#fiyah magazine of black speculative fiction

[ilikereadingactually]

Magazine highlights: FIYAH Issue 29, Winter 2024

you can tell how far behind i've gotten in my magazine reading because i'm still working my way through issues from LAST WINTER, but i've been so looking forward to diving into FIYAH! every work here was incredible, but these two are my particular favorites:

"Kiss of Life" - P.C. Verrone

premise: angels—of a sort—pick up an enslaved young girl and make her their translator as they travel from place to place..."building bridges."

gut reaction: holy shit! i've come away from this one bleeding internally. the voice and the progress of the plot are both so compelling, and then the slow horror of what's happening starts to dawn, and both the text and the allegory stab you right in the chest. stunning.

"D.E.I. (Death, Eternity, and Inclusion)" - N. Romaine White

premise: a freshly turned vampire is called to the office of the head of the clan, who makes her an offer.

gut reaction: sharp and hilarious! i would read a whole novel about Carolyn and her new role in undead society. what a glorious callout of corporate racism! and also each character is beautifully clear and distinct, a real challenge in short fiction.

for real though, an exciting range of styles and emotions to be had in this issue, and it's short enough to read in a sitting (even though i did not manage to read it in a sitting whoops).

[elizabethminkel]

The big story in the SFF world last week was Clarkesworld's announcement that they were being flooded with AI spam and had to temporarily close submissions. So for WIRED, I talked to EIC Neil Clarke about what's actually been going on, as well as LD Lewis of FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction and Matt Kresell, the developer of Moksha, the submission software used by lots of SFF publications (including Tor, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons).

They discussed the ways they're thinking about dealing with a host problems around AI submissions—and I was struck by how practical and measured they all were, which was reassuring! Because a lot of writers (in SFF and beyond) are rightfully freaking out right now. I was also struck by how they all stressed those solutions can't create new barriers that would hurt marginalized authors in particular—that commitment to openness/accessibility feels really important.

[zekethefreak]

My latest novelette: ANANSI MOON in FIYAH Magazine!

Ladies and gentlemen, issue #32 of FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction is now available! Inside you’ll find my story, ANANSI MOON. Please purchase a copy of an award-winning publication and help support some amazing authors. I���m extremely proud to be a part of this and eternally grateful for your support! https://fiyahlitmag.com/shop/issues/2024-issues/fiyah-32-spacefaring-aunties

[fiercynn]

if you like short fiction, poetry, and short nonfiction, there are also so many great speculative fiction sites and online literary magazines that prioritize nonwhite authors and anti-colonial perspectives! three of my favorites:

FIYAH: a quarterly speculative fiction magazine that features stories by and about black people of the african diaspora

khōréō: a quarterly magazine of speculative fiction and migration that is dedicated to elevating the voices of immigrant and diaspora authors

strange horizons: a weekly online magazine about speculative fiction; check out some of their special issues like their 2023 caribbean issue, their 2022 southeast asia issue, their 2021 palestine issue, their 2020 mexican special issue, and honestly so many more if you go further back. (they also have a sibling magazine called samovar that is specifically focused on speculative fiction translated into english, i'm not as familiar with them tbh but i've heard good things)

many of the authors listed above have been published in these sites and magazines too!

also, one more author rec: nisi shawl is a black queer speculative fiction author who is also just a very cool person. nisi's novel everfair is fantastic, as is nisi's other fiction and nonfiction. i don't think nisi's website is very up to date but there are still a lot of fantastic links there!

PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin or that Babel was too heavy-handed just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here

Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn

[chocochipbiscuit]

I love short stories and original work, and want to add some of my favorite subscriptions to the list!

Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy is, as the name implies, a magazine of science fiction and fantasy! Per their own blurb:

A 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022 Hugo Award winner, 2016 Parsec Award winner, 2019 British Fantasy Award winner, and numerous-time Locus Award finalist, Uncanny Magazine is an online Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine featuring passionate SF/F fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, provocative nonfiction, and a deep investment in the diverse SF/F culture.  Each issue contains intricate, experimental stories and poems with verve and imagination that elicit strong emotions and challenge beliefs, from writers of every conceivable background. Uncanny believes there’s still plenty of room in the genre for tales that make you feel.

It's fantastic and one of my longest-running subscriptions. I love not only the stories (which cover a wide range of topics and feelings; some make me uneasy, some make me cry, some spark joy, but they definitely make me feel) but the poetry and essays. There is also a podcast if you prefer to listen to some of the stories. :)

FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction is a 2021 Hugo Award-winning magazine that features stories by and about people of the Black diaspora. Or, in a snippet from their own page:

What does it mean to be Black and look at intersectional issues of equality through the lens of science fiction and fantasy? Where are those stories in the canon? There is Black excellence out there waiting to be discovered and not tokenized. Octavia Butler is our past and she is an amazing ancestor, but she should not be our only storyteller.

