Subconsciously perhaps, many people count on some kind of magic to step in and save the fossil-fuel economy from its own self-terminating nature, ushering in an age of limitless abundance. It won’t. But what if magic were to show up in the deindustrial future…and take things in its own directions?

In a themed issue first proposed shortly after the inception of New Maps to enthusiastic response, here are five stories of magic showing up not to save us from the consequences of the age of profligacy, but to help us deal with the new reality, to soften the blow of its arrival, or to cast the foolishness of the old one into a revealing light: from a subway car visited by scruffy supernatural subterraneans, to a way to escape Earth that seems too perfect to be true, to high-schoolers experimenting with an occult slide rule, to a witch with an ancient secret to use on an invading army, to the genesis of a new goddess from warring times and troubled origins. Illuminating new articles, book reviews, letters, and poetry complete an uncommonly magical issue.

Contents

Introduction		iv
Letters		1
Essays & Reviews
Cheap Thrills: Legend Tripping	Justin Patrick Moore	7
Review: Carrie Vaughn’s Coast Road World	Yvonne Rowse	16
Review: A Kid for a New World: Michael Perry’s The Scavengers	Nathanael Bonnell	20
Two Haiku	Tom Murphy	23
Stories
A Rat in the Cell	Justin Patrick Moore	27
Way Out	Daniel Crawford	38
True Math	Eric Rust Backos	59
Kedorra’s Kin	G. Kay Bishop	68
The Goddess of Immokalee	Santiago De Choch	75

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