I was extremely sad to hear about the closing of Realms of Fantasy. I feel as if I did my part to keep them afloat by having a subscription, but I’m really disappointed that I never had a chance to publish a story there. I hope that this isn’t an indication of the writing on the wall, because lagging magazine sales in the short fiction market have been a huge problem. And RoF really did fill a niche in the market–of the “big” professional publications, it was the only one that catered specifically to fantasy. It seemed to balance nicely–RoF for fantasy, Analog for science fiction, and Asimov’s and Science Fiction & Fantasy somewhere in between. RoF was also special in that unlike any of those three, it was a full-size magazine with (beautiful) illustrations for every story. Of course, I suspect that was part of the problem; it was probably considerably more expensive to produce.
In honor of the magazine, I leave you with this:
Robots and Falling Hearts by Tim Pratt and Greg van Eekhout (two of my favorite short fiction genre writers). This is an Escape Pod version of the story, which originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy (and was also in one of the “Year’s Best” anthologies), narrated by my talented Clarion classmate, Alex Wilson.
Casey Lynn Wright 