Science Fiction - AQP

Strange. Beautiful. Shocking. Surreal. APEX MAGAZINE is a digital dark science fiction and fantasy genre zine that features award-winning short fiction, essays, and interviews. Established in 2009, our fiction has won several Hugo and Nebula Awards. We publish every other month. Issue 129 contains the following short stories, essays, reviews, and interviews. EDITORIALEditorial by Jason Sizemore ORIGINAL FICTIONIt Happened in 'Loontown by Lavie TidharCity...

"Set in near-future America, The School for Good Mothers introduces readers to a government-run reform program where bad mothers are retrained using robot doll children with artificial intelligence. Protagonist Frida Liu, a 39-year-old Chinese-American single mother in Philadelphia, loses custody of her 18-month-old daughter, Harriet, after she leaves Harriet home alone for two hours on one very bad day. To regain custody, Frida must spend a year...

Brandon experiences his reality unraveling when he begins losing chunks of time and finding himself in an apartment he doesn't recognize, and starts to suspect his new employers have discovered time travel and are covering up violent crimes.

In a future where human life has been restricted to Earth, while posthuman descendants called alloys freely explore the galaxy, Jayanthi, the adopted human child alloys, and her alloy pilot Vaha are sent to test the habitability of an Earthlike planet called Meru, an unoccupied new world, and the future of human-alloy relations.

"A locked-room murder mystery set at a hotel for time travelers--in which a detective must solve an impossible crime before her own grip on reality crumbles--from the author of The Warehouse. On any ordinary day, the Fairbanks--affectionately known to its staff as the Paradox Hotel--is packed with ultra-rich tourists dressed for a dozen different time periods, all anxiously waiting to catch their "flights" to the past. And as if that weren't strange...

"Hugo, Locus, and Nebula-Award winner Mary Robinette Kowal blends her no-nonsense approach to life in space with her talent for creating glittering high-society in this stylish SF mystery, The Spare Man. Tesla Crane, one of the richest women in the world, is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between Earth and Mars. She's traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and her husband is named...

"When Enae's grandmaman passes away, Enae inherits something entirely unexpected: a diplomatic assignment to track down a fugitive who has been missing for over 200 years. No one actually expects Enae to succeed; it's an empty assignment meant to keep her occupied. But Enae has never had a true purpose--no one ever expected her to do more than care for grandma--so she is determined to accomplish this task to the best of her ability. Reet knows nothing...

"Whoever controls our memories controls the future. Janelle Monáe and an incredible array of talented collaborating creators have written a collection of tales comprising the bold vision and powerful themes that have made Monáe such a compelling and celebrated storyteller. Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts-as a means of self-conception-could be controlled or erased by a select few. And whether human, A.I., or other, your life and...

"The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from an island off Vancouver in 1912 to a dark colony of the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and planets"--

"Delia Welegtabit discovered two things during her childhood on a South Pacific island: her love for mathematics and a novel that isn't supposed to exist. But the elusive book proves unexpectedly dangerous. Oskar Lens, a science fiction-obsessed mobster in the midst of an existential crisis, will stop at nothing to find the novel. After Delia's husband Levi goes missing, she seeks help from Daniel Chase, a young, face-blind book dealer. Lode Stars...