Weirdfictionreview.com Features Kali Wallace's Short Story The Liberators
This week on Weirdfictionreview.com, I want to direct your attention to Adam Mills’ editorial about taking over as managing editor, Ann VanderMeer on Weird Tales, a great interview with Steve Duffy, and “The Liberators” by Kali Wallace, a new story from a rising star.
A trace of road skirted the dead city, the same road the platoon had followed months ago on the last days of their desert march. Bloody blisters had made every step agony, and the soldiers had passed nervous nights beneath the city’s walls and windows as aimless wind moaned through its streets. And during the day the sun, the blinding, inescapable sun had quivered from dawn to dusk, throbbing in Francisco’s eyes, peeling the skin from his neck and melding the scaled armor to his body like a carapace. When they rested, stinking of sweat and blood, the soldiers shared stories of what they might find in the city. Alien riches and encampments, enslaved colonists and mountains of human bones, every possibility more outlandish than the last.
Wallace was part of the Clarion San Diego 2010 class, during which Ann and I were lucky enough to be the instructors for the last two weeks. She has already had short fiction appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with a story workshopped at Clarion, the stunning “Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls,” and you can read an interview with her about that story at F&SF’s website.In the comments on that interview writer Carolyn Ives Gilman rightly notes that “This was an awesome story. Creepy, yes, but really original. I’d never read anything like it, and that’s getting harder and harder to say. I want more.” We really love her fiction—it’s sharp, unique, always has depth, and it consistently surprises. She also has stories forthcoming this year in Lightspeed and Asimov's SF Magazine, and made a cameo with a short entry in our Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities antho.The 2010 Clarion class was incredibly talented, and as far as we’re concerned any or all of them could go on to have major careers--- already readers are discovering writers from that class like Karin Tidbeck (Weird Tales, Unstuck), John Chu (The Boston Review), Tom Underberg (Weird Tales), Jennifer Hsyu ( Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword & Sorceress XXVI), Gregory Bossert (already published in Asimov’s before Clarion), and Tamsyn Muir (Fantasy Magazine and Weird Tales), to name just a very few.We really count it a blessing to have encountered their work at Clarion and thus to be on the look out for all of the great writing they're doing. I’ll be blogging about more writers from this class as the year progresses, I’m sure.