M-BRANE SF

Hiatus!

2011-11-21T20:09:00.000-06:00

As those few of you who still pay attention to me know, my other-life of busy career has caused a lot of serious delays with M-Brane SF publication. What I said in the last post--that I intend to publish the final two issues of the current format shortly--is still true, and I am close to done with content selection for those. I have, however, closed to further submissions. I haven't yet made final decisions as to which stories will fill those last two issues, but I believe that I have them in hand and just need separate the great from the really great. Since I am no longer taking subscriptions for the current (soon-to-be-former) format of the zine, the final two editions will be released for free on this site and elsewhere.

M-Brane SF will appear in a new iteration in 2012, details forthcoming. In the meantime, this site will remain a place for news of my small press's business, including future book projects, our fantasy zine Fantastique Unfettered and other cool stuff.

Thanks, everyone, for all the support, companionship (and patience!) over the past three years. I have some good stuff in the works for after the end of this little hiatus.

Update on the Recent Inactivity

2011-10-06T21:17:00.000-05:00

I've made no new post to this blog since July, and that one was about how I imagined my schedule was back under control and that M-Brane Press and zine matters would resume their normal calendar. Such has not happened. Since that post, the situation with my day job has changed fundamentally. We are in a transition there, and I have been doing essentially the work of at least two people. An average work day has been about 14 hours, and I haven't had a single full day off since Labor Day. I am not complaining (I do like my job), just reporting facts by way of explaining why M-Brane SF has not had a new issue lately and why writers who have stories in submission have been awaiting reply for an exceptionally long amount of time. So I want to update anyone who still cares about what's going and what the future holds for my little publishing operation...

1) The M-Brane SF zine will appear in its normal format twice more, as issues #28 and #29, probably in November and December. After that, I intend to change it into something else. I want to continue curating the particular kind of fiction that I have attracted to M-Brane SF, but it needs to be in a manner that both draws more attention to its writers but which also requires a less crazy amount of labor on my part given the ongoing facts of my "real" life.

2) Writers who have stories in submission to M-Brane SF (or whom may still submit) can either patiently await my reply or email me at mbranesf at gmail dot com to inquire about their submission status or withdraw their submission, no hard feelings. A bunch of stories have already been in the "maybe" folder for going on 90 days, which is crazy-long by my standards, so I understand if anyone is tired of waiting. That being said, stories that I have here will be replied to eventually, and new submissions will be considered for the last two normal "monthly" issues until I have them filled.

3) M-Brane Press projects such as our fantasy zine Fantastique Unfettered and our various book projects will be unaffected by the change with the M-Brane zine.

4) Some new M-Brane Press projects--including a re-imagining of the M-Brane SF zine concept--will be announced later. We have have a couple of books on deck, and have a few other cool things in the cooker.

I've learned a lot, met a lot of cool people, and done a lot of wicked awesome stuff in the almost three years since I launched M-Brane SF, and I don't intend to stop doing any of that. It will just be different and probably better. Thanks, all, for not sending me a lot of hate mail during my recent relative silence.

M-BRANE SF #29 releases tonight

2011-07-12T20:41:00.000-05:00

The new issue releases in PDF form to its subscribers tonight in about an hour. Below is the usual PayPal button that one may use to purchase a copy. Money received in this way is a large part of what keeps the zine going. Due to various delays, I missed my usual post previewing the table of contents and the writers, so I copy here my intro notes from the issue:

EDITORIAL NOTES 6/11

Since I’m already late with getting these stories to you, I won’t take up a lot of time with my usual news updates and other ramblings. It’s a powerful quintet of astounding visions that comprises this new issue, and together they form an answer to the question, “Why science fiction?” A writer can explore big ideas and smaller-scale personal situations in any genre, but there’s not a genre quite like sf for probing into those interstices between the grand and the minute, the cosmic and the personal, the Big Idea and the assimilation of it on a smaller scale.

Occasionally I hear complaints that a “sense of wonder” left the genre a long time ago, supplanted by smaller ideas and unimportant concerns. When I hear this, I wonder what people are reading because this is certainly not true of the best of the contemporary genre. This attitude emanates, I think, from a conservative outlook on the genre and a notion that the old Golden Age, and its total occupation with Idea and Plot, was necessarily superior somehow to contemporary work where Character and Style are of interest and importance and where the imaginary boundary between science fiction and “literature” has blurred and broken down. I think that over time with M-Brane SF I have managed, unintentionally, to show that this debate is at least somewhat contrived. Because here we have it all.

The new issue opens with A.J. Fitzwater’s stunning “Twixt,” and it ends with Kenneth Burstall’s lavishly bizarre (and very “M-Braney”) item “The Cone.” In between, we have stupendous entries from Mark Ward (“After the Fall”), Mason Gallaway (“Ocean of Change”) and M-Brane SF veteran and recent Writers of the Future winner Patty Jansen (“War Games”).

Engage and enjoy.—CF

Back to business, for the most part

2011-07-01T22:00:00.002-05:00

Readers of our zine, or people who follow it or me in other online ways, may have noticed that I have been somewhat off-schedule and generally absent for the last few weeks. A big pile-up of projects in May, plus an incredibly busy work schedule through May and June caused some problems: we missed entirely our May issue of the zine. The third print Quarterly (collecting issues #25, #26 and #27) is a bit late, as is issue #29 (we're skipping #28--it may show up later in some kind of special off-schedule form). But the good news:

1) Issue #29 is basically done and will release in a few days (it will be called the June issue, even though its release will happen a few days into July). It's full of terrific new stuff. I'll post its table of contents, info about its authors, and its cover image shortly.

2) The third Quarterly is also basically done, and it, too, will show up within a few days. I have to finish its cover and a few other little details, but it's about there. It will feature some great content not seen in the electronic issues: two brilliant stories by Adam Callaway and an interview with him.

3) Issue #30, July, is expected on schedule, returning us to our normal calendar.

4) I may have an announcement about some kind of cool new book project soon.

My day-jobbery is always busy (and a fresh new change in my job description adds to this), but it has a couple of high seasons each year, and last week was the climax of one such. I worked all seven days of it and clocked about 74 hours on duty. While that was a bit out of the ordinary, it's not too different than what most weeks have been like for the last couple of months. But we're in a bit of slower spell now for a few weeks, and I intend to catch up on a lot of other business.

Thanks everyone who has supported M-Brane SF and M-Brane Press's other projects over the last couple of years. We've been a bit quiet lately, but are still in business.

(The image, appropos of nothing, is of the dessert from a wine dinner I prepared in June--part of the day-job work. It is a chocolate-peanut butter ganache tartlet with salted caramel sauce, accompanied by red and white wine jellies. Yeah, zinfandel and chardonnay solidified with apple pectin, like wine Jello shots!)

Behold, the M-Brane SF Double!

2011-06-07T17:26:00.001-05:00

A short vid of me showing off the proof copy of the M-Brane SF Double. It should be live for purchase on the major online booksellers any hour now. Also, I will still honor the pre-order special indefinitely if anyone wants to take advantage of the electronic freebies, because why not? Click on that "related articles" item at the end of this post for more info on that.

M-Brane SF #28 is late!

2011-06-02T21:22:00.000-05:00

So this is all rather embarrassing: the month of June seems to have begun already without there ever having been a May publication of M-Brane SF. The twenty-eighth issue fell to my crazy work schedule during May, plus the final push to finish The New People/Elegant Threat (M-Brane SF Double). We had a situation like this in December when the December 2010 issue was actually released in the first half of January 2011, followed two weeks later by the January issue. This might be how it plays out with May and June this time. Expect either two nearly back-to-back releases this month, or a double issue.

While just being too busy (average work week was 65-70 hours during May) was the main factor, there was another situation that contributed to this unusual lateness. I just didn't really have enough stories that I wanted for it. I looked at a ton of submissions and didn't see a lot that was quite right. I did not, however, want my decision-making to be too much affected by fatigue--and the fact that I was seeing basically nothing indicated that the problem might lie partly with me--so I held a lot more candidates in the "maybe" folder than I might have otherwise. I've gradually worked through it, and there are now only eighteen stories submitted since April 26 that are awaiting a decision, which I hope to get done within a couple days.

Zack Kopplin cheered for blasting Bachmann

2011-05-26T22:16:00.002-05:00

At M-Brane Press, we defend rationality, sanity and science. Over on my personal journal, I tonight declared 17-year-old Zack Kopplin an M-Brane SF "Anti-Douchebag" for his campaign to repeal Louisiana's idiotic Science Education Act, which opens the public schools wide to Creationist bullshit, and for directly challenging Congresswoman Bachmann to cough up her alleged Nobel laureates who actually believe in "intelligent design." The occasional acknowledgement of a regular civilian who has done something great to defeat stupidity used to be something that I just did personally, but now it is an "Official" program of M-Brane SF and M-Brane Press. Stupidity and anti-science are on the march everywhere in the United States. M-Brane stands against this madness.

2020 VISIONS released in epub format on B&N

2011-05-17T18:56:00.006-05:00

It's a few months later than planned, but we finally have an .epub-format ebook version of Rick Novy's 2020 Visions available as a Nook Book at Barnes and Noble, and directly from M-Brane Press as well (details below). It's our hope that people who passed on the lovely print version of the book (also available at B&N as well as Amazon) were just waiting for a version that they could read on their Nook or iPad or a variety of other devices and will now go ahead and get a copy of this great book. 2020 Visions is a beautiful original anthology of very near-future speculative fiction (the "2020" in the title refers to the year) featuring stories by Mary Robinette Kowal, Alex Wilson, Jack Mangan, David Gerrold, Emily Devenport, Alethea Kontis, Ernest Hogan, Jeff Spock, David Lee Summers and many others. This is a very cool book, and for only $4.95 at Barnes and Noble, it should not be missed.

You can also buy it right here for only $3.95, using the Pay Pal button below (takes credit cards and e-checks if you don't have a Pay Pal account). One may wonder why we seem to be undercutting our own price at Barnes and Noble. We're really not--it's just that direct purchase from M-Brane means a bit more money more quickly that can eventually go to the authors when this book goes into profit. But if you're shopping at B&N anyway, then by all means get it there. By the way, if you purchase it here, allow anywhere from a few hours to a day or so for delivery: we're not rigged for direct download from this site, so we send a link to you by email.

One last special detail: Anyone who buys 2020 Visions in any format (print, Nook, Kindle) from B&N, Amazon or directly from M-Brane Press will get a free subscription to the electronic (PDF) edition of M-Brane SF, our very nice monthly magazine of short speculative fiction. If you purchase from B&N or Amazon or any other retailer, just forward a copy of your order confirmation or receipt to mbranesf at gmail dot com, and we will add you to the M-Brane SF subscription list.

The "DOUBLE" PRE-ORDER SPECIAL BEGINS!

2011-05-01T14:58:00.009-05:00

The M-Brane SF Double, by Alex Jeffers and Brandon H. Bell, is finally within days of completion. This beautiful book is due for official release May 31. People who have followed my blogs or paid attention to me on Twitter and Facebook over the past year know that I have long dreamed of publishing a book that would honor the style of the old Ace Doubles from decades ago, those wonderful books where two short novels were published back-to-back (and upside down in relation to one another), so that the book has the effect of having two front covers. Over the last two years, I have had the joy of publishing monthly issues of M-Brane SF, a couple of gorgeous anthologies, a couple of lovely single-author short fiction collections, and the new fantasy periodical Fantastique Unfettered. I adore all of these things, but this new book, the Double, has become something of the new baby of the family, the special adored one, the focus of all attention (The rest of my operations will probably be glad when it's finally released! )

While I have worked hard on this project, the work I that have done is petty, insignificant, a mere trifle compared to that of the real talent behind it, the two great writers and the one great cover artist. These three came together to make my pet project not just real but actually a thing worth doing. I am going to introduce the two authors and their stories at length below, in the form of publishing here the actual intros that I prepared for the book. But first I want to acknowledge artist Jeff Lund for making two fine, matching covers for this book which each catch an essence from the stories they introduce but which also together create the whole look that I was after for this book. Of course everyone who knows me at all knows very well that Jeff is also my life partner, but his employment as the cover artist was by no means an easy inside job. He fought me for months on actually doing the work, insisting that he wasn't qualified for it. But I knew that he could do it--because I had seen so much great work from him before--and that he was the exact artist that I needed for this very special project. This post on my Live Journal , from many months ago, tells the story of getting the covers done in more detail.

M-Brane Press is offering a fine domestic (US and Canada) pre-order special for the M-Brane SF Double: The New People/Elegant Threat, Print Edition. Buy here, using the Pay Pay button below (takes credit/debit cards and e-checks if you don't have an actual Pay Pal account) for $14.95. For this price, you will get a copy of the beautiful print edition of this book (shipping included) plus this giant slew of electronic bonuses:

1) A permanent electronic (PDF) subscription to M-Brane SF, the monthly magazine of astounding science fiction. Your subscription will begin (and never end!) with a three-issue "starter pack" consisting of issues #25, #26 and the new #27--check out a free issue with the button over in the right side bar...

2) Electronic copies of Fantastique Unfettered #1 and #2 (worth the price right there). Fantastique Unfettered is our new "Periodical of Liberated Literature," a gorgeous magazine edited by Double author Bell...

3) Electronic copies of our fabulous anthologies Things We Are Not (queer sf) and 2020 Visions (near-future sf)...

4) An electronic copy of Ergosphere, the special twelfth issue of M-Brane SF, guest-edited by Rick Novy...

5) A giant mega-bundle of the entire second year of M-Brane SF, back issues #13 through #24.

(Again, US and Canadian orders only; sorry, we can't manage high overseas shipping costs at this low price, but the print book will become available in the UK, Europe and Australia after release.)

We are giving away nearly everything we have to give away with this special. That's how terrific we think it is, and how important we think it is that people get a copy of this book. But there's one catch: The special ends by the 5/31 publication date or as soon as 100 readers order this special. As soon as order #100 is received, we will will shut down the pre-order and the book will then be available only through B&N, Amazon, etc. (This isn't just an arbitrary number or a gimmick--processing pre-orders is a lot of work, and a 100 is about as many as we want to commit to in the next couple weeks). Readers who decide to jump on this good deal should do so right now by using the Pay Pal button. Allow us up to a day to send you by email the details of your purchase, including all your download links to your fat new cache of electronically preserved fiction. The print Double won't ship to you until 5/31, but you'll have more than enough to read in the meantime.

Here's the nice, easy-to-use Buy Now button, and please continue reading below to learn more about the authors and their novels...

$14.95 includes M-Brane SF Double (print), and everything mentioned above.

he fact that Alex Jeffers does not quite yet seem to be a common household name among readers of speculative fiction is a deplorable situation that I mean to do whatever little I can to correct. A writer of fantasy, science fiction and difficult-to-categorize literature, Jeffers has been one of my favorite writers that I have encountered over the last couple of years. He is a storyteller of remarkable imagination, a wordsmith of great talent and an editor’s dream of a writer with whom to work on a project.

I first learned of Jeffers when he offered a story for my GLBT science fiction anthology Things We Are Not (2009). I accepted “Composition with Barbarian and Animal”—a gorgeous, exotic, enthralling tale—for the book and counted myself lucky to have gotten such a nice item for my first attempt at editing an anthology. After I learned more about Alex Jeffers, I suspected that he was a writer perhaps a bit out of my league at the time (as the very small-time editor I was), and I doubted that I’d have a shot at publishing him again any time soon. But a short while later he surprised me with “Jannicke’s Cat” (M-Brane SF #10, November 2009). And it was then, while reading this achingly lovely story, that I learned of the singular world of Rahab, an oceanic place with but a few small islands where humans live in interstellar isolation from their cousins on other distant, out-of-reach planets. There befell a situation that resulted in the birth of no more females to the last generation of women on that world. Jannicke, an old woman at the time of the story, is one of the last of her sex, in a soon-to-be all-male world where the very survival of the species may be in peril.

Fast-forward many, many years: Science found a way where nature didn’t, and the humans—the men—of Rahab survive and flourish as humans always have, living their lives, dreaming their dreams, marrying and having families. But something else also remained the same as it had always been: most males were still born heterosexually oriented but they would live their lives never knowing a single living woman. This biological, existential conundrum and one possible solution to it are at the core of The New People. If, based on what I have just said, you have already formed expectations or made presumptions about what you will find in The New People, you are probably wrong. Jeffers surprises throughout both with the details of the story and the way his vividly rendered characters navigate through it.

When Jeffers submitted The New People to me over a year ago, I was frankly stunned. Because he submitted it for consideration as a story for the normal run of the M-Brane SF magazine, taking me at my word that I had no upper limit on word count. Indeed I do not have a firm upper word count limit for the magazine, but a thirty thousand word novella that I suspected would be fantastic (before I’d even read a single word) seemed altogether too much to treat as a normal submission. So, what to do? I had already been chattering on the web about my dream of creating a new book in the old style of the Ace Doubles, but I was still pretty far away from committing to the actual doing of it, and I had no idea what I’d be able to get for its content. But as I started reading The New People, I realized that I had one half of my Double in hand already. It was the perfect situation all around: I had one story that would work beautifully for the new book, and it was a story that had long deserved but had never gotten a proper presentation to the public.

As with the story that forms the other half of this book, Jeffers’ tale is one stand-alone piece of what we must hope will one day come forth as part of a much larger story. Jeffers says he has in process a work called A Boy’s History of the World, which will incorporate all of his Rahab stories. This is something that ranks highly on my personal list of Books That I Wish Existed. But for now, I will content myself with the terrific pleasure of being the one to point toward this great open window into that world. Enjoy.

—Christopher Fletcher, Editor, M-Brane SF

Foreword to Elegant Threat by Brandon H. Bell..

have been telling readers about Brandon H. Bell since I first read his work in the slush-pile the first month I was producing M-Brane SF magazine. In the slightly more than two years since M-Brane SF #1, I have published Brandon’s stories twice more in the magazine and in a couple of anthologies (Things We Are Not and the M-Brane SF Quarterly #1), and I have been gratified to see, as his list of publishing credits steadily lengthens, that other editors are seeing what I see in this extraordinarily imaginative and intelligent writer.

