I put Salon Futura #4 live earlier today. As usual it is full of good stuff.

Our guest article for this issue is by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and looks at the long history of generation ship stories.

Karen has an international look to her short fiction picks this month. Of the three stories, one is from Clarkesworld, but the other two are from magazines based in Germany and Israel.

Sam heads off to Tasmania via Finland and the Congo to review the new Johanna Sinisalo novel, Birdbrain, and look at other SF books influenced by Joseph Conrad’s classic story, Heart of Darkness.

Jonathan heads off into space with Leiji Matsumoto, the artistic genius behind Space Battleship Yamato.

My own column tries to persuade reluctant males that not all fantasy novels written by women are romance novels in disguise. The authors covered are Cat Valente, Lauren Beukes, N.K. Jemisin, Karen Lord, Ekaterina Sedia and Liz Williams.

This month’s interviews are with Al Reynolds and Juliet McKenna. Both of them were shot at BristolCon, and they both have a lot of interesting things to say.

The Salon is entitled “Steampunk Without Empire”. Karin Lowachee, Lavie Tidhar and Jeff VanderMeer join me to discuss whether steampunk is necessarily imperialist.

Possibly the most exciting news of the month is that the web store is beginning to ramp up at last. I’m delighted to be able to announce that we are now stocking some titles from Lethe Press, including the fabulous Diana Comet by Sandra McDonald.

And we have some lovely cover art from local artist, Simon Breeze.

I’m very relieved to have got to the end of the year with all four planned issues released on schedule. We are now, of course, Hugo eligible for next year, though it would be an amazing achievement to get a nomination on the basis of just four issues. I’m rather more interested in stopping losing quite so much money. I’ll have more to say about that in a couple of days, but in the meantime donations are always appreciated, and if you have an iPad the magazine looks utterly gorgeous on it, and is very cheap.