THE EDITOR’S WORD by Lezli Robyn

We welcome readers to the September issue of Galaxy’s Edge. Two days after this editorial goes live, Shahid, the publisher of this magazine, and I are heading to Dragon Con, the first in-person convention both of us will have attended since the Covid-19 pandemic started. The delta variant is rapidly spreading through the US, accounting for most of the current cases, but fortified with dragon masks and vaccine jabs, we have taken all the precautions we can to attend because we have a very special purpose at this convention.

To present the trophy to the very first winner of The Mike Resnick Memorial Award.

Judges Nancy Kress, Bill Fawcett, Jody Lynn Nye, Sheree Renée Thomas and Lois McMaster Bujold have picked the winner and runners-up for the award, and we can’t wait to introduce our readers to these wonderful authors. Mike Resnick would be so proud of their efforts and delighted to see new writing careers take flight.

Laura Resnick, Mike’s daughter, will be revealing the trophy design, online, at the start of the awards event on Sunday the fifth of September, and within hours we’ll be able to announce the winner. Regardless of who takes home the trophy, we are so impressed by all our finalists—Shirley Song, Christopher Henckel, Torion Oey, Z.T. Bright and Lucas Carroll-Garrett—and we look forward to sharing their fiction with you in future issues of Galaxy’s Edge.

In this issue of the magazine, we introduce another writer to our readers, Carrie Callahan, with her fantasy story, “The Whisper of Winter,” about a man who gets led into the woods and is trapped by mystical creatures. We are also publishing our first story by David Boop, “Crystal Clear Perception,” about another man who peers into alternate realities for a glimpse of his late wife, forming a connection across the multiverse that could save many lives….

Mica Scotti Kole returns to our pages with another science fiction story, “Three, Two, One,” about a team of temporal agents sent to clean up after other agents-gone-wrong, and Todd McCaffrey’s “Tracks on the Moon”…well, I don’t want to say anything to spoil this quick but clever read!

“Against the Current” by Robert Silverberg asks what would happen if a man became unmoored in time and starts to inexplicably drift into the past, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Renn and the Little Men” is set in the Wild West, where gunslingers populate the legend of many a dime novel. Renn knows her way around a gun, or a book, better than most (including her famous brother), so when unusual little men appear asking to hire her missing sibling, Renn takes the job instead.

We round out the short stories in this issue with our two regular fiction segments: a story from our previous editor of the magazine, and a recommendation by the editor of the Chinese sister edition of our magazine, Yang Feng. Mike Resnick’s “The 43rd Antarean Dynasties” tells the story of Hermes, a native and cynical insectoid tour guide showing a family of three humans around the capital city of his home planet Antares. As he escorts the visitors around, he is annoyed by their insensitive actions, especially when they refuse to feel sorry for the violence and destruction previous human invasions have caused for the Antareans. Of “Into a Warm Cold Night” by Wang Nuonuo, Yang Feng says, “This story is as elaborate as a stage play, with all sorts of characters encountering each other in one dramatic scene, leading to intense plot conflict in which the author creatively interweaves the past, the present, and the future of Lenghu Lake and the fates of all the Lenghu Lake people.”

Along with non-fiction columns from our regulars, L. Penelope, Gregory Benford and Richard Chedwyk, Jean Marie Ward interviews the incomparable Jonathan Maberry, and we include two of the best essays submitted by readers about what is their favorite Robert A. Heinlein book, and why. We had run a competition as part of our monthly newsletter, and the response was a very welcome insight into the minds of our readers. We’d like to congratulate Shayla Elizabeth on her winning entry. I hope our readers enjoy her perspective, and the rest of this issue of Galaxy’s Edge. If you are also attending Dragon Con, please find us and say hello, and come to the awards ceremony to witness the first presentation of The Mike Resnick Memorial Award. It will be an occasion to remember.