27
Mar
FreeApex Magazine consistently offers some of my favorite mixed genre stories. The February issue kicks off with “Cai and Her Ten-Thousand Husbands” by Gord Sellar, a multicultural tale of war, violence, prostitution and immortality. Cai is “liberated” from her small village, directly into a house of concubines, which serve to both amuse the troops and experiment on them. The years of being programmed to be a sexual submissive change her, but how much change, and how many years go by, not even Cain knows. For a story that revolves around the many aspects of sex, there’s very little of the act in the story. But there is a complicated world with many secrets for Cai and the reader to discover.
“Dark Planet” by Lavie Tidhar also features and exotic feel. In this offering, a group of troops have been deployed to Fly, a planet so terrible (seriously, there are exploding shrapnel bugs and living trees that eat people) that many deny it even exists. The plot is hazy and leaves readers wondering if they “got” all of it. But the world building is beautiful and dangerous, as if this tale was tailored for Apex’s style.
“A Plague from the Mud” by Aaron Polson is a reprint from Permuted Press’ giant creatures anthology, Monstrous: 20 Tales of Giant Creature Terror. The narrator, a teacher in a small logging town in the Oregon woods, is witness to the strange emergence of beetles, with habits like the cicada, but with a predictably large size and taste for bigger meals than other bugs.
Finally, for fiction, comes “Tearing Down Tuesday” by Steven Francis Murphy which first appeared in Interzone. Much like the traditional tale of a boy and his dog, with a dark twist, “Tearing Down Tuesday” is the story of a boy and his robot, the only person who loves him and does him right, no matter what the cost to both of them.
All together it’s another dark, fine edition of Apex Magazine.
Also Featuring:
Popped Culture: Robots in Distress by Justin Stewart
Monster in the Closet by Alethea Kontis
Libraries Like Jungles, Side to Side by Lavie Tidhar
An Interview with R. Thomas Riley
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