Issue 51
NewMyths.com
A quarterly ezine by a community of writers, poets and artists.
Issue 51 - June 2020
Dear Readers,
We hope you all are staying safe and well and have, perhaps, a few extra minutes now to pull up a chair, and read "to your heart's content." And here in this issue are some excellent stories we hope you'll enjoy reading as much as we did!
But we can say that about all our stories, and usually do, in every new issue. What we don't mention often enough is how proud we are of the poetry, nonfiction articles, and stunning artwork we offer in each issue too. And so...
In March, I congratulated two of our poets who were nominated for Rhysling awards─a great accomplishment! But then I learned we actually had FIVE poets nominated for Rhysling awards last year. Wow! They are: "How to Colonize Ganymede" by Mary Soon Lee, "No Fairy Tale World," by Lisa Timpf, "The Daily Freak Show" by Bruce Boston, "Obsidian" by Fungisayi Sasa, and "Why Not?" by Gerri Leen. We're so proud of all of you. Thank you, and all our poets, for always sending us such wonderful poetry.
And in this issue we're honored to run two articles by Peter Jekel, who so often provides our readers with informative and insightful material. Peter's articles this time look at the science and science fiction behind androids, one of the themes we'll be exploring in our new anthology due out next year, NeoSapiens, and more relevant perhaps to our current "real" concerns, the science, history, and science fiction behind pandemics.
My last shout out is to one of our all-time favorite artists, Fiona Meng, who returned to our pages to do the stunning special cover for our 50th issue in March and returns again this issue with a charming "furry" neosapien─a lost mouse. Thank you, Fiona, your art work is always so beautiful.
-Susan Shell Winston, Editor
Table of Contents
Fiction
"Indebted" by K M Dailey
If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be this: never become indebted to a mortal.
"We Are All of Us" by Deborah L. Davitt
They wore white armor, sleek and chitinous—not the white of chalk, but the white of bone peeking through the skin of a mummy.
"The Fée Knight" by Cara DiGirolamo
My brother taught me my first song when I was just a girl. The tip of his finger tracing shivers up the back of my arm, his voice low and promising every delightful horror, he told me tales of the Fée. He warned me, if I ever met a Fée, I should have a poem in my pocket.
"Blood, Bone, Feather" by Justine Gardner
The small red hen stops scraping at the dusty patch behind the coop and cocks her head. There, a rustle. The faint scratch of grasshopper on leaf. She pauses, looks at the others scattered in front of her, and moves closer to the sound—just enough, just so. One step. Two.
"Dreaming Up Fairy Tales with Feral Bots" By A. Katherine Black
Patched with mismatched alloys, its little body was surprisingly clean, considering it lived on a desert planet. Its eyes blinked at my knees, blue-green-blue. Tiny radars crowned its head like feathers. Its beak snapped, arms extruded and retracted repeatedly, as if it didn’t know what to do with the sight of me.
Flash Fiction
"Garden of Stars" by Ashley Bao
I sit in a garden of stars. Red and brown dwarfs grow on silver vines wrapped around old sycamore trunks. Neutron stars dot the dirt, their light blinding the zodiac mice scurrying on the ground. Destinies are stuck in their whiskers and cheese is stuck in their teeth.
"Famous Last Words" by Jeffrey Hunt
The year: 2099. The course: Introduction to Temporal Physics. The task: Initiate a universe-shattering time paradox...
"The Key to the Door" by Dawn Lloyd
The key to the locked door lay on the table next to him. It had been there for eight hundred and twenty-three days. That’s when his creator had walked out the door, calling over his shoulder as he stepped into the sunlight, “I need to work on your beta version.” And so he was alone with a table, a sink, a broom, a cot, the key to the door, and eventually ninety-two dead flies.
NonFiction
"Our Machine Destiny" by Peter Jekel
Computers and their machine relatives are taking over the world. Soon everything, including human beings will have a piece of computer technology imbedded in them.
"Welcome to the Anthropocene" by Peter Jekel
It feels surreal. It feels like one is living in the plot of a science fiction story. How quickly the world can change around us...
Poetry
"Dragon's Lament" by Jasmine Arch
"Only Half in the World of Form" by Mark Childs
"Virtual Reality" by Debkanya Mitra
