Locus Review for Issues 1-3

Just received email that the following review will appear in the next issue of Locus:

Anthologies and webzines, yes; but what about the promotional exercise I mentioned at the start? Well, Clarkesworld Magazine is now publishing, on its website (and later in printed form), two new short stories a month, chosen by Sean Wallace & Nick Mamatas, and the selections thus far are very sound; they may well attract more online book purchasers to Clarkesworld’s precincts (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com). To begin with: in October, Sarah Monette’s “A Light in Troy” considers touchingly the desperate quest for affection by victims of war throughout the ages; and Lavie Tidhar’s “304, Adolph Hitler Strasse” penetratingly scourges the mentality of Nazism and anti-Semitism, presenting an alternate history of German victory in World War Two that proceeds to swallow itself up, consumed by the frenzy of its own degenerate fetishism. Tidhar is an emerging master, and as usual, he pulls no punches at all.

In November, Ian Watson & Roberto Quaglia send up a different sort of fetishism—that of the Japanese consumer—with exuberant daft eroticism in “The Moby Clitoris of His Beloved”; and in December, Jenny Davidson’s “The Other Amazon” wittily evokes the addiction of the online book buyer, the fantasies of alternate retailers purveying impossible books that must occur to every bibliophile, early and often.

—Locus, (Nick Gevers).