The story you are about to read is a marvel, and the realization in print of a project that Brandon Bell has been working on for a long time. He has created a rich, lavish, fascinating and sometimes frightening Post-Singularity, interplanetary milieu. Some lucky readers have had a chance to peer into it a couple of times already: one of his first published short stories, “Best Gift” (Return to Luna, Hadley Rille 2008) was, as Bell describes it on his website, “a tale about Sterling Suits, Neo-Dromedaries, and the persistence of love, trust, and faith on the lunar surface.” The next glimpse into this strange world was in M-Brane SF #5 (June 2009), with the story “Abraham Discovers an Artifact Impenetrable to All Harm,” an enigmatic and startling story about an unusual family struggling to make their way in the universe at the edges of an impending war between humans and Post-humans. These stories were so fascinating that my only complaints were that they were too short and that there weren’t enough of them. But now, with Elegant Threat, we finally get to spend a longer time in Bell’s world.

Elegant Threat—the story of people who wrangle aquatic fauna from the harrowing tides of the moon Shanama against a backdrop of imminent conflict with the mysterious Post-humans and sectarian strife within their own ranks—was envisioned by its author as the first of a triptych of stories that will eventually comprise a much longer novel. But this story herein—a novella of about thirty thousand words—is also complete, self-contained and will satisfy readers even if the other portions are never seen (though all readers of this one will certainly clamor for the rest and Bell likely shall feel obliged to produce it soon enough).

Bell has deployed an interesting and unexpected literary device in telling this story. Its subtitle, On the Demise of Captain Fantomas Patton-Guerrero and Loss of La Amenaza Elegente, gives the reader a big clue up front essentially how the story is going to end, as does the very first chapter’s final line: “…La Amenaza Elegente dropped toward the planet, beginning its descent toward the place that would soon become its grave.” As with an ancient Greek tragic play or a Shakespeare drama, we go into it knowing that Captain Fantomas and his ship are doomed but the fascination lies in seeing how and why this disaster unfolds. And even though the ending is foretold from the earliest pages, the reader will not see coming the stunning sequence of events that bring about that ending. This way of telling the story, as if it is a recounting of an event that the reader may have heard of before, adds an alluring patina of history to it. But what really makes this story and this way of telling it succeed is the way that Bell draws such lovely, nuanced characters and makes the reader really care about them enough to hope that maybe somehow, against all odds, they will still avert tragedy even though we already know that the Amenaza is not going home again.

Now, without further delay, please visit spectacular, deadly Shanama and witness the fate of La Amenaza Elegente.

—Christopher Fletcher, Editor, M-Brane SF

M-BRANE SF #27 RELEASED

2011-04-29T17:27:00.000-05:00

The electronic edition of the new issue will be released to subscribers tonight. Others are invited to support future issues by buying for $2.00 a PDF copy of this great new issue using the Pay Pal button below. Within a day, you'll receive by email a link to download your copy. Such contributions make it possible to continue offering this zine each month. Further below, I will post my entire editor's notes from the new issue, introducing each of the authors and their stories. Annual subscriptions to electronic edition may be purchased at the M-Brane Press page. The contents of issue #27, along with those of issues #25 and #26, will be featured in print book, along with some bonus material, called M-Brane SF Quarterly #3 in June.

EDITORIAL NOTES 4/11

April has been a month of readjustment both in the M-Brane world and in my “real” life as I figure out how to organize my time and energy in the best way to get through the coming months. In my day job, as a chef with a local high-end catering and managed services company, “high season” is upon us. Our special events venues are heavily booked, and our restaurants are getting busier and busier. In the M-Brane world, it’s also been a sort of high season in that I have had to manage ongoing monthly issues of this zine, the launch of the second issue of our new sister zine Fantastique Unfettered (a gorgeous print periodical edited by Brandon Bell) and the completion and impending publication of the M-Brane SF Double. Also, we recently put out the second M-Brane SF Quarterly and have the third one coming very soon.

Every month for the last four months, I have seriously considered just deciding that the monthly zine is too much work and either putting it on hiatus, restructuring it, or bagging it altogether. Just a week before the time of this writing I nearly decided that there would be no April issue. But what made me get a grip and change my mind was the fact that I had some terrific stories sitting here that needed me to publish them. The selection of each issue’s content is by far the hardest part of this job. As much as fun as it can be, it can be also be very complicated and stressful. The actual work of compiling and formatting and publishing of the issue is nothing by comparison. After twenty-seven months of it, I can do that in my sleep. But after I finally knew what the stories would be this month, I fell back in love with the whole thing again and decided it was decided it was dumb to have ever considered not doing it. I went through that hate-love process last month, too, and may again next month. But there is now, and will be then, a new issue.

I have a simple system for story selection that works decently well, but where it gets stressful is when—as was the case this month—there are a huge number of stories that make it into the MAYBE folder. This usually just means that I was too easy-going during the initial cull and that I will quickly weed out a bunch more NOs in a few minutes. Stories usually make the MAYBE cut simply by displaying both good writing and some kind of hook that appeals to me on the first page or two, but a lot of them end up sent over to the NO folder later for various reasons when I read deeper into them. (If you have submitted a story to M-Brane SF and have waited much more than two weeks for a reply, it’s probably because your item is sitting in that MAYBE folder.) But there were just so many good ones to consider this time, enough to make the whole project rather discouraging. But, eventually, I sorted out the ones that were good but still weren’t quite M-Brane stories, and I ended up with six, these:

Joyce Chng’s “The Bones Shine Through With Light” mesmerizes with its language and imagery. A mysterious story of someone grappling with a legend of a “tiger demoness” and arriving at a life-changing revelation, it is probably not even science fiction in the way we usually define it, but it is nonetheless the correct keynote for this new issue. Chng appeared here last year, and I have been a fan since.

The most classic and expected element of military science fiction—the training and deployment of some kind of space-going infantry or marine force—was probably done best in the classics Starship Troopers (Heinlein) and The Forever War (Haldeman), and it has been re-done again and again, sometimes well and sometimes not. I like this subgenre in theory, but I see a lot of stories like that submitted here that do not work at all. But I like it enough that I have been puttering around off and on for about three years with a novel focused on a military unit in the future. The new military sf stories that I want to see (I have said to myself in despair), are either not being written at all or I just never see them. Ross Gresham delivered an antidote to this problem with his “Spending the Government’s 28.” I still don’t know exactly why this story scratches the itch so well, but it does, and I like it a lot. The writing itself and the voice that comes through it is perfect, and it’s also quite funny—something of an oddity around here in itself, a comical story.

The idea of “the city” as a sort of character in itself, an unconscious entity holding sway over human characters and their story has often, for some reason, appealed to me a lot. I always think of the puzzle of blighted Bellona, the city of Delany’s Dhalgren, that is almost as alive in its way as its human inhabitants. I’ve published a few stories over the run of M-Brane with city-as-enigma at their hearts, and I’ve noticed the development in my own recent work of an imaginary city that stands a bit outside even the stories’ own internal reality. Why I am talking about this will be clearer after reading Kaolin Fire’s strange, thoughtful story “Travelers Through Eternity.”

Court Merrigan’s offering, “The Patch,” is rather funny but also a little bit puzzling. What exactly is it about? Are we to take in stride, at face value, the rather preposterous circumstances depicted here, or is there an obvious layer of allegory and deliberate commentary that we are expected to contemplate? I am not going to offer any commentary of my own other than to say that it's an odd entry even in the long catalog of oddness that M-Brane has been. Also, I was mildly surprised to learn that this came from an American author, because it struck me as having some of the same sensibility as a lot of the quirky British stuff that I have published over the last couple of years (longtime readers may know that I have an affinity for such).

I thought I recognized the name David Alexander Mulis when I saw it as the byline on “Standard Deviation.” I thought I might have published him before, but I haven’t. I checked old mail, and then remembered. He showed me two years ago a story that I didn’t feel was really science fictional enough, though I did think the quality of the writing was quite good. So I was glad to see another one from him and to be able to publish it this time. Readers may wonder well into his new story if this one is indeed a science fiction story. It is, I promise. I suspect that some readers might find the subject matter of this one to be uncomfortable. Its point-of-view character is a porn video director and he does not come off as the most sympathetic person, but it is not M-Brane’s mission to make things easy.

And, with that in mind, we end with “Silverfish.” Hobie Anthony has created a very damaged protagonist and placed him in a horrific world, under the control of one of the most heinous villains I have ever seen in an M-Brane story. Like the story preceding it, readers may wonder for a few pages if they are reading a science fiction story or an out-and-out horror story. It does have a science fictional underpinning that becomes apparent deeper into the narrative, but by the time it does, it almost seems beside the point because the point-of-view character cannot understand it anyway and it is very unclear whether anything can ever change for him.

Enjoy.—CF

Announcing M-BRANE #27 authors and stories

2011-04-26T22:26:00.000-05:00

A touch late again, but if it comes out at least by the end of the month, I consider that good enough anymore. Busy around here! The new April issue will release by the 30th now that I have finally finished the painstaking task of selecting its contents. This was a tough one. I had a lot of compelling submissions to sort through. Stories moved back and forth from "maybe" to "yes" and back. Too many good ones didn't quite make it.

If you're looking for uplift and good cheer, April might not be your month on the Brane. But for some fine, perceptive writing, then this is just the right time. Here's the line-up:

Joyce Chng: "The Bones Shine Through With Light"
Ross Gresham: "Spending the Government's 28"
Kaolin Fire: "Travelers Through Eternity"
Court Merrigan: "The Patch"
David Alexander Mulis: "Standard Deviation"
Hobie Anthony: "Silverfish"

Joyce Chng has appeared once before in M-Brane, and is so very welcome back with this strange, lovely offering that I knew needed to lead the new issue as soon as I read it. It's a bit too brief, but absolutely delicious, a fine starter course to what follows. Ross Gresham gave me that rare piece of military sf that I've been looking for. I say all the time that I like the military subgenre, yet I seldom actually find that to be true when I read submissions that deal in it. But this one is nearly perfect. Kaolin Fire (of the great Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD) Magazine) returns to our pages with a very evocative, mysterious and lovely item that I shan't say much about so as not to spoil it. He tends to produce stories a bit shorter than I usually want, but they are always thought-provoking and finely told. Court Merrigan's story is just plain weird, but also quite funny and quite pointed. I think people will find it offers a couple different layers of enjoyment. The last two items of this issue may have spent the longest time in the "maybe" box because I vacillated a lot about how dark I wanted to let April get. But the quality of their prose and their directness in dealing with their subject matter left no doubt that they are M-Brane stories even though their sf-nal elements are almost incidental, almost beside the point. David Alexander Mulis visits the dark thoughts of a jaded and tired pornographer during what's probably an important moment of realization and transition in his career, while Hobie Anthony takes us into the nearly unbearable world of a very special and profoundly damaged character under the thrall of a villain running a violent and bizarre conspiracy.

The new issue will be out in just a few days. News of such will post right here.

New novel from M-Brane alum S.C. Hayden

2011-04-23T16:42:00.001-05:00

Writer S.C. Hayden, whose fascinating short story "End Day" was a highlight of M-Brane SF #3 two years ago, has had a string of publications since, and his new novel, American Idol, is just out from Black Bed Sheet Books. Hayden describes it as a dark social satire that takes some swipes at religion, consumerism, and politics.

In a twisted yet somehow familiar version of America where militias, doomsday cults and self proclaimed Prophets are as commonplace as gas stations and fast food restaurants, The American Idol Company is born. Their goal: resurrect Idolatry as a prominent religion and get rich manufacturing and selling Idols. They publicly promote their fledgling company as if it were a legitimate religion and they themselves Prophets. The company becomes quickly and wildly successful but outrages millions across the country and around the world. Operating under the belief that scandal and controversy will increase sales, Augustus and Desmond manage to insult everyone from the Pope to the Ayatollah, and come dangerously close to starting World War 3. Meanwhile, a shadowy group of religious fundamentalists manipulate a naive young man named Robert General. Robert, a repressed homosexual and member of the Sweethaven Chapter of the Righteous American Nazis, is used as a pawn in a plot to destroy The American Idol Company. The looming threat of disaster comes to fruition in the city of Galapagos, Texas, when Rob General, confused and drug-addled, flies a small ,explosive laden airplane into The American Idol Company headquarters.

I have only read the first four chapters of this book, and so I cannot provide an actual review of it. But Hayden is a good writer with an engaging style. Very often, satirical speculative fiction that trades heavily in contemporary situations does not appeal to me because it is often too contemporaneous, too self-consciously about current affairs and often quite blunt in an inartful way. But I am not finding this to be the case at all with Hayden's book a few chapters in. Readers who are into this kind of story ought to check it out. It's also available at Amazon.

By the way, I like to offer plugs for M-Brane writers when they have a new book out, but I have probably missed a lot of such opportunities. So if you are a writer whom I've published in M-Brane SF or in one of our anthologies, and would like a shout-out for your current work, do let me know at mbranesf at gmail dot com. I cannot promise reviews because reading time is so precious nowadays but I'll do my best to help get the word out.

FU gets fantastic review

2011-03-28T08:44:00.000-05:00

I am reprinting here a great review of our periodical Fantastique Unfettered. But you may want to instead visit its original posting at the Future Fire site because links to a lot of the writers are intact over there.

Reviewed by Nader Elhefnawy
M-Brane Press, the publisher of small press science fiction magazine M-Brane SF, launched a fantasy counterpart to that publication last year, Fantastique Unfettered (or FU). Under the editorship of Brandon H. Bell, FU has as its stated purpose the publication of ‘well-written, compellingly readable, original stories of fantasist fiction,’ both short fiction and poetry, which is ‘unfettered by traditional copyright,’ so that all its content carries a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license.

The authors appearing in the premier, Winter 2010 issue of the publication, which has eleven short stories and three poems in its 140 pages, offer a wide range of approaches and settings. Perhaps exemplary in this respect is the story to which the issue’s cover art is devoted, Michael J. Shell’s ‘The Death of a Soybean’, which presents an off-the-wall alternate version of the Manhattan Project and World War II. More a uchronia than an alternate history, ‘Soybean’ surreally scrambles the events of our timeline rather than exploring a counterfactual scenario, with Robert J. Oppenheimer just a Los Alamos security guard who happens to be eccentrically preoccupied with an idea called ‘nuclear fission,’ and a femme fatale lady physicist with the unlikely name of Maladi scheming, seducing and killing her way to fame, fortune and a place in scientific history.

Offering a nightmare complement to Shell’s noirish dream is Kaolin Fire’s ‘The Aetheric God’, in which a young technician named Asher who spends his days building steam-men for his employer ‘Chief Technician’ Father Isaiah. He spends his nights hiding in the cathedral’s library-desperately burying himself in its books to try and quiet ‘the voice of God within his head’ calling for Asher’s mutilation and destruction, a crisis that soon enough moves out of his head and into the physical world.

Going in a sharply different direction from either is Alan Frackelton’s ‘A Blessing From the Blind Boy’, the story of a disgruntled gaucho named Juan Hernandez who burglarizes the mansion of his ruthless landowner employer somewhere (and somewhen) in twentieth century Latin America, putting Hernandez’s young son Ramon in the center of a cycle of revenge, loss and longing.

In a lighter, more fanciful vein, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s ‘Breaking the Spell’ (a reprint from Philippine Speculative Fiction 4) has for its protagonist a little girl who becomes fascinated with the miniature world her father keeps under a bell jar. While her father’s fairy tales never ring true for her (she is ‘determined not to kiss a prince’), entry into that little world becomes the object of her own fairy tale quest.

However, in contrast with exoticism, the issue favors toward contemporary contexts, and compared with the world-changing (and rather nihilistic) events of Shell’s story, or the intense confrontation with the supernatural of Fire’s, subtler uses of speculative elements inside quieter, more personal stories. The descriptor that came to mind when I read Frank Ard’s story of a love triangle between a man, mer-man and woman ‘Small Fish in the Deep Blue’ is ‘slipstream.’ Others incorporate surreal intrusions into what might otherwise be a realist narrative, like in Mary J. Daley’s ‘The Book of Barnyard Souls’, in which a young farm girl named Kalee receives nightly visits from the souls of deceased animals; Natania Barron’s ‘Without a Light’, in which a sixth-grade teacher in a small town starts an affair with a mysterious colleague; Elizabeth Creith’s ‘Five Oak Leaves’, where a man encounters a young changeling girl living on the street.

In Anna Manthiram’s ‘Boris’, a meditation via fortune cookie-like clothing tags on the titular character’s involvements with various women; Christopher Green’s ‘Holding Hands’, in which a Vietnam veteran encounters a girl he left behind at thirteen many years later in his wife’s ballet studio; or Michael J. Deluca’s ‘The Driftwood Chair’, in which a man roams the beach trying to cope with the loss of a love; it is possible to blink and miss the speculative touch.

By and large the sensibility is ‘literary,’ and the quality is high (the two, of course, not always the same thing), virtually all the stories assembled here working, though to different degrees and in different ways. ‘Death of a Soybean’ succeeds on the strength of its pacing and strangeness, Fire’s ‘The Aetheric God’ on the nightmarish force of the telling. The poems offer similar grandiosity, particularly Bruce Boston’s rich, dark, chaotic ‘The Time Traveler Leaves History Behind’ and Alexandra Seidel’s glittering ‘In Babel.’ Daley’s touching ‘Barnyard Souls,’ is the most emotionally resonant story in the volume, though the pieces by Frackleton and Creith also succeed on this level.

That combination of quality and variety means that Fantastique Unfettered #1 offers something for many different tastes, in what seems to me a very promising start for the new publication.

This review is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, (c) Nader Elhefnawy. You are free to republish this review anywhere you like, so long as you give attribution to the author and to The Future Fire and keep this license text intact in any copy.

M-Brane 26 releases tonight; a few comments on Verday, Dragon Age

2011-03-27T17:35:00.004-05:00

In a couple hours I will release the electronic edition of M-Brane SF #26 to subscribers. The following is a version of my editorial notes from the new issue. The first section is about the stories; the second part consists of some comments, with links, on a couple of matters that drew my attention this week: author Jessica Verday pulling out of an antho because the editor said her characters didn't have the right gender combo to be acceptable, and game company Bioware rejecting some whining from the beleaguered Straight Male Gamer.

UPDATED 3/28 to add button to purchase this issue's PDF at bottom of this post; funds raised by single-issue sales support future issues; copies are distributed by way of a link sent by email, so allow up to a day for delivery to your in-box.

This month, we have five terrific entries and a lot pro writers. I am about a week late in presenting them, so I won’t delay things too much further except to say that if you read only five stories this month, you could do a lot worse than reading these five. They are lovely. Of the authors, two have been seen here before. Rick Novy makes his at least sixth (maybe seventh—lost track!) appearance this month with a story that has not previously been printed but which he presented in audio form with music as part of Michelle Welch’s Theme and Variations audio anthology. Rick was also the guest editor of our twelfth issue, and the editor of the M-Brane Press anthology 2020 Visions. Michael Andre-Driussi appears here for a fourth time. His vast project of producing reference works for Gene Wolfe’s fictional universe makes him perhaps one of the coolest people around or one of the hardest-core geeks ever. Either way, we’re glad to see him here again. That we ended up with a great story from J.M. Sidorova forced me to conclude that she had exhausted all other possible publication options because every other editor had either lost his/her mind or perhaps had too many Sidorova items booked elsewhere already. In any case, I’m thrilled. I don’t know if I was intended to find a big “message” in Eric Del Carlo’s story, but I decided that it’s an appropriate item, especially for our American readers, in our present age of Permanent War where no one seems to directly bear the cost of armed conflict save for the soldiers themselves and their immediate families. Before I saw his story, I was not familiar with Gary Budgen, but his entry was one of those items that went directly from the slush folder to the “maybe” folder after I read the first page. When I went back to look at the “maybes,” it quickly went to the “yes” folder. It’s shorter than I usually choose for M-Brane, but it’s lovely.

Two items popped up in the last week that crystallized some common sense. The first is this item about Bioware telling a spokesperson for the “straight male gamer” demographic to get over it that there is an option for same-sex romance in the Dragon Age 2 game. The second is from Hollow Trilogy author Jessica Verday on her decision to withdraw a story from a forthcoming YA antho.

The Bioware staffer who responded to a complaint about the possibility of gayness in that game said something that is so obvious when one thinks about it, but said it in a better way than I have seen in recent memory: “And if there is any doubt why such an opinion might be met with hostility, it has to do with privilege. You can write it off as ‘political correctness’ if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They're so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. [emphasis mine] They don't see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what's everyone's fuss all about? That's the way it should be, and everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.”

This makes the point a lot more cogently and reasonably than what my response would have been. I am sick of every time someone tries to be inclusive of a minority in any kind of media, it is blasted as “political correctness” and—even more outrageously—as disrespect to the all-important straight-male demo. Because, you know, they’ve never gotten their way with anything. I applaud Bioware for thinking that romance can be for anyone.

Similarly, listen to this from Jessica Verday:

“You don't choose who you fall in love with and you don't choose to be gay. We're constantly bombarded with messages from sick people who try to tell us that it's a choice or a lifestyle or an agenda. But Wesley and Cameron's story isn't an agenda or an issue. It isn't an ‘I have to prove something to the world’ story. Wesley and Cameron's story is a love story. About one boy who loves another boy so much that when something bad happens to him, he'll do whatever it takes to get him the help he needs.

“Just bittersweet, hopeful, first love. And I think the world needs more of that.

“While I may not have intentionally written an ‘issues’ story, in the real world this issue is very personal to me. I have gay friends, fans, and family and by allowing my story to be changed in that way I would be contributing to a great disservice to them, the entire LGBT community, and to readers in general. You are not wrong or a dirty little secret for being who you are. Love is beautiful and rare. When you find it, you should hold onto it and not let go. You should not be made to feel inferior.”

The editor, Trish Telep, from whose antho Verday’s story was withdrawn, replied thus:

“Oh dear. Might as well give you my two cents. Not that it really matters but... Don't take it out on the publishers, the decision was mine totally. These teen anthologies I do are light on the sex and light on the language. I assumed they'd be light on alternative sexuality, as well. Turns out I was wrong! Just after I had the kerfuffle with jessica, I was told that the publishers would have loved the story to appear in the book! Oh dear. My rashness will be the death of me. It's a great story. Hope jessica publishes it online. (By the way: if you want to see a you tube video of me wrestling a gay man in Glasgow, and losing, please let me know).”

While that’s lovely that Ms. Telep admitted that she made a boneheaded mistake, it’s too bad she did it in such a half-assed and ultimately non-serious way. What’s “wrestling a gay man in Glasgow” got to do with it? Is it supposed to be funny? Is it supposed to be a version of “oh, I don’t have a problem with gayness, I have gay friends.”? But here’s what really turns my crank about her response: there is no such thing as “alternative” sexuality. Sexual orientation is not an “alternative,” it’s not a “preference,” it’s not fucking choice, and I don’t propose to spend the rest of my life arguing about it with fools. The fact that Telep seemed to think that Verday’s story would be perfectly fine for the book if she simply (simply!) changed the gender of one of the characters belies a deep misconception and prejudice of which she may be honestly unaware of inside herself. She needs to take a look at that. I don’t think she is probably a homophobe by conscious intent, but she blithely expresses majority privilege nonetheless.

Privilege always lies with the majority. The majority gets pissed off if they ever detect that they’re not being exclusively catered to. And anyone who doesn’t fit into the majority is not just some “alternative” that everyone can set just aside. Love is for everyone. Thanks to these people in very different fields for making these points so cogently.

Buy a PDF of M-Brane SF #26 here.

Announcing M-Brane SF #26 contents

2011-03-24T10:52:00.001-05:00

Running a little late this month, but not too badly so. Following is the list of stories and authors of M-Brane SF #26, the March issue will release probably Sunday. Rick Novy (editor of 2020 Visions), returns with a very cool item, as does Michael Andre-Driussi. New to our pages are J.M. Sidorova, Gary Budgen and Eric Del Carlo, all offering some remarkable visions.

J.M. Sidorova “Watching the Rubber Band”
Gary Budgen “Salt Cellar”
Michael Andre-Driussi “Junkboy and Debutante”
Eric Del Carlo “The Iron’s With Me”
Rick Novy “K.622”

Items from this electronic issue will also be compiled in print with items from issue #25 and April's issue #27 in the third M-Brane SF Quarterly.

M-Brane SF Quarterly #2 has been released

2011-03-20T13:13:00.001-05:00

My real job--the one that provides my paycheck--got rather unexpectedly busy over the last couple weeks, causing me to fall behind on normal updates in the M-Brane world, such as the release of M-Brane SF Quarterly #2 last week (thank you to the writers who have done more to spread the word on this so far than I have). This is the second volume of a print book series collecting the fiction from three electronic issues of M-Brane SF. Also, this book contains some items not included those issues: two spectacular stories by Zachary Jernigan and an interview with him. It's such a lovely book, way worth the $9.95 on Amazon. M-Brane SF makes a couple dollars profit on each sale, and all of this money goes right back into continuing the zine and our other publishing projects, so picking up a copy is a good way to support us and also to find some really fine fiction.

Gay Marriage: Will Fletcher appoint Supreme Court?

2011-02-23T19:11:00.000-06:00

BREAKING—Anonymous sources confirm that M-Brane President-for-Life Christopher Fletcher is about to announce the formation of a “Supreme Court” which he claims will have “planet-wide jurisdiction over the question of the legality of gay marriage.” For months, sources within the Brane’s administration have indicated that Fletcher has become increasingly impatient with “the sheer idiocy of the anti-marriage-quality position and the slow pace of reform by conventional Earth-based governments. And also dumbassity.”

Said one member of the administration, speaking on condition of anonymity, “It’s all he talks about anymore. His entire throne room is acrid with the smoke of burning Maggie Gallagher and Jim Demint in effigy.”

Though the composition of this new court remains unknown, critics fear that Fletcher will stack the tribunal with judges sympathetic to his own position on the matter. Possible nominees to the new court include the following:

Theodore “Teddy” Altman (aka “Hulkling”): Superhero and member of the Young Avengers. Conservative critics of the M-Brane regime claim that Altman cannot be unbiased on the matter of gay marriage since he himself is gay. It is unlikely that this argument will gain much traction within M-Brane Tower.

Jonny Quest: Raised by same-sex parents, Quest is thought to be sympathetic to marriage equality, though his own sexual orientation is unknown. Conservatives insist that Fletcher would never consider Quest for appointment to his new court if he were not already confident of Quest’s bias on the matter of gay marriage. Also, Fletcher’s recent frequent visits to the “Questworld” compound in a subset of aetherspace have drawn much attention.

Magneto: Possibly the most controversial choice; conservatives decry his attempt of a few years ago to use the “Cerebro” device to find and possibly kill all of the “humans,” which they read as code for “straight people.” Also, suspicions linger that Fletcher has recreated a Cerebro machine at the apex of M-Brane Tower. Fletcher’s close relationship with the rogue mutant has been a subject of controversy for years.

Jeff Lund: It is assumed that Fletcher’s life partner would be a guaranteed vote for the government position. Liberal critics, however, point to Lund’s frequent condemnations of marriage as a concept (for all people) and suggest that he is a loose cannon whose vote cannot be predicted.

Legal scholars remain divided over whether M-Brane Tower, as an extra-planetary domain, can in fact assert worldwide jurisdiction on the issue of marriage rights. They also differ in opinion on a recent “legal finding” by the regime which decrees that a new court, if constituted, may not hear arguments based on religion or “the Bible,” as these would be ruled automatically to be not “rational.” It is expected that when the court is convened, opponents of gay marriage will have thirty days to prove their position “rationally.” It is assumed that they will face an uphill battle if religiously-based arguments will not be heard. Also, it is expected that the “gay sex is icky” argument will be excluded from consideration.

M-Brane SF #25 released

2011-02-21T16:54:00.000-06:00

We have released the twenty-fifth issue, which happens to be the first monthly issue of our third year of monthly publication. Table of contents:

Anna Caro "The Shape of My Wife"
Catherine Batac Walder "Of the Magdiwang that Never made it to Baguio and other Studies of Trains"
Grey Valleau "Tiger"
Michael Ray "Alchemy"
Shaun O. McCoy "Electric Blues"
Peta Freestone "Neverspring"

The individual issue PDF can be had for a donation of $2.00 using the Pay Pal button below. Funds raised in this way support future issues.

Hear the new OUTER ALLIANCE podcast!

2011-02-14T14:58:00.000-06:00

I feel like I've neglected the Outer Alliance lately. This is a terrific association of writers, editors, publishers and other kinds of creators that I was fortunate enough to have had a small role in helping to found and promote about a year and a half ago. Our mission statement: "As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work." We have hundreds of members now, and while our level of activity varies a lot, it's always a great resource. One of the coolest newer things going on is the podcast, hosted by the great Julia Rios (who has also conducted scores of written interviews with people for posting to the site--most posts anymore are her "Spotlight" interviews).

The fourth installment of the podcast is made of win, featuring in its first half an interview with Nora Olsen, discussing her YA book The End: Five Queer Kids Save the World. And in the second half--this is awesome!--an interview with M-Brane Press's own Brandon Bell discussing his zine Fantastique Unfettered and our antho The Aether Age, and (very informatively) his Creative Commons licensing concept. He is joined by writer Frank Ard, author of "Small Fish in the Deep Blue Sea", his really great story from FU #1. It was very interesting listening to Frank discuss his fiction, and also to hear my collaborator Brandon discuss and promote our various projects (including the Double--coming soon!). Also, I don't recall ever having heard myself mentioned in a group discussion on a podcast before, so that was cool and weird, too, that sense that stuff that I do actually emanates outside of my library somehow. Check it out, and subscribe it in your iTunes player or however you get your podcasts.

M-Brane #25 ToC announced

2011-02-09T18:12:00.001-06:00

The cover image is not ready yet, but the story contents are final for M-Brane SF #25, the February issue due out on about the 20th. Prepare for these fine items:

Anna Caro "The Shape of My Wife"
Catherine Batac Walder "Of the Magdiwang that Never made it to Baguio and other Studies of Trains"
Grey Valleau "Tiger"
Michael Ray "Alchemy"
Shaun O. McCoy "Electric Blues"
Peta Freestone "Neverspring"

(actual order of this ToC may be different)

Readers will find this to be an interesting mix of stuff, ranging from straight-up hard sf to a couple of items that are a bit harder to classify. All six of these writers are new to M-Brane SF, and most are new to me as well, though I know a couple of them by reputation and their other work. Also, I am delighted to have ended up with a majority-female ToC after several months of not having very many women in our pages. As I've said before: while I like boys, that doesn't mean they need to dominate the zine's pages all the time.

Michael Ray is editor of Redstone Science Fiction, a fairly new and well-regarded periodical. Shaun McCoy's a martial artist about whom one ought to think twice making fun of for playing D&D. Grey Valleau is also a martial artist as well as a neuroscientist, devoted now to fiction writing. Peta Freestone's night job is editing Scape, a new sf ezine for young adults. Catherine Batac Walder, a native of the Philippines, resides and writes in England and has given me an item of that Filipino-influenced speculative fiction that I have come to love. Finally, writer and editor Anna Caro is well-known in the New Zealand spec fic world, and I know readers will love her contribution to this issue.

The "two spaces" "controversy," and other notes on manuscript format

2011-02-05T19:58:00.001-06:00

I was going to comment on this on my Live Journal instead of here, but it occurred to me that it might be edifying to writers who write for M-Brane SF. First, read this article by Farhad Manjoo on Slate about why one should never, ever EVAR! use two spaces after a period (or "full stop," as folks in some of the other Englishes prefer to call it). While the information in it is largely correct and even mildly interesting, it does make me wonder exactly why this is such a big damned deal, for Manjoo's essay on this topic is not by any stretch the first screed on two-spacing I have seen in the last year or two. It pops up all the time. Editors and writers rant about it on Twitter. Embarrassed, degraded two-spacers apologize for it and try to change their silly old ways. And it seems that when this topic arises, it is not sufficient to just point out that it's an outmoded typing convention that held sway during the manual typewriter era, and that it's preferable to not do it anymore. No: the people who still do it are not merely stuck in an old habit or ignorant of the new correct convention, they are actually frakking jackasses, they are destroying the world of typography, and they may as well stick their heads in their ovens in a state of abject shame.

Let me tell you something: Every single month when I format M-Brane SF, after I have all the edited story docs compiled into a single file, I do a two-second find/replace operation telling the word processor to find double spaces after "full stops" (jeebus, I can't get used to that term) and to replace them with single spaces. And each time, I get a report from the word processor that says something like "Word has finished searching and made 876 replacements." That's a lot replacements in the 20 or 30 thousand words of text that usually comprise an issue of M-Brane SF. The 876 number is just an example, but it is always in the hundreds. Which means that many, if not most, of the manuscripts that were the source documents for an M-Brane issue were originally typed by those bloody, scurrilous two-spacers. I do not look back to figure out who the offenders were. I do not care, because it took me two seconds to fix all of them. I, like most publishers, have a typographic house "style" which I apply to all text that I publish, but I do not expect my writers to somehow know all the details of this and send me manuscripts complying with it. Just as I do not care if they two-space, I do not flip my lid when they use double hyphens instead of dashes. I just fix it it another quick find/replace maneuver. I don't even fret about how nearly everyone uses paragraph tab indents that are way too deep, a wholly unsightly full half-inch. I just fix it. It's part of my job.

[An aside: It strikes me as funny that there are probably more than a few of my colleagues who bristle at the two-spacers but who still ask to see manuscripts in 12pt Courier. Talk about out-dated: this is the very font that caused the whole two-space-after-the-full-stop problem in the first place! Really, y'all, the whole "standard manuscript format" convention, while it has its advantages as an industry standard, is wholly based on outmoded typewriter-era stuff. Why double-space the lines? It sure as hell does not make it easy to read on screen. It's so someone can go at a paper copy of it with a pencil and write notes to the typographer on it. Here, there is never a paper copy of anything except when someone buys one of our finished print books.]

If I were going to be a serious pain in the ass about this kind of stuff, here are a few things that I'd like to see no more of in submissions to my magazine:

1) Use of sans serif fonts such as Helvetica, etc. Look at a "real" book (ie. a print or even most electronic ones produced by a major publisher) or a professionally-produced print magazine, or even one of the more nicely designed webzines, such as Rudy Rucker's Flurb (deliberate that the example of Flurb to which I linked is Adam Callaway's story; I really enjoyed it). You will find almost nowhere long-form stuff printed in sans serif fonts (except in small press books, more on that in a second). Since M-Brane is presented primarily as a PDF, and since its content gets printed in book form in the Quarterlies, I eschew sans serif fonts for body text. Because it makes it look like it's supposed to be something brief on a computer screen. These fonts are favored for online uses because they tend to be readily readable at even very small sizes (such as in those tiny little notes on Facebook and Twitter where they tell you where and when an update originated), and they are fine for short blocks of text. For long stuff, or anything printed, they are kind of unsightly. (By the way, I had a short story published last year in a print book which used throughout a sans serif font (and way-too-deep paragraph indents). This is common micro-press error, and it makes me wonder why, even if you are an amateur (like me), you can't just look at what someone pro has done again and again and make it more like that).

2) Formatting a manuscript in "web" style, with no paragraph indents and double spaces between paragraphs (like the way this blog post looks). Again, this is a convention for online stuff, and I don't object to those applications of it. But my magazine and my books do not look like this, and never will. It's ugly in print. Look at a "real" book. It's not formatted like that. But since so many of my fellow publishers actually want to see submissions formatted in this style because it probably makes it easier for them to transfer them to their websites, I just live with it. This is one thing, however, that is not always just a two-second fix for me. It varies depending on how much embedded bugginess is in the writer's source file, and sometime I have fought with it a bit.

3) Emphasis indicated by underlining or, gods forbid, bold text. This is an also an outmoded typewriter convention, because generally one could not change font style on a typewriter. When I was a high school journalism kid in the just-barely-pre-computer days, we indicated font style for the typographer (who worked on a fancy electronic Xerox MemoryWriter) with underlines and squiggly underlines, etc., on paper manuscripts. But those days are long gone. Like most people, I print emphasized words and things like internal monologue in italics, and it would make my life a lot easier if they were that way in the first place when I get to the point of preparing a story for publication. I'm not in the typing biz, yo. When your story is accepted, it is literally the document that you sent me, with edits and format changes, that is used to create the final printed version, and the fewer old typewritery traits it bears, the better. But again, I know that for some reason many of my colleagues want emphasis to be indicated by underlining. In my humble opinion, they are acting like the two-space-after-a-period crowd and they need to enter fully the post-typewriter age.

But none of these biases will, by themselves, deny a submitter a fair reading and possible publication. These problems are too pervasive to contain now anyway. I am used to it all, and I accept that it is my job to make M-Brane's text look the way I want it to look (classy).

Second Anniversary Notes and Acknowledgements

2011-01-19T22:09:00.001-06:00

UPDATED 1/20: M-Brane SF #24 was just released to subscribers. As a gift to all of our supporters (and hopefully a bunch of new fans) on the occasion of our second anniversary, I am making available the PDF of the new issue for free here.

The following is from my editorial notes from M-Brane SF #24:

Some Second Anniversary acknowledgements:

I know I am about to forget to mention a lot of important names here, but I need to recognize at least a few of the people who were so helpful and wonderful to me and M-Brane Press during these first two years. First, thanks to all the many, many fellow editors and publishers who offered me so much help and moral support, particularly Kaolin Fire (GUD Magazine), Bart Leib and Kay Holt (Crossed Genres), Jason Sizemore (Apex), Caren Gussoff and Eden Robins (Brain Harvest). I want to also mention again my awesome collaborators Brandon Bell, Rick Novy, Jaym Gates, and Eric T. Reynolds (Hadley Rille Books). A lot of great writer-friends helped make all this worth doing, such as Dan Tannenbaum, Michael D. Griffiths, T.J. McIntyre, Derek J. Goodman, Jeff Kozzi, and Abby “Merc” Rustad, and many, many more. The writers as a group are really owed all the credit, and they are too many to list here, but I’ll throw out a few names that really stood out lately: Patty Jansen, Cate Gardner, Gustavo Bondoni, Aaron Polson, Shawn Scarber, Edward W. Robertson, Ian Sales, Sunny Moraine, Joyce Chng, Jason Heller, Therese Arkenberg, and, of course, the late Jamie Eyberg, whom so many of us knew for far too short a time. Though I have already heaped praise on them almost to the point of indecency elsewhere, let me single out again the incendiary talents of Cesar Torres and Alex Jeffers. Artist and writer Mari Kurisato merits the Red Star of Socialism (the M-Brane equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor) for her terrific artwork and her other work on General Awesomeness on Earth. And I’d be totally remiss if I forgot to mention as a group all my badass Twitter and Facebook and Live Journal followers and friends. Curmudgeons who still think that the social media are a stupid waste of time are dead wrong: I wouldn’t know anyone and M-Brane SF would be nowhere without it. This is and always has been a grass-roots operation, y’all. So thanks perhaps most of all to the masses of you who actually bother to read my little posts and my longer outbursts throughout the vasty spaces of the intertubes. Love radiates from me to you.

An assessment at the two-year point…

This does not suck

January 20, 2011: Two years ago today was a day of great significance. A new President of the United States was inaugurated, my cat Maus turned twelve years old, and I released M-Brane SF #1, the first volume of a new monthly magazine of science fiction short stories. It was a project years in the works. I had begun and then set aside various plans to launch a science fiction zine going all the way back to 1994. I needed the proper convergence of motivation and technology to make it real, and the time finally seemed right by late 2007. But M-Brane—then tentatively called Homeworld—stalled out again for a while when I realized that I still did not have adequate computing power nor adequate command of how to use the internet to make a new zine’s presence known. But a year later, I was ready to try it. I started the M-Brane blog, posted writer’s guidelines and started reading the surprising number of submissions that appeared almost immediately.

Issue #1 opened with a quirky and funny tale called “Time Enough for a Reuben” by the late Glenn Lewis Gillette. It continued with fantastic stories by a couple of writers very well known to M-Brane readers now, Brandon Bell and Rick Novy. The first issue also included great entries by Barton Paul Levenson, Frank Roger, Joshua Scribner, Mel Cartagena and Jason Earls. I am happy that I am able to look back on that very first issue and say, “This does not suck.”

Of quantity and quality

In the second year, from about issue #13 to the present, M-Brane changed in a number of ways. I simplified its design, making it less magazine-like in appearance in favor of a more book-like look. I also started publishing a lot less material per issue. These changes happened for a number of practical reasons, but also because of an evolution in my thinking on what M-Brane SF should be. During the heady early days, I wanted to have a cool, interesting, and unexpected sf zine with awesome writers and astounding stories, with a real proletarian, hand-made sensibility. But I also wanted to publish a huge quantity of material and make it as big a room as possible for all kinds of writers. While I still think this was achieved to some extent, it also resulted in some uneven issues with a fair amount of content that I liked for various reasons but which probably made the zine as a whole have more of an amateurish, fanziney character than what seemed good for the long-term future of it.

I still wanted the unexpected and brilliant stories, but I decided to severely limit the number of stories that could appear in an issue (six is generally the upper limit now, while some Year One issues had as many as thirteen). I decided that I could, by forcing myself to not exceed a certain amount of content, refine the quality of the zine’s content and better define its character. As the number of submissions to the magazine has steadily increased, I have found that I generally have more and more interesting stuff from which to choose. Sometimes this makes story selection extremely difficult. Since I strive to completely clear the slush pile every month, this means that I must pass on stories that I really like all the time. But there are always more where those came from. I also decided that while six stories per month is probably the upper limit, I don’t necessarily have to find six: when I was assembling issue #22, I only had four items that I considered to be proper M-Brane stories, and so that issue was our shortest to date. So while quantity has diminished a lot, quality has gone up, and it’s more apparent what kind of fiction this zine deals in. When I assembled the first Quarterly (the print compilation of electronic issues 19, 20 and 21) and looked at its table of contents, I got a clearer sense of my own concept for M-Brane than I think I’d ever had before.

Expansion

Technologies like print-on-demand make it really easy to publish print books nowadays, and I decided to try that out for some dream projects. The ease of printing a book also invites a lot of really lousy work from well-meaning creators who don’t know how to design anything, as one can see from the surfeit of really ugly books that are floating around the indie press world now. So, very carefully, I selected some special projects for book publication and put a lot of effort into making them handsome objects. The first was Things We Are Not (2009), an anthology of GLBT short stories and novelettes. A few months ago, M-Brane SF was described incorrectly in a Locus online review as being billed as a gay-oriented magazine, but if it were in fact a gay-oriented magazine, then Things We Are Not gives one a good idea of what that would be like. I am very proud of it, especially as my first project as a book publisher. In 2010, I featured a couple of writers that I am very interested in by presenting collections of their work: Cesar Torres’ The 12 Burning Wheels and Derek J. Goodman’s Machina. These two lovely volumes are as different as two books could be in some regards: Cesar’s is a collection of very short items while Derek’s is a quartet of novelettes and novellas. But they are similar in that they both showcase in a very attractive way excellent writers from whom readers will be hearing a lot more in the near future. Then, late in 2010, we brought out a real stunner of an anthology, 2020 Visions, edited by Rick Novy. A collection of stories set in the year 2020, this is a must-read antho. Next, in a couple of months, we will bring out another beloved pet project, the “Double.” The date for this will be announced very soon.

Collaboration

2010 was a year of exciting collaborative projects. With the brilliant and lovely Jaym Gates, I co-edited the sexy little zine Little Death of Crossed Genres. This was intended to have been a quarterly periodical of erotic speculative fiction from Crossed Genres, but, alas, I think it ended up being a one-night stand. But even if there is never an issue #2 of it, I am quite pleased with the nice work we did on it. The biggest collaborative project of the year for me was, of course, the awesome and monumental The Aether Age. Co-edited by Brandon Bell and me and published in November 2010 by Hadley Rille Books, this was the realization of a terrific shared vision. Not only did two editors and two publishers collaborate on getting it done, but dozens of writers collaborated from afar to create a whole new fictional world that we have opened up for limitless future invention. The Aether Age has only just begun. But as exciting as publication of The Aether Age was, I am just as pleased about the newest addition to the family, Brandon Bell’s Fantastique Unfettered. Issue #1 of M-Brane SF’s new fantasy sibling was released just a few weeks ago as a very beautiful print publication. A quarterly “Periodical of Liberated Literature,” FU is based on the same Creative Commons philosophy as Aether Age, and I think it’s going to be a great big deal in the next year.

Future

And so it goes.

Issue #24 contents announced

2011-01-11T18:55:00.000-06:00

The cover image is not ready yet, but I can announce the story selection for M-Brane SF #24, due out January 20 on time for the zine's second anniversary. There may be an addition to it later, haven't decided yet, but these five items are confirmed, and they are all heavy-hitters from some really good writers:

Alex Jeffers "The Arab's Prayer"
Jude-Marie Green "Sparrow and g.d:shrike"
Edward W. Robertson "When We Were Mutants"
Mike Sauve "Everything You Can Think of is True"
Jason Heller "Other Gray Things"

Jason Heller has appeared twice previously in M-Brane SF. His stories are always interesting and surprising, but this one might be the best of his work that I have seen, including items of his that I've read elsewhere. It's a moving story with a seriously cool science fictional premise. Mike Sauve is new to me, though he has a number of credits in other publications of note. His item is a challenging and rather effed-up end-of-the-world tale that evokes Burroughs (William S., not E.R.) and some of the creepiest business from end-times culture. Ed Robertson has appeared previously in M-Brane SF and also has two entries in The Aether Age anthology (three if you count title page art he drew for one of his stories). I always like his stories, but this one really rewards. Jude-Marie Green makes a first appearance in M-Brane with a really delightful and weird tale that will suck readers in from the moment they see the strange syntax of its title. This is one those rare items that moved from directly from the slush folder to the "yes" folder without a layover in the "maybe" folder. Alex Jeffers leads the set with a touching tale about a gay couple in near-future Israel. The author says he intended it for the 2020 Visions anthology, but it wasn't ready on time. While it would have been great in that book, I am delighted to have it for the new M-Brane. Jeffers has appeared previously in M-Brane SF as well as in our LGBT anthology Things We Are Not. His novella The New People is one half of the forthcoming "Double," and a piece of short fiction set in the New People universe was one of the bonus items in the recent M-Brane SF Quarterly #1.

I may or may not include a sixth story. These five are probably more than enough for any one issue, but we'll see. Other content will probably include a reflection by me upon the first two years of this zine.

M-Brane #23 released

2011-01-06T22:07:00.001-06:00

The PDF edition of the new (very belated) issue was released to subscribers tonight. i'm very glad to finally be able to share it.

M-Brane SF #23

Seth S. Marlin "Era Solaris"

Erich William Bergmeier "The Miracle Cure"

Patrick Whittaker "The Skitterlings"

Jeff Kozzi "A Pediatrician in Wartime"

James Ward Kirk "Butterfly"

Margaret Karmazin "If Truth Be Told"

The 24th issue follows soon on 1/20, our second anniversary.

Readers unfamiliar with the zine may want to buy a copy of the PDF for $2.00. Money received from these sales supports future issues.

Announcing issue #23 contents

2011-01-01T21:22:00.000-06:00

I don't have the cover image done yet, but I do have the stories ready to announce for M-Brane SF #23, which we are going to persist in calling the December 2010 issue even though it's already January. The issue will release in a couple days. Also, in a few days I will announce the contents of issue #24, set for January 20, our second anniversary.

M-Brane SF #23
Seth S. Marlin "Era Solaris"
Erich William Bergmeier "The Miracle Cure"
Patrick Whittaker "The Skitterlings"
Jeff Kozzi "A Pediatrician in Wartime"
James Ward Kirk "Butterfly"
Margaret Karmazin "If Truth Be Told"

Kozzi and Karmazin have appeared in our pages before. The rest of these writers are new to the Brane, and we welcome them. It's a very nice group of stories.

TWAN gets nice write-up at new Rise Reviews site

2011-01-01T13:45:00.000-06:00

The new site, Rise Reviews has launched with a slew of reviews of indie press books, including our very own Things We Are Not (2009), the anthology of queer speculative fiction. Curated by managing editor Bart Leib (co-founder of Crossed Genres) and a staff of well-qualified reviewers, Rise Reviews' mission is to provide a review space for publications that pay writers less than pro rates but which pay at least something. This is welcome thing especially after Tangent Online moved recently to drop coverage of non-pro publications.

As the editor and publisher of Things We Are Not, I was very flattered that reviewer Kelly Jennings had a lot of good things to say about the stories and that she also really got where I was coming from philosophically with the project. Also, since we haven't sold any copies of it in recent memory, I admit that I hope this new attention on the book will attract some more readers--readers that I hope will also pick up from Amazon some of our other titles as well, like Cesar Torres' The 12 Burning Wheels, Derek J. Goodman's Machina, Rick Novy's 2020 Visions, and Hadley Rille Books' The Aether Age. All qualify for Free Super Saver Shipping on orders of $25 or more, you know!

Amazon's ebook lending scheme unsettles the usual suspects

2010-12-30T22:19:00.003-06:00

Amazon has a new feature for Kindle books where someone who has bought one may lend it to someone else for a limited period of time. I'll skip all the really boring details that would only interest a publisher--if even. I'm a small publisher, and even I find the numbers and terms and little nuts and bolts of it really fucking boring. But for Kindle users, it seems pretty damn cool. But for some small e-publishers, it's the end of the goddamned world because people will illegally steal all their books, because Amazon is a hegemonic Great Satan, they will opt out and even pull all their titles from Amazon, et cetera (at least today, and really just in the way that everything Amazon ever does is the end of the world for a day or two until everyone either forgets about it entirely or takes a pill).

I'm a lurker member of a forum for digital publishers. I keep up on what they discuss by way of emails from a Google Group. I have only commented to the group twice in about a year and a half because I generally don't know much about what they are talking about since I am not as big an ebook publisher as most of the other members and I don't feel as smart as most of them on most topics that they discuss. The first time I spoke up in the group was to suggest to some members that they call off the hysterical lynch-mob mentality over that douche in Colorado with the stupid pedophile book on Amazon (that no one would ever have heard of were it not for internet echo chambers). The second time I commented was just a little while ago this evening. This is what I said in response to a thread of comments that seemed overwhelmingly of the "AMAZON IS THE DEVILLL" and "PEOPLE ARE STEALING OUR STUFF" bent:

What about the possibility that lending could attract new readers that you don't have now to buy new titles? That's exactly how it works with print books. Nearly every author that I have gotten excited about and bought books from is one that I learned about because someone lent me a copy of a print book that that they liked or I read something cool that I got from the library and then ended up buying my own copy or buying other titles by the same writer. Or bought a used copy of something and then later bought new stuff from the same author. This is especially true of some of the more obscure and unknown stuff.

Things are always changing with e-publishing and none of it's perfect yet, but I think that any publisher who believes that they can expand their business by NOT dealing with Amazon is living in a total fantasy world. Amazon's not going away and they are not going to give up on all their plans because a few minor pubs are worried about file-sharing. And opting for a lower percentage to avoid the lending scheme is going to do nothing but reduce your royalties and probably ultimately limit your readership. We'll see how this plays out over time, but I will be shocked if anyone loses a dime because of this. Because the people "borrowing" your reader's copy weren't ever going to buy it from you anyway--you didn't even have that customer to begin with and probably were never going to get them. But now you might because someone new, some friend of friend, might say, "Wow, this is cool! Where do I get more?" Almost everything on my shelves of print books got there in exactly this way, and it can work like that with ebooks, too.

So, what does anyone think about this? Did I make any sense, or am I totally smoking something? It just seems like common sense to me that if you have an interesting book and author to offer, then the more people who know about it will ipso facto result in better sales. My little press makes no money, but it brought in a lot (relatively speaking) more in Year Two than it did in Year One. Year Two was a year in which I straight up gave away lots and lots of content just to get it in front of some new people. I'd really like to sell a lot more copies of M-Brane SF Quarterly #1 (a print book, not a Kindle book). While it has not been made available as an ebook, I do have a PDF of it that I could release if I wanted to. I bet that if I gave away a hundred copies of that for free and encouraged those hundred recipients to share it with at least one other person, I would sell at least ten copies of the print book to people who had never heard of M-Brane before. And I'd have at least two hundred people who would have thought about us recently and might buy something from us later. And what I would lose? Nothing. In fact, I'd gain about thirty bucks in royalties from selling ten print copies and I'd get new readers that I didn't have before. Who might buy stuff later. Because of how frakkin' cool our stuff is. I'm considering it.

Issue 23...still late!

2010-12-29T21:06:00.000-06:00

OK, I probably owe the one or two people who may have given a damn about it an explanation for the ridiculous tardiness of issue #23, the December issue. Knowing that there was no way I was going to make the normal first week of the month, I announced a date of 12/15. Which I have now missed by two weeks. I could offer excuses, even reasonable ones. But what it boils down to is that I just got so busy with too much other late-year stuff that carried deadlines of Greater Consequence and Dire Urgency.

