{"id":19,"date":"2013-01-03T04:48:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-03T04:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/a-look-at-the-first-issue-of-waylines\/"},"modified":"2013-01-03T04:48:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-03T04:48:00","slug":"a-look-at-the-first-issue-of-waylines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/a-look-at-the-first-issue-of-waylines\/","title":{"rendered":"A Look at the First Issue of Waylines"},"content":{"rendered":"
I discovered a new online magazine today, Waylines<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 It bills itself as a magazine of speculative fiction and film.\u00a0 There was a promotional issue last month, which I missed.\u00a0 I think the publication is bimonthly, but I never found anything that said explicitly what the publication schedule is.\u00a0 I base the previous sentence on the fact that it does say edtior David Ress-Thomas will be writing a bimonthly editorial.<\/p>\n

I want to take a look at the first issue.\u00a0 This one contained an editorial, interviews with some of the writers, artists, and filmmakers, plus interviews with Cat Rambo and Christopher Barzak.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Rather than start with the fiction, like I usually do, let’s examine the films.\u00a0
<\/a>
The first is Grounded<\/i><\/a>, a haunting piece about a spaceship crashing on a distant planet by Kevin Margo.\u00a0 It’s the longest of the three films and winner of a number of awards.\u00a0 The second is Francesco Calabrese’s Lovely Monster<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 This one concerns a young woman who is some type of monster.\u00a0 This film wouldn’t load correctly, and the sound and video weren’t in sync.\u00a0 Near the end, when we’re supposed to be finding out what type of monster she is, the video went black until the last few frames.\u00a0 Some of that is probably due ot issues with my computer, but I’m not sure how many.\u00a0 My favorite was the third film, The Maker<\/i><\/a> by Christopher Kezelos.\u00a0 I loved the twist on the end of this one.<\/p>\n

I think the fact that Waylines<\/i> is featuring films in each issue is a great thing.\u00a0 A number of online publications are incorporating some type of podcast, but this is the only one that includes films regularly.\u00a0 At least as far as I know.\u00a0 This approach looks to be a way for the publication to stand out.<\/p>\n

There were three pieces of fiction.\u00a0 Now I prefer science fiction to speculative fiction, namely because I’ve seen too many examples of speculative fiction where the author was lazy and didn’t bother to get the science right and then proceeded to justify such poor workmanship as “It’s speculative fiction, not science fiction.\u00a0 The science isn’t what it’s about.”\u00a0 Not every story has to be a nuts-and-bolts hard science tale, but if your story contains elements that clearly violate known science and you don’t care, you’re lazy.\u00a0 I realize not everyone can get the science 100% correct 100% of the time, but at least make the effort.<\/p>\n

But I’m getting on my soapbox.\u00a0 There’s a lot of good so-called “soft” science fiction that goes by the label speculative fiction.\u00a0 The magazine’s editorial policy states that it’s looking for science fiction, fantasy, and weird stuff.\u00a0 I’m okay with that.\u00a0 So let’s examine the fiction.<\/p>\n

First,\u00a0 “An Echo in the Shell”<\/a> by Beth Cato.\u00a0 This was a strange sort of blend of science fiction and fantasy about a world in which a hippie environmental group in the 60s put a curse on some labs so that the workers would turn into what they experiment on.\u00a0 It’s the tale of a teenage girl whose grandmother was the mail carrier for this laboratory complex.\u00a0 Now she’s turning into something else.\u00a0 This one is dark and tragic.<\/p>\n

The next story, Jeremy Sims’ “Fleep<\/a>“, is a science fiction piece about the owner of a hotel in southeast Asia who is struggling to pay the bills when a group of aliens check in.\u00a0 The owner of the hotel and his partner talked in a type of pidgeon English that I found annoying.\u00a0 It spoiled what was otherwise been an amusing story.<\/p>\n

Grayson Bray Morris turns in “The Message Between the Words<\/a>“.\u00a0 This was the most science fictional story in the issue.\u00a0 It’s about a pilot who lives a life of regret until she gets an opportunity to send a message to her younger self.\u00a0 I liked the character development, even if I didn’t entirely like the character.\u00a0 And while I found the mechanism through which she is able to send a message a bit contrived, I liked this story best of all.<\/p>\n

So, overall, I think Waylines<\/i> is off to a good start.\u00a0 The films are a nice change from the usual online magazine fare.\u00a0 The stories weren’t all my cup of tea, but that’s fine.\u00a0 The editors have to please a diverse audience to be successful.\u00a0 The fiction pieces were well written.\u00a0 This is one publication which shows promise.\u00a0 I’ll be checking the next issue.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I discovered a new online magazine today, Waylines.\u00a0 It bills itself as a magazine of speculative fiction and film.\u00a0 There was a promotional issue last month, which I missed.\u00a0 I think the publication is bimonthly, but I never found anything that said explicitly what the publication schedule is.\u00a0 I base the previous sentence on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-waylines-magazine"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-j","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}