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    Apex Magazine: Issue 52
    Apex Magazine: Issue 52
    Apex Magazine: Issue 52
    Ebook137 pages1 hour

    Apex Magazine: Issue 52

    By Lynne M. Thomas

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    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 the first Tuesday of every month.

    This month we feature work by Margaret Ronald, Anaea Lay, Hal Duncan, Mary Robinette Kowal, Maurice Broaddus, and Deborah Stanish.

    Fiction
    “Someone Like You” by Margaret Ronald
    “Turning the Whisper” by Anaea Lay
    “The Boy Who Loved Death” by Hal Duncan
    “Body Language by Mary Robinette Kowal
    “I Can Transform You: The Carmillon” by Maurice Broaddus

    Nonfiction
    “Blood on Vellum: Notes from the Editor-in-Chief” by Lynne M. Thomas
    “Fangirl Isn’t a Dirty Word” by Deborah Stanish
    “Interview with Hal Duncan” by Maggie Slater

    A 2013 Hugo Award nominee for Best Semiprozine!

    Cover art by Steven Kenny.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherApex Book Company
    Release dateSep 4, 2013
    ISBN9781301028634
    Apex Magazine: Issue 52

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    • 4/5
      Another excellent issue. Standouts include the outstanding contributions from Greg Mellor and Nancy Kress.

    Book preview

    Apex Magazine - Lynne M. Thomas

    APEX MAGAZINE

    ISSUE 52, SEPTEMBER 2013

    Smashwords Edition

    EDITED BY LYNNE M. THOMAS

    Copyrights and Acknowledgments

    Blood on Vellum: Notes from the Editor–in–Chief Copyright © 2013 by Lynne M. Thomas

    Someone Like You Copyright © 2013 by Margaret Ronald

    Turning the Whisper Copyright © 2013 by Anaea Lay

    The Boy Who Loved Death Copyright © 2013 by Hal Duncan

    Body Language Copyright © 2009 by Mary Robinette Kowal (Originally published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show in 2009. Reprinted with permission of the author.)

    Fangirl Isn't a Dirty Word Copyright © 2013 by Deborah Stanish

    Interview with Hal Duncan Copyright © 2013 by Maggie Slater

    I Can Transform You: The Carmillon Copyright © 2013 by Maurice Broaddus (excerpted from I Can Transform You, Apex Publications, 2013)

    Publisher/Editor — Jason Sizemore

    Editor–in–Chief — Lynne M. Thomas

    Senior Editor — Gill Ainsworth

    Managing Editor — Michael Damian Thomas

    Slush Editors — Sigrid Ellis, Deanna Knippling, Kelly Lagor, Eileen Maksym, Jei D. Marcade, Michael Matheson, Fran Wilde, Emily Wagner, Will Savage, Saira Ali

    Graphic Designer — Justin Stewart

    Digital Formatting — Stephanie Jacob

    ISSN: 2157–1406

    Apex Publications

    PO Box 24323

    Lexington, KY 40524

    About Our Cover Artist

    First settling in New York City, he gained notoriety as a freelance commercial illustrator. Clients included Sony Music, Time Magazine, AT&T, United Airlines, Celestial Seasonings, Microsoft and many others. His illustrations repeatedly received awards from the Society of Illustrators, Communication Arts Magazine and the Art Directors’ Club of New York.

    In 1997 Steven turned away from illustration in order to devote his full attention to the fine arts. Since that time he has lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and his home state of New York before settling in St. Petersburg, Florida. His award-winning paintings are exhibited in galleries across the United States and Europe.

    From an early age the beauty and mystery of nature have deeply influenced his chosen subject matter: compositions that most often combine the human figure with elements from nature to comment on our interactions with the environment while symbolically alluding to the dynamics of human nature in general.

    The Shout

    Table of Contents

    Editorial

    Blood on Vellum: Notes from the Editor–in–Chief

    Lynne M. Thomas

    Fiction

    Someone Like You

    Margaret Ronald

    Turning the Whisper

    Anaea Lay

    The Boy Who Loved Death

    Hal Duncan

    Body Language

    Mary Robinette Kowal

    I Can Transform You: The Carmillon

    (2,500 word exclusive sample from I Can Transform You)

    Maurice Broaddus

    Nonfiction

    Fangirl Isn’t a Dirty Word

    Deborah Stanish

    Interview with Hal Duncan

    Maggie Slater

    Blood on Vellum: Notes from the Editor–in–Chief

    Welcome to Issue 52 of Apex Magazine.

    I’m really pleased to share these stunning stories with you. Anaea Lay’s Turning the Whisper, provides a meditation on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and death. Hal Duncan brings us a short, sharp, vicious tale about a school shooting in The Boy Who Loved Death (Trigger Warning: some readers may find this story disturbing). Margaret Ronald’s Someone Like You explores what happens when the tenuous bonds between alternate realities, and relationships, are ruptured.

