Welcome to the new-look Mythaxis Magazine!
It’s been six years since new management took over, and the first thing we did then was give the site a more modern edge. But the times they keep a-changin’, so we thought it was time to give our facelift a facelift. Since our last issue came out, we’ve been scrambling behind the scenes to have things in place for the spring issue, and here we are!
Your editor enjoys genre fiction of significant conceptual scope, and right from the off here we have that. But there is also something about short stories that effectively embrace great temporal scope that catches my attention. Spinning a tale that spans years, “against the clock” as it were, while maintaining a sense of the weight of passing time requires a deft touch, and Frank Baird Hughes shows he has just that.
I dislike the term “literary fiction” as a genre label. It smacks of pretension (to abuse Orwell, “All fic are lit, but some fic are more lit than others”) or marketing desperation (“We can't just call this thing ‘a drama’, damnit”), and it's probably both. Yet when I think about P. W. Lewis’ story, with its faintest of magic realist touches, “lit-fic” keeps popping into my head… maybe I like it after all.
After I finished reading The Perfect Mother for the first time, I lay back against the submissions pile and thought, “That sort of reminds me of 'My Beloved Is Mine' from back in issue 34.” Imagine my surprise, then, when et cetera et cetera et cetera Jude Clee. They make for sharply pointed family-life bookends, these stories!
Vanessa Fabiano's fiction is invariably character-driven and often grounded in her first-hand experience of various world cultures – possibly also of some spectacularly unusual people. The results are always striking and vivid, even spilling over into the surreal, if not necessarily the outright fantastical. On this occasion, however…
List stories are an exemplar of “format” fiction, but often result in numbered section headers that frame a longer, more detailed text, bestowing convenient creative elbow room instead of a challenging constraint. In my opinion, at their best, list stories just present The List, whatever it is, and force the reader to construct a world unseen beyond the few words the author chooses. Reader, I give you Jon Clendaniel.
Clearly Mythaxis is becoming didactic, as for the second consecutive issue we finish our fiction offering with a lesson. Somewhat less final than the previous, though, since Sean Myers provides a learning experience which, while still painful, its recipient will have more than mere seconds to reflect upon!
I, the editor, considered Simon Jimenez's debut novel The Vanished Birds one of the most entertaining space operas since the passing of Iain M. Banks (rather shorter than the field leader, that being the whole of The Expanse series). Interesting then to hear the perspective of Mattia Ravasi on Jimenez's continuation into epic fantasy.
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