Helen Michaud

It seems that every few weeks someone writes a piece about why agents will stop reading your manuscript, often within the first few sentences. It doesn’t seem fair, and perhaps it isn’t, but these are readers with a finely honed sense of what works — or more precisely, what they can sell — and they know that no one with buying power gets any more forgiving further downstream from them.

J.J.S. Boyce

This is how it begins in many of the stories: A prominent scientist thinks he can reconstruct a Neanderthal genome and puts out a call for a willing surrogate mother. Is this real-life Harvard geneticist speaking out of turn, or is he really as close as he thinks and claims? Because if this really happens, we’ll be entering a new era. A new (or rather, old) species of human being will walk the Earth alongside our own, for the first time in 30,000 years.

D.F. McCourt

Welcome back for Issue 11. AE continues to grow and we are doing our best to manage without too many visible growing pains or too much premature aging for our editorial staff. Without dwelling too much on statistics, our readership (as estimated by monthly unique non-automated visitors) is more than three times what it was one year ago. And in April 2012, our readership was nearly three times what it was in April 2011.

J.J.S. Boyce

Robert J. Sawyer isn’t particularly interested in repeating himself. Last year’s Triggers was a techno-thriller that mixed bits of Dan Brown and Robert Ludlum with his own trademark style. Now, with his Martian murder mystery Red Planet Blues, the science fiction veteran has gone hard-boiled.

Paul Jarvey

Fiction and science can be a strange mix. While authors will occasionally bend the laws of physics for the sake of narrative convenience, the most successful stories inspire their fans to apply authentic science to the fiction. This is the tack chosen by Star Wars Identities, a science-via-fiction exhibit currently on display at Edmonton’s Telus World of Science. Despite flirting with content and conceptual connections that could easily be controversial, Identities is gracefully assembled, technologically flawless, and a faithful tribute to the Star Wars universe.

AE Editors

Each year, as our thoughts turn to thawing temperatures and the approach of spring, we realize it’s time once again for AE Micro, our annual contest where we provide a one-word theme and ask you to write some very short stories to appear in a special edition microzine.

J.J.S. Boyce

No genre is an island. When we write about difficult-to-categorize writers, we often talk about them bridging a genre divide, or throw a lot of hyphens into our descriptions: X is a great mystery-sci-fi writer, or Y’s new novel is a fabulous comic-fantasy romp. But writers also steal from each other all the time and readers don’t always pick up on the resulting work’s mixed pedigree.

Historical fiction is a pretty good example of this, and I’d like to consider some of those trailblazers that have acted as somewhat of an uncredited grandfather to some modern speculative works.

Helen Michaud

In a way it’s fitting to review John Park’s Janus in January, a month that often finds us looking both forward and backward like the Roman god after which it was named. That same duality forms the tension at the heart of Park’s novel.