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Uncanny Magazine #31
Uncanny Magazine Issue 31: November/December 2019
The November/December issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine.
Featuring new fiction by Elizabeth Bear, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Laura Anne Gilman, and Jenn Reese. Essays by G. Willow Wilson, Alexandra Erin, Brandon O' Brien, Jeannette Ng, and Keidra Chaney, poetry by Sonya Taaffe, Hal Y. Zhang, Annie Neugebauer, and Sylvia Santiago, interviews with Elizabeth Bear and Jenn Reese by Sandra Odell, a cover by John Picacio, and editorials by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota.
Featuring new fiction by Elizabeth Bear, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Laura Anne Gilman, and Jenn Reese. Essays by G. Willow Wilson, Alexandra Erin, Brandon O' Brien, Jeannette Ng, and Keidra Chaney, poetry by Sonya Taaffe, Hal Y. Zhang, Annie Neugebauer, and Sylvia Santiago, interviews with Elizabeth Bear and Jenn Reese by Sandra Odell, a cover by John Picacio, and editorials by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota.
182 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 5, 2019
3 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Lynne M. Thomas
105 books223 followersIn my day job, I am the Head of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Rare Book and Manuscript Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the largest public university rare book collections in the country. I used to manage pop culture special collections that include the papers of over 70 SF/F authors at Northern Illinois University. I also teach a Special Collections course as an adjunct in the iSchool at Illinois, and used to do so at SJSU.
I'm an eleven-time Hugo Award winner, the Co-Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Uncanny Magazine with my husband Michael Damian Thomas. The former Editor-in-Chief of Apex Magazine (2011-2013), I co-edited the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords, Whedonistas, and Chicks Dig Comics. I moderated the Hugo-Award winning SF Squeecast and contribute to the Verity! Podcast. You can learn more about my shenanigans at lynnemthomas.com.
I'm an eleven-time Hugo Award winner, the Co-Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Uncanny Magazine with my husband Michael Damian Thomas. The former Editor-in-Chief of Apex Magazine (2011-2013), I co-edited the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords, Whedonistas, and Chicks Dig Comics. I moderated the Hugo-Award winning SF Squeecast and contribute to the Verity! Podcast. You can learn more about my shenanigans at lynnemthomas.com.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
June 18, 2020
Time travel to ... the late 1970s? It's actually pretty good. This is a review for "A Time to Reap," nominated for a Locus award. My review was first posted on Fantasy Literature. This novella is free online here at Uncanny magazine.
In this time-travel novella, Kitty Whelan, a petite 16-year-old actress in the year 2028, is playing the part of 12-year-old Sissy in the play Time to Reap, based on a real-life series of unsolved murders that took place in 1978 at the Abbott family reunion. The cast, along with a few reporters, takes an excursion to the Massachusetts farm where the reunion and murders occurred fifty years earlier. When Kitty sneaks off to the barn, she’s yanked back in time to 1978, before the murders have occurred. She meets Margaret Abbott, inadvertent inventor of a time machine … who Kitty knows will be the first victim of the murderer.
Kitty quickly convinces Margaret that she’s from the future (she doesn’t mention the pending murders) and Margaret introduces Kitty to the clan as her great-niece. As Kitty meets Sissy, who will also be one of the murder victims, and gets to know various members of the Abbott clan, she dithers about time paradoxes, changing the past and whether to say anything to the people she’s befriending. She also becomes aware of some of the undercurrents and tensions among the Abbotts … and she may herself be in danger from the murderer.
Kitty has her own issues to deal with, mostly arising out of her stage mother’s controlling behavior and diet demands on Kitty, that add some nuance to this story. It’s fun to see the past through Kitty’s eyes, especially where the play she’s been rehearsing diverges from reality, and her surprise at some of the things (like children traveling alone) that people took for granted in the 1970s.
In this time-travel novella, Kitty Whelan, a petite 16-year-old actress in the year 2028, is playing the part of 12-year-old Sissy in the play Time to Reap, based on a real-life series of unsolved murders that took place in 1978 at the Abbott family reunion. The cast, along with a few reporters, takes an excursion to the Massachusetts farm where the reunion and murders occurred fifty years earlier. When Kitty sneaks off to the barn, she’s yanked back in time to 1978, before the murders have occurred. She meets Margaret Abbott, inadvertent inventor of a time machine … who Kitty knows will be the first victim of the murderer.
Kitty quickly convinces Margaret that she’s from the future (she doesn’t mention the pending murders) and Margaret introduces Kitty to the clan as her great-niece. As Kitty meets Sissy, who will also be one of the murder victims, and gets to know various members of the Abbott clan, she dithers about time paradoxes, changing the past and whether to say anything to the people she’s befriending. She also becomes aware of some of the undercurrents and tensions among the Abbotts … and she may herself be in danger from the murderer.
