DreamForge Magazine, ed. Scot Noel. Issue #1 (spring 2019). DreamForge Press, LLC, 2019. Pp. 60. ISSN 2614-2543. $10.00.
Reviewed by Djibril al-Ayad
The first issue of this glossy and well-made magazine,
DreamForge #1 bills itself as bearing “tales of hope in the universe,” and so joins a growing movement for optimistic or bright futures in SF. The editor’s preface further clarifies the zine’s agenda, beginning, “The world has been coming to an end for a long time,” and characterizing as “doomsayers” those who worry about our future. Worse, Noel dismisses climate crisis fears as an atavistic “fight or flight” response, and suggests that any harm we do now will be fixed by science in five hundred years. This is clearly not the optimistic SF of the hopepunk or solarpunk movements, where daring to dream of how we can really reverse the current moribund politics of our planet is a radical act, but rather a harking back to the glib futurism of golden age SF. The contents of this issue, ten stories, two poems and an article, are a more mixed offering—and widely varying in quality—than this initial assessment may suggest.
Who doesn’t love Baba Yaga? In this golden age of Folktale retellings, the witch of Russian folklore has been a favorite subject, and dozens of recent novels in a variety of genres draw inspiration from this feared and beloved character. Audiences have been fascinated by her for centuries—Baba Yaga appears in numerous tales in A.N. Afanas’ev’s nineteenth-century collection Complete Folktales, the largest and most well-known collection of regional Russian folktales. Skull and Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga is a collection of new retellings of these tales and new narratives imagined around this character. The collection will be a perfect introduction to Baba Yaga for those who have not yet heard stories of the grandmother witch in the woods, and there are several gems for those who are more familiar with her tales, although many do not depart too significantly from the folktales.
