Apex Magazine Issue 65
By Sigrid Ellis
()
About this ebook
Apex Magazine is a monthly science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazine featuring original, mind-bending short fiction from many of the top pros of the field. New issues are released on the first Tuesday of every month.
Edited by Hugo Award-nominated editor Sigrid Ellis.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITORIAL:
Resolute: Notes from the Editor–in–Chief — Sigrid Ellis
FICTION:
Primrose or Return to Il'maril — Mary McMyne
Coins for Their Eyes — Kris Millering
The House in Winter — Jessica Sirkin
What I Am — Tom Piccirilli
NONFICTION:
Interview with Kris Millering — Andrea Johnson
Fandom Activism for Change in Visual Entertainment Media: We Have the Power — Loraine Sammy
Clavis Aurea: A Review of Short Fiction — Charlotte Ashley
Interview with Catherine Denvir — Loraine Sammy
POETRY:
Half Wives — Chris Lynch
The Excavation of Trow — Sonya Taaffe
On the Excarnations of the Gods — Neile Graham
NOVEL EXCERPTS:
King's War: The Knights of Breton Court 3 — Maurice Broaddus (eBook/Subscriber exclusive)
Cover art by Catherine Denvir
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Apex Magazine Issue 65 - Sigrid Ellis
APEX MAGAZINE
ISSUE 65, OCTOBER 2014
EDITED BY SIGRID ELLIS
Smashwords Edition
Table of Contents
Editorial
Resolute: Notes from the Editor–in–Chief — Sigrid Ellis
Fiction
Primrose or Return to Il’maril — Mary McMyne
Coins for Their Eyes — Kris Millering
The House in Winter — Jessica Sirkin
What I Am — Tom Piccirilli
Nonfiction
Interview with Kris Millering — Andrea Johnson
Fandom Activism for Change in Visual Entertainment Media: We Have the Power — Loraine Sammy
Clavis Aurea: A Review of Short Fiction — Charlotte Ashley
Interview with Catherine Denvir — Loraine Sammy
Poetry
Half Wives — Chris Lynch
The Excavation of Troy — Sonya Taaffe
On the Excarnations of the Gods — Neile Graham
Excerpt
King’s War: The Knights of Breton Court 3 — Maurice Broaddus
Resolute: Notes from the Editor–in–Chief
My heroes have aged as I have.
When I was younger, I wanted heroes who were teenagers, young adults. I wanted heroes who were embarking on life for the first time. I loved protagonists in the midst of their first encounters with evil, with love, with hard choices. I had yet to struggle with those things myself, and I wanted a map. A guide.
I wanted a friend to show me the way forward through dark places.
I’m older now. I have kids; I have two careers; I have a house. More importantly, I have made mistakes. I have done things I am not proud of. I have done things I regret. I have failed to do things, and those failures keep me up at night.
These days, I like a hero who understands that. I prefer a protagonist who has screwed everything all to hell, yet inexplicably finds herself still standing.
If you don’t die, well, then, I guess you go on.
We need maps for this road, too.
I feel that fandom — gaming communities, SF/F communities, comics fandoms, all of us — are looking at those harder roads ahead. We’re not callow youths anymore. We’re not knights in shining armor, prepared to die fighting dragons.
We’re older, as communities. We’re not shiny and new anymore. We’re older, but we’re not necessarily getting wiser.
We need to be wiser. We need to grow and change.
We need maps for this road, too.
This issue of Apex features a number of works regarding that next road. The path onward. What happens after you choose the less–traveled–road, after you go further up and further in. This is not what’s on the other side of the looking–glass; this is what happens after you get home and are never the same person again.
These are stories of regret. Stories of hope and commitment to a cause. Stories of enduring. Stories of following through in full knowledge of the cost.
These stories and poems are fiction and don’t contain the answers that solve GamerGate; they don’t explain how to include transpeople in feminist circles; they don’t broker peace between misogynist fans and women. But these stories are, by nature of their existence, proof that the world is wider than the worst of us would have it be.
There are other roads to the future.
There are other maps to traverse these days.
We’ll find them together.