So here's the current status and the new plan: Stories have been selected for M-Brane #23. But their authors have not been informed of this yet. I will get to that by Friday. Writers generally reply with their delighted acceptance of our publication terms immediately. Indeed, we have published as soon as next day after all writers answered affirmative. We're a machine like that. So a Saturday, January 1 release is not impossible. Yes, I said it: the December 2010 issue may actually release in January 2011. This is quite embarrassing, but there it is. What this means, however, is that January will see the release of two issues (because #24 is coming hell or high water on 1/20, our second anniversary). I'd considered a single double issue, but the numbers bother me. I want 24 to be truly the 24th monthly volume of M-Brane SF, therefore there must be a 23 before it. So what's probably going to happen is that writers will be notified of acceptances for 23 and 24 shortly and the two issues will go into production more or less simultaneously with 23 releasing in a few days, followed by 24 on 1/20. The contents of these two issues plus November's issue 22 will also comprise the printed book M-Brane SF Quarterly #2. As with the first Quarterly, this will contain some bonus material not seen in the electronic editions. The second Quarterly will release sometime in February. And then we'll be rolling into our third year back on schedule and in high style.

Book plug: New Apex imprint releases queer zombie novella

2010-12-28T21:02:00.000-06:00

Apex Publications offers Asylum by Mark Allan Gunnells as part of its new zombie imprint. I haven't read the book and don't know the author, so I can comment on neither directly, but I do know Apex Publications and publisher Jason Sizemore and have a lot of respect for him and his publications. Also, I am delighted any time that I see gay content in the zombie subgenre, which is sometimes rather conservative despite its outré premise (odd also considering that the whole thing derives from a film franchise created by Romero, a lefty). So, sight unseen, I will point people who are into zombie fic toward this novella. That Jason published it is sufficient recommendation as far as I am concerned.

The blurb:

"Curtis, a young college student is dragged to his first gay club by

his best friend Jimmy for a night of dancing, drinking and sex...at

least until the dead start to rise and attack the club. Trapped inside

the Asylum are a small band of survivors, including a drag queen, a

male stripper, a Vietnam vet bartender, a pretentious gay couple, and

an unstable DJ.

Will this motley crew survive the hungry undead rattling the sealed-

off doors? Will they survive each other? Will they survive their own

personal demons? Asylum recalls George Romero's classic Night of the

Living Dead--except with more gore and a more current social message.

FU #1 RELEASED

2010-12-23T21:57:00.001-06:00

[This is much the same post as the announcement on the M-Brane Press site, but I added a personal note and a taunting pic at the end]

The inaugural issue of our beautiful new fantasy quarterly Fantastique Unfettered is officially released in print today. Edited by Brandon H. Bell (Aether Age co-creator and M-Brane contributor), FU is a "Periodical of Liberated Literature," all of its content released under a Creative Commons license. As such, we think it is probably unique, and we know of nothing else quite like it. As a physical object, FU #1 is a delight to hold in one's hands. It's lovingly designed and full of terrific artwork to compliment the really amazing writing (11 items fiction and three poems).

We're using a new printer and distribution system for this first edition of FU, and its availability will probably trickle through the system gradually over the next few days, but it is available right now on the Barnes & Noble site with a sweet discount. Our cover price is $9.95, but it can be had on B&N for $7.01. We can't even sell it that cheaply directly, so we are encouraging everyone to get over there and grab it up. We do not have ebook versions available yet, but will have news of that forthcoming reasonably soon.

Please visit the FU site for more information on the magazine, its content and philosophy.
----

On a personal note, I need to say that I am so proud to be the publisher of this new periodical and so delighted with editor Brandon's fine, fine work in putting it together (not just selecting its content but designing its entire package as well). I am also delighted to be sitting here holding the first printed copy of it. The jealousy that readers of this post must be feeling now can be alleviated with a quick visit to the B&N site!

Personal writing update: New story out now

2010-12-15T21:00:00.000-06:00

Just popping in to plug this book, Zombiality: A Queer Bent on the Undead, from Library of the Living Dead Press. Edited by Bill Tucker, it is an anthology of zombie short fiction focused on LGBT characters, and it contains my new story "The Cairn." I just received my contributor copy of it yesterday and haven't had a chance to read many of the other stories yet, but I have enjoyed what I have read so far and I am delighted to have been included in such a book. Some readers may recall that this book was the subject of some foofaraw on the intertubes earlier this year because it was cancelled by the publisher after some controversy about its subject matter and some people's reaction to such. At the time, I offered some of my own commentary on the matter here and there. Because the book ultimately did get rescheduled and did get published, all that stuff can probably be left in the past, and since I am in the book, I should probably recuse myself from speaking of it anyway. But I will say that there were two very different versions of why the project was originally controversial.

But now that it's done and published, I give major kudos to its editor (who is a very cool guy) for coming up with the premise, and its publisher for taking a chance with such an anthology concept. Long live the Library of the Living Dead!

[Pick up a copy on Amazon and throw in Aether Age and 2020 Visions--free Super Saver Shipping!]

M-Brane #23 due around the 15th; Some slush-pile thoughts

2010-12-05T10:51:00.003-06:00

The new issue will be out around the 15th. I'm still reading for it, and remain rather behind on things. I'm still in the final push toward completion of far too many projects, but the end is near. I've decided it's good enough if I get it out sometime this month and not worry over much about the exact date. As I continue reading for it, I may make a number of short posts on some problems that I am seeing in the slush pile and some thoughts about what I'd like to see more of in this zine. I was reading a few stories out of a collection of stuff published by Amazing Stories back in the late 1920s and 1930s, and I was reminded of a huge problem that blights perhaps as much as a third of all submissions to M-Brane SF. I call it "Professors Talking About Shit." Here, read the following passage:

'It is remarkable.' said Dr. Manners, 'how the scope of our pharmacopoeia has been widened by interplanetary exploration. In the past thirty years, hundreds of hitherto unknown substances, employable as drugs or medical agents, have been found in the other worlds of our own system. It will be interesting to see what the Allan Farquar expedition will bring back from the planets of Alpha Centauri when -- or if — it succeeds in reaching then and returning to earth. I doubt, though, if anything more valuable than selenine will be discovered. Selenine, derived from a fossil lichen found by the first rocket-expedition to the moon in 1975, has, as you know, practically wiped out the old-time curse of cancer. In solution, it forms the base of an infallible serum, equally useful for cure or prevention.'

'I fear I haven't kept up on a lot of the new discoveries,' said Rupert Balcoth the sculptor, Manners' guest, a little apologetically. 'Of course, everyone has heard of selenine. And I've seen frequent mention, recently, of a mineral water from Ganymede whose effects are like those of the mythical Fountain of Youth.'

That is not from the M-Brane slush, but rather the opening paragraphs of a story called "The Plutonian Drug" by none other than Clark Ashton Smith (shown here in the pic at age eighteen or nineteen, rather attractive if melancholy-looking as a young man) published by Amazing in 1934. In its day, this may have evoked some "sense of wonder" and been really interesting to readers of the earliest sf, but it's well nigh unreadable now and such an opening passage certainly would get a story bounced at M-Brane. Indeed, a lot of stories do open like this and get bounced. And the passage above is actually a lot better than much of what I usually get in the slush, probably because Smith was a talented writer even when he was writing such tedious material as "The Plutonian Drug." But it doesn't let up after those first two paragraphs. It goes on for at least fifteen hundred words in this fashion. Eventually, the story itself starts, which is about Dr. Manners's guest sampling some of the drug from Pluto and having a trippy experience where he sees his own (very short) future. That part's actually pretty decent, but one must first slog through pages of these dudes blathering to each other about stuff that they both know already (selenine, "as you know," practically wiped out cancer). I see story after story after story where various kinds of scientists, doctors, and academics sit for the first few pages and discuss at length whatever the sciencey business of the story is. Instead, I'd rather open with an event happening to the characters that is perhaps based in whatever they are talking about, but bypassing altogether the long discussion of it. Also, characters in very narrow and elite professions, like "nuclear physicist" or "professor emeritus of biology," are especially hard to relate to or care about unless some kind of human action is happening to them right away. They need to be more than their job title.

2020 VISIONS released!

2010-12-01T22:29:00.002-06:00

The fabulous anthology of near-future sf, edited by Rick Novy, has finally, after a few little production snags, become available to the reading public. It's available as a trade paperback for $13.95 on here on Amazon. Those of you who pre-ordered copies can expect them to ship to you within a few days. Readers who did not pre-order should grab it on Amazon right away and take advantage of "Free Super-Saver Shipping!" on orders of $25.00 or more by also buying this week's other major release, The Aether Age (if I may make a suggestion).

I'm very proud of 2020 Visions and the fine work that editor Rick and all the great authors did for it. It's a very good anthology, and I think people will be duly impressed. Same goes for the amazing Aether Age, so just go ahead and get them both while you're at Amazon!

AETHER AGE goes on sale today!

2010-11-29T08:53:00.002-06:00

After a year and a half of anticipation, from the summer of 2009 when we dreamed up the Aether Age universe in online discussions, the book is finally done and available for purchase. We'd love to see some excellent sales of it today--which happens to also be the fifth anniversary of our publisher, Hadley Rille Books. So go to Amazon to buy your copy of The Aether Age, and consider also picking up another of Hadley Rille's many fine titles (just search "Hadley Rille Books" on Amazon, and you'll find a lot of cool books). And consider, also, picking up a copy of the recently-released M-Brane SF Quarterly #1.

See the Aether Age trailer.

Glenn Lewis Gillette

2010-11-10T20:46:00.000-06:00

I just heard the sad news that author Glenn Lewis Gillette has passed away after a fight with cancer. Here is a remembrance of him here on the SFWA site. Please, everyone, take a minute to read it. Glenn was the first author that I ever published in M-Brane SF. His story "Time Enough for a Reuben" led issue #1 in February 2009. When I launched the zine, I wondered if any real pro-level writers would ever bother to submit to my new and very small effort. Glenn's submission was one of the first few--it arrived a day or two after my guidelines went online--and it was the first that I accepted for publication. That issue has been available for free reading on Issuu since its release and it may be read here. Earlier this year, I published Glenn's work a second time, his story "Why Look Down?" in issue #16. I've decided to make that issue available as a free download now. You can get a copy here.

I didn't know Glenn well personally, though we chatted via Twitter now and then. I had no idea he was ill, and I am stunned to know now that he is gone. He was a fine writer with a really quirky, weird, and funny sensibility. He was also very well-read in the genre, a real expert on sf with a lot of awareness of the literature's history. It's our great loss that we have heard the last from his capacious imagination, but also our great fortune that we got to know him when we did.

M-Brane SF #22 released

2010-11-09T21:04:00.001-06:00

The new issue was released tonight in PDF format. It is comprised of a lovely quartet of new stories by Gustavo Bondoni, Patty Jansen, Joseph Auslander, Jr., and Bryce Mainville.

This issue may be purchased here. Money received keeps the magazine going from month to month. Allow a day for response--copies are distributed by way of download links emailed to readers. For readers who prefer print, the stories in the issue will be compiled with those from the next two electronic issues in our next print quarterly omnibus edition, due in late January.

Issue #22 contents announced

2010-11-05T22:27:00.001-05:00

Just a day or two before publication, I can finally announce the contents of M-Brane SF #22. The largest number of fiction submissions in a month has oddly yielded our shortest issue ever, a mere four stories. But it is a quartet of gems:

Gustavo Bondoni leads with "Wyrm of the Mangroves," a quite unsettling story of life engineering and created intelligence. Gustavo has appeared twice previously in M-Brane SF. Patty Jansen also makes a third appearance, this time with a rather humorous item titled "The Invisible Fleas of the Galaxy." Next, Joseph Auslander's bizarre "The Delivery" offers a remarkable idea that I really can't say anything about lest I spoil the whole thing. Bryce Mainville wraps things up with "Wild Arms," a thoughtful tale of a near-future young woman and her amazing body modifications.

M-BRANE SF QUARTERLY #1 in print on Amazon

2010-11-03T17:52:00.000-05:00

The big print omnibus, compiling the stories from electronic issues 19, 20 and 21 plus some bonus items is available now at Amazon. It's a lovely book with nearly 300 pages of spectacular work by some really fine writers. Further details can be found in previous posts about the Quarterly and about the individual electronic editions from which it is compiled.

Zine publishing schedule update; slight delay with issue #22

2010-10-27T17:45:00.000-05:00

Publication date for issue #22 will be moved from the expected November 1 to November 6. I'm not even calling this "late," just re-scheduled. A few days ago, as I was trying to finalize the content for the next issue, I found that I did not have what I feel is a sufficient quantity of appropriate items for it. So I considered either putting out a short issue on 11/1 or reading some more submissions that I might not have otherwise gotten to this week and delaying publication a few days. It's an odd situation: I have received more submissions than ever in the last month or so (a trend that seems to continue from month to month lately), but the batch hasn't contained a lot of items that have grabbed my attention. I've considered that the problem may lie with me. One night, as I was whittling down the submissions, I realized that in less than two hours I had sent several dozen items to the "no" box without a single one being sent to the "maybe" box. That never happens, so I stepped away and decided I'd better look again later. But whatever the deal is, I think it's best to work on this issue a few days longer.

In other "delay" news, M-Brane Quarterly #1, the fancy print-only omnibus which contains the stories from electronic issues #19-21 plus some bonus items, is done but I am awaiting my proof copy from the printer. As soon as that is here (was expecting it today), I can put it up for sale. I'd hoped to have that out in the world at least a week ago, but life intervened. Stories from electronic issues #22-24 will be in the Quarterly #2 in January, which will also mark the zine's second anniversary. I'll probably have some extra-specialness in store for that auspicious occasion.

2020 VISIONS US pre-order begins

2010-10-14T22:20:00.000-05:00

Last night we began the pre-order on the forthcoming anthology of next-decade science fiction 2020 Visions, edited by Rick Novy. Information, including the table of contents and a preview of the cover art is here at the Press page. The more I look at this book (and I have been doing a lot of looking at it lately as we complete the final edit and formatting) the more convinced I am that this is not only a very cool collection of short fiction but also an Important Anthology of This Year. This is some really good work, y'all. People will be impressed. Some doubt may surround it because of the fact that I am a micro-publisher of no real great reputation, but once some people finally read it, the truth will be obvious: 2020 Visions is a really fine book and will soon accrete around itself great gravitas and high stature. The authors in the ToC are no slouches either--we have the likes of Mary Robinette Kowal, Jason Ridler, Alex Wilson, Cat Rambo and many others (even David Gerrold, the inclusion of whom just about makes me swoon). These stories are not conventional, run-of-the-mill stuff either. There's some real adventure and risk here in concept and execution. I'd go so far as to say that some of the stories will appear in this book, rather than in one of the pro mags or in a major publisher's antho, because they are too good, too ahead of the curve, too dangerous for the majors. In a few weeks, readers will be thrilled.

Site construction update

2010-10-12T20:58:00.000-05:00

Though I took down the obnoxious "SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION" banner a couple days ago, I am still entirely unsatisfied with the design and functionality of this site. But it has fallen to deep into the basement of priorities during the past couple months. So I guess it's not "under construction"until I do something to it again. After the next couple book projects are put to bed and the day job gets a little less hectic (both things to happen quite soon), I will probably attempt another redesign and finally make this thing do the stuff I want it to.

LITTLE DEATH available in print

2010-10-08T21:52:00.000-05:00

I have been sufficiently swamped with activity lately, that a lot of things that I should have posted about or promoted already have been piling up on the to-do list. Last week, a lovely print version of Little Death of Crossed Genres became available here on Amazon. Electronic versions (in a multi-format bundle) can be had directly from Crossed Genres for a mere ninety-nine cents. Little Death is a publication of erotic genre fiction edited by Jaym Gates and me. It features fine work by Lorna D. Keach, Jason S. Ridler (an M-Brane SF alum), Wendy N. Wagner, Jennifer Brozek (who's also appeared in M-Brane), and Shanna Germain. This was intended as a quarterly zine, but has since been placed on an indefinite hiatus. If this first issue should prove to be the only one ever, then at least it's a terrific one.

Here are my introductory comments from it:

I love with great passion both speculative fiction and sex. That the two can be combined with writing of fine, beautiful quality was a formative revelation to me as a very young man when I first encountered the eroticism in science fiction stories by the likes of Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) and Samuel Delany. I was at an age when I was too young and inexperienced to really understand these writers’ subject matter but old enough to know that I wanted to understand it. I’d pore over certain fascinating passages again and again, trying to absorb their meanings and implications, awed that writers could say something like that like this.
Many years have passed since I first discovered that intersection of literary speculative fiction and sex, but it still turns me on just as deeply, and so it was easy for me to accept Bart and Kay’s invitation to participate in The Little Death. Honestly, I probably didn’t really have time in my schedule to add another project, but I felt I would have been a fool to pass on this one. Now that our inaugural issue is complete, I am proud to join Jaym in presenting the five fine stories within, which range across genres and occupy the unclassifiable spaces between them. I hope you will join me in being enticed, thrilled, creeped out, turned on, delighted, seared by words, and seduced.

I much enjoyed this little project, and hope many readers will treat themselves to it.

Pre-order THE AETHER AGE

2010-10-06T18:42:00.000-05:00

Hadley Rille Books has begun a pre-order special for The Aether Age, our awesome shared-world, alternate history anthology. Eric is offering discounted prices on both the paperback and hardcover editions, with free shipping. Publication date is November 29. When you go to the Hadley Rille site to order your copies (the holidays are coming soon, yo), take time to browse the rest of this fine publisher's great titles and pick up a few more of them. Publication of The Aether Age happens to coincide with Hadley Rille's fifth anniversary, and we hope that they will sell 5000 copies of their various titles (or 5000 copies of The Aether Age..ahem!)

As an added bonus, I will give anyone who pre-orders The Aether Age a free 12-month subscription to the electronic (PDF) edition of M-Brane SF. Just forward a copy of your PayPal e-receipt to mbranesf at gmail dot com, and you're on the subscrips list.

Go here for more info on this book and to see the cool trailer.

M-Brane #21 RELEASED

2010-10-04T21:16:00.000-05:00

The new issue is available in PDF form right now, featuring great new work by Cesar Torres, Therese Arkenberg, Kaolin Fire, Ian Sales, Fredrick Obermeyer and Sunny Moraine, with cover art by Mari Kurisato. It's a really good issue. If you are not already a subscriber and would like to see it, the single issue may be purchased right here for only two dollars, and funds thus raised support future issues. Allow about a day for receipt of your copy (copies are delivered by way of an email containing a link).

