the industry itself. Because it comes from the fans it is trustworthy in ways that commercial interest cannot be. Fanzines tend to be unpaid passion projects, and because of this tend to be run by people who really care and want the genre to stay healthy and to move forward in interesting ways. Also, because there usually isn’t a commercial factor behind the fanzine they can take risks, do things their own way, and move faster than the traditional publishing world. Most of us live for science fiction, for me it is largely that I want to give back to a field that has brought me so much enjoyment over the years.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

I think that because most things have moved online people will eventually get tired of the format and react against it by trying new things, and or doing things the way we used to. We’ve often seen this with nostalgia over which mediums we use to listen to music. Ultimately the content is more important than the medium, but I do worry over the temporary and fragile nature of the internet, one coronal mass ejection and it all gets wiped away. I also think we will see more hybrid formats and mixed media. That being said, any way people can connect and share their passions is a good thing, and we will continue to try and connect with each other regardless of the medium.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

Oh yes! There are so many great ones I don’t know if I can list them all here. But here’s a short list:

I currently write for https://warpspeedodyssey.com/ which is a relatively new Canadian SF blog run by Steven Morrissette

As I’m sure your readers know http://indiespecfic.blogspot.com/ is a wonderful resource!

http://galacticjourney.org/ is always putting out great content!

And here’s a few others that I have found useful:

http://worldswithoutend.com/

https://www.aphelion-webzine.com/

https://www.aphelion-webzine.com/

https://dreamfoundry.org/

Where can people find you?

Simultaneous Times Podcast (semiprozine): https://spacecowboybooks.podomatic.com/

Simultaneous Times Supplementary Log (fancast): https://spacecowboybooks.bandcamp.com/album/simultaneous-times-supplementary-log-interviews-with-the-authors-and-musicians

Simultaneous Times Newsletter (fanzine): https://spacecowboybooks.blogspot.com/p/simultaneous-times-newsletter.html

Space Cowboy Books online store: https://bookshop.org/shop/spacecowboybooks%20

Twitter: https://twitter.com/space_books

IG: https://www.instagram.com/spacecowboybooks/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyQwqKhUuhW_s9lDtXnKmsA

Thanks, Jean-Paul, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Simultaneous Times, cause it’s a great podcast. And should you ever find yourself in Joshua Tree, California, visit Space Cowboy Books in person or check out their online store from anywhere in the world.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine or site and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Fanzine Spotlight: Warp Speed Odyssey

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines featured by clicking here.

Today’s featured fanzine is Warp Speed Odyssey, a science fiction review and interview blog.

And now I’d like to welcome Steven Morrissette of Warp Speed Odyssey.

Tell us about your site or zine.

Warp Speed Odyssey is a sci-fi blog that I have started about a year ago to write some book and movie reviews. Soon enough I started meeting some authors that wanted to get involved and some also sent me their books to be reviewed. Rapidly the blog took off and now we have conducted some interviews with authors, reviewed books, and featured many guests that presented their novels.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

I started by myself slowly but then I met Jean-Paul Garnier from Space Cowboy Books who was of tremendous help and also became the first contributing author, reviewing some books and conducting some interviews for Warp Speed Odyssey. Furthermore, Robin Rose Graves who is a friend of Jean-Paul became the second contributing author submitting book reviews and interviews as well. And Finally, there is my sister Jessica who started translating some of the articles into french.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

Initially, I started Warp Speed Odyssey to practice my writing skills by writing about different sci-fi themes and reviews. But soon enough the orientation of the website shifted to become a place where authors could promote their work and get interviewed about their writing journey.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

Warp Speed Odyssey is in a blog format. I chose the blog format because it is similar to a magazine but it is online and the cost is relatively low, permitting me to offer free services to authors.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

I think that fanzines are important because they are a good place for indie authors to promote their books and get them reviewed as well.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

The future of fanzine will probably focus on online platforms because it’s less expansive and easier to reach the audience via social media. But there will always remain those true paper lover readers like me that will buy their physical copy.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist, and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers, and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

I would like to recommend Nathan Warner a Star Trek fan artist and writer.

http://www.blabberdock.com/home.html

Where can people find you?

