EDIT: sry for the repost. I meant to add more review but hit the delete button accidentally (luckily I was able to copy paste my old review before refreshing the page!)
Firstly, the change in physical quality of the magazine is a pretty severe downgrade. It went from being like a sturdy, high quality paperback, to around comic book quality. By the end of finishing the magazine, the cover is ruffled and some pages are beginning to come loose. It's exactly like an Analog magazine (which isn't surprising, given the change in ownership).
I don't even know if I'm complaining--it's just noticeable.
But, like Analog, despite the pulpy exterior you've still got some good stuff in between those flimsy cover sheets. And this one is no exception.
All the fiction was great, and super idiosyncratic. Really, very fresh stuff! The kinds of things that open you up to new reading experiences and perspectives.
Maurice Broaddus' Soul Rebel will definitely bait you into seeking out more of his writing, but I loved the actual tech/anti-colonial/steampunk themes, with lots of Jamaican Patois as well as a little bit of introduction to the Rastafari culture and ethos.
My apologies to the other stories as I'm a very slow reader with a foggy memory, I won't have as much to say about the other, earlier entries in the magazine. If I leave anything out it's because I don't have anything to say, not because I thought it was bad.
Threat Assessment, by Matthew Kressel & Mercurio D. Rivera was very topical (AI super intelligence) to one of our latest collective anxieties, and a great mindfuck story.
The Final Trial of Jalen, Oba of Uhuri, by Justin C. Key will really get your blood going. Horror coded, "elevated" and with some of the most striking depictions of animals I've experienced since playing Animal Well, by Billy Basso.
The Corporate Soul, by John Shirley, despite being about a world that's sort of fallen to the corpos, felt good to read. It has that punchy hopeful streak through it, which comes out in the ways characters relate to each other. Like the bonds between people haven't been totally atomized away. Just straightforward and good.
The Apology Tour, by Nnedi Okorafor is really well written, I just don't know how I feel about it. It has a real clarity about it that makes it very legible, and the world it describes is one of those pseudo S-risk dystopias of personhood denied (MMAcevedo vibes). I need to think about this one a bit more, because maybe I bristle at the perceived soft-peddling of artificial intelligence/consciousness as inevitable... in the light of people anthropomorphising LLMs with chat bot interfaces tacked in front of them already waaay too much.
Not to start debating authors, but I feel like LLMs prove you don't need sentience to process information.
And a Little Garlic, by William Mangieri: lol, no notes.
The Red River Summers, by Inda Lauryn was hard to read (about enslaved people), but has that streak of hope against hope can turn a story into fuel for change, or maybe just wake some people up.
It's not fiction, but I've also got to give a big shout out to By the Numbers 10: Why We Need to Count on Each Other, by Arley Sorg. It's a seriously woke piece about systemic racism in the writing world, it's like the kind of thing I'd expect to see in progressive online circles rather than a traditional magazine, so that was really refreshing and gives me hope for the direction of the magazine overall.
Finally, I'm just happy this magazine finally got made. I think it's been about a year? since I've seen the last issue? I was not hopeful about ever seeing another issue, so just the fact that it's here in my lap is wonderful.
