I'm enjoying how consistently if one of us doesn't like a story, we ALL don't like it, lol.
The thing that really got me about the frame story question is that we're supposed to be asking her why she didn't warn anyone and the whole THING is about her basically being punished for warning them?? How could I know who she was and where and not know that.
I'm not really into the "are machines people?" genre so I lost interest very quickly and as a result, wasn't particularly impressed with it, but after reading Cal's comments last night I decided to give it another try... and it turns out the story was actually... good?? :O
Aw yiss. I'm glad you gave it another shot, it's absolutely my favorite from this set. The more I think about it, the more stuff I find to like.
I've actually been thinking about it some more since my comparison to kamikaze attacks specifically as a World War 2 metaphor and comparing it to that other story on Mars we were all disappointed by. Both stories are pretty clear WW metaphors about sacrifice and memorials and being on the losing side, but are otherwise completely different.
That's my secret, Cap. I'm always bad at computers.
This week's magazine is Lightspeed Magazine, for the most part.
Once again there were no poems this week, however I noticed on the site that they linked to two other magazines, Fantasy Magazine and Nightmare Magazine, which seem to be sister magazines by the same publisher and sharing some editorial staff, and those did have poems in their november issue, so I decided to include a poem from each of them.
There's six stories total, because it includes two pieces of flash fiction and two short poems, so it's still under 11.000 words.