You can contact me on the contact page of warpspeedodyssey.com or @OdysseyWarp on Twitter.

Thanks, Steven, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Warp Speed Odyssey, cause it’s a great blog.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine or site and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Fanzine Spotlight: Runalong the Shelves

It’s time for the next entry in my Fanzine Spotlight project. For more about the Fanzine Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines featured by clicking here.

Today’s featured fanzine is Runalong the Shelves, an SFF book blog from the UK.

And now I’d like to welcome Womble of Runalong the Shelves.

Tell us about your site or zine.

Runalong The Shelves is now in its fourth year and is very much a book blog with a big focus on reviewing science fiction and fantasy but also interested in horror and the occasional thriller. You may find me interviewing authors on recent works; answering the odd book tag and taking part in a small annual blogger jury award named Subjective Chaos Kind of Award which is a lot of fun debating books with different bloggers. I try to be diverse both in the types of books I review but also increasingly promoting the diverse voices creating them which I think is a wonderful move for our genre (and way overdue)

We joke on twitter about Book Tempting but I really really like trying to find a book for the right reader. Knowing someone enjoyed a recommendation is one the best things ever!

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

Its’s just me! Forty something British human who for complex reasons these days is better known as Womble on the internet

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

I’ve loved reading for a long time and in the old days of forums would often see me in the Books section talking and recommending books. Another forum member Dave Probert invited me to their own website GeekPlanetOnline to join a panel of reviewers and when that went on indefinite hiatus I thought it may be time to start my own and have a bit more choice on what types of stories I could review as well.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

I went with blog – I’m most familiar with reading these as I’ve grown up and I like the way the format can change. I can add new features when I wish and these days quite easy to update not just on PCs but also phones and tablets. I also think they’re an easy way to cross the borders plus work well with social media sharing.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

Fifty years ago you probably could read all the SF books and short stories published in a year if you had a decent amount of time. Now that number is in the thousands each year and I think blogs help collate what is out there for readers in ways algorithms just cannot. You can find specialist blogs in your favourite sub genre be it horror or crime or 1930’s crime tales. We help show a spotlight on books and sometimes they may not be the ones with the largest marketing budgets. If you find a blogger who you know has similar tastes to yours its a useful way to find new stories that you may not see in your local bookshop’s main pages. The indie publishing system is now very established and contains some excellent material that’s easy to miss if you say just went to your local Waterstones or Barnes & Noble. Blogging can give those stories plus the wider self published market a little nudge to readers

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

The format will change with the technology. Youtube and podcasts are increasingly easier and more affordable for people to use and I’m sure somewhere someone is creating an unusual TikTok. I do wonder if more collaborative efforts are the way forward as well – taking the strain off individual bloggers but also allowing a wider ethos of what a site/zine is looking for/shouting about. Possibly more like Geek Syndicate that are truly multi-media genre sites working in blog, podcast and youtube.

I also am finding increasingly more contact with authors from all over the world not just the US/UK centric ones we know and love. Over the next decade I think this could make reading experiences even more universal!

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

Apart from yourself!

Alasdair Stuart is one of my go to writers and their insights are brilliant. Blog wise I recommend The MiddleShelf, There’s Always Room for One More, Journey Planet, Skiffy & Fanty, Nerds of a Feather, Geek Syndicate and on Booktube Claire Rousseau, Kitty G and Kalanadi

Where can people find you?

Apart from the blog you usually can find me in twitter as @runalongwomble and on Sundays I have a thread where we all talk about what we are currently reading which is a lot of fun. Please join in.