This is the future of Black SFF.

I especially love their themed issues (ex: Food & Cuisine, Hauntings & Horror) but they're all excellent. Each issue also contains poetry. :)

khōréō is one of my newer faves, and their podcast won a 2022 IGNYTE award!

khōréō is a quarterly magazine of speculative fiction and migration. We are dedicated to diversity and elevating the voices of immigrant and diaspora authors.

We publish fiction, genre non-fiction, and art; our stories include fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and any genre in between or around it — as long as there’s a speculative element. We’re especially interested in writing and art that explores migration. Examples include themes of immigration, diaspora, and anti-colonialism, as well as more metaphorical interpretations of the term.

These magazines not only work to pay their writers fairly, but also promote queer and neurodiverse authors. Many of the stories are free, either to read online or to listen via podcast, but I think these are subscriptions worth paying for if you have the extra cash on hand.

Amazon fucks everyone over again

some of you may recall Neil Clarke's blog post on the deluge of AI-generated spam that has hit Clarkesworld Magazine's submissions queue.

well, Clarkesworld and other short fiction magazines like it are about to get another swift kick in the dick: Amazon is discontinuing their magazine subscription service (and replacing it with a new service that pays creators much, much less). of the very little money made in the short fiction market, most of it was coming from Amazon.

as Clarke points out in his editorial on the subject, "While there are plenty of people happily reading, listening to, and writing short fiction, a very disappointingly small percentage of those same people are actively paying for it."

short fiction is not dead. the existence of subreddits like r/NoSleep and blogs like @writing-prompt-s proves that. if you value these stories and you want to help writers get paid for their work, please consider checking out (and subscribing to) some of the following publications:

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Apex Magazine

Asimov's Science Fiction

Clarkesworld Magazine

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Fantasy & Science Fiction

Fantasy Magazine

Nightmare Magazine

many of these publications charge less than $5 USD per month for subscriptions, so if you've just dropped Netflix and have an extra $10/month lying around, you can instead support two fiction magazines full of interesting, original, well-written stories.

(feel free to reblog with your own favorite publications!)

[deadassdiaspore]

[moontiara-action]

Forgot to post this here (better late than never), but I wrote about a freelance demon slayer who travels the US and happens to be nonbinary. The story's called "All in a Day's Work." I hope to write more stories featuring Walker the demon slayer in the near future!

[ethereallad]

ONLINE EVENT: Beyond Afrofuturism -- MAY 17

ONLINE EVENT: Beyond Afrofuturism — MAY 17

Join me and Black editors Eboni Dunbar (FIYAH Magazine),  Brent Lambert (FIYAH Magazine), Chinelo Onwualu (Omenana/Anathema), and LaShawn Wanak (Giganotosaurus).  We’ll be discussing their journeys into editing and the role editors play in creating space for the voices of BIPOC communities in the speculative fiction field. Moderated by Arley Sorg of Locus and Fantasy Magazine. Further…

[snailchimera]

If you like Murderbot, I'd also suggest you check out Ann Leckie's Radch trilogy, in which you can find a dead spaceship/horrifically mindwiped human body drone from a destroyed hivemind learning to think of herself as a person in a world where she has only been a disposable tool of empire. There are similar themes of personhood, autonomy, resistance against oppressive systems, and being an idiot incapable of understanding that other people care about you. Leckie also has some very good books with different characters in the same setting. All of them have casually queer characters.

Yoon Ha Lee's work is also very good, though *very* dark. Like every common trigger warning dark. The core thesis of his best known series, Machineries of Empire, is that corrupt and bloody systems will inevitably corrupt and bloody the people within them, and that trying to be a good person or even just hang on to your humanity within such a system will inevitably break you. It comes to the conclusion that the only way out is to break those systems, by any means necessary. It's not hard sci fi, as it does center around a functionally magical calendar, but I wouldn't call it fantasy.

The Tensorate series by Neon Yang is more steampunk fantasy (or silkpunk, to be more precise), but I don't think it's a bigger stretch than The Hollow Places. Wonderful characterization, interesting conflicts that mirror the real positive and negative effects of industrialization, lots of politics but not so much that the plot gets lost in it. Yang also wrote a space mecha Joan of Arc story that's more or less about religious manipulation and falling prey to cult thinking, which wasn't really my thing but might be yours.

