It’s the two hundredth issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies this week. I’ve published seven stories with them — more than I have with any other venue; possibly twice as many, now that I think about it — and I want to take a moment to talk about what BCS means to me.

Years ago, I remember reading guidelines for a new magazine which announced proudly that they, unlike all those other magazines out there, wanted fiction that broke the boundaries of genre. In fact, I remember reading those guidelines more than once — because for a while there, it seemed like every new magazine wanted genre-breaking material: call it interstitial, call it slipstream, bring on your magical realism and your experimental formats and so forth, just so long as it isn’t quite fantasy.

But as Marissa Lingen once said, while she’s a fan of interstitial fiction, she’s also quite fond of stitial fiction: the center from which all those other things branch out. I’m right there with her on that. If you want to know what I most reliably enjoy, it’s stories which carry me away into a world that isn’t like ours, a three-dimensional, full-color secondary reality. The kind of thing I’ve sometimes called “cultural fantasy,” because part of what it’s doing is exploring different ways of life: different government, religion, family structure, history, physical environment, style of dress, domestic architecture, the food the characters eat.

And that’s why I was so delighted when Beneath Ceaseless Skies launched. It is the one magazine I’ve ever found that reliably publishes the type of thing I like, week in and week out. Even when a given story doesn’t work for me (because no magazine bats 100%), it is almost invariably the kind of story I enjoy. And I’m delighted to see it still going strong, two hundred issues later.

They’re running a subscription drive to mark this anniversary. Check out the mega-sized issue #200, and if you like what you see, you know what to do!