Thanks, Womble, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Runalong the Shelves, cause it’s a great blog and also follow Womble on Twitter, so he can match you up with books you’ll love.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine or site and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

WandaVision: “Now in Color” – and with Twins

Okay, so it looks as if I am doing episode by episode reviews of WandaVision, Marvel’s new sitcom parody/Dickian faux reality paranoia. Previous installments (well, just one) may be found here. Also, may I remind you that Disney is still not paying Alan Dean Foster and others.

But before I get to the review, I also want to point out that I have another article up at Galactic Journey. This one is a double review of the 1965 Edgar Wallace movie The Sinister Monk and the 1966 sword and planet (though that term wasn’t in use yet) novel The Sword of Lankor by Howard L. Cory a.k.a. Jack Owen and Julie Ann Jardine.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

When we last left our favourite mismatched superhero couple, Wanda and Vision had not only seen their black and white sitcom world suddenly become a lot more colourful – no, Wanda was also very suddenly very visibly pregnant.

By the start of episode 3, the world is still in colour – and indeed the episode title is “Now in Color” – and there has been another time jump. Cause while episode 2 (which didn’t have a title, as far as I can tell) was set in the mid 1960s (the black and white to colour TV change happened in 1965/66 in the US), episode 3 is set in the early 1970s. The main models are The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, which ran from 1969 and respectively 1970 to 1974. The opening sequence for episode 3 is very directly modeled on the opening sequence of The Brady Bunch. Unlike the models for the previous episodes, I have actually seen a bit of both shows, though my feelings about The Brady Bunch are strongly influenced by the less than ideal circumstances under which I saw the show.

I was fifteen and had been visiting relatives in the US. I was fairly independent and considered myself an adult, but for legal reasons, I was still classified as a child travelling alone. And so  they stuck me in a dingy room at Atlanta airport with all the other kids travelling alone (who were actually kids – I was the oldest person there except for another teenage girl who spoke only Spanish, so we communicated in eyerolls). There was a single person who watched the kids and made sure we didn’t run off, but otherwise there was no effort to make our stay pleasant. There were drinks, but nothing eat for hours (and that watchdog woman wouldn’t let me go into the terminal to get myself something to eat) and there was nothing to do except watch the lone TV, which was playing nothing but Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch in an endless loop. Come to think of it, the way they treated us was borderline abusive, especially considering I’ve since heard that the assistance services of other airlines and airports are much better.

The experience left me with a violent dislike for Atlanta airport, Delta Airlines, Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. I also associate The Brady Bunch with the feeling of being trapped, which is actually a very apt comparison to WandaVision. Hmm, now I wonder whether WandaVision‘s showrunner was also trapped in that dingy room at Atlanta airport and forced to watch The Brady Bunch in an endless loop.

But even though there has been a time jump of five to eight years, Wanda is still pregnant and as far as she and Vision are concerned (who neither seem to notice nor are troubled by the fact that they seem to be reliving US postwar television history on fast forward) Wanda has only been pregnant for a day at most (and indeed, the audience sort of witnessed how Wanda became pregnant, when she used her magic to push the censorship-friendly twin beds together and turned off the bedroom lights in the previous episode). But when Vision – who now sports longish floppy 1970s hair – calls in one Dr. Nielsen (who, as a commenter at Camestros Felapton’s blog points out, is named after the institute which calculates the US TV ratings), Dr. Nielsen declares that Wanda is actually four months pregnant. But how can that be?

Dr. Nielsen, an elderly man who looks like all of the doctors and psychiatrists in vintage US TV shows, also mansplains the progress of pregnancy to Wanda and Vision, using fruits as example. Keen viewers will notice the respective fruit popping up in the background throughout the episode. Though honestly, were papayas common in the US in the early 1970s? Cause I first encountered them in Singapore in the early 1980s and they didn’t come to Germany until several years later.

Dr. Nielsen takes his leave, mentioning that he and his wife are planning to go on holiday. Meanwhile, Wanda and Vision do their best to get ready for the new arrival. Vision reads pregnancy books, while Wanda prepares the nursery. They also argue about names. Wandy wants to name the baby Tommy, while Vision prefers Billy. However, there are also increasing signs that not only is the pregnancy proceding much faster than expected (Vision calculates that the baby should be born on Friday afternoon), but it’s also messing up Wanda’s powers. The first indicator is that when Wanda feels the baby moving for the first time (“a fluttering sensation”), she accidentally brings a butterfly mobile to life.