Nnedi Okorafor is one of the biggest names in Africanfuturism, and iirc is the one who coined the term (as distinct from Afrofuturism, which deals less with Africa itself and more with the Black diaspora in the US). She's another one whose stories are often tragic or have prominent tragic elements; a common (though not the only) trajectory for her protagonists is "realize everything is shit, try to make things better, lose everyone and everything you love, Burn It All Down". There's also a fair amount of sexual assault or threat of assault in her work. But for all that, Okorafor is strikingly hopeful and posits that change is not only possible, it is inevitable; the question is what that change will look like. These books also have magical elements more often than not, though I hesitate to call them fantasy elements given their specific cultural and religious connotations.

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a whole bunch of stories set in the universe of the Ekumen, which are the space anthropologists from The Left Hand of Darkness. She also wrote a lot of other sci fi. It's definitely dated in some ways (there are actually some very interesting interviews out there on how LeGuin's own shifting understanding of gender and race as well as the expansion of what she could get away with in traditional publishing shows in these dramatic changes between her early and later works), but worth it for the way she gives her characters space to be people even as she tackles these big philosophical and sociopolitical questions. Of course books like The Dispossessed and The Lathe of Heaven are held up as classics of the genre alongside The Left Hand of Darkness for good reason, but I'd actually recommend looking for some of her short story collections, which are usually a mix of sci fi, fantasy, and things that don't fit neatly in either category. Wind's Twelve Quarters is a good one if you can find it.

And speaking of short stories, did you know literary magazines are still a thing, and you can get them online as ebooks or PDFs? Uncanny Magazine and Apex are good ones. Luna Station Quarterly specializes in speculative fiction by women authors (explicitly including trans women). FIYAH, which primarily publishes Black authors, really leans more fantasy, but has had some sci fi special editions.

But honestly? Probably my favorite sci fi writer right now aside from Wells (and it's a close competition) is Derin Edala, who mostly self-publishes on their own dedicated site, derinstories.com. You can also find them here on tumblr at @derinthescarletpescatarian. You can jump straight into their ongoing stories about space pirates and a bug on a Chosen One mission respectively, or try some of their short stories (I'm a big fan of the one with the dragon mechs), but my strongest endorsement currently goes to Time To Orbit: Unknown, a full length novel (or duology, given it was too long to be self-published as one physical book and thus got released as two) about a Very Normal Spaceship. You should read it, and then if you have money you should buy it from their Ko-Fi shop or Smashwords.

EDIT: WAIT WAIT WAIT if we're doing movies you gotta watch Space Sweepers. You gotta. It's the law.

I'd also recommend Subnautica, Hypnospace Outlaw, and Extreme Meatpunks Forever. Honestly there are a *lot* of tiny cool indie scifi games out there and we will be here all day if I try to make a list, so instead I'll suggest spending an afternoon some time shaking itch.io upside down for a while until something interesting falls out.

do you have any good scifi recs? i recently read the murderbot diaries and realized i have shamefully little experience with scifi....

Y'know, my scifi's actually pretty limited! I mostly just like the cover art, sorry. oTL Looking at Steve Purcell's work has me thinking about influences in illustrative art of that era so that's why I was in the tag lol

Left Hand of Darkness is an interesting read (just go in knowing what era it's from and know it's mostly about anthropology on a planet where people change genders more or less at will and a lot of it is the protag going HUH????).

Ray Bradbury's The Veldt is an all time good creepy short (what is that noise in our children's hologram room? it sounds like us screaming. well i'm sure it's nothing.)

is the Southern Reach series considered sci-fi...? It's sci-fi horror at least, I'd say (what if there was a spot that was more or less a DNA scrambler and what if you were a biologist lady who loved staring at freak shit. and also your husband's a dolphin. or an owl. dont worry about it.) I still need to read the newest book, but there's a moment in book 2 where a surface is described as like a manta ray's skin that I still think about

if I'm REALLY stretching here, The Hollow Places counts as scifi for me. It's scifi horror/fantasy horror- (what if there was a portal to another world and it was sooooo safe and you should go in.) There's a part I still think about where a man had been standing in this like, waist deep pit of water for a while (years?) and the protag has some realizations about what she's looking at when she sees him that still freak me out.

Otherwise, watch MST3K. That counts, right?

[skrutskie]

Earlier this year, I announced my intent to donate the advances I've received and will continue to receive for Bonds of Brass to organizations and initiatives promoting authors and publishing professionals of color. As of today, I have donated 125% of the money I've received this year and roughly 40% of the money I have received overall. I'm continuing to donate on a monthly basis and plan to make even more large scale donations when I receive the remainder of my advances. Given that many other people are looking for places to donate this holiday season, I thought I would highlight some of the organizations these funds have gone to.

