It's a simple enough premise, one that might have already occurred to you, and a few elements might remind you of Arrival or Annihilation, but MacDonald's precise and seemingly effortless prose makes this an example of near perfect writing.

It's also a bleak and doom-laden story, diverting but devastating.

And speaking of bleak, the novel included in this magazine, Francis Irby Gwaltney's The Day the Century Ended, is a gruesome and harrowing World War 2 saga, about a perfect life that a young man gives up to ship out to the Pacific.

He encounters so much trauma and violence and disgustingly cruel behavior, sometimes stupid, sometimes evil, that he starts to break apart piece by piece, mentally and emotionally at first but by the end of his story, with permanent physical damage as well.

This is not some Greatest Generation celebration, this is a true horror tale about all kinds of pain and misery.

So Happy Father's Day!