Fantasy Magazine Issue 55, October 2011
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Fantasy Magazine Issue 55, October 2011 Table of Contents Editorial, by John Joseph Adams “The Secret Beach” by Tim Pratt (fiction) Author Spotlight: Tim Pratt (interview) Feature Interview: Richard K. Morgan, by Andrew Liptak (interview) “Absolute Zero” by Nadia Bulkin (fiction) Author Spotlight: Nadia Bulkin “The Downsides of Dating a God” by Genevieve Valentine (nonfiction) “Unnatural Disaster” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (fiction) Author Spotlight: Kristine Kathryn Rusch (interview) “Five Ocean-Dwelling Creatures That Look Like Aliens (But Aren’t)” by Jeremiah Tolbert (nonfiction) “The Invisibles” by Charles de Lint (fiction) Author Spotlight: Charles de Lint (interview) “Are You Watching Carefully?” by Christopher Priest (nonfiction) Coming Attractions © 2011, Fantasy Magazine Cover Art by Bram Lee Horng. Ebook design by Neil Clarke www.fantasy-magazine.com Editorial, October 2011 John Joseph Adams Welcome to issue fifty-five of Fantasy Magazine! Here’s what we’ve got on tap this month. There are some places so magical they can change the very course of your life. In Tim Pratt’s “The Secret Beach,” one man stumbles across such a remarkable place. Now the question is: What will he do to stay there? In our feature interview this month, Andrew Liptak talks to Richard K. Morgan about switching (and blending) genres, cynicism and economics, and what’s next for Ringil Eskiath, the protagonist of Morgan’s epic fantasy The Steel Remains. In “Absolute Zero” by Nadia Bulkin, one man must confront the monstrous truth about his family—before it destroys his town. It’s not easy loving a deity. Genevieve Valentine explores human-god relationships in her article “The Downsides of Dating a God.” When a big-city cop takes over as a small-town sheriff, trouble is bound to happen. But in Kristine Katherine Rusch’s “Unnatural Disaster,” the trouble comes in a surprisingly weird package. Jeremiah Tolbert explores the strange creatures that lurk in the barely explored depths of our oceans in “Five Ocean-Dwelling Creatures That Look Like Aliens (But Aren’t).” In “The Invisibles,” by Charles De Lint, one artist rediscovers the belief in magic he thought he’d buried years ago. Christopher Priest, author of The Prestige, explores the arts of misdirection and magic in his article “Are You Watching Carefully?” So that’s our issue this month. Thanks for reading! John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. Upcoming anthologies include: Lightspeed: Year One, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Armored, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. He is a finalist for the 2011 Hugo Award and the 2011 World Fantasy Award, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com. John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. The Secret Beach Tim Pratt Two teenagers showed me the way, a boy and a girl, not siblings but also not in love, or if they were, trying to hide it from one another. I was walking along the sidewalk toward downtown Berkeley, a few blocks past the long- abandoned ice skating rink, thinking how nice it would be to be the sort of person who bicycles along with a loaf of fresh bed sticking up jauntily from the bike’s basket, instead of the kind of person walking to the drugstore to buy club soda because things haven’t gotten quite bad enough for me to drink cheap Scotch straight yet. That’s when I saw them: dripping wet in swimsuits, each with a towel draped damply over a shoulder, laughing as they turned a corner in one of the residential neighborhoods between downtown and the Bay. I paused because I couldn’t think where they’d be walking from; miles from the Bay, which was way too cold to brave without a wetsuit anyway, and there were no public pools over there, and while there might have been a pool in someone’s backyard, those weren’t common— houses in this part of town tend to be squeezed onto lots barely larger than themselves; the houses with yards of any size are precious commodities, never mind swimming pools. Besides: They had sand on their bare legs, and stuck to their arms, and though I’m the kind of person who uses the self-checkout line at grocery stores just to avoid the necessity of small conversation with a human cashier, I blurted out, “Hey, where were you guys swimming?” as they reached the corner where I lingered. They exchanged a glance of raised eyebrows and quirked lips, both inhabitants of a world of nonverbal communication for which I had neither map nor codebook, and she said, “The beach,” and giggled, the laugh of someone who thinks disappointment is something that happens to other people far away, like earthquakes in China or tsunamis in the South Pacific. They both walked on past me up the street, moving a little faster than before, sparing their exit line from any follow- up questions from the balding thirty-something guy wearing too much black for such a warm day. I forgot about my trip to the CVS and the all- important club soda, even though that first tall glass— filled with ice and two shots of Trader Joe’s Blended Scotch Whisky (9.99 a bottle) and a crackling popping measure of soda to fill it up—had become the closest thing in my life to a sacrament or a vocation. Instead I turned down the sidewalk the way the teenagers had come, and yes, I say they showed me the way: because they’d left wet shoeprints on the sidewalk and the occasional spatter of dripping water, like a blood trail on a forensic crime show, making a trail even a city dweller like me could follow like a great wilderness tracker. I followed their dripping trail past flaking Victorian houses and brightly painted adobe bungalows, yards full of oversized flowers or drought-resistant succulents, until after a block and a half or so their trail ended next to an empty lot enclosed by a chain-link fence so overgrown with vines that it could have passed for the entry to a jungle ruin. Was there some renegade swimming hole in there, a guerilla community art project of hauled-in sand and a concrete-lined pit, like the pocket parks that sprang up sometimes when enterprising hippies or hipsters decided to reclaim waste ground or precious parking spots with a few cubic feet of potting soil, a plastic bench, and an ornamental fountain? Seemed like an ill-advised project, ultimately just a mosquito breeding program, but what else could it be? I pushed through the overgrown shrubs, barely making out a trail, and reached the fence, where I found the chain-link had been cut apart and then re-closed with fuzzy pipe cleaners, green and red and blue. (Does anyone use pipe cleaners to clean their pipes anymore, or are they produced exclusively as arts and craft supplies for children?) I carefully untwisted them and squeezed through the gap, snagging my sagging belly-flesh on a sharp end of wire and sucking in a hiss of air through my teeth. Once I was through, I stood up, under a sky that was noticeably bluer and more cloudless than the one on the other side of the fence, and stared at the closest thing on Earth to infinity: The ocean. Or, at least, an ocean. Now, understand. Berkeley, California doesn’t abut the ocean. Berkeley does touch San Francisco Bay, a few miles to the west, and it’s a pretty enough sight when the weather’s right, the gray city beyond the bay rising up from the water. But this was ocean, blue-green, wide as wide can be, view so clear you could see the curve of the horizon, and a beach of sand the color of bread crumbs toasted golden. The sound of the surf was the world’s own rhythm section, a percussive susurration that had been utterly inaudible beyond the fence, and now filled the world. In stories, people usually assume they’ve gone crazy when things like this happen. It occurred to me that this all might be a dream, but I never notice smells in my dreams, and this was a world of salt tang and crisp air. I sank to my knees in the warm sand and stared at the grand expanse of tumbling waves, and thought if this was a coma or some profound electrochemical misfiring in my brain, then so be it: It was the most beautiful way to go I could imagine. There’s a place in Maui, where I went on my honeymoon, that most people just call Big Beach, considered one of the most pleasant stretches of shoreline in the inhabited world. And there’s a place near Santa Cruz, on Highway 1, where you pass beneath a natural bridge and discover a strand of narrow sand bordered on one side by sea cliffs and on the other by the cold lovely Pacific. Both are glorious places, homes of my heart, from a time when my life was an opening-out instead of a closing-in. I betrayed both instantly. This beach, this twist in the usual flow of time and space, was my new favorite place in the world or out of it.