Things become more serious when Wanda experiences Braxton Hicks contractions a.k.a. false labour and causes kitchen appliances to go haywire and eventually knocks out the power for the entire suburb of Westview. Though at least she saves Norm (the darkhaired man with the moustache and the prominent nose) from having to answer his wife Dottie’s (Emma Caulfield Ford of Buffy fame) question, if those earrings make her look fat.

Shortly thereafter, Wanda experiences the first real contraction and things become even crazier. For starters, Vision’s powers go out of control as well and he levitates in panic and Wanda needs to coax him down. Then Wanda’s waters break in the most spectacular way posssible by causing a rainfall inside the house and, it is implied, the whole neighbourhood. Vision now takes off (literally, with super-speed) to fetch Dr. Nielsen before he can go on his vacation. He gets lucky and finds the Doctor, too, because the Nielsens’ car just happened to break down.

Meanwhile, Wanda is interrupted by new neighbour “Geraldine” (who we know is really Monica Rambeau) who drops by to borrow a bucket, since “Geraldine” has also been hit by the flood of amniotic fluid that Wanda unleashed upon Westview. Wanda desperately tries to hide both her condition (a nine months pregnancy developing in two days would be hard to explain), the fact that she’s in labour and her acting up powers from “Geraldine” and tries to get rid of her as quickly as possible. But unfortunately “Geraldine” wants to have a chat about her new temp job at an advertising agency, which I suspect is a reference to Teyonah Parris’ previously best known role to date as Don Draper’s secretary Dawn in Mad Men. Though Geraldine’s story of how she was promoted from temp secretary to copywriter is closer to Peggy’s than to Dawn’s.

Not that Wanda listens anyway, because she’s not just in labour and trying to hide it underneath oversized coats and finally by holding a bowl of fruit in front of her belly – which are of course some of the tactics TV executives use to hide the real life pregnancies of actresses to this day, usually with as little succees as Wanda (my Mom and I can always spot real life pregnancies in TV shows quickly and tend to point them out to each other). We could see all of those techniques at work in season 3 of Star Trek Discovery. You didn’t think that it was just coincidence that people in the 32nd century wear oversized sweaters and bulky trenchcoats, did you?

But Wanda doesn’t just have to deal with a nine month baby bump and contractions, her powers also conjure up a life stork that’s stalking about her house and no amount of magicking can make the stork go away, even as Wanda tries to make it vanish in a poof of red dust. The stork even bites Geraldine/Monica in the leg, which makes me worry about her, because at least in Germany, according to legend storks not only deliver babies, but also cause pregnancies by biting women in the leg.

Geraldine finally realises the truth when she blunders into the nursery and then turns around to ask, “Wanda, are you pregnant?”, only to realise that not only is Wanda very, very pregnant, she’s also about to give birth. Geraldine takes the revelations in stride (which confirms that she’s more than just another neighbour) and talks Wanda through the contractions, telling Wanda that she’s a strong woman. Geraldine finally delivers a baby boy who looks a lot older than newborn (about three months old, I guess, but then babies in movies and TV shows rarely look like newborns), just as Vision returns with the Doctor in tow.

Vision is crestfallen that he missed the birth of his son – but then he wouldn’t have been allowed in the delivery room anyway, since Dads in delivery rooms wasn’t yet a thing in the early 1970s. Dr. Nielsen proclaims mother and baby healthy, praises Geraldine for her help and tells her that she would make a fine nurse. I wonder whether this is a reference to Julia, a sitcom that aired from 1968 to 1971 and was the first US TV series featuring a black lead actress (Diahann Carroll) playing a nurse.