Kitty has her own issues to deal with, mostly arising out of her stage mother’s controlling behavior and diet demands on Kitty, that add some nuance to this story. It’s fun to see the past through Kitty’s eyes, especially where the play she’s been rehearsing diverges from reality, and her surprise at some of the things (like children traveling alone) that people took for granted in the 1970s.
Meeting one Abbott after another … I realized what made them such a weird-looking family. What had been bothering me on the way up the stairs.The story loses some steam toward the end as the plot — and the treatment of time travel and multiple timelines — get a little muddled. The ending raises some interesting ideas, though, and I overall I enjoyed A Time to Reap.
Every last one of them was white. The whole family.
The past really is a different country.
December 4, 2019
"Black Flowers Blossom" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad is on my list of the Best Short SFF of November 2019: https://1000yearplan.com/2019/11/30/t...
Read
July 6, 2021It’s a wooden box,
ornately carved, beautifully
stained a dark mahogany.
It’s dry as I lift it up
and gently slide out the
tongue-and-groove top.
I started with Annie Neugebauer's 'The Wooden Box', which was really good. Read here.
ornately carved, beautifully
stained a dark mahogany.
It’s dry as I lift it up
and gently slide out the
tongue-and-groove top.
I started with Annie Neugebauer's 'The Wooden Box', which was really good. Read here.
February 21, 2020
Rating and review for Vina Jie-Min Prasad's Black Flowers Blossom.
No clear plot, just a bunch of monster erotica with graphic sex (tentacles included) and vague hard-boiled detective work. Or maybe I am too stupid to understand what it meant. Oh well. I did not enjoy it. I usually love the author's work.
No clear plot, just a bunch of monster erotica with graphic sex (tentacles included) and vague hard-boiled detective work. Or maybe I am too stupid to understand what it meant. Oh well. I did not enjoy it. I usually love the author's work.
June 2, 2021
Review & rating solely for "A Time to Reap" by Elizabeth Bear, https://uncannymagazine.com/article/a...
A well-done time-travel and murder-mystery novella, and I think you are better off going in cold & just reading it. Like all time-travel stories, it doesn't really make sense, and the ending gets even muddier. But a helluva story. Elizabeth Bear's writing just keeps getting better & better. Strong 4 stars, highly recommended, especially for Bear fans.
I saw it in Jonathan Strahan's list of recommended 2019 stories, and it was also nominated for the Locus best-novella award.
PS: tried "Black Flowers Blossom" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. Too odd for me: skimmed & DNF. Yuck.
A well-done time-travel and murder-mystery novella, and I think you are better off going in cold & just reading it. Like all time-travel stories, it doesn't really make sense, and the ending gets even muddier. But a helluva story. Elizabeth Bear's writing just keeps getting better & better. Strong 4 stars, highly recommended, especially for Bear fans.
I saw it in Jonathan Strahan's list of recommended 2019 stories, and it was also nominated for the Locus best-novella award.
PS: tried "Black Flowers Blossom" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. Too odd for me: skimmed & DNF. Yuck.
January 12, 2020
Review is for Black Flowers Blossom, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad.
A detective and his eldritch lover come together in multiple lifetimes - more graphic than I was expecting, but also surprisingly touching in places. Find it online here: https://uncannymagazine.com/article/b...
A detective and his eldritch lover come together in multiple lifetimes - more graphic than I was expecting, but also surprisingly touching in places. Find it online here: https://uncannymagazine.com/article/b...
February 26, 2022
Review is only for Black Flowers Blossom, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad available here https://uncannymagazine.com/article/b... .
I have now run out of her short stories to read (there are two I have not read which seem to be only available in print in rare anthologies but not chasing those...) and I do love her dense universes and characters and this kind of romanticism.
But this was wow, confusing. I reread parts and wow still confusing - I am not betting on having understood it ALL though. Also more weird (no kinkshaming, but I think it might be the correct technical term) graphic sex. But as a romance it really works for me, those two are a very interesting romantic pair. And at a time when it feels like there are no new plots anywhere, I do not remember quite this plot or a pairing like this. But it is confusing, and it feels puzzle like for the sake of being cryptic.
I have now run out of her short stories to read (there are two I have not read which seem to be only available in print in rare anthologies but not chasing those...) and I do love her dense universes and characters and this kind of romanticism.
But this was wow, confusing. I reread parts and wow still confusing - I am not betting on having understood it ALL though. Also more weird (no kinkshaming, but I think it might be the correct technical term) graphic sex. But as a romance it really works for me, those two are a very interesting romantic pair. And at a time when it feels like there are no new plots anywhere, I do not remember quite this plot or a pairing like this. But it is confusing, and it feels puzzle like for the sake of being cryptic.