Sigrid Ellis
Editor–in–Chief
Primrose or Return to Il’maril
Mary McMyne
A chapter from the unfinished memoir
of Virginia Booth, noted xenoanthropologist
and novelist, London, Earth (b. 2345–d. 2474).
I will not leave this cavern,
the voice said as soon as I stepped into the cave mouth. A baritone decaying into vibrato, an old man’s voice, full of dignity and pride.
I tried to pinpoint its source, but the air was thick with fog. The haze seemed to originate from inside the chamber, where a mysterious current of cold wind blew from underground. All around me, where the vapour met the pink light, it glowed, the colour of the primrose buds in my terrarium back home. The thought of missing them in full bloom this year, pricked at me. Focus, Virginia, I told myself. Don’t be so bloody addled. There are lives on the line.
There was no way to know for sure whether the voice belonged to the man I’d been sent there to meet, Vierro Casstratil, the grandfather shaman of Il’maril. Due to the technology taboos, there had been no holos made of him, but the voice sounded just as I’d imagined his would.
I know how sacred your world is to you,
I said in his native tongue, the language I learned on my first visit decades ago, which a visit to the pharmatutors had refreshed. But I beg you to reconsider —
Not that old song and dance,
the voice snapped. From you?
I beg your pardon, sir. What do you know of me?
I requested you.
Casstratil sounded pleased, almost amused. I heard movement, then footsteps, though I still couldn’t see anyone. When the I.U. asked to send another representative. Perhaps they hoped indulging me would change my mind.
He tittered, a thin laugh that devolved quickly into a cough.
Folding my arms over my traditional tunic, I nodded. The Interstellar Union had mentioned nothing of the sort to me, but it certainly would explain why they’d called me out of retirement. Stepping further into the cavern, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. For a moment, it was like cataracts again, before my op. Then, I emerged from the haze, and the chamber came clear, filled with stalactites and stalagmites, crooking out of the stone like teeth. At its back, a tunnel, the apparent source of the wind, glowed with dim purple light. When I realised it wasn’t flickering like a candle, but steady, my heart stopped. Light, I thought. The Il’maril refuse medical care. They would rather die than board a transit ship. They aren’t supposed to use tech at all.
Focusing on the light brought the rest of the chamber into relief. A cloaked figure stood at its back, not much taller than I, two silver eyes glowing faintly beneath a hood. Tiny puffs of condensation floated from his mouth as he spoke. I am glad our destinies have further intertwined. My father was the one who approved your first visit.
I wish I could thank him.
The life expectancy on Il’maril was fifty years.
The silver lights of Casstratil’s eyes went out. May he live on in the sun.
May he live on in the sun.
In the traditional silence that followed, I found myself remembering my first visit. My first mission as an I.U. xenoanthropologist. My first visit to Andromeda, my first love. Everything had begun then. Even my pub career. I couldn’t stop writing about the way the steppes glittered in winter, afterward, the terror and beauty of the Il’marillian sky at night. It was marvelous and wild, unlike the carefully controlled biodome of London, inside of which you could never quite forget the extreme heat and cold of the wastes outside.
Now was not the time for sightseeing, though.
I wrote several —
I paused, trying to remember the Il’maril word for physical pubs, which the pharmatutors apparently hadn’t restored. "— books. I wrote several books about my time here. It’s an honor to get an audience with you."
Yes, yes, of course.
He bowed slightly beneath his hood, then lowered his voice. It cannot surprise you that we refuse to go.
It doesn’t,
I said quietly. I’d awakened that morning with a particularly germane line of scripture on my tongue. All day, as the caravan led me to this cave, I’d been repeating it to myself, worried I would forget without the memory chip I’d refused out of respect for the taboos. "‘Without the sun we are nothing.’"
He nodded. Your teacher taught you well. And yet you advocate for evacuation?
No matter how much I love this place,
I hoped he could hear the regret in my voice, I must.
From the surface, the Il’maril sky was enchanting, the crimson sun bathed in rose–coloured light. Only from space was it clear the planet actually had two suns: a tiny white dwarf and its companion, a rosy red giant blooming petals of dust. Probe ships had been making passes over the system ever since convection began in the