Tuesday, April 5, 2011

New Aphelion short fiction: "The Sky Above Pandemonium" by Sergei Servianov

The March 2011 issue of Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy has an interesting new short story by Sergei Servianov titled “The Sky Above Pandemonium.” The plot revolves around a reporter from the Mars-based magazine Pop Inferno, who follows the leader of the 8th Women's Sniper Platoon from battle to battle. Here are the opening lines:

Lieutenant Imoto Range was the perfect man.

From the moment I first saw her slumped in a raggedy chair, sleeping in some destroyed basement next to the front line, I knew that I'd found the focus that my article needed.

I'd already spent a week in Cairo, sending my editors in Tharsis ream after ream of feel-good propaganda about sweet young boys fighting the nasty hordes of the African Union. They weren't pleased. Pop Inferno prided itself on finding the offbeat among the banal. They weren't pretending we were free to write whatever we wanted. Press freedoms had been a joke on Earth ever since the Second Alien War and especially since the Generals' Rebellion. A Martian journalist could quickly find himself blasted back into space for publishing the wrong thing....

Sergei Servianov's story "The Memory Miners" appeared in the magazine Encounters #4 (Black Matrix Publishing, October 2010).

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