Announcing M-BRANE #27 authors and stories

A touch late again, but if it comes out at least by the end of the month, I consider that good enough anymore. Busy around here! The new April issue will release by the 30th now that I have finally finished the painstaking task of selecting its contents. This was a tough one. I had a lot of compelling submissions to sort through. Stories moved back and forth from "maybe" to "yes" and back. Too many good ones didn't quite make it.

If you're looking for uplift and good cheer, April might not be your month on the Brane. But for some fine, perceptive writing, then this is just the right time. Here's the line-up:

Joyce Chng: "The Bones Shine Through With Light"
Ross Gresham: "Spending the Government's 28"
Kaolin Fire: "Travelers Through Eternity"
Court Merrigan: "The Patch"
David Alexander Mulis: "Standard Deviation"
Hobie Anthony: "Silverfish"

Joyce Chng has appeared once before in M-Brane, and is so very welcome back with this strange, lovely offering that I knew needed to lead the new issue as soon as I read it. It's a bit too brief, but absolutely delicious, a fine starter course to what follows. Ross Gresham gave me that rare piece of military sf that I've been looking for. I say all the time that I like the military subgenre, yet I seldom actually find that to be true when I read submissions that deal in it. But this one is nearly perfect. Kaolin Fire (of the great Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD) Magazine) returns to our pages with a very evocative, mysterious and lovely item that I shan't say much about so as not to spoil it. He tends to produce stories a bit shorter than I usually want, but they are always thought-provoking and finely told. Court Merrigan's story is just plain weird, but also quite funny and quite pointed. I think people will find it offers a couple different layers of enjoyment. The last two items of this issue may have spent the longest time in the "maybe" box because I vacillated a lot about how dark I wanted to let April get. But the quality of their prose and their directness in dealing with their subject matter left no doubt that they are M-Brane stories even though their sf-nal elements are almost incidental, almost beside the point. David Alexander Mulis visits the dark thoughts of a jaded and tired pornographer during what's probably an important moment of realization and transition in his career, while Hobie Anthony takes us into the nearly unbearable world of a very special and profoundly damaged character under the thrall of a villain running a violent and bizarre conspiracy.

The new issue will be out in just a few days. News of such will post right here.

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