Realms of Fantasy (August 2009) The Review

Is it a good cover just because it looks good? I'm sure Dominic Harman's "Mermaid" took a lot of hard work and skill to paint. Maybe someone would love to have a copy hanging on their wall, but it's not what I look for in a cover.

A cover should be more than a pretty picture. It should seize your attention, and compel you to pick up the magazine. It should make you want to read and find out what's going on or what's going to happen. The cover is supposed to fight for attention because in a magazine rack it has to compete with dozens, maybe hundreds of other magazines to attract new readers or casual buyers who pick up an issue now and then.

Maybe artists and art directors get caught up in things which only people who really know art will notice. They lose sight of cover fundamentals.

1. Grab attention! Your cover has to compete with lots of other covers, lots of other choices.

2. Intrigue people. Tantalize them so much that they want to read the magazine. Stories need a hook to pull readers in. The cover is the hook for the whole magazine.

This cover doesn't do any of that. Other than having fantastical subject matter, it has nothing else to do with the contents.

It looks nice though.


For more of Harman's work see http://www.dominic-harman.com/ Maybe you can get a nice print of "Mermaid" without all the words and titles, right?

Shawna McCarthy, Douglas Cohen, and Warren Lapine know more about running a magazine than I do. So, I'm not writing this to tell them how they should do covers. As a customer though, I enjoy covers that achieve those traditional cover goals.

A lot of the advertisements are for books which are a hybrid of fantasy and romance. Hey! Let's make male readers feel unwelcome. It makes me wonder if I'm part of Realms' target audience. Then again, if these are the companies willing to buy ads . . . well, hey! Why should Tir Na Nog turn down revenue which can help the magazine stay afloat? Still . . . reading this in the break room at work, for instance, risks a deluge of derisive comments from co-workers.


Realms contains lots of nonfiction. It has a games column. I'm not a gamer. I don't care. That's six pages I could do with out. I'm sure a lot of fantasy fans are gamers, so it makes sense.

I'm not a Harry Potter fan, but I've enjoyed the movies, and maybe I'll try Rowling's books some day. I enjoyed Resa Nelson's piece about the new Harry Potter movie.

As for the "Folkroots" column, I like music, but this section didn't grab my attention. Another eight pages I could do with out.

Karen Haber's article about artist Michael Hague interested me more than the "Folkroots" column.

Of the non-fiction departments, I liked the book reviews most. I discussed Warren Lapine's note last time, and I'll discuss Shawna McCarthy's editorial later in this post.

Now, on to the fiction. Often when people think of fantasy, they think of stories set in an imaginary land, in a pre-gunpowder age where magic works. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Robert E. Howard's Conan stories serve as prime examples. Both can fit under the banner of heroic fantasy. However that's not the only type of fantasy. I just want to say that because this issue contains no heroic fantasy. That's disappointing because I'd love to read some newer sword & sorcery like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber wrote.

This issue's closest stories to traditional heroic fantasy are Tanith Lee's "Our Lady of Scarlet" which has a medieval European setting and Bruce Holland Rogers's "Well and Truly Broken" which has a generic fairy tale (RE: medieval/ early Renaissance European) setting.

Andelm, the protagonist of "Our Lady of Scarlet", is a scholar. A plague ravages the city. Andelm privately rejects Christianity while maintaining a public pretense of respect. He trusts only in his own intelligence and learning. It disturbs Andelm when his landlady starts a cult to a false idol, The Red Virgin.

Lee creates a creepy atmosphere as Andelm realizes the newly spawned deity stalks him. Nor is The Red Virgin the only being who stakes a claim on Andelm.

Dennis Danvers's "Healing Benjamin" won't get confused with heroic fantasy. It's also an excellent story, following a man and a very long lived cat named Benjamin who can talk and successfully invest in stocks. (We could use more cats like him these days.)

The cat isn't the only member of the duo with peculiar abilities. See, the man and the cat grew up together, and the cat was normal until he died at the ripe old age of seventeen. - - Then the man brought him back to life.

The story follows the man and Benjamin through their lives which they mostly live while keeping some distance between themselves and others. They keep the cat's unnaturally long life a secret until the man starts dating a certain someone.

Complications follow . . . .

Ian Creasey's "Digging for Paradise" occurs in the distant future when the world has stopped turning. The characters come from a culture with advanced machinery powered by magic. Sorcerers are celebrities and seem like politicians or perhaps mob bosses.