November 22, 2019
A very uneven issue for me. "A Time to Reap" by Elizabeth Bear was a solid 4.5*, I love a good mystery in SF and throw in some well done time travel paradoxes, I will eat it up. Vina Jie-Min Prasad's story was also excellently written, as I expected, but fatally flawed by the pretty graphic monster sex content which just wasn't my thing. I'll remember that story, for sure, but mainly because of the whiplash between "so good" and "oh god not my thing".
The remaining stories either felt incomplete, half-baked, poorly written, or cliche, sadly.
The remaining stories either felt incomplete, half-baked, poorly written, or cliche, sadly.
January 5, 2023
Cool idea and execution but could have done without the weird and graphic tentacle sex
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December 9, 2019Read "A Time to Reap" by Elizabeth Bear (4 stars)
February 10, 2021
This review is solely for Elizabeth Bear's "A Time to Reap"
4.5 stars, one of my all-time favorites of Bear's short fiction. Love it and would like to one day have it in a print short story collection of hers.
4.5 stars, one of my all-time favorites of Bear's short fiction. Love it and would like to one day have it in a print short story collection of hers.
comics-and-magazines
January 24, 2020Favorites:
A Time to Reap (Elizabeth Bear)
A Mindreader’s Guide to Surviving Your First Year at the All-Girls Superhero Academy (Jenn Reese)
A Time to Reap (Elizabeth Bear)
A Mindreader’s Guide to Surviving Your First Year at the All-Girls Superhero Academy (Jenn Reese)
February 2, 2020
Rating for "A Time To Reap" by Elizabeth Bear
November 24, 2019
I really liked the novella A Time to Reap by Elizabeth Bear, the rest of the stories didn't do a whole lot for me.
January 30, 2020
Fiction
A Time to Reap by Elizabeth Bear: 3.5/5
Nutrition Facts by D.A. Xiaolin Spires: 2.5/5
Black Flowers Blossom by Vina Jie-Min Prasad: 1/5
Peridot and Rain by Laura Anne Gilman: 2/5
A Mindreader's Guide to Surviving Your First Year at the All-Girls Superhero Academy by Jenn Reese: 3.5/5
Non-fiction
The Page and the Prose: Writing Between Prose and Comics by G. Willow Wilson: 4/5
The Science, Fiction, and Fantasy of Genre by Alexandra Erin: 4.5/5
If You've Heard This One Before by Brandon O'Brien: 3/5
As You Know, Bob... by Jeannette Ng: 3/5
Confessions of an Adjacent Geek by Keidra Chaney: 5/5
Poetry
I really liked Manananggal by Sylvia Santiago!
Average rating: 3.2/5, rounded to 3/5
A Time to Reap by Elizabeth Bear: 3.5/5
Nutrition Facts by D.A. Xiaolin Spires: 2.5/5
Black Flowers Blossom by Vina Jie-Min Prasad: 1/5
Peridot and Rain by Laura Anne Gilman: 2/5
A Mindreader's Guide to Surviving Your First Year at the All-Girls Superhero Academy by Jenn Reese: 3.5/5
Non-fiction
The Page and the Prose: Writing Between Prose and Comics by G. Willow Wilson: 4/5
The Science, Fiction, and Fantasy of Genre by Alexandra Erin: 4.5/5
If You've Heard This One Before by Brandon O'Brien: 3/5
As You Know, Bob... by Jeannette Ng: 3/5
Confessions of an Adjacent Geek by Keidra Chaney: 5/5
Poetry
I really liked Manananggal by Sylvia Santiago!
Average rating: 3.2/5, rounded to 3/5
January 7, 2020
This review is for Jenn Reese's "A Mindreader's Guide to Surviving Your First Year at the All-Girls Superhero Academy"
A very short and sweet story that is sort of what it says on the box (That title, y'all! Who could resist it?), but is mostly an optimistic examination of first love and deciding what kind of person you'll be. Recommended if you like superpowered coming-of-age stories.
A very short and sweet story that is sort of what it says on the box (That title, y'all! Who could resist it?), but is mostly an optimistic examination of first love and deciding what kind of person you'll be. Recommended if you like superpowered coming-of-age stories.
December 22, 2019
Not my favourite issue as a whole.
Preferred stories were “A Time to Reap” by Elizabeth Bear and “Black Flowers Blossom” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (both for reading and in audio). The essay on the ‘Joker’ was also thought provoking.
Preferred stories were “A Time to Reap” by Elizabeth Bear and “Black Flowers Blossom” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (both for reading and in audio). The essay on the ‘Joker’ was also thought provoking.
January 13, 2020
I read A Time to Read (4 star) and Black Flowers Blossom (5 star) from this issue.
February 12, 2020
A Time to Reap by Elizabeth Bear was a very solid time travel story, probably even better for people from the US: https://uncannymagazine.com/article/a...
March 1, 2020
Highly Recommended
Read
June 1, 2020"A Time to Reap" by Elizabeth Bear was really good.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews