AE’s Relaunch Issue Goes Live, Includes Something by Me

AE, the Canadian online science fiction magazine, is finally, finally back, with a new issue—its first in nearly three years—launching today. Five new stories and three new nonfiction pieces are available to read.

One of those pieces is by me: “An Exercise in Telling: Sylvain Neuvel’s Themis Files” evaluates whether the narrative structure Neuvel adopts in those books is a success or not. It focuses on the first two books in the trilogy—Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods—because at the time I wrote this piece the third volume, Only Human, hadn’t been published yet. Note that Only Human came out in May 2018: this piece has waited a long time to come out.

That’s because, for various reasons, getting AE back online has taken far longer than anyone involved in the project expected it to take. In September 2016 its database was hacked and the whole site was taken down. Recovering from that hack, and getting the previous six years’ content ported onto another platform, took until August 2018. Getting enough of the remaining ducks in a row to get things up and running again—that took until, well, now.

More than a dozen people worked on getting this magazine back up and running, in what little spare time they could find. I think it would have been easier, and quicker, to start from scratch. Refusing to give up on continuity took some tenacity.

Here’s hoping for smooth sailing from here on.

Previously: AE Is Back Online; AE Is Resurrecting Itself.