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Issue 19 (Mar 2012)
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Featured in this issue: It Pays To Read The Safety Cards, Stained, The Book of Love, |
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by Joe Vaz
| Our March issue comes at you with four original stories, one SF and three horrors. We start off with some good advice in ‘It Pays to Read the Safety Cards’ by R.W.W. Greene on the 6th of March. Chris Steven’s twisted story, ‘Stained’ will be posted on the 13th of March. On the 20th of March comes Peter Damien’s ‘Ghost Love Score’, and we close off the issue with Nick Scorza’s ‘The Book of Love’. Our interview for March is with South African television and film actor, Brandon Auret, who has just come off the new Niell Blomkampf (District 9) film. Together with Mark Sykes’s Sixth Sense of Humour, this completes our issue for this month. If you just cannot wait to read all the stories then why not purchase the magazine now, or take out a subscription through Weightless Books? |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Hendrik Gericke
I recently got turned down for a sci-fi concept art gig, because I didn't have enough of that kind of thing in my portfolio. It's annoying, because I love sci-fi, yet in concept art it's been done to death and I tend to go the opposite direction to the general norm. So I took this as the gauntlet that had been thrown down and jumped at the chance to get stuck in. A massive inspiration of mine is the painter John Harris, who has done a lot of covers for Tor Books (they have an amazing stable of artists), and I definitely took cues from him. I wanted to relate the sense of scale between the craft and the planet, giving it a telephoto feel.
Read more »by R.W.W. Greene
A lot of people cheered when our space plane docked with the Sam Walton but I wasn’t in the mood. The ride up was terrible. First I felt squashed, then I felt like I was falling, then I just wanted to puke. The flight attendant had handed out anti-nausea gum before we took off, but people were throwing up all around me. A couple of rows back, someone missed the barf bag and vomit bubbles floated by my head. The attendant captured it with a net. Gross. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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interview by Vianne Venter
I think we have it in us, but we have a fair amount of growing up to do first. It would take a concerted, worldwide effort to do so, and we’d need motivation everyone could get behind. In the short term, I don’t know that we could do it out of sheer curiosity or a drive to explore, but a threat to the species might be enough to scare us all into line. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | 
Tags: Interview, Issue 19, RWW Greene, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | 
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by Mark Sykes
SURELY ONE OF THE best things about reading short fiction is waiting for the twist at the end. Not every short story has to have one, and some do very well without them, but they are delicious when they’re done properly. And could there be more fitting genres for them than sci-fi and horror? |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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by Chris Stevens
The stench of sulfur wafted through the air as Colin lit the black candles positioned at each corner of the pentagram. He stared intensely at the large pentagram he had drawn on the bare concrete floor. It had taken a while to remove the carpeting and padding from the room. Harder still was the remnant of glue that was swirled on the floor to keep the padding in place. Colin had even gone so far as to remove the tack strips and their anchors, in order to get a nice smooth surface for the task at hand. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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interview by Vianne Venter
I’m not sure what I believe. I like to think that when we die it is however we think it will be. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | Tags: Chris Stevens, Interview, Issue 19, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed
by Peter Damien
If there was pain from the small equator of raw flesh and blood, she did not feel it. She went mad, that first day, a madness the pain could not penetrate. Her mind filled with rage and despair, the animalistic panic at being trapped like this, being snatched away. What was left of her mind was filled with those last few moments: the sound of scuffling, the sound of Eric shouting at her to run, goddammit, get the hell outta here, get the – and then the sound of his voice being cut off by a thunderclap explosion which left her ears ringing. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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interview by Vianne Venter
In my first attempt at the story, she wasn't blind. That was okay, I suppose, but I'm always looking for ways to push the stories and ideas just a bit further. There have been an uncountable number of horror stories about a pretty young woman being menaced by a murderous nutjob. You've read it, I've read it, so what's the point in rehashing it? Quite why I settled on her being blind as opposed to anything else, I don't remember now. It made her stand out a little more, gave the story some of the energy I needed to push through it. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | Tags: Interview, Issue 19, Peter Damien, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed
review by Deon van Heerden
Published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd PB 752 pages RRP £9.00 (Kindle £9.99) When I heard that Stephen King was releasing a time-travel novel, I found myself excited and apprehensive in equal measure; time-travel novels are pretty much the multi-disc concept albums of the literary world, and even the finest authors can easily stumble and embarrass themselves when traversing this uneven, but well-trod, ground. And yet, somehow, 11/22/63 manages to be almost impossibly good, a historical-fantasy-thriller-romance novel, which excels at every one of these. |
From Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
by Joe Vaz
Many, many years ago Brandon Auret and I spent most of our days studying drama at Pretoria University of Technology, and most of our nights either rehearsing for plays, performing them or playing guitar and singing covers in bars and restaurants all over Pretoria, sometimes getting paid in pizzas and beer. Hey, what else did we need? |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews, Non-Fiction, Podcasts | Tags: Brandon Auret, Interview, Issue 19, Joe Vaz | 1 Comment »
by Nick Scorza
It is all because of the book, that accursed book I came across in my employ as a dealer in antiquities. I did not choose the profession, but rather awoke to find myself immersed in it – being something of an antiquity myself, even as a young man. I loved all old things, whether from the past century or the past millennium. I was mad for them, but books I prized above all else. Is there anything more wonderful than a book? It is a treasure trove – the wealth and wisdom of the dead preserved for the living as no hoary pharaoh could have hoped for. In books I sought the same commune with things greater than myself that others sought from the church. To me, any book was a bible. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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interview by Vianne Venter
This story came out of a love of Lovecraft and Arthur Machen -- especially Machen, in this case. Machen's stories and novels are some of the most wonderful and terrifying out there, I think, but one thing that bothers me in some of them is a sense of female characters as both victims and objects of horror. I wanted to write a story that both paid homage to everything I love about Machen and addressed or turned the tables on this issue a bit. The story also came out of a lot of broader thinking I'd been doing about love and relationships. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | Tags: Interview, Issue 19, Nick Scorza, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed