Letter From The Editor - Issue 55 - February 2017
Welcome to 2017's first issue of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show! For all you
fine readers who will be attending the various literary awards for 2016 work, I hope you'll
consider our offerings on your ballots.
After all the candy of the holidays, the well-wishing and indulgences of New Year's, we thought
we'd present something a bit more . . . bittersweet for this issue. Our six stories this issue are
melancholy and earnest; sweet and sad; bracing and pensive.
I hope you enjoy them!
M. Bennardo's "The Wine on Your Lips is Ash on Your Tongue" explores the idea that returning
from Fairyland is worse than spending eternity there. Of course, that's a story told only by those
who return.
Samuel Marzioli has "A Mundane Encounter with a Civilized God." In Arkham Asylum, the
Shoggoth-spawn sing a dirge to twist the minds of all who therein dwell. Of all the patients,
though, one alone is strangest; one alone is, perhaps, the most absurd: the one who may not be
insane at all.
No one wants Jessup. She's passed from relative to relative, like a family heirloom no one has
room to keep. So when she's kidnapped, it's a complete surprise to her. Allison Mulder explores
issues of family, love, collections, and belonging in "Collecting Jessup."
"The Sea of Ghosts" by Anna Zumbro is an appropriately haunting tale of a boy and the ghost
that shows him a world beyond the auroras and sea he's known all his life. But how much of the
journey is actually his, and how much of himself will he lose to the whispers of a dead woman?
It's a ghost of another sort that the super-hero Safeguard is dealing with: Her sister, the villain
Surekill, is dead. But it makes no sense--killed the wrong way, by the wrong heroes . . .
Safeguard searches for the meaning behind death in Michelle Ann King's "The Five Stages of Grief."
Our audio selection this month is '" Century of Princes," by H.L. Fullerton and read by SFF
Princess Alethea Kontis. Briar woke Rose a bit earlier than the enchanted princess was meant to
wake . . . but that doesn't seem to stop princes from knocking at their door.
Most Melancholy Salutations,
Scott M. Roberts
Editor
Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=i55&article=_fromeditor
