Lightspeed (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), edited by John Joseph Adams, had a somewhat weak year, but still managed to publish good work by Indrapramit Das, Mari Ness, Cadwell Turnbull, Pat Murphy, Susan Palwick, Lina Rather, Greg Kurzawa, and others. Lightspeed won back-to-back Hugo Awards as Best Semiprozine in 2014 and 2015. Late in 2013, a new electronic companion horror magazine, Nightmare (www.nightmare-magazine.com), also edited by John Joseph Adams, was added to the Lightspeed stable.
Tor.com (www.tor.com), edited by Patrick Neilsen Hayden and Liz Gorinsky, with additional material purchased by Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, and others, published a mix of SF, fantasy, dark fantasy, soft horror, and more unclassifiable stuff this year, with good work by Greg Egan, Linda Nagata, Stephen Baxter, Allen M. Steele, Jo Walton, Julianna Baggott, Lavie Tidhar, Yoon Ha Lee, and others. They also launched a new program, Tor.com Publishing, which brought out many of the year’s novellas in chapbook form.
An ezine devoted to “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies (www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), edited by Scott H. Andrews, published good stuff by Richard Parks, Stephen Case, Carrie Vaughn, Sarah Saab, Tony Pi, M. Bennardo, Marissa Lingen, Rose Lemberg, Kameron Hurley, Jeremy Sim, and others.
Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), the oldest continually running electronic genre magazine on the internet, started in 2000. Niall Harrison stepped down as editor-in-chief, to be replaced by Jane Crowley and Kate Dollarhyde. There wasn’t a lot of SF to be found in Strange Horizons this year, which seems to have swerved back to mostly slipstream, but they did publish interesting work by Ana Hurtado, Helena Bell, Iona Sharma, Su-Yee Lin, and others.
Newish magazine Uncanny (uncannymagazine.com), edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, which has won the best semiprozine Hugo two years in a row in 2016 and 2017, had entertaining stories by Naomi Kritzer, Sarah Pinsker, Sam J. Miller and Lara Elena Donnelly, Seanan McGuire, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Sarah Monette, N. K. Jemisin, Fran Wilde, Tina Connelly, and others.
Galaxy’s Edge (www.galaxysedge.com), edited by Mike Resnick, reached its fifth year of publication, and is still going strong; it’s available in various downloadable formats, although a print edition is available from BN.com and Amazon.com for $5.99 per issue. They continued to publish entertaining original stuff this year, although the reprint stories here are still stronger than the original stories.
The quality of the fiction seemed to go up at Apex Magazine this year, (www.apex-magazine.com) which published good work by Rich Larson, Lavie Tidhar, Nisi Shawl, Tobias S. Buckell, S. B. Divya, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ken MacLeod, Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt, and others. Jason Sizemore is the new editor, having taken over the position last year.
Abyss & Apex (www.abyssapexzine.com) ran interesting work by Rich Larson, James Van Pelt, Jon Rollins, Angus McIntyre. Jordan Taylor, and others, although little of it could be considered to be core science fictiton. Wendy S. Delmater, the former longtime editor, has returned to the helm, replacing Carmelo Rafala.
Kaleidotrope (www.kaleidotrope.net), edited by Fred Coppersmith, which started in 2006 as a print semiprozine but transitioned to digital in 2012, published interesting work by Cat Sparks, Octavia Cade, Ken Brady, and others.
Long-running sword and sorcery print magazine Black Gate, edited by John O’Neill, transitioned into an electronic magazine in September of 2012 and can be found at www.blackgate.com. They no longer regularly run new fiction, although they will be regularly refreshing their nonfiction content, essays, and reviews, and the occasional story will continue to appear.
Other ezines that published worthwhile, if not often memorable stuff, included Ideomancer Speculative Fiction (www.ideomancer.com), edited by Leah Bobet; Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), now edited by Scott R. Roberts under the direction of Card himself; SF/fantasy ezine Daily Science Fiction (dailysciencefiction.com) edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden, which publishes one new SF or fantasy story every single day for the entire year; Shimmer Magazine (www.shimmezine.com), edited by E. Catherine Tobler, which leans heavily toward fantasy, and GigaNotoSaurus (giganotosaurus.org), edited by Rashida J. Smith, which publishes one story a month.
The World SF Blog (worldsf.wordpress.com), edited by Lavie Tidhar, was a good place to find science fiction by international authors, and also published news, links, round-table discussions, essays, and interviews related to “science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics from around the world.” The site is no longer being updated, but an extensive archive is still accessible there.
A similar site is International Speculative Fiction (http://internationalSF.wordpress.com), edited by Roberto Mendes.
Weird Fiction Review (weirdfictionreview.com), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which occasionally publishes fiction, bills itself as “an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird,” including reviews, interviews, short essays, and comics.
Other newcomers include Omenana Magazine of Africa’s Speculative Fiction (omenana.com), edited by Chinelo Onwualu and Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu; Persistent Visions (persistentvisionsmag.com), edited by Heather Shaw; Shoreline of Infinity (www.shorelineofinfinity.com), edited by Noel Chidwick; Terraform (motherboard.vice.com/terraform),edited by Claire Evans and Brian Merchant; and Fiyah: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction (www.fiyahlitmag.com), edited by Justina Ireland.
Below this point, it becomes harder to find center-core SF, or even genre fantasy/horror, with most magazines featuring slipstream or literary surrealism instead. Such sites include Fireside Magazine (firesidefiction.com), edited by Brian White; Revolution SF (www.revolutionsf.com); Heliotrope (www.heliotropemag.com); and Interfictions Online (interfictions.com), executive editor Delila Sherman, fiction editors Christopher Barzak and Meghan McCarron.