Into other worlds
This is embarrassingly belated, but there’s a new online magazine for lovers of secondary-world fantasy: Beneath Ceaseless Skies, currently featuring stories by Chris Willrich and Yoon Ha Lee.
Secondary-world fantasy is difficult to get right — it’s very easy, for me at least, to get bogged down in the details of worldbuilding and neglect either the plot or the style of the story. Or, going the other way, it’s easy to cobble together a world out of scraps without a care for its internal consistency or for ingenuity. But when it’s done well, when the world and the plot and the style all feed into each other and weave together, it can be stunning. And the stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies are done well, with an eye toward literary skill as well as fantastic (in both senses of the word) worlds.
I’ve even sold them a story (and one of which I am very proud): “Dragon’s-Eyes” will be forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, probably sometime after the turn of the year.
Go take a look. Immerse yourself in other worlds for a while.
Margaret Ronald 