The Doctor and Geraldine go outside to give Wanda and Vision some privacy with their little boy, whom they’ve named Tommy. Wanda tells Vision that with the others gone, it’s time that Tommy got to see his Dad as he really is, namely red and with an infinity stone on his forehead. It’s a touching moment, that’s rudely interrupted when Wanda has another contraction and little Billy makes his entrance. Now by the early 1970s, surprise twins were no longer a thing, for even though ultrasound was only just beginning to come in (my Mom told me that they did an ultrasound only in the hospital, when she was about to deliver me), doctors and midwives were well able to tell, if a woman was carrying twins via the fetal heartbeat. My aunt had twins, my cousins, in 1970 and she knew beforehand. But then, nothing about Wanda’s pregnancy is even remotely normal.

Vision takes the Doctor back and wishes him a good vacation, whereupon the Doctor ominously remarks that he’s not leaving after all, because small towns are so hard to escape. Upon his return, Vision stops outside to chat with his neighbours Herb (the black guy with the afro we met last episode) and the perpetually nosy Agnes. Herb was earlier seen cutting into the fence between his and Wanda and Vision’s house with his electric hedge trimmer. It also becomes clear that Herb and Agnes both know that something is very wrong in Westview. Herb is about to spill the beans, but Agnes stops him. Though she does tell Vision to beware of Geraldine, because she’s not from around her and doesn’t have a home, at least not in Westview.

Meanwhile, Wanda and Geraldine are inside, wrangling the twins. Wanda remarks that she was a twin herself and that she had a brother named Pietro (Quicksilver, who died in Age of Ultron and has not been mentioned since). Then she begins to sing a Sarkovian lullaby to the twins, looking increasingly distant. “He was killed by Ultron, wasn’t he?” Geraldine asks, whereupon Wanda freaks out. She also notices that Geraldine is wearing a pendant with the S.W.O.R.D. logo, which Wanda has seen before on a reality breaking helicopter shortly before Geraldine arrived in Westview. “Where did you get that?” she asks and “What did you say about Pietro?” Then Wanda tells Geraldine to leave and kicks her out, quite literally, because we see Geraldine/Monica flying through some kind of energy barrier, as the screen expands from the old 4:3 to the modern 16:9 aspect ratio. Gerladine lands in a field outside Westview, as Jeeps and helicopters bearing the S.W.O.R.D. logo surround her. Cue credits.

The big question is of course, “What precisely is going on in Westview?” We already knew that it is some kind of constructed reality in which Wanda and maybe Vision (or maybe not, since he’s dead) are trapped. However, in this episode there are hints that the other inhabitants of Westview are trapped as well (the Doctor being unable to leave, Herb trying to cut through the wall and almost spilling the beans, Agnes clearly terrified) and that they are real people rather than NPCs who are part of the constructed reality.

Though we still don’t know just what precisely Westview is. Was Westview created by someone else (S.W.O.R.D, Hydra, Dormannu, Mephisto, etc…?) to entrap Wanda or did Wanda create Westview herself as a way of processing her grief over losing first her parents, then Pietro and finally Vision? Or – as the final scene seems to hint – is Westview a real place with real people whom Wanda sucked into her little sitcom fantasy and who are now forced to play along and can’t leave? Or is this some kind of Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes/Lost* situation, where everybody is dead and Wanda is in a coma like Sam Tyler. After all, Vision was dead the last time we saw him in the real world. And just before Agnes stopped him, I could have sworn that Herb was about to blurt out, “We’re all dead.”

One thing, however, is clear: Whatever is really going on in Westview, Wanda wants the illusion to continue. Last episode, when a man in a beekeeper’s outfite emerged from a manhole, Wanda rewound the episode, so she would not have to face him. And this episode, when Vision starts wondering about what’s going on and how very unlikely everything, Wanda again rewinds reality to the point before he started asking questions. Vision quoting Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” from As You Like It is also a big honking clue.

