☼ Lambent Tetrad Issue ☆

  Welcome to the thirty-second issue of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a lambent tetrad of tales. This world wide conglomerate began in the summer of 2009.  Back then we serialized exciting new science fiction novellas such as John Shirley's swashbuckling Sky Pirates, Blag Dahlia's street gritty armed to the teeth with LIPSTICK, David Agranoff's Wuxia prequel The Fallen Guardian's Mandate, and even serialized, for the first time anywhere, Richard Dadd's epic poem Elimination of a Picture and Its Subject--Called the Feller's Master Stroke, among many other stand alone short stories, poems, and more daily serializations, too many to keep track of really, which is why they're showcased in the form of this blog, a nifty means of keeping everything tidily preserved for posterity and archived in chronological order.  

   Fast-forward through the Blog Archive nearly thirteen years until you get to the year 2022, and here we are. As long-time readers of the webzine know, a portion of my neurons were taken over by a mysterious microfleet of nanobots sent back in time to the year 2009 from someplace in the future (now known to be from a Tesla podcraft in orbit about Ceres around the year 2045).  This has been revealed over the past decade in the form of many digital missives which have been typed up remotely with my own fingers by virtue of having my brain's Operating System hijacked by the bloodHost.  

   For this year we at the helm of the FREEZINE have been instructed by the nanoFleet (another moniker for our emissaries from the future) to put out an issue every month.  Last month we ran Philip K. Dick's 1953 story Second Variety in eight installments, along with two more short stories by our very own local contributors: Survivor Guilt by Vincent Daemon and Speed Demon by Shaun Lawton.  

   The February, 2022 issue of the Freezine ran four stories (images hyper-link to the stories):

The Push of a Finger, by Alfred Bester

Slither Eyes, by John Shirley

Divine Wind, by David Agranoff

White City, by Lewis Shiner

  I want to take this time to give a hearty shout-out of THANKS to Alfred Bester; first of all, for keeping me enthralled in high school reading every book and short story of his I could get my hands on.  Luckily for us his 1942 short story The Push of a Finger remains in the public domain. An additional thank you goes out to the team at Project Gutenberg who uploaded the text for creative commons distribution.   (On a side note, I consider myself the first reader in line for this particular story, as it turns out I don't recall ever having read it before. So I'm grateful to the Freezine for having dusted it off and ran it in this month's issue.) I loved every  minute of the story. Now I find myself having come full circle as both editor and reader, here. I'm eager to unearth more overlooked classics over the coming year, when the opportunity presents itself. 

   It is with much appreciation that I must thank John Shirley once again for continuing to participate in our growing venture into the science fictional and more fantastic realms of cyberspace right here on the world wide web. I think we can all agree that were Nikola Tesla alive today, he'd be outright tickled pink by this technological wonder of a communications tool we all have been virtually taking for granted since it's inception. For all we know, Tesla played a hand in inventing the internet. I really dig the focused and creepy vibe of Slither Eyes, with its feel of rapidly induced immediacy and its harrowing subject matter.  I think the artwork I generated for it (courtesy of the Wombo Dream app on my smartphone) ended up working perfectly to complement the visceral terror of the story. If the freezine can be anything like Creepshow, I'm happy. In this one, the creep runs deep. 

   A thousand-and-one Thanks go out to my cohort in cyberspace David Agranoff for submitting his science fiction tale Divine Wind to our digital endeavor.  Since I'm a father now, the story's theme and events hit me hard, providing the emotional basis to see the tale through to the end. The story has a certain resonance with current events.  I utilized a detail from one of my AI-generated artworks (that was slated to be an oracle card for a Kaiju Battle Deck) whose original title was "Wind Demons" and it struck me that it would serve David's story well.  I really dig the story and I'm very happy that David has returned to his old stomping grounds, here at our perennial zine.  

   Last but not least, a very sincere Thank You to Lewis Shiner, who I reached out to by this wonder of modern tech, and was not disappointed as he kindly allowed me to run any story I wanted from his website Fiction Liberation Front.   You all should check it out since there's a ton of his fiction archived there, free to peruse and share as you'd like.   The story White City sure comes across as a short, sharp shock of a tale.  I love how concise and elegantly written it is, vividly conjuring the scene at the Chicago's World Fair and Columbian Exposition of 1893. There's certainly a lot of telling detail compressed into this historical micro-fiction, and it all leads effortlessly to a mind-bending twist that I did not see coming, and which left me reeling with curiosity and a renewed sense of wonder. Really a fine way to end this edition of our periodical.  These four stories just kind of fell together as we marched through February.  I'm really looking forward to next month so we can build the next issue together. (Send queries through IM or to the email in italics listed below.) 

   So that's a wrap on yet another issue  (#32) of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Following after the footprints left in the dust behind us by Anthony Boucher (founder and editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) the Freezine staff  (that includes you and anyone else who wishes to be included) remain devoted to collecting submissions and commonly distributed creative writings, either in the public domain or to be printed with permission of the copyright holder (whichever the case may be), and to continue putting out novellas and longer works serialized in installments or stand-alone short stories of a particular flavor, bordering on the razor's edge of death, concerning crypto-terrestrials, technological wonders so commonplace as to leave their users jaded, scientific curiosities no longer meaningful to the majority, riveting mysteries concerning strange events, scary tales to be read late at night with all the lights turned on brightly, or practically any fantastical examples of the written word that may be perused in a satisfying manner, to be accompanied here by fabulous illustrations rendered by the limitless imagination of willing contributors.  

   Consider the freezine to be a free form creative writing workshop or just

 Feel free to message me on FB or send me an email to:

freezinefantasysciencefiction@gmail.com 

and I'll respond in a timely manner.  The Freezine is really for people on social media, so if you're on social media, it'll work for you.  You can easily share all the individual posts' URLs on Twitter and FB, etc. Anyhow thanks for reading and following the freezine. We've all been somehow tricked into this existence. 

   

   

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