An Open Letter to Harlan Ellison

2010-09-28T21:57:00.001-05:00

Dear Mr. Ellison,

Just yesterday, I read this article anticipating your final convention appearance, at MadCon. I had not been aware that you are, as you say, dying, and I am very unhappy to hear that. Though I do admire greatly your own attitude about it and hope that I will feel the same way when my own time comes. But that's not the subject about which I try to reach out to you today. This is:

"My wife has instructions that the instant I die, she has to burn all the unfinished stories. And there may be a hundred unfinished stories in this house, maybe more than that. There's three quarters of a novel. No, these things are not to be finished by other writers, no matter how good they are. It could be Paul Di Filippo, who is just about the best writer in America, as far as I'm concerned. Or God forbid, James Patterson or Judith Krantz should get a hold of The Man Who Looked for Sweetness, which is sitting up on my desk, and try to finish it, anticipating what Ellison was thinking -- no! Goddammit. If Fred Pohl wants to finish all of C.M. Kornbluth's stories, that's his business. If somebody wants to take the unfinished Edgar Allan Poe story, which has now gone into the public domain, and write an ending that is not as good as Poe would have written, let 'em do whatever they want! But not with my shit, Jack. When I'm gone, that's it. What's down on the paper, it says 'The End,' that's it. 'Cause right now I'm busy writing the end of the longest story I've ever written, which is me."

OK. I totally get where you're coming from (and always love it when you take yet another swipe at Judith Krantz). But for the fucking love of all that's good and decent on Earth, do not burn your unfinished stories! Jeeezus keee-rist on a crutch, dude! Look: your admirers would buy any goddamned thing you have ever written, finished or not. I would right now pay for a hardbound edition of a freaking grocery list typed by you. Please, please, please, rescind this horrible, bloody directive to your wife! You are well acquainted with legal machinations, and I am certain that you could guard in some kind of iron-clad, steam-powered, smoke-billowing titanic way your literary legacy from such obscene ravages as Krantz or her ilk trying to finish your novel. How about this: authorize the publication of at least some of your unpublished items and will the money generated from such toward endowing a scholarship, or maybe even one of the writing workshops like Clarion. Create the "Harlan Ellison Fellowship" or some such thing.

OK. I understand that this unfinished and unpublished writing is entirely your stuff to do with as you please. But you need to understand that you are, to many, many readers and writers and dreamers, an even bigger deal than what even you may have thought. Yeah, even if you keel over right now and all your unpublished stuff is burned as per your orders, you will still have a legacy that may last as long as people read stuff worth reading. But why not go a little bit further? Find some way to make a lasting gift of your unpublished work. You don't owe it to anyone, but do it anyway, if not for your successors who will be inspired by you, then for the cranks who will be pissed off that your name keeps showing up all the time long after you're gone.

Best wishes,
Christopher Fletcher, Editor M-Brane SF
(who read "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" when he was 11 years old and has never been the same since)

Announcing M-BRANE #21 writers and TOC

2010-09-21T22:26:00.001-05:00

Here is the table of contents for M-Brane SF #21, due out October 1. The cover art is once again by the fabulous Mari Kurisato. This issue will complete the first "quarter" under the new scheme for the print edition, so its stories and those from the the previous two issues will all appear together in a print omnibus in October along with some bonus material. More info on that will come forth soon.

Cesar Torres: "The Nagual's Elision"
Therese Arkenberg: "Outlive"
Kaolin Fire: "Thirty Since the Reckoning"
Ian Sales: "Human Resources"
Fredrick Obermeyer: "Harmday"
Sunny Moraine: "Centralia"

I will warn you: this one ain't a cheery issue, y'all. But you won't regret reading it either. This is some really fine and thoughtful work by some fine writers. Other than Sunny Moraine--she's new to me, and I am glad to have made her acquaintance--these folks have been in M-Brane's pages before. Ian Sales and Kaolin Fire are both well known in these genre press lands, and both appeared fairly recently (Fire in issue #15 with "Immersion" and Sales in #19 with "Through the Eye of a Needle"). Fredrick Obermeyer previously appeared about a year ago in #9 with the bizarre "Graftworld." Therese Arkenberg appeared in #4 with "Mother" and in our LGBT antho Things We Are Not with the spectacular "Reila's Machine." The issue leads off with a fine new story by one of my favorite writers, Cesar Torres. Earlier this year, M-Brane Press published his collection The 12 Burning Wheels.

Thoughts on TREK's 44th Anniversary

2010-09-08T12:42:00.000-05:00

That Star Trek debuted on television forty-four years ago this week makes me feel suddenly quite old. I remember vividly another Trek anniversary--the twentieth in 1986. In September of that year, a friend and I published the fourth issue of our monthly Star Trek zine The Alternative Warp. In our youthful enthusiasm, we committed ourselves to making that issue a 100-page spectacular commemorating twenty years of Star Trek. A normal issue ranged from 32 to 48 pages (and we didn't quite make our goal of 100 pages--I think it was about 88 when done). If I had a copy of it here, I would take a pic of myself holding it up and post it here. I doubt many of its original 120 copies are extant, but I believe that my father has one at his home in Wisconsin. Indeed, I am somewhat glad that I do not have my own copy here because I am sure that I would find the whole thing quite embarrassing now and would need to bury it in the bottom of a drawer.

But embarrassing or not, it was the work of fifteen-year-olds, and created with great enthusiasm and attention to detail, and it even had a little bit of fairly high-end content in it as compared to most of our issues. The 20th Anniversary edition featured a fairly extensive interview with David "The Trouble With Tribbles" Gerrold (which he graciously allowed us to conduct with him by phone) and a transcript of a speech by Trek creator Gene Roddenberry that I tape-recorded when I saw him speak at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh and then painstakingly put on paper in columnar format with a manual typewriter. Other items included our "news" pages where we would gather short articles about Trek-pertinent current events. How we even found anything to report on during the pre-Web Era, I have no idea, but we did. The biggest bulk of it was filled with Trek fan fiction, written mostly by my co-editor and me, including a novella-length concatenation of nonsense titled "Peace in Our Time" by yours truly. I don't remember many of its details, but it dealt with a vast and secret infiltration of the Federation by a mysterious alien menace called the "Exoscan." As I recall, the Federation was being taken apart from the inside by this entity as a gigantic spacecraft or huge cluster of linked spacecraft of unknown (possibly extra-galactic) origin moved toward Federation space. It was all very portentous and frightfully epic. (Interestingly, a couple years later, the TV series Star Trek: the Next Generation presented a story about bug-like alien critters taking over the minds and directing the actions of Starfleet personnel as part of an insidious conspiracy. Picard returns to Earth to find Starfleet Command in the thrall of these beings. This was not entirely unlike the conspiracy in my own story).

Over the twenty-four years since then, my enthusiasm for the overall Star Trek franchise with its many TV shows, movies, books and other projects has waned considerably. I did follow faithfully the Next Generation series, the best seasons of which happened during my college years, and I was sad when it ended. I'll still occasionally turn it on when I see that a rerun is on one of the cable channels. I also watched Deep Space Nine. While it took me some time to warm up to it, I eventually became deeply engrossed in the story arc that dominated its last two or three seasons. But it doesn't hold a lot of repeat-viewing appeal for me. The Voyager series had a lot of good in it, but was very troubled and it was during its run that I realized that I didn't necessarily have an obligation to see every single episode of any show bearing the Star Trek brand. The last of the TV shows, Enterprise, was deeply disappointing. It had so much potential to rekindle what was great and fun about the Original Series and almost unerringly missed the mark, particularly when its creators made the inexplicable decision to sink the whole thing into a lame long-running story arc that only the most hardcore Trekker could have cared about. Also, the feature films of the last couple decades have been a mixed bag. While First Contact was wonderful, Insurrection and Nemesis were very weak (the former with too small a story for a feature film, the latter with a really big one that was realized in too small a way). The Abrams re-boot film last year was very entertaining but wholly preposterous.

None of these disappointments, however, have stripped away the luster of the Original. It remains, to my eye, one of the most lovely, most charming and engaging things of the whole television era. When I first got a DVD player, I set about collecting the entire Original Series on disc, and I still reach for these discs when I want some soothing ambient light and sound. I don't even necessarily watch the episodes: they might just be playing in the background, and more often than not, I will fall asleep on the couch halfway into it. There has never been anything quite like it; no other show has ever even looked or sounded like it. It's a thing of its period, the 1960s, yet seems to stand slightly outside its period and culture, as if it intruded from an alternate timeline just a little bit different than our own. And it's just plain weird and cool and hypnotically re-watchable. The worst episodes of Star Trek are better than almost any currently-running television program. Right now, as I finish this post, I am half-watching/listening to one of the best, "Mirror, Mirror" on the CBS website.

[The images are of Leonard "Spock" Nimoy as he appeared in the original, un-aired pilot "The Cage," and William "Kirk" Shatner as he appeared in the second pilot episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before." Because of some kind of TV scheduling weirdness, however, even this second pilot was not the first episode shown on TV. That honor went to the fifth episode in production order "The Man Trap," the one starring the shape-shifting salt vampire].

M-Brane #20 released

2010-09-02T21:13:00.000-05:00

The new issue is available in PDF format. As predicted, it's late, but only by a day. It contains great new work by some really great writers (see previous post for table of contents). Its contents, along with those of the electronic editions of #19 and the forthcoming #21 will appear in the first M-Brane SF Quarterly in October, a print-only omnibus which will also feature some bonus material not present in our e-versions.

The issue #20 PDF can be purchased for $2.00 using the Pay Pal button below:

M-Brane #20 ToC

2010-08-29T21:52:00.001-05:00

I am ridiculously late in the month on announcing these details, but below is the table of the contents for the September issue of M-Brane SF, our twentieth. But first, check out that awesome cover art. The great Mari Kurisato, who provided the double cover for Things We Are Not, created it (including the sweet rocket ship logo). Though it will certainly embarrass her if I say this, I will do so anyway: Mari rulz!!

Here are the stories, about to be released from our brane:

Will Kaufman "Cooper and the Satellite"
Garrett Ashley "FAL 2020"
Natasha Simonova "The Scrying-Glass of Doctor Dee"
Michael Andre-Driussi "Hardboiled Proust"
Jennifer Brozek "Family Duty"
Colin P. Davies "The Booby-Trapped Boy"

As is fairly typical of an issue, this one features a mix of pro writers and relative newcomers each of whom showed me something that made me say, "Oh yeah, that's just what I was looking for right now." As a package, the content this time is fairly wistful, sometimes frightful, sometimes funny, and altogether fascinating. It's a bit different in mood than the last issue, maybe not as out-and-out weird, but somehow very right for September. Of the authors, Kaufman, Ashley and Simonova are entirely new to me, and I am delighted to make their acquaintance. Each of them has delivered a remarkable and rather edgy story in their own unique ways. I have published Andre-Driussi a couple of times previously and each time he offers a story very different than the one before it. Davies will be a familiar name to a lot of readers because he has been widely published for many years, though this will be his first appearance in M-Brane, with a very thoughtful tale. Brozek is well known in the small press world as a writer and an editor, and I am pleased to include her very dark story this month. Coincidentally, I am about to have a hand in publishing her twice: while this is her first appearance in M-Brane SF, she is also appearing any day now in Little Death of Crossed Genres #1 which I edited with Jaym Gates, forthcoming from Crossed Genres.

The new issue may be a day or two late. This has never happened before, but August afforded me many opportunities for difficulty as far as keeping up with my expanded List of Stuff to Do. It was a great month in many ways, but maybe a bit too great as far as the task list. But, you know, onward and upward.

"Sometimes life really does get in the way."

2010-08-19T21:20:00.000-05:00

I've decided to aggregate here links to some of the blog posts that friends and fans of the late Jamie Eyberg have put up this week. I'm sure these aren't all of them (and people may leave more in the comments if they wish), just some that I have read since last night. My own words fail me in this situation. I can't quite figure out how to express what this loss means to me nor exactly why I feel it so strongly. One thing I am certain of, however, is that when people assert that life online isn't "real" life, that when they say that contacts with people by way of the internet and its social media is not "real" human interaction, those people could not be more wrong. It's different than face-to-face contact, but it's still real. Because I exchanged remarks with Jamie by way of Twitter quite frequently, I know that he liked to enjoy a beer, as do I. Sometimes, I knew that we were doing this "together" even though we were hundreds of miles apart and had never met in person. That I published him in M-Brane and got to know him casually by way of Twitter is different than if we had been "real" world friends, but it was certainly real to me. And the deep pain of loss that I feel now is certainly real. I'm sure the following people would agree:

Aaron Polson
Cate Gardner
Jeremy Kelly
T.J. McIntyre
Brian Keene
Andrea Allison
Gabriel Beyers
Barry Napier
Jeremy D. Brooks
Rebecca Nazar
Natalie L. Sin
Danielle Ferries
Kody Boye

The general profile of the names on that list give an indication of what a talented and creative person Jamie. He was always there for his fellow writers, popping in on their blogs or hailing them on Twitter with encouraging words. His own blog was regular stop on the web for so many of us. I've read his last post there (from which I took the title of this post) about twenty times, savoring its normalcy and wishing there could be another.

Kody's post contains information about a fundraiser that Library of the Living Dead Press is doing to raise some money for the memorial fund for Jamie's young children. The family requests that memorials be made to the Kennedy and Brendan Eyberg account at Iowa Savings Bank in Coon Rapids, IA.

Jamie Eyberg

2010-08-18T22:08:00.000-05:00

I just heard the terrible news that writer Jamie Eyberg and his wife Ann have died in an accident where they were overcome by some kind of gas leak in a well at their home.

I never met Jamie in person, but I felt like I knew him well from our many conversations on Twitter. He was a very fine writer, and he will be missed by many, many people.

I had the privilege of publishing him once, his story "Winter Solstice" last year in M-Brane SF #8. As a small kind of memorial to Jamie, I am making that issue available for free download here, and it will remain so permanently.

I am not yet aware of any kind of fund or charity being set up for their children, but if hear of something, I will pass that information along also.

A memorial guestbook for Jamie is located at this link.

2020 VISIONS contents announced

2010-08-12T16:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Rick Novy, editor of our forthcoming anthology of near-future science fiction 2020 Visions, announced the table of contents. I repeat the list here:

Mary Robinette Kowal – “Birthright”

Sheila Finch – “The Persistence of Butterflies”

Randy Henderson – “A Shelter for Living Things”

Jason S. Ridler – “Showing Light”

Ernest Hogan – “Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs”

David Lee Summers – “The Revelation of Thought”

Jeff Spock – “Teh Afterl1fe”

Emily Devenport – “If the Sun’s at Five O’Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies”

Cat Rambo – “Therapy Buddha”

Jack Mangan – “Dead Rookies”

David Boop – “Organ Cloning While You Wait”

Spencer Ellsworth – “The Black Plague of Our Generation”

Gareth L. Powell – “The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns”

Alethea Kontis – “Pocket Full of Posey”

Alex Wilson – “Nervewrecking”

David Gerrold – “Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists”

I am very excited about these stories and about seeing all of these particular writers in a single table of contents. It's a terrific mix of pros, semi-pros and newcomers who all found something astounding to say about the world a decade hence. I let Rick read and select stories without nosing into his process at all, so seeing the resulting ToC for the first time was as pleasant a treat for me as I think it will be to many readers. A couple of these writers I have published before in M-Brane SF (Cat Rambo and Jason Ridler), while Alex Wilson appeared in my GLBT anthology Things We Are Not last year. A couple of the names were altogether new to me, while I was familiar with the work of many of the others. Rick plans to profile the authors on his site over the coming weeks, and the first of those profiles (of Mary Robinette Kowal) is up now.

Comments on vanity presses

2010-08-09T17:30:00.000-05:00

Writers may be interested in this post over on my Live Journal about vanity publishers. It contains a link to an article on the Writer Beware blog about a fraud operation which evidently stole a bunch of money from writers. It seems to me that access to print-on-demand by nearly everyone should end these kinds of problems.

The "One Lovely Blog" Award

2010-08-07T16:05:00.000-05:00

I am honored that this site was selected for the lovely One Lovely Blog Award by writer TJ McInytre, author of the Southern Fried Shorts flash fiction site (himself another recent recipient). It's a fun way to spread word about cool sites and boost each others' signals. TJ's post about the award and his 14 other selectees for it can be found here on his Live Journal.

Book projects in motion this week

2010-08-03T21:24:00.000-05:00

It looks like it's going to be a busy next few months around here. In addition to the regular monthly zine, I have coming very soon the first issue of Little Death that I am co-editing with Jaym Gates for Crossed Genres. Later, we have the launch of Fantastique Unfettered, our new fantasy quarterly, edited by Brandon Bell. Also, I will release the first of the new quarterly M-Brane print omnibus editions in October. And then, we have four books all due out before the end of the year, all of them with uncertain publication dates (but which are now becoming more certain).

I just heard from Eric T. Reynolds of Hadley Rille Books, our great collaborator and publisher for The Aether Age, that he has in hand the print proof for the advance reader copy of the book (which he describes as "beyond amazing"), and that reviewers should have those ARCs soon. And this means that we are very close to being able to finally announce the publication date and hopefully put up some kind of cool pre-order deal on it.

A couple days ago, Rick Novy completed story selection for 2020 Visions, our forthcoming anthology of very-near-future fiction. I cannot wait to announce the ToC for this one. Rick has put together a really great group of writers for this book. I am confident of publication by November 1, or at least not much later than that.

The fabled "M-Brane Double," my long-held dream of publishing a book reminiscent of the old Ace series of short novels published back-to-back in tete beche style, moves closer to reality. One of the two halves is still undergoing some work, but I think we might be able to manage a late September release on this one. The two authors, Alex Jeffers and Brandon Bell, have crafted drop-dead beautiful stories for this book, and I cannot wait to show them off in the fancy package that I have planned.

