The Story So Far . . .
by Walt Boyes
Woo. The Grantville Express is leaving the station. Please take your seats and have your tickets ready for the conductor. That's me. I'll be conducting this tour of the Grantville Gazette.
First, we have "Angels Watching Over Me" by Virginia DeMarce. Ryan and Meg got married, not knowing that she had a fatal heart defect, which would kill her as she gave birth to their first child. All Ryan wanted was a memorial for her. What he got was a huge pile of Lutheran church politics.
Next, David Carrico gives us a rollicking sendup of a famous series of detective novels from up-time in "A Pilum for your Sternum." Bet you can't guess which one until the end, though.
Tim Sayeau discovers what the de Sade family thought about their interesting descendant in "Vicious Practices."
In Non-Fiction, Iver Cooper starts a series on "Photography in the 1632 Universe." He goes through the things up-timers and down-timers can do, and things they can't, and won't be able to for years.
In Hot Off the Ring of Fire Press, I'll share with you the most current and some upcoming books from Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press. You're gonna like what you read!
Bjorn Hasseler, our esteemed Managing Editor, has written about the Best of the Gazette 2018 winner. Well done, both Bjorn and our winner.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch focuses her gimlet eye on Conventions in her column, "Notes from the Buffer Zone."
But the most impressive things on the tour of the Grantville Gazette are in the Universe Annex!
Here we have Yaroslav Barsukov's "The Blue Room" which came to us through the Universe Slush Critique Group for which we thank him and Edith Maor, our assistant editor.
Then we have one of the most gripping and poignant stories I've read in a while from Ring of Fire Press author Marella Sands. Her new novel Purgatory is coming out in less than a month. It is the sequel to Perdition which came out earlier this year discovering what the election of George McClellan in 1864 would mean in 2019. Her story, "The Ghost He Knew Best" is a brilliant evocation of Thai village life and what it means to be dead and alive.
Finally, we have a sort of prequel to Shoshana Edwards' great novel Death Lives in the Water which came out from Ring of Fire Press earlier this year. The witchy natives of Harper's Landing are confronted by a rude and obnoxious city developer who wants to buy the forest and put in a golf resort. The good news is that getting rid of him is "Easy as Pie."