    Our reprint this month is Body Language, Mary Robinette Kowal’s tale of the artistry of remote character puppetry used to foil a kidnapping, originally published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show in 2009.

    In our nonfiction for the month, Deborah Stanish explains why fangirl is not a dirty word. Maggie Slater interviews Hal Duncan. Please believe me when I say that this interview is epic in both scope and linguistic gymnastics, particularly in its use of profanity.

    The Hugos have come and gone, and what an amazing evening it was with our friends, colleagues, and fans. We are deeply honored to have been nominated. Thanks once again to everyone who supported Apex!

    I hope that you enjoy this issue of Apex Magazine.

    Lynne M. Thomas

    Editor–in–Chief

    Plow the Bones

    Apex Voices: Book 1

    by Douglas F. Warrick

    In these pages, interdimensional lampreys feed on a dying man’s most precious memories, and a manga artist’s sketches remake Osaka into part fantasy, part nightmare. Combining elements of fantasy, magical realism and horror, the collection floats on a distinctly literary voice that is creepy, surreal and just plain weird.

    ISBN: 978–1–937009–15–1

    Someone Like You

    Margaret Ronald

    Athéne — the Athéne who was never mine — used to say that I was always slow to catch on. Even if it wasn’t true to begin with, it’s become true, and so I guess it makes sense that I didn’t understand how serious the tether break was until the consequence ran smack into me. I doubt she’d appreciate the irony.

    In my defense, I wasn’t there when the break occurred. Athéne didn’t like it when I monitored her runs — she called it pathetic — so I restricted myself to preparing calculations for the next run while she was in the tilism. I spent a good hour checking this client’s request (chemical simulations, again, and the kind that the tilism excelled at), and when I emerged from my exile in the cafeteria, there was already a commotion by the capsule.

    Kassim hurried past, monitor lenses pushed up on his forehead, their cable dangling down his back. Tether? I asked.

    Break, he said, turning to glance at me just inside the capsule chamber. Worst yet. You do know it was Athéne in there —

    Yes, I know, I said, before he could be kind. She’ll be fine somewhere.

    The capsule isn’t much to look at — only the inclusion of the monitoring equipment keeps it from resembling a latrine — but the tilism effect makes up for it. So long as it’s still moored in infinite-fold reality, the capsule is a blur, millions of minuscule differences shivering across its skin. As I followed into the chamber, the capsule resolved into one single image, the setup just slightly askew from what it had been this morning.

    Kassim cast a quick look back at me. Dr. Vourlis? he called. There’s been a severe tether break —

    Yes, I know. It was hard to ignore. Athéne opened up the capsule and glared at him. Someday my heart would stop turning over when I heard her voice. We’ve been studying the effect in my fold of reality, too. She extracted herself from the capsule, all long limbs in tight black clothing. I looked away. Well, this fold looks close enough to what I left. I assume you’ll be running a reelback?

    A what? someone said.

    Athéne sighed. "A reelback. The process of tracing my path to see where I intersected with other folds? The possibility of return? I certainly hope this fold has advanced that far at least."

    "Oh, that, the same person said. Yes, we call it the Piracha-Moussami Process."

    Good, I — She stopped. Piracha?

    I turned to leave; it never helped the project to see the team leader turn vicious, and I didn’t want to provide the excuse. But I couldn’t resist a quick glance to the side so that I’d see her in my peripheral vision.

    Athéne leapt away from the capsule, shoved past Kassim and the others, and slammed into me so hard I knocked against the wall. Seema, she whispered, turning me around so that I was once again looking up at her, closer than we had been in a decade. Seema, you’re alive.

    And before I could say anything, even her name, she kissed me hard and sweet. My knees went weak as they always had. The tether crew gaped at us, except for Kassim, who knew our history. I am, I said, took Athéne’s face in my hands, and kissed her back.

    §

    For a very long time we treated the multiple-folds theory of reality as pretty but practically useless; once an observer was introduced, the infinite possibilities collapsed down to one. In my first tilism notes — and the first notes were mine — I hypothesized otherwise: an observer in a tilism state becomes part of that state, thus collapsing reality only to the subset of folds that includes them. It’s a smaller infinity, but still useful for running simultaneous parallel calculations along billions of folds, producing in one run what would take non-parallel computing two million years to process.

    That was the basics of it, and the project’s since borne it out: Kassim and I engineered the tilism state capsule, and Athéne took over from there, adding the spark and fire and funding (cryptography, molecular simulations, many-body systems; everyone wanted time on the tilism). The trouble came from the observers — namely, bringing back the right one. A broken tether doesn’t result in the return of a capsule from an entirely different fold of reality; there’s a set of folds in which we’ve constructed a tilism, after all, a smaller subset in which we use the observer-collapse method, and a still smaller subset

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