I hear from Mike Griffiths that he has been busily workshopping, revising and editing his Skinjumper, a full-blown novel-length realization of the milieu that he sketched out in a series of short stories last year. Full of body-swapping, gender-bending danger, this story should be great fun, and we will publish it before year's end.

Even if all the books are not out by November 1, I plan to have the hardest part of the work on all of them done by then because I intend to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I guess I'll sleep in December.

M-BRANE #19 released

2010-08-01T15:14:00.000-05:00

The new issue has just been released to subscribers in PDF format. This issue, and subsequent ones, will not have a print edition. The contents of this issue and the next two, along with some bonus material, will form M-Brane SF Quarterly #1 in October, the first of the new quarterly print version. Links to subscribe to the monthly PDF or find back issues in PDF and print may be found at the M-Brane Press page. That site's "under construction" period continues, but it's functional.

Also, on the M-Brane Press page, I had been offering issue #17 from June as a free sample of the magazine, but I have replaced it with the new issue #19. Because of an appearance in #17 by the first-rights-reselling author mentioned a few days ago here and in many other places, I don't feel good about free distribution of it any longer despite how good its content was. I may produce a redaction of it, excising the non-original piece, and then repost the link to that issue.

Right-wing submissions

2010-07-25T16:53:00.000-05:00

I got a snarky email the other day which seemed to allege that I am something of a hypocrite because I "act all liberal" and yet won't publish anything in M-Brane SF that is of a right-wing bent. In fact, I have published a few stories related to economic and climate issues that come from an obviously right-wing point-of-view, and I am about to publish a story in M-Brane #19 that is obviously political but which is also uncomfortably ambiguous as to where it sits on the political spectrum, and it may raise some eyebrows because of that.

But the fact that I "act all liberal" should actually be a clue that I don't generally want conservative politics in my zine. I don't see the fact that I reject, as a matter of policy, items that seem to advocate for religious fanaticism, sexism, homophobia or Glenn Beck as being inconsistent with how I represent myself. Being a "liberal" (which I am) does not mean I have to be liberal about putting up with bigotry and irrationality. In fact, it means quite the opposite. Indeed, to put a finer point on it, it means that there is an actively enforced (if unwritten) policy of not accepting such material for publication. So the emailer, or any other submitters, should not be surprised if I pass on so-called "Christian" material or items which advocate by implication the assassination of President Obama. Indeed, it should be assumed that I would be repelled by such. And it's not "censorship" that I reject expressions of such deranged ideologies, since most of the rest of the media seem very open to them. It's a "free market" in general. But this particular one happens to be closed to such nonsense.

It's like they think they have "caught" me in something: "Ah ha! He says is open-minded, yet he rejects the 700 Club!" As if that's an inconsistency.

Back to the slush.

M-BRANE #19 ToC announced; change planned for print schedule

2010-07-23T22:50:00.001-05:00

Finally, over a week later than planned, I have a table of contents for the August 1 issue of M-Brane SF. Most of the writers were notified just last night that I'd selected their stories, but they were all quick about returning their publication agreements, so I can make it official now:

Shawn Scarber: "Burnt Benediction"
Bart Leib: "Flip the Switch"
Ian Sales: "Through the Eye of a Needle"
Jacques Barbéri (tr. Michael Shreve): "Isanve"
Jason S. Ridler: "4x40 Killers"
Regan Wolfrom: "A Step Beyond the Rain"

All of this month's authors are first-timers in the pages of M-Brane SF. Shawn Scarber, a Clarion West grad and lover of weird fiction, offers a vision of a future or alternate-world priest and his strange mission for the Church; Bart Leib, known to many of you as co-editor of Crossed Genres, delivers a terrific reimagining of humanity's first step off this world; British writer Ian Sales opens a window into a possible post-climate-catastrophe dystopia in the politically-charged "Through the Eye of a Needle"; Michael Shreve brings us the translation from the French of writer and musician Jacques Barbéri's "Isanve," a lush tale of strange intelligent automata and someone's literal soul. Shreve is a writer and translator living in Paris, and Barbéri is the author of over fifteen novels and many short stories; Jason S. Ridler's bizarre and creepily erotic "4x40 Killers" delves into long-simmering resentment between two friends and its incredible resolution; Regan Wolfrom's somber and thoughtful tale of two sisters in a colony on Titan concludes the collection. Wolfrom will also appear with "Birth of Hellas"in the forthcoming The Aether Age.

With the new issue comes a major change in the schedule for the print-on-demand editions of M-Brane SF. The monthly editions, offered by way of our Lulu store, ended with issue #18. Henceforth, the print version will be a quarterly omnibus consisting of the stories from three issues of the monthly electronic versions. In other words, the August stories will be featured in M-Brane SF #19 (electronic) on August 1, and in M-Brane Quarterly #1 (print) in October, along with the items from the September and October electronic editions. Also, we'll probably have some bonus content for these print quarterlies that will not appear in the electronic monthlies. The goal is to produce a somewhat fancier book with better distribution than the Lulu monthlies have had. This new version will be available in more places, such as Amazon, and at a cheaper price per volume as compared to buying three issues the old way, so I think it will be a win for the readers as well as the writers.

Enhancements to the electronic offerings are in the works as well, such as a new epub edition, which iPad and Nook users have been wanting for a while. We stopped putting new issues in the Amazon Kindle store a few months ago for various reasons, but we may resume that as well in the near future.

Writers guidelines updated

2010-07-18T20:42:00.001-05:00

A slight change has been made to the last guidelines update (from January). M-Brane SF no longer considers reprints. While I haven't (knowingly) published very many, I used to be open to them. But, alas, no more. Also, we now acquire First World English Rights rather than First North American Serial Rights, and we are serious about the "First" part of that phrase. Evidently some writers (or at least one that I know of so far) find it acceptable to shop the same story around to different zines and actually contract for "First" rights more than once, without ever mentioning previous publication. Here this is frowned upon, and is actually downright dangerous to one's prospects of getting published anywhere else since I am an email away from about 1000 other genre press editors nearly all of whom would take a similarly dim view of such chicanery. Other than the fact that I now consider previously published work dead to me unless you are the Second Coming of Samuel Delany (or Delany himself), I am as easy to work with and writer-friendly as ever. The guidelines now read as follows:

UPDATED 7/19/10

to change advice on REPRINTS from "Maybe. Query." to "No."

First, the bullet points. I'll elaborate on them somewhat below.

GENRE: Science fiction (any variety)

NOT: Horror and fantasy unless it has a strong science fictional underpinning; not into paranormal/occult; In Search Of...type myths-and-monsters stuff, UFOs, ghosts, Big Foots, Loch Ness Monsters, Yetis, chupacabras, etc.

WORD COUNT: no lower or upper limit, though be advised that I'm not the biggest fan of "flash" fiction

SIMUL-SUBS: Yeah, sure, who cares? Just let me know that it is one.

MULTI-SUBS: Ditto

REPRINTS: No.

E-SUBS: Only. I'll not look at paper mail (and won't even give out an address for such).

SUBMISSION FORMAT: Standard mss format is just great, though I don't really care so long as it's readable. All submissions should be sent to mbranesf@gmail.com as anattachment in .doc or .docx or .rtf form.

If you want to know more about my biases before dashing off your mss, continue reading below....

Genre: I've been getting a lot of straight-up horror and dark fantasy submissions lately. While I may welcome elements of these genres, the stories still need to be somehow science fictional. In other words, the speculative or weird elements should be grounded in some kind of development of science, technology, or society that has (at least within the context of the story) a rational basis. No magic or wizardry or supernatural evil, please. As for specifically what sorts of sf I like best, it's hard to pin down. My mood changes over time. Lately, I am not as excited as I once was about space opera and epic galactic empire stories. On the other hand, small-scale character-focused stories set in such a milieu might work. I have seen scores of stories during the past year focused on the shenanigans of university professors and their students (usually involving time travel or some other secret lab project). I'd like to not see so many of those in 2010, thanks. And time travel in general, even without professors, is wearing me out.

Nowadays, I like hard sf with strong characters and softer sf with a literary bent. Weirdness is great if not supernatural in its origin. I like most of the "punk" subgenres fairly well as long as there's a story supporting the aesthetic. M-Brane has been characterized by at least a couple of readers as dystopian. If true, it's not deliberate; hopeful, positive-outlook tales are welcome, too, and I am personally very technophilic. M-Brane SF is open to fiction with queer/LGBT content. Also, this zine is not aimed at children, so adult language and erotic content is not excluded when it makes sense in a story.

Payment is still a paltry $10.00 flat per story paid on publication, with an option of taking instead a subscription to the PDF edition of the zine. For this meager fee, I ask for First World English Rights with all remaining rights reverting to the writer upon publication. Payments are made exclusively by Pay Pal.

Reprints: Consideration of reprints has been ruined for everyone.

Artwork:

I'm not offering any payment for art at this time. But I'll look at it and consider publishing it. I can offer some fairly good exposure for it on the blog as well.

NON-FICTION

I have not yet published much of this, but I would still like to see some. I am interested in thoughtful pieces about sf authors and books, interviews and scholarly criticism. I am not currently offering payment for non-fiction, but any that I take for the magazine will also get published on the M-Braneblog.

A note on manuscript format:

I run a "green" operation. I don't print anything. No paper or ink are killed in reading stories for M-Brane. I do all of my slush reading on my screen, and every submission I receive ends up getting reformatted into a style that suits me best for this, which is why I don't care much about manuscript format. If I accept your story for publication, however, I may ask you to repair your document if it's formatted in web style with no indents and double spaces between paragraphs and if it resists for some reason easy reformatting on my end. I've been getting docs lately that have been causing me a lot of work in manually removing formatting weirdnesses. M-Brane looks like a traditional book with paragraph indentations, and with double spaces between paragraphs used only when there is a scene break.

FANTASTIQUE UNFETTERED opens to submissions

2010-07-15T18:51:00.000-05:00

It's a big day in the M-Brane Press world as our new zine, Brandon Bell's Fantastique Unfettered, opens for submissions. Visit the Fantastique Unfettered site and click the Guidelines tab if you are a fantasy writer with some great new stuff to present. This quarterly zine will appear in print and electronic formats on a quarterly basis starting later this year. We're very excited about it!

The Ruins of Earth

2010-07-14T21:20:00.001-05:00

I haven't been reporting on personal reading or making book recommendations a lot in recent months. My reading time has been so scattered among so many different things, including reading lots of unpublished stuff for projects that I am editing, that it's been hard to keep track of it all. I have, however, been taking in a good deal of short fiction that I have had sitting on the home library shelves for a long, long time but never made it to previously. I recently noticed this gem, sitting long-ignored on a lower shelf, The Ruins of Earth, "an anthology of stories of the immediate future" edited by Thomas Disch back in 1970.

Considering that within a month or two, M-Brane Press will probably be announcing the publication date and table of contents for Rick Novy's 2020 Visions (also an anthology of stories of the immediate future), I thought it would be interesting to see what another editor had pulled together forty years ago around a similar concept. But while our forthcoming book is intended to present an array of possibilities about a very specific year, Disch's book is themed very much around ecological catastrophe and the assumption that such is coming in one form or another (a concern familiar to people now, and which perhaps feels more imminent). He organized the book into four sections titled, "The Way it Is," ""Why the Way it Is," "How it Could Get Worse," and finally, most pessimistically, "Unfortunate Solutions."

I have not read all of the stories in the book yet, so I won't comment on them, but what makes me consider this book something of a gem is its remarkable table of contents. Lesser-known works such as Kurt Vonnegut's "Deer in the Works" and Fritz Leiber's "America the Beautiful" and Gene Wolfe's "Three Million Square Miles" are combined with well-known items like Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds" (the basis for the eponymous film by Hitchcock) and Harry Harrison's "Roommates" (the seed for his novel Make Room! Make Room! which was the basis for the film Soylent Green) and Philip K. Dick's "Autofac." I chose as the first item to read (last night, as I fell inevitably asleep on the couch), J.G. Ballard's "The Cage of Sand." Though I haven't finished it yet (sleep, you know), as I started reading it I felt myself settle comfortably into one of Ballard's uncomfortable worlds. This one starts with someone in a hotel building which is evidently getting overtaken floor-by-floor by drifting sand, and it has the flavor of one of his 1960s catastrophe stories, The Drowned World or The Wind From Nowhere, both of which I like a lot.

A book like this is the answer that I wish I could give to the various people over the years (looking at you, Jeff!) who sigh and wonder why it is that I ever need to buy another book and why we must move from home to home cases and cases of books that I may never read again and which I may never have read in the first place. I bought The Ruins of Earth as one of a thick stack of books that I lucked into at a thrift shop about 12 years ago. It still has a fifty-cent Goodwill price tag on its cover. Did I need it right then? Probably not. And it did sit for over a decade, and moved to several new homes, untouched except to pack it into a box and then unpack it to put it back on its shelf. Until last night, when I was looking for just the right thing to read before sleep time, and I saw it on the shelf and said, "Hmm. What's this one about anyway?" And that's why I bought it all those years ago.

Irrelevance

2010-07-08T20:28:00.000-05:00

This recent post from Jason Sanford gets to the heart of something that has bugged me for years, and he gives a great example of it by pointing to a micro-press lit mag which says in its writer's guidelines: "Unsolicited submissions must be accompanied by a receipt for a hardcover or paperback from a real-life bookstore." The rationale for this piece of douchebaggery is: "We believe that there are more people who want to be published in literary magazines and small presses than there are people buying these magazines and books. This program is not meant as the solution. There is no one solution."

There's a lot that's wrong with this. Sanford, in his concise rebuttal, points out that not everyone lives near a brick-and-mortar bookstore. This is not only true, but getting truer by the day. A couple weeks ago, I needed new glasses and I had an eye appointment and bought new glasses at the Lenscrafters store in the St. Louis Galleria, the biggest fanciest shopping mall in the St. Louis metro area. While I could give a fuck about 99% of the contents of the mall, I figured I could at least pass the hour while I waited for my new glasses to be made browsing in the bookstore (or, at the very least, wander into Abercrombie & Fitch and gaze at wall-sized photos of comely half-naked youths). I vaguely remembered that they once had two bookstores in that mall. I figured that wasn't true anymore, but I thought the crappier one of the two still existed. But no. This gigantic "upscale" shopping aneurysm that is the Galleria has ZERO bookstores in it nowadays. Not a fucking book or magazine to be found anywhere in all its square mileage of retail valhalla. Oh, and there's not even an Abercrombie & Fitch either! And this in a mall that has north AND south locations of Sunglass Hut AND Sunny Shades (not even counting their in-store kiosks within the anchor stores). I was so freakin' bored, I made phone calls. Phone calls! I couldn't even go browse in the Apple Store because it was iPhone pre-order day and the whole place was under the control of Imperial Stormtroopers.

But I digress. The real point is that times, as usual, are changing. A lot of people never lived near a bookstore in the first place. A lot of people have seen their nearby bookshops vanish. And a lot of people (like me, for example) who do have some bookstores nearby (though not in the Galleria) often prefer the convenience and selection of the online retailers. People can piss on Amazon and B&N and the ebook publishers all they want, but the existence of these things has made more authors' work more available to more people than what was ever possible in earlier decades. People who live in the backwoods of Idaho or Manitoba can read the same stuff that someone in New York City or London can nowadays, and that was absolutely not true years ago without a lot of work and expense on the part of the person living in a remote area.

But this is all a sort of side issue. The real problem is that there are simply not enough readers of any kind anymore. In the US, the percentage of the population who buys and reads book is tiny (single digits). And of that tiny wedge of the population, the percentage that reads fiction of any genre is incredibly small. And of those who read fiction, the number who are reading "literary fiction" in "literary" journals is smaller still. Smaller to the point of being virtually non-existent outside of the literary and scholarly types who themselves would like to write and publish such fiction. This probably sounds familiar to any genre editors who wish more people would buy their zines. Ever wonder if we're doing it for anyone other than other writers and editors? So, in the genre press, we have this problem as well, and we are way more popular than the "literary" zine press. It's pretty discouraging, and I'd love if the lit mags would find an answer to the problem, but I think the problem is too big and they're too small. And getting smaller all the time. Making writers send receipts showing that they walked into a "real" bookstore won't stop the shrinkage.

Info-dump and world-building

2010-07-03T20:55:00.001-05:00

I spent the last three hours weeding through new submissions to M-Brane SF, and I realize that the number one reason that I pass on a story--even over clumsy writing--is probably the way a lot of writers choose to lay in the information about their world, the way that many of them (probably feeling a need to get a lot of details in front of the reader) fall into dropping in a big fat info-dump rather than finding less intrusive ways to insert these details.

In science fiction, it's probably an easy ditch to fall into since, of course, the writer wants to present the awesome new world that her story is set in and make as clear as possible what cool or weird circumstance is driving the story. But what I see happening again and again in submissions are long scenes (sometimes even entire stories) that consist of characters sitting across a desk from each other discussing a situation in way that is entirely contrived to convey a lot of information to the reader but which doesn't ring very true as far as how real people would behave. It's the old "As you know, Bob," problem. As in, "As you know, Bob, ever since the founding of the Terran Douchebaggery, access to android porn has been severely curtailed." And while that may be an important bit of info to get out there, there must be some way to do it without making one's characters sit in an office rehashing information that they themselves certainly must know already.

Another variation on this that I see a lot of is where the story is going along swimmingly and the all of a sudden a giant info-dump shows up in the form of a secondary character revealing to the protagonist what's really been going on all along. I just read one where the writer had managed to set up very evocatively a great setting and had suggested a strange mystery and shown some clues toward its possible meaning, when suddenly about three-quarters of the way into the story..."I'm sorry I couldn't tell you this earlier, Bob, but actually you've been assigned to our new project of breeding half-human/half-android beings. Which you never heard of before, nor had any reason to suspect. But still. Sorry." I read another one like this a couple weeks ago which I enjoyed so much through most of the length of it that it was almost heart-breaking when it all went to hell in this fashion right at the very end. It's almost as disappointing as "It was all a dream."