Of course, readers of the comics know that Wanda is not only very powerful, one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel universe in fact, but also highly unstable. “No more mutants”, anybody? Film/TV Wanda is not comic Wanda, her backstory is completely different. However, film/TV Wanda has been unstable from the moment she was first introduced in Age of Ultron and she’s also had more than her share of trauma. She and Pietro lost their parents at a young age and were trapped for days in a ruined house with an unexploded bomb. Later, Wanda and Pietro were given superpowers by Hydra experiments, used by Ultron for his own ends and then Wanda lost Pietro, her twin brother and only living relative. The relationship with Vision seemed to be the only thing that kept her together and then she lost Vision as well. And unlike everybody else killed in Infinity War, Vision doesn’t come back. So in short, it wouldn’t be surprise, if Wanda finally cracked and the only reason that she hasn’t cracked already is because we’ve seen very little of Wanda (and even less of Vision) since her introduction in Age of Ultron.

Which brings me to the issue of the twins. In the comics, the twins weren’t real, but created by Wanda’s magic from a splinter of Mephisto’s soul. Eventually, they vanished, because they had never existed in the first place, causing Wanda to spiral ever deeper into depression. Though apparently, the comics recently resurrected the twins as members of the Young Avengers. One twin, Tommy I think, will turn out to be gay and date the Hulkling BTW. I really hope they keep that storyline, especially since it would fit the “socially conscious” sitcoms of the 1990s and 2000s, when they suddenly realised that gay people existed and started having very stereotypically gay characters.

But most of all, I hope that they keep the twins around and don’t just let them blink out of existence. For while I normally hate the supernatural miracle pregnancy trope (explained at length here), I am willing to tolerate it here, because it’s very obvious that WandaVision is not set in the real world, so real world rules don’t apply. Plus, we have seen other normal pregnancies and children growing up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, e.g. Cassie Lang, Morgan Stark and the three Hawkeye children, one of whom is born on screen – sort of. However, I really hope that they don’t follow the supernatural miracle pregnancy trope to the bitter end and have the twins either disappear or turn evil. Besides, a Young Avengers TV show or movie would be cool.

As before, the clothing, hairstyles and interior design is pitch-perfect for the time period. Vision looks like a stepped out of a Woody Allan movie. Wanda looks like Maureen McCormick or Susan Dey, the oldest daughters respectively of The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, since the mothers of both families were middle-aged. And Geraldine looks like Pam Grier in Foxy Brown, complete with fabulous afro and great period clothes. Once again, the way the episode is shot also mirrors the way that real sitcoms of the period were shot with limited stagey sets (basically just the Wanda/Vision house) and very limited outside shots, which are clearly shot on a soundstage as well. At one point, when Vision is in the driveway, talking to Herb and Agnes, it’s also very obvious that the garden behind him is really a painted backdrop. Now we know that Disney has more money than God (especially since they’re not paying Alan Dean Foster and others) and could create a perfectly rendered CGI suburb, if they wanted to. The fact that they don’t, but deliberately use old TV techniques for the Westview scenes (whereas the “real world” scenes are shot like a modern movie or TV show) further reinforces the impression that the whole world were seeing is artificial.

However, the cracks in the facade – barely present in the first episode and slowly mounting in the second – are becoming increasingly apparent. Just as WandaVision moves away from sitcom antics into horror territory. But then, typical American suburbs have been the setting for horror movies just as often as they have been the setting for sitcoms, one of the most artificial forms of entertainment there is. And WandaVision even stresses this artificiality by drawing on the most harmless, silly and artificial sitcoms of the respective area, e.g. The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family rather than somewhat grittier fare like Till Death Do Us Part/All in the Family/Ein Herz und eine Seele. Not that I wouldn’t love to see Wanda unleash her powers on that old reactionary Archie/Alfie/Alfred.

The overall effect of the show is some king of Dickian and Lynchian meta-weirdness, which will keep at least me watching and reviewing.

*Fun fact: The series finales of Ashes to Ashes and Lost aired on the same day and had the same resolution – everybody is dead and this is the afterlife – though the series had nothing esle in common with each other.