Apex Digest recently made the jump to an online magazine, raising the pay rates and making content free to readers. The new format puts out a story and a series of articles and columns each week, new content every Sunday.
This week’s fiction offering is a horror tale, Andrew Porter’s “In the Seams”. Part Appalachian thriller and part Lovecraft mythos its science fiction elements are debatable, but the story is a solid one. It centers on a pair of coal miners, excavating one of the richest veins in local history, only to discover a large number of strange fossils in the mineral itself. Scientific curiosity and a drive to be more than “the coal miners who discovered the fossils” to the annals of history lead the pair to get far too involved in uncovering what should remain buried.
It’s nice to see a story that’s both local, and doesn’t portray the region like a bunch of hicks or greedy, Earth plundering creeps. Porter manages to make what’s practically in my back yard into a near-exotic local, rich with a dark history.
Sweet, somebody reviewed Andrew’s story. I think what hooked me was that it was a an accurate portrayal of the region and of mining. Except for the scary monster part.
BTW, did you read “These Days” by Katherine Sparrow? It was our first new online story.
Comment by Jason Sizemore — July 30, 2008 @ 7:15 am
Are you sure about the scary monster part?
I did read “These Days” but not until yesterday. I didn’t review it because I felt like I was way behind. I liked it a lot, especially the dynamic between the two Zakis. And I loved the line: “I don’t like thinking about being whole and trapped in the brokenness.” That’s both soulful and ironic since I think a lot of people in the normal world feel like the world is whole and they’re broken. It’s a very striking story.
Comment by Michele Lee — July 30, 2008 @ 8:59 am
Thanks for the comment! I love Kentucky and grew up in the mines. When I was a child I had a three foot long fossil fish that I spent hours examining. My uncles and grandfather would bring home ferns and other flora and fauna for me that created a love of the areas nether regions to this day. Lovecraft and Bob Howard were my own discoveries.
As to the debatable nature of “seams” sci-fi content I can only say that you are probably correct. As a deliberate take off of a Lovecraftian world view I ran smack into the problem of that author’s theory of history. The flow of time for Lovecraft was necessarily down hill. Dark, mostly forgotten, “strong time” is followed by age after age of progressively weaker and more decadent history (see “At the Mountains of Madness”). This allows the motif of helplessness in the face of over-mighty history to be so effective. More classic science fiction tends to build toward an uphill future. Technology requires less impressive predecessor as a platform for improvement and therefore the sense one gets, even in dystopian plots such as “A deepness in the Sky” is a type of vertical progress. Luckily the sci-fi mainstream has long been the most ardent caretaker of the Lovecraft legacy at least critically speaking.
Comment by Andrew C. Porter — August 19, 2008 @ 11:40 am
The title story in Pump Six by Paolo Bacagulpi is a fantastic example of a SF story that has a downward progress. In it humans are de-volving instead of evolving. Drastically.
I do think the idea of SF Cthulhu is interesting, so was your story
Comment by Michele Lee — August 19, 2008 @ 7:53 pm