A sorcerer named Ren Gessel hires Hadro, the story's narrator. Hadro is an archaeologist. Hadro is desperate because a sorcerous despot has imprisoned his wife and sent lackeys after him. Hadro plans to bribe the lackeys with his earnings. He didn't know that Ren Gessel intended to put him in stasis for eons, and that he'd wake up long after his wife and everyone he knew except Gessel and Gessel's servants had died.

In the story's world, sorcerers can draw power from power stones which they sow and which soak up magical power until the sorcerers collect them years later. Gessel decided that he and a few key helpers, including Hadro, should stay in stasis for thousands of years by which time the stones could have absorbed almost infinite power.

Gessel promises to share the power and entices Hadro by saying Hadro could restore his wife to life. Would she really want that though? Having suffered under a sorcerous tyrant, Hadro wonders if he should trust anyone with virtually unlimited power. There may be a way to stop Ren Gessel, but should Hadro do it?

There are times when this story threatens to devolve into a shrill political screed. Creasey succeeds in portraying the conflict and maintaining suspense. Blindly trusting others with power can have horrific consequences, but does too little trust pose problems too?

Bruce Holland Rogers's "Well and Truly Broken" reads like a fairy tale. Three sisters wander into a forbidden forest and gain something to aspire to . . . if they can ever truly reach it. I wondered if there was a classic con happening here, where the con artist uses a mark's greed and willingness to deceive others against the mark.

In her editorial, Shawna McCarthy makes a case for the importance of genre magazines like Realms and why genre readers should support them. She argues that they serve as training grounds for up and coming writers on one hand. On the other hand, they serve (along with book publishers) as gatekeepers who save readers from having to sort through all the drek to find the good stuff. She contrasts this to certain Internet and print on demand venues with no quality checks.


With my less than stellar proofreading skills, I really shouldn't complain about all the typos, but . . . Dang! They distracted, especially during Tanith Lee's story.

Douglas Cohen (who I gather served as kind of a first reader even though he is the nonfiction editor) and Shawna McCarthy did an excellent job selecting stories. I enjoyed them, but if I wasn't a subscriber, I probably wouldn't have bought this issue if I saw it on the newsstand. First, would I have browsing time left after looking at competitors with more intriguing covers? (Again, I don't have a problem with the artwork. It's just that nothing about it makes me say, "Whoa! I need to read that magazine to see what that's all about.)

If I had enough time, or no one else had a cover which screamed for more attention, I'd still have problems. The magazine is eighty-two pages long, but for me, fourteen of them, the gaming and "Folkroots" column, are a waste. Do people really buy this magazine because of the gaming column? It seems like gamers could spend their money better on the magazines devoted specifically to gaming. (Just like fans of fantastic fiction could get more bang for their buck by buying magazines which devote more space to stories. Get the picture?)


I will read stuff like the Harry Potter and Michael Hague articles if they're in magazines I got for other reasons. (On the other hand, if it was a Hal Foster article with lots of stuff I didn't know about Foster, I'd be more intrigued. Still, that's not my point.) I liked the book reviews, and they at least show fantasy readers where they can find more fantasy to read.


That brings me to my main problem. Cohen and McCarthy picked excellent stories, but I want more of them. Remember those eighty-two pages? They only contain twenty-four pages of fiction, plus four full page illustrations accompanying the stories. I didn't include full page ads when counting story pages. (There was at least one page divided half and half. I counted it as a story page.)


For a few dollars more, I could buy a standard paperback containing far more fiction. What's the better deal?


At the newsstand, instead of Realms, I'd spend my money on something with more story content. As a subscriber, I'd like to see Realms replace some of the departments with more fiction.


For Realms 's website, go to: http://www.realmsoffantasymag.com/

Realms of Fantasy (August 2009) OR The Return of Warren Lapine.

Something seemed strange.

Last Saturday I checked the mail and found the latest issue of Shawna McCarthy's Realms of Fantasy. Hmmm . . . That's weird.

No.1 - - I wasn't a subscriber.

No.2 - - I thought it got cancelled.

I explained those away. I figured I'd heard wrong about the cancellation, and maybe it was a promotional copy. You know, a sample to get me hooked. I didn't know I was in for an even bigger surprise.

I was just finishing The Year's Best Science Fiction 17 which reprinted stories from 1999. I decided, "Hey! Now I'll review something current!" So, I opened Realms and saw something that nearly floored me.

The publisher's name.

Warren Lapine.

According to his account in Chronicle #233 (February/March 2003), Lapine started publishing in 1993 with a small press science fiction magazine called Harsh Mistress. Lapine walked into a bookstore and saw it shelved next to Hustler. He decided he needed a new name, and he settled on Absolute Magnitude. Among the stories published there was the Hal Clement story "Exchange Rate" which I discussed in my Year's Best Science Fiction review.

He met and married Angela Kessler. Together they started Dreams of Decadence, a magazine of vampire fiction and poetry. Lapine had teamed with Edward McFadden, editor/publisher of Pirate Writings, and decided to buy out McFadden. Then Lapine went a step further and changed Pirate Writings' name to Fantastic Stories after the famous SF/fantasy digest.

Buying established magazines and using established names became a pattern with Lapine's DNA. (BTW, he gave credit to various partners through out his tenth anniversary account of DNA's history.) For instance, Owlswick, had been publishing a revival of the renowned pulp Weird Tales. The revival was on the brink of collapse and had even lost the rights to the title Weird Tales. Lapine bought the magazine and got the rights to the title back. He seemed like a monopoly player using all his cash early on to buy every property he landed on.

I bought copies of the DNA Weird Tales and the occasional Fantastic Stories at the Holyoke, Massachusetts Barnes and Noble.

I'd subscribed to Andrew Porter's genre news magazine, Science Fiction Chronicle since 1992. DNA bought it from Porter and took over with #207 (August/September 2000). Lapine announced big plans, and in the early days he carried them out. Here are only a few examples most noticeable to me as a reader. Starting in 2001, Lapine switched the magazine back to a monthly schedule and got it out on time. The switch to glossy paper wasn't a big deal for me, but yes, he switched it to glossy paper. He also shortened the name to Chronicle. I wasn't too keen on that last one.

Porter was supposed to stay on as editor for a short time, but then he appeared to abruptly depart earlier than expected.

However, the issues came out monthly and on time. Plus, I enjoyed reading them.

Then signs of trouble appeared. I still bought Weird Tales at Barnes & Noble. One issue, I saw an announcement that Weird Tales was going monthly. The issue carrying the announcement was the last I ever saw at Barnes & Noble. It could have been just a single store changing its buying policy, right?

In 2004, DNA launched a magazine devoted to the rock band Kiss. Was DNA overreaching? Was it losing focus? Lapine already had another non-genre magazine. He'd bought and remade the floundering Whole Cat Journal.

I often wondered how Weird Tales was doing after it disappeared from the local Barnes & Noble. I kept thinking I should subscribe. Errr . . . well . . . Then I got Chronicle #261 (July 2005). Lapine announced that he'd sold Weird Tales to Wildside Press.

What was going on? Wasn't Weird Tales a core title, a prestigious name for someone building a small press genre empire?

I kept receiving Chronicle for a few more months, but they started arriving late. The last couple seemed downright irregular. Then they stopped arriving at all.

I wondered, had there been some kind of snafu with my subscription? I tried contacting DNA. No luck there.

Well, I figured that's one of the hazards of subscribing to small press magazines. Publishers burn out and disappear from the scene, or they run out of money. After all, a lot of these things do well if they just break even. For most fan publishers, it's a hobby. If they can minimize the losses enough to keep putting stuff out with money earned at a "real job," they keep going until enthusiasm runs out.

I was surprised it happened to Science Fiction Chronicle, (sorry, but that's the title by which I'll always remember it) but I harbored no ill will toward Lapine. I know many people didn't share my opinion, and that writers, artists, editors, and business associates had bigger stakes than I did. I resigned myself to thinking I'd lost my subscription money.

So there I was looking at Warren Lapine listed as Realms' new publisher. He called his new company Tir Na Nog. I think that's Gaelic for "Land of Eternal Youth."

I flipped to the publisher's note to see what was going on. Lapine glossed over DNA's collapse. Turns out that there had been a Facebook campaign to save Realms just when Lapine was returning to magazine publishing. Rather than revive Fantastic Stories first as planned, he bought Realms.

Then I found out why I got an issue of Realms. Lapine said, "Some of you've received Realms unexpectedly. You received it because you had unfilled subscriptions to the magazines that I used to publish- Absolute Magnitude, Dreams of Decadence, Fantastic Stories, and SFC. You'll get one copy of Realms for each issue you were owed. We're also seriously considering reviving several of those titles. If we do you'll still get the full amount of those magazines that you were owed, so ultimately you may get two issues for each one you paid for."

Maybe some of us who subscribed to those other magazines won't like the substitution.

Me?

I wish Science Fiction Chronicle was still going, but Realms intrigues me. I like fantasy. Plus, I'm at least getting something for the money I paid.

I'm glad Warren Lapine returned to genre publishing. Maybe he's learned some painful lessons and gained some knowledge which will help him to do better this time.

Welcome back, Warren.