We Need Diverse Books: A grassroots organization of children's book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people. They do astounding work that includes an emergency fund for diverse creatives during the pandemic, mentorships and internships, classroom resources, and much, much more.

People of Color in Publishing: A grassroots organization created by book publishing professionals dedicated to supporting, empowering, and uplifting racially and ethnically marginalized members throughout the industry. POC in Publishing provides networking opportunities, mentorship, and informational events for publishing professionals who self-identify as people of color.

Melanin in YA: A resource for all things Black in traditional Young Adult publishing, providing a hub of information to amplify and invest in Black voices. Officially launching in January, this site provides directories of not only books, but also influencers, events, adaptations, and Black-owned bookstores.

MarginsBox: A monthly subscription box featuring Black, Indigenous, and person of color (BIPOC) young adult authors alongside handcrafted items from BIPOC creators curated to coincide with book themes.

FIYAH Lit Mag: A quarterly speculative fiction magazine that features stories by and about Black people of the African Diaspora. In addition to publishing fantastic fiction, FIYAH runs reviews of Black speculative fiction books and hosts a convention celebrating marginalized voices in SFF.

If it's within your means, I strongly encourage you to help support these initiatives! Just yesterday, the New York Times published a critical look at how white publishing remains, a reminder of just how much work there is left to do. With our support, we can help these organizations make that essential change happen.

[fiyahlitmag]

Introducing the FIYAH Grants Series

The FIYAH Literary Magazine Grant Series is intended to assist Black writers of speculative fiction in defraying costs associated with honing their craft.  The series includes three $1,000 grants to be distributed annually based on a set of submission requirements. All grants with the exception of the Emergency Grant will be issued and awarded as part of Juneteenth every year. The emergency grant…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Science Fiction Writers of America on Black Lives Matter

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has published an excellent statement on Black Lives Matter and the protests.

https://www.sfwa.org/2020/06/04/a-statement-from-sfwa-on-black-lives-matter-and-protests/

In it, they acknowledge that "SFWA has historically ignored and, in too many instances, reinforced the injustices, systemic barriers, and unaddressed racism, particularly toward Black people, that have contributed to this moment."

Science fiction has had a large reactionary element literally from the start, when leftist science fiction writers from the Futurian house were excluded from the very first World Science Fiction Convention because of their political views.

http://www.jophan.org/mimosa/m21/kyle.htm

SFWA's forums and message boards were slow off the mark to address racist and sexist harassment, and white supremacist elements in the field have tried to sabotage the Hugo Awards, picketed conventions, and sent racist messages over SFWA's channels.

But SFWA underwent a sea change some years ago and has been making meaningful strides towards inclusion ever since. In the new statement - unanimously signed by SFWA's board - the organization acknowledges that these measures are not enough.

They announce a raft of new, concrete steps they will take to improve the inclusivity and diversity of the field, including:

* Donating proceeds from June Nebula Conference ticket purchases to the Carl Brandon Society and the Black Speculative Fiction Society

* Matching every Nebula ticket bought in June with a seat for a Black writer at the event

* Waiving fees for Black writers at next year's Nebula event

* Offering travel subsidies to Black writers attending next year's Nebulas

* Waiving SFWA membership dues for Black writers for the next year

* Offering grant money to Black-led sf/f organizations

The organization also links to several reading lists, notably Ibram X Kendi's "Antiracist Reading List":

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/books/review/antiracist-reading-list-ibram-x-kendi.html

And they provide links to several Black sf/f and literary organizations:

* Black Science Fiction Society

https://blacksciencefictionsociety.com/page/contact-us

* FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction

https://www.fiyahlitmag.com/support-us/

* Carl Brandon Society

https://carlbrandon.org/

* Black Tribbles

http://www.blacktribbles.com/

* People of Color in Publishing

https://www.pocinpublishing.com/donate

* I Need Diverse Games

https://ineeddiversegames.org/donate/

* We Need Diverse Books

https://diversebooks.org/fundraising/

[chocochipbiscuit]

Hey, copying this over from Twitter for anyone interested:

“FIYAH is a quarterly speculative fiction magazine that features stories by and about Black people of the African Diaspora. This definition is globally inclusive (Black anywhere in the world) and also applies to mixed/biracial and Afro-appended people regardless of gender identity or orientation.

Accepting prose and poetry submissions for October’s JOY themed issue through June 30th, 11:59PM EDT.

Pay is now: Shorts (<7k): $600 Novelettes(<15k): $1200 Poetry: $100″

I would also like to point out that an annual subscription of 4 issues is only $15 and entirely worth your time.