I received issue #4 of Subterrean Magazine over a month ago and finally had a chance to start reading it the other night. It got lost in the shuffle around here but I'm making up for lost time now. Sci Fi fans may have heard that John Scalzi was guest editor of this issue and what he crafted was a "Sci Fi Cliches" collection. Originally he pitched it as an anthology idea but when the book wasn't a fit for Subterranean Press they decided to cut Scalzi loose on the magazine. I was expecting a lot of silliness and maybe some snarkiness but all my offbase preconceived notions were thrown out the window with the issue's first story, Rachel Swirsky's "Scene From a Dsytopia". This is Swirsky's first published story and man did she hit it out of the ballpark. By picking up the tiniest background characters of a story and then expanding on why they might really be in that story it immediately brought to mind every single one of those damn "Star Trek" episodes where the unnamed crewmember died in the first five minutes. Swirsky's piece is way more indepth then that - it's stunning - and much more serious. So I knew, from the very beginning, that this issue was not at all like what I expected. Then I read "The Third Brain" by Charles Coleman Finlay and James Allison and had my mind blown - in a good way.

Who thought a stolen brain story could be so poignant? Who thought a jacket could seem like a pet? Who thought a reader would care?

So yeah - brain story good, very very good.
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I'm only about halfway through but there's tons of great (and unexpected) writing in here. As a historian I especially enjoyed Gillian Polack's "Horrible Historians" Here's a quote: "This when I finally worked out that scientists lived in a science fictional reality. Real history has mud, not moments". (Historians everywhere are loving that one, trust me.)

If you didn't know about Subterranean then you're missing something, trust me. It's a great deal and all fans of short stories should check it out.

All this good Sci Fi got me to thinking that I should maybe subscribe to Locus. I keep thinking I should but end up dancing along the hard to commit line. The problem is we get so many magazines around here (Smithsonian, Nat Geo, Pop Sci, Pop Mech, Virginia Quarterly Rev, Vanity Fair, Slightly Foxed......you get the idea) so I worry that one more will just get lost in the shuffle. But, as someone writing a YA urban fantasy and hoping to one day be a published Sci Fi/Fantasy author (how funny is this - the book my agent has is completely literary but I dream of the chance to be a genre author - in fact a YA genre author which means a double genre, right?!) I think Locus would be helpful. I do like the book reviews a lot and the interviews...maybe I'll just commit after I check out the latest issue. Maybe.....

This is the sort of thing that only married writers worry about you know. What industry mag should I subscribe to? What genre do I belong to? What the heck are all the names of all my characters again??? (oops, probably should have kept that to myself...)