Editorial

Science fiction that expects better of humanity

God and the Machines: The Short Fiction of Peter Watts

Editorial
BY Jonathan Crowe

The notion that Peter Watts’s work is particularly dark, dystopic or depressing is common enough, but it’s an assessment that could stand some scrutiny.

AE #19

Letter from the Editors #19

Editorial
BY D.F. McCourt and the AE staff

Welcome to Issue 19 of AE. In this issue, we are excited to bring you the sixth edition of AE Micro. Keeping with that theme, this issue's incredible cover art by Jamie Gaunt shows a haunting perspective on a microscopic world.

Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free

How Copyright Laws Are Broken,
and Why It Matters

Editorial
BY AE

I am an editor of an online Canadian science fiction magazine that publishes its content under a Creative Commons license, and a refugee from the print publishing industry who found a home in the software industry. So naturally when Cory Doctorow talks about copyright laws and the way they have evolved in the age of the Internet, it is very relevant to my interests. Not everyone is convinced by Doctorow’s perspective, but (to paraphrase his promise in the introduction to Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free), even if he’s wrong, it’s in a well-informed and thought-provoking way.

Narration, voice, and compelling storytelling

Over the Transom: The Voice

Editorial
BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

What makes narration work? Voice, the confident delivery of narration, is a cornerstone of making it work.

WordPlay 2014

Interactive Narrative and WordPlay

Editorial

Non Fiction
BY The Editors

This past weekend I had the honour of sitting on the jury for WordPlay 2014, an annual festival that celebrates writerly video games. Video games have incorporated text and prose almost since the beginning (“The princess is in another castle”), but the prevalence in games has waxed and waned.

AE #17

Letter from the Editors #17

Editorial
BY D.F. McCourt and the AE staff

Four years. If AE were a person it would have just started junior kindergarten. But magazines grow up far faster than that, especially today. We say a ten-year old dog is seventy in “dog years” because, like a seventy-year-old human, that dog is starting to get within spitting distance of its life expectancy. If we apply that logic to magazines, AE is ancient. Only 20% of new periodicals survive to celebrate a fourth birthday, making us about 90 in magazine years.

A breeding ground for dangerous visions

Still, Dangerous Visions

Editorial

Reviews
BY The Editors

With each story individually introduced by Ellison and then played off with an afterword by their authors, the Dangerous Visions books stand as an incomparable monument in the history of science fiction. I am not the only one to lament the fact that the planned third volume The Last Dangerous Visions never saw the light of day.

Dark is Cool

Over the Transom: The Not-So-Dark Future

Editorial
BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

You’ll hear the same advice repeated in books, magazines, and blogs aimed at writers: Do bad things to your characters. Raise the stakes. Give them something they care about and then take it away. And then do it again.

The Mako Mori Problem

Gender in Pacific Rim: The Mako Mori Problem

Editorial
BY The Editors

Structures of Magic

Midterms at the Magic Academy

Editorial
BY D.F. McCourt

There’s an exclusive private school in the hills. Youngsters from all over come to attend, drawn by programs and curricula that are simply unavailable anywhere else. It’s a boarding school, of course, and the students rarely, if ever, come into town.

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