Letter From The Editor - Issue 51 - July 2016
On with the show!
Stewart C. Baker offers A View from Driftwise Spindle. From the top of Driftwise Spindle, you
can see political posturing, war, greed and selfishness. All the little miseries that make humanity
insufferable. You can also see love, devotion, and ingenuity--all under the inevitable and
impending doom of Earth.
Speaking of the doom of Earth, Shane Halbach's teenage protagonist in Ten Things Sunil and I
Forgot to Prepare for, When Preparing for the Apocalypse might have been able to teach the
folks in Driftwise a thing or two. That is, if their apocalypse had involved pop-culture zombies
and not the shattered remains of Mars. But seeing as how the young man's own world is not
threatened by zombies either, he has a lot to learn.
Silvio Cortez, in Andrew Neil Gray's Mathematical Certainty, knows a lot. But knowledge will
only take you so far, and in the high-risk world of asteroid mining, it's what you don't know that
will inevitably get you stranded in the middle of nowhere, and bargaining the rest of your life to
the insurance companies for the price of a tow back to safety. The question is whether that kind
of life is worth living . . .
Sabina's life in the Kingdom of Sicily had been well-planned by her family. She upset all their
plans when she tempted the laws of God and man and began practicing the art of bestia mastery.
Now, disgraced, she's been sold off to the convent of Santa Agata--a dreary life she can't wait
to escape. In Aimee Picchi's Only Then Consume Them, Sabina may get her wish for freedom,
but at a bitter cost.
The cost of doing business as a gong farmer is . . . fairly high. There's the cesspits full of human
excrement, for one. Let's be honest, that's a high enough price. Pretty much anything else is just
overkill. For Kat Otis's Lidea, being The Gong Farmer's Daughter also means contending with
an age-old family "blessing" and her drunk, layabout father. Also, the plague. And gunpowder
plots.
Amy, in Rachael Jones's The Raptor Snatchers, is too young to know much about diabolical
plots. What she knows is that someone is stealing kids' velociraptors from them, and that her
own raptor is strangely attracted to the woods near her home. What starts out as a sweet story
about a girl and her alien dinosaur becomes something much more bittersweet as Amy does a lot
of growing up in a very short amount of time.
We've also got a reprint of Kameron Hurley's short story The Light Brigade, and Lawrence
Schoen's interview with her. Bonus content: Kameron's essay, Why I'm Not Afraid Of the
Internet, from her new book, The Geek Feminist Revolution.
Enjoy!
Scott M. Roberts
Editor
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