Top 13 Fantasy Magazines I Follow – Taylen Carver

Fantasy as a genre tends to run long. One hundred thousand words (400 pages) for a novel is average.

But short fantasy: short stories, novellas and novelettes, are a specialized artistry for the fantasy author. The shorter stories have the same amount of world building as the longer novels, but you only glimpse it. It’s implied by how the character behave and respond to situations, what they say, what the world looks like.

A single word can imply huge amounts of information about the world the story is set in. Perhaps the most famous example of this is a science fiction one. Robert A. Heinlein said in Beyond This Horizon, “The door dilated.” So much is implied by that simple three-word sentence.

A fantasy example would be; “The crow told her the time.” So, crows can speak in this world, and they can tell the time. They interact with humans, too. And they’re smart. (They’re smart in our world, too!)

In a novel, the author would perhaps linger for a paragraph or more, explaining how crows and humans get along, and a potted history of how this came about. A short story can’t afford to colour in all the lines. It implies and moves on.

Can you tell I like short stories? Always have. A well-told fantasy short story is a thing of joy. I like writing them, too, but I don’t get a lot of time to do it.

I read a lot of them.

I have a bunch of favourite magazines where I get most of my short fantasy fiction. Most of them also publish science fiction, but they work to make sure there’s an even balance of both each month.

I subscribe to some of the magazines, to get all their fiction every month, because I really like most of the stories they publish. Other sites, I monitor their RSS feed and read the short stories that are provided free each month. Even just following the RSS feed provides me with a ton of short stories to read each month.

Some of the magazine are 100% free for readers, relying on advertising for revenue, or sales from anthologies of their archived fiction.

All of them provide a huge spectrum of fantasy fiction, though. And none of them are “the big three” magazines. (Analog, Asimov’s, Magazines of Fantasy & Science Fiction, none of which I read on a regular basis. Surprised?)