This month’s fiction emphasizes the tensions inherent in contradiction: dark and light, speech and silence, good and evil, earth and sky. Richard Bowes sketches a wedding between contemporary minions of Heaven and Hell in order to save humanity in this timestream. Mari Ness weaves a folk tale of stories that are told to children when they do not speak for themselves. Our reprint this month, from Jay Lake, adapts King Lear as a space colonization story.

In this month’s nonfiction, Julia Rios introduces us to a new acronym, QUILTBAG, a more encompassing term for our expanded understanding of gender and sexuality in literature, and discusses incorporating convincing QUILTBAG characters into fiction. Jay Lake discusses his writing career, travel, and writerly productivity in this month’s interview.

I hope that you enjoy this issue of Apex.

Lynne M. Thomas
Editor-in-Chief