I'd be interested in hearing what other writers have to say about ways to lay in rich detail in their stories but avoiding the info-dump. Or even ways to use an info-dump effectively so it's not dull or distracting, because it can be done sometimes.

New trailer for THE AETHER AGE!

2010-07-02T08:47:00.000-05:00

This is some fine work by T.C. Parmelee and Paul Rothchild, with the spectacular music by the Chameleon Chamber group. The visual component consists largely of the interior artwork that will accompany the stories. Spectacular, all of of it!

2020 VISIONS briefly open to submissions: send positive outlook, near future sf

2010-07-01T15:46:00.002-05:00

Rick Novy, editor of 2020 Visions, an anthology forthcoming later this year from M-Brane Press, reports that he has received a lot of excellent stories. The tone of them, however, has been overwhelmingly dark and pessimistic, so he would like to balance this with some material that has an upbeat, positive outlook on the very near future. This was previously an invitation-only book, but we are briefly opening it to unsolicited submissions in hopes of getting some more optimistic selections. Here are the details:

2020 Visions: Speculative fiction set ten years from now, to be published as a print book and in several ebook versions.
Needs: Stories with an optimistic outlook or positive outcome for the near future. For this submissions call, please do not send dark, bleak, dystopian, or negative-outcome stories. Rick wants to see some ideas for how things could actually turn out well.
Word count: open
Send submissions in standard manuscript format as attached RTF files to ricknovy at gmail dot com. In the subject line of your email, say "Submission: 2020 Visions" and the title of your story.
Payment: Token advance on publication (probably something in the $10-25 range), plus a copy of the print edition of the book, plus royalties paid as a pro-rata share of book's profit (We have a few "name" authors lined up already, and have a credible expectation that the book will, in fact, earn royalties for its contributors). Acquiring First World English Rights, print and electronic.
Deadline: July 17, 2010

Yes, that deadline is in just a couple weeks, so this submissions call may be good for writers who have something finished or in process that fits the theme and tone, or for those who get inspired soon and can write it quickly.

M-BRANE #18 PUBLISHED

2010-06-30T20:49:00.000-05:00

The new issue released moments ago, with astounding new work by Patty Jansen, Joyce Chng, Damon Lord, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mary E. Lowd, Rick Novy and Jaym Gates. It's a fine night on the Brane.

Announcing M-BRANE #18 writers and TOC

2010-06-20T11:59:00.000-05:00

M-Brane SF #18 will appear on July 1 with these fine new stories:

"Prototype" by Patty Jansen
"Lux Perpetua" by Joyce Chng
"Weekday" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
"The Ambi-Cognitive Man" by Mary E. Lowd
"Return to the Moon" by Rick Novy
"Lord of Heaven and Earth" by Jaym Gates

And a poem by Damon Lord titled "Cryo-Hell."

The new issue's writers are far-flung, with representatives from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Singapore, and it is a majority-female group, which pleases me because the previous couple of issues had an extreme gender imbalance in the other direction. I don't apply any sort of gender quota when I select stories, but nor do I want to be one of those male sf editors who seem to always end up with all-male TOCs. I've been actively encouraging submissions from female writers or ones about female protagonists, and I am glad to notice more such items appearing in the in-box.

This month's authors include a couple of familiar names to M-Brane readers. Rick Novy has appeared in the zine many times previously, and he guest-edited our twelfth issue, released as a trade paperback titled Ergosphere. He is also editing a new anthology of near-future sf called 2020 Visions, which M-Brane Press will publish later this year. Patty Jansen, a recent Writers of the Future finalist, appeared in M-Brane last fall and she is also on the staff of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Silvia Moreno-Garcia appeared in our pages a few months ago, and this month offers a science fictional take on vampirism set, like her previous entry, in a future/alternate Mexico (a place that I have come to really like as a location for speculative fiction). Jaym Gates, my co-editor on Little Death of Crossed Genres, appears the first time in M-Brane SF (though she has two entries in the forthcoming The Aether Age). She and Joyce Chng lend a steampunkish flavor to this issue with their highly imaginative tales. Also new to M-Brane is Mary E. Lowd, offering a story about some unusual brothers and sisters on a distant world. Finally, while I don't believe I have published poetry in M-Brane SF before, I am presenting a science fictional poem by British writer and good friend of M-Brane Damon Lord.

M-BRANE #18 ToC late but forthcoming

2010-06-15T20:24:00.000-05:00

I'm seriously late on announcing the contents of the July issue...because I haven't actually finalized it yet. The last few weeks have presented an unprecedented volume of submissions and it has been quite difficult to make some rather close decisions. But the issue will be on time and it will be excellent. Also, the July issue may be the last one that has its own print edition since I plan to go to a new quarterly plan (though monthly releases will still happen in the electronic versions). Occasionally, when I am at a loss for anything else to present, I dig up from the bowels of YouTube a "theme song" for the impending issue:

Probable change to print edition impending

2010-06-11T21:23:00.000-05:00

In addition to some planned changes with the electronic editions of M-Brane SF and the upcoming online edition, I am considering a major change in the print edition. While the electronic forms will remain monthly, I may move to a quarterly schedule for the print version. The new quarterly version, as I envision it, would be an omnibus of three months of the electronic fiction content and possible some "premium" content not available elsewhere. It's possible that a less-frequent print version might draw more attention than the current monthly facsimile of the PDF version, and it would be possible for me to get it into more distribution channels that what I can with the ways it's been done so far. Also, a quarterly schedule for the print version might be more compatible with other M-Brane Press operations such as the forthcoming stand-alone books still on the docket for this year and our new fantasy zine, Brandon Bell's Fantastique Unfettered, which we plan to launch in high style later this year.

New site!

2010-06-10T19:24:00.000-05:00

As regular readers can see, I've started a make-over of the M-Brane site. This new M-Brane SF-dot-com site will eventually house online much of the content on the regular zine, though the PDF subscription option will continue to exist, as will a new epub version. A new M-Brane Press site (also under construction) will be the place to order these zine subscriptions, buy print editions of M-Brane SF and find news and order information for M-Brane Press books, current and forthcoming.

Cesar Torres reads from THE 12 BURNING WHEELS

2010-06-03T19:56:00.002-05:00

Writer Cesar Torres posted this link which goes to an approximately twenty-minute video of him reading before a live audience a couple of stories from his collection The 12 Burning Wheels, published in February by M-Brane. While the audio quality is not perfect, it's entirely listenable, and I was absolutely thrilled to see and hear it. I am very proud to be the publisher of this fine little book, and this was the first time that I got to see someone do a public reading of something from my little press, and I was so happy for Cesar over the evidently positive reaction of his audience. In case I have not said it enough in the past, Cesar Torres is brilliant writer. His work is beautiful, memorable and achingly good, and if I never have another notable success as a small press publisher, I will always be very happy that I had a hand in showing off his work to the world with The 12 Burning Wheels. The book is available in print from Amazon and in electronic formats from M-Brane (option 4 on that list).

M-BRANE #17 released today

2010-05-31T11:42:00.001-05:00

The new issue went out moments ago with great new stories by Aaron Polson, Margaret Karmazin, Jason Sizemore, Edd Howarth, Charles Muir, Joe Jablonski and Lawrence Dagstine. It also contains some interesting news about M-Brane's exciting future, and I'll be posting more about that here on the blog within a few days.

The print version of the new issue is available in the Lulu store. Also, I updated the single-issue PDF order button on Page 2, but it only goes back as far as issue #9. A better storefront system is on the way soon, but in the meantime, if anyone wants a single issue predating #9, one can just order one of the later ones and specify in the Pay Pal note which one they really want.

New office, new color

2010-05-25T19:46:00.001-05:00

Today Jeff and I repainted the room of our new home that I call alternately my office or my library, and which is the new M-Brane SF "World Headquarters." Previously it was, like most rooms in the place, a weird blueish gray that seemed to suck away all light and life. Gradually, Jeff has removed this color from the entire place, and today I assisted him with this room. It's a smaller room than the office in the old place, so all the book shelves don't fit into it, but there was plenty of room elsewhere in the place for some of them, and I think it's quite agreeably appointed and cozy now. These pics, taken a few minutes ago, show off my new room's lovely reddish glow:

I guess that's all I have to report right now!

Good review for CROSSED GENRES 18 (Eastern theme)

2010-05-24T15:41:00.000-05:00

Philippine Online Chronicle has an overall very nice review of the recent "Eastern" issue of Crossed Genres, which included my story "I Will Come Home." I consider valid the one criticism of my story--that it seems to end too abruptly "as though it were simply an introduction to a longer narrative." In fact, the world in which it is set was mined from a "future history" that has been percolating in the back of my brain, occasionally spilling out into lots of mostly unfinished stories, for quite a number of years.

If I were to ever write all the stories that comprise this world, they would span many centuries and this particular one would be set very early in chronology. There exists an outline and some written chapters of a novel that I started several years ago which details an epic struggle for control of Earth and Mars waged among some of the descendants of the characters in "I Will Come Home." Then, set much later is the story that's closest to actual completion, my oft-mentioned novel Shame, which deals with a dying, post-apocalyptic Earth and a powerful human-inhabited Mars that rose to dominance over human affairs sometime centuries after the events of "Novel 1." Then, set even later in time, is an extensively outlined but unfinished space adventure epic that my friend Pat and I were intending to collaborate upon but have let sit idle for many months now. That project was not originally conceived as being part of this larger world, but as I developed characters and situations for it, it started to make sense to link it. So if the new story seems like a set-up for a bigger story, then that is probably an effect of me having all this other stuff churning around in my head.

Weird Asimov dream

2010-05-22T22:10:00.000-05:00

Of possible (though not probable) interest to M-Brane readers is a new post on my Live Journal where I describe a strange dream that I had about Isaac Asimov, and also recount the time when he sent me a note (in real life). In the dream, he looked much as he does in this picture.

Announcing M-BRANE #17 writers and TOC

2010-05-18T09:32:00.002-05:00

I am excited about the upcoming issue of the zine. Here's the cover image and the table of contents for #17:

Edd Howarth: "The Moon Man"
Aaron Polson: "One-Tenth of One Percent"
Margaret Karmazin: "I'll Be Leaving"
Charles A. Muir: "Smoke Nurse"
Lawrence R. Dagstine: "The Girl Who Dreamt Portals"
Joe Jablonksi: "Tremoik"
Jason Sizemore: "For the Sake of Pleasing"

With the exception of Dagstine, who returns to M-Brane's pages with his charming Orphan-Annie-meets-sf tale, all these writers are new to this zine. Edd Howarth (who claims to have written his first short story in crayon on his mother's kitchen walls...at age twenty-one) leads the issue with his thoughtful and amusing "The Moon Man." Aaron Polson, whom I suspect is well-known to a lot of this zine's followers as a result of his many appearances elsewhere, offers a grim item inspired by the films of The Thing and the Campbell story, "Who Goes There?" upon which they were based. Prolific writer Margaret Karmazin delivers a sensitive tale about a marriage and a husband's strange secret. Inspired by dreams and legends of ghostly bedside visitors, Charles Muir's "Smoke Nurse" fascinates and chills. A cult on an alien world and its inevitably lethal trajectory is the subject of Joe Jablonski's "Tremoik." Stoker Award-nominated writer and editor Jason Sizemore of Apex Publications concludes this issue with his spectacular sf adventure novelette "For the Sake of Pleasing." It contains, among other things, exploding heads.

Second-Person POV/ Theodore Sturgeon

2010-05-16T11:01:00.000-05:00

On Twitter, most of the people I follow have some kind of interest in or involvement with fiction writing and publishing, but I have gradually weeded out of the stream nearly all of the literary agents that I was monitoring during the early months of my Twitter era because I grew bored with the endless tips and advice on how to write queries and also the constant lists of "bad" things writers shouldn't ever NEVAR! do with their prose. The former is simply not interesting to me since I am not in the business of writing queries currently, nor do I require them as an editor. The latter is actually pretty annoying because it's obvious to anyone who reads a lot and with discernment that much of the best stuff that's been written and published contains one kind or another of never-do-it, top-ten-mistakes-of-writers rules breakage.

A few months ago, I noticed a mini-trend of agents and editors tweeting about the use of second-person point-of-view on their lists of things they hate and that they never want to see again. You know, it's that POV where you are sitting here typing on your MacBook. You are working on a post for the M-Brane blog, which you have been neglecting. You want to write about Theodore Sturgeon, but you have gotten sidetracked, digressing about agents and POV. You wonder if you ought to instead being posting the ToC for issue #17 (your fellow editor and comrade Jason Sizemore will have a story in it!). Your cat Maus sits atop your desk and shrills at you. You wonder if he is out of food. [He was not out of food.]

Granted, second-person is the least common narrative mode in literature in English (though it's all-pervasive in song lyrics for some reason) and possibly the most difficult to use effectively and perhaps the easiest with which to annoy someone, but I really dig an effective use of it when a writer manages it. Last month I published a novelette by new writer Bob Labar called "Wake," which is told principally in second-person and which also employs several other unconventional methods. When I started reading it for the first time, I wondered if the point-of-view was going to be a "good" use of it or a "bad" use of it, but then when I got deeply enough into the story to understand what was going on, I decided it was maybe a borderline-brilliant choice of POV, one where the technique itself helped illuminate the main character's situation in a way that would have felt very different in third-person.

Then, just a few days ago, I read for the first time Theodore Sturgeon's fantastic short story "The Man Who Lost the Sea," also told largely in second-person. I read it in a paper book, called The Golden Helix, that's been in my collection (mostly unread) for years but fortunately it is also online, recently reprinted here by Strange Horizons (originally in F&SF). It's just spectacular all the way through and especially at the very end when one "gets" what's going on. The copy on my shelf includes a foreword by Sturgeon in which he describes that it came out of period of low productivity, then turned into a 21,000-word novella which he then chopped down to a 5000-word short which was then hailed as one of the best stories of 1959. As I read Sturgeon now, with the perspective of time and the evolution of the sf genre, it's even more obvious what a fine writer he was. He not only told compelling stories, he did it with great style and literary panache in an era where a lot of sf was still pretty crude. A lot of less-well-remembered sf writers in the 1950s could have told this same story, but not many could have told it as well.

Sturgeon is one of probably too many great sf writers that I have not read enough of, and I've been trying to correct that deficit lately. As a kid, I knew his name because he wrote the teleplays for a couple of memorable episodes of the original Star Trek series, "Amok Time" (the one where Spock succumbs to the Vulcan seven-year mating cycle) and "Shore Leave" (where an idyllic planet produces physical manifestations of one's fantasies as a sort of amusement park). He wrote a third unproduced episode called "The Joy Machine" which was later adapted by James Gunn as a novel with the same title for Pocket's Star Trek line. In my childish Trek fan way, I would often sample books and stories by writers whose names I recognized from the Star Trek credits thinking that they must be great if they wrote that show. With Sturgeon, I tried and failed with Godbody, his last book, posthumously published the year of his death. At fourteen or fifteen years old, I wasn't an experienced and sophisticated enough reader to get that book. I found that I didn't like it. It bored and confused me and I gave up on it less than halfway in (and it's not very long). I did hang on to my book Science Fiction Book Club edition of it over the years, however, and went back at it as an adult and got a lot more out of it.

But since that book was Sturgeon's last and had an odd feeling of being a coda to his career, I wanted to find some other stories that were more typical. What I discovered is that none of his work was "typical" but a lot of it was very daring and transgressive. The tres creepy short novel Some of Your Blood, for example, told in epistolary style like Dracula, lingers in the back of the mind long after it's been read. Sturgeon's contribution to Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" probably offends more readers than it delights, but it is exemplary of Sturgeon's way of putting questions to readers and pushing them along toward interesting possible answers. Now I am working my way through the stories in a couple of neglected collections that have been sitting here waiting for me for years, and am enjoying them very much. Has anyone reading this page read Sturgeon, and if so, did you like his work? Are there other writers of that period that you like that don't seem to get enough attention anymore?

Fan fiction?

2010-05-10T20:57:00.000-05:00

I haven't been very looped in on the discussion, but evidently a debate has been happening in the interwebs over the value--or not--of fan fiction.

Here's an item by George R.R. Martin in which he denounces the idea of fan fic and basically says writers are dumb to let fans play in their sandbox. He cites as examples the famous case of Marion Zimmer Bradley getting threatened with a lawsuit by a fan who was writing Darkover fiction that Bradley had read and encouraged after Bradley wanted to write a novel using a premise similar to something in this fan's story. He also talks about Lovecraft and how he died a pauper supposedly because he didn't protect his copyrights, while Edgar Rice Burroughs made himself a millionaire off his Tarzan and Barsoom properties.

Here's an item by Nick Mamatas rebutting Martin's piece and contending that the comparison between Lovecraft and Burroughs is invalid, and making the case that the only reason Lovecraft has a legacy and is so well known and highly regarded now is that he encouraged his fellow writers and fans to play with the Cthulhu Mythos which, in turn, helped keep Lovecraft's own work alive so many decades after his death.

This is an item by Corinne Duyvis in which she ascribes a lot of value to fan fiction as a way for writers to practice the craft and get feedback from readers.

And there are many other such posts around the world dealing with this general topic. What do M-Brane readers think about it? Does anyone who reads this blog or who has written for the magazine read or write any fan fiction, or have you in the past? I used to when I was a kid and had a lot of fun with it, and I think it may have had some of the benefits that Corinne describes. I even self-published a lot of it in my Star Trek fanzine under a variety of pseudonyms. My co-editor and I probably wrote ourselves over half of all the content that we ever published over 21 monthly issues, so we certainly got some practice at writing a lot of stuff. That's not to say that any of it was any good, but it was probably a useful exercise for a young kid nonetheless.

Move completed; New story published!

2010-05-01T07:35:00.002-05:00

I'll indulge in some bragging about the appearance of my short story "I Will Come Home" in this month's issue of Crossed Genres. My pride in this publication comes not from satisfaction with my own work, but from the fact that Crossed Genres is such a fine publication and the fact that I appear alongside such talented people. As