“Choose Your Own” by Robert Joseph Levy
“Ne Que V’on Desir” by Tanith Lee/Judas Garbah
“Sleep in Winter, Dream of Spring” by Rodello Santos
“Walking at the Speed of Light, More Slowly” by Chaz Brenchley

Reviewed by Bob Blough

Icarus is a fairly new magazine on the SF/Fantasy front as this is issue 3. It is a beautifully designed full-sized magazine that announces itself as “The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction.” Don’t feel that if you are not gay that this magazine cannot entertain you. The stories are based around gay relationships but are stories in the fantasy genre and thus of interest to anyone involved in reading genre stories.

This issue contains four pieces of fiction – all of them fantasy/slipstream type of stories. First up is “Choose Your Own” by Robert Joseph Levy in which you are allowed to make various choices throughout the story to decide which ending occurs. Some of the endings are more interesting than others; believe me, I tried them all. It concerns a man whose lover has died and the choices he has before him. It’s an interactive story that involves witches or time travel depending on your choice. It is well done, but a trifle. I do look for more from this writer as it was smoothly handled.

Next up is from a very famous fantasy writer  – Tanith Lee. Here she is writing in her Judas Garbah persona. “Ne Que V’on Desir” is as lushly written as we have come to expect from Lee. It takes place on a train traveling through snow covered countryside in some un-named Slavic-feeling country and concerns a wolf or sexual predator on board. Whether he is truly a wolf is left to our own musing. Not enough to be a story but beautifully written none-the-less.

My favorite story of the bunch is “Sleep in Winter, Dream of Spring” by a fairly new writer – Rodello Santos. It is a story told as fairy tale or myth about a curse upon a man, Dane, that only allows him to be awake in the spring/summer (shades of the Persephone myth) but must sleep through the autumn/winter. There is deep love between the protagonist and Dane. What happens when the cursed man’s lover determines to break the spell by killing the sorcerer that cursed Dane is the story, and it is compelling and emotionally fulfilling. Wonderful work. Keep writing Mr. Santos.

Another famous author finishes up the quartet. Chaz Brenchley writes about death, too, in “Walking at the Speed of Light, More Slowly.” As in Levy’s story, we meet a man whose lover has just died. This turns out to be a ghost story about those we love holding on to us after death and how we deal with that – the legacy and the heartache. Again, nicely written if not overly memorable.

One thing I must say about these stories is that three of them deal with the death of a lover (Tanith Lee’s protagonist has just left his lover – a kind of smaller death, perhaps?). Is this still a reaction to the AIDS plague that decimated so many in the gay community? Only one specifically names the disease as the Gay Related Immune Syndrome obviously happening before the AIDS virus was discovered. But the deaths of young virile men haunt these writers. Whether that is the case or not death is something we all must face and that makes these stories universal. I applaud these writers for taking on such an unforgiving subject. Bravo.

The Icarus website can be found here.