5 out of 5

Nailed it.

Each 250+ page quarterly drop of this mag is an accomplishment, for sure, but nonetheless, there have been either slight growing pains, or just some difficulties in getting such a large collection of material to feel cohesive. Having an issue-by-issue theme is both a hindrance and a boon: I’m a huge believer in having some kind of guiding principle for your anthology (if anything, to make it easier to market), but sometimes that means kind of shoehorning material in to fit. This fourth collection is seamless, though – the topic of utopias is both flexible and specific enough to garner a wide range of stories while also allowing for some curation, grouping by tales that focus on particular types of utopias, or that lean towards dystopias, and so on.

…And so it went: editors Frissen, Giger, Lucido and Thomas cluster our -topian tales into post-Earth stories, or near-future stories, or parables, with veins of transhumanism or repeating myths and so on. As always, we get a really great assortment of styles and storytelling, such that if one is not to your taste, there’s another option soon to follow. The reprints also blend seamlessly in: you really can’t tell what’s new or old, with the exception of Picaret’s and Tardi’s Polonius, which gets a full 40 pages, but this is really a very stunning, affecting alternate-world tale that deserves its centerpiece treatment.

The interviews all feel very fitting and are well-conducted – questions are pointed, getting quality answers – and the every-few-stories editorial inserts also come across as focused; again, I think the theme was really helpful in keeping this stuff on-topic.

This book has not not impressed, and I recognize we’re still going to get some misses when it comes to issue theme vs. contents, but I also was never in doubt that a great issue was soon to come, and I’m glad we got it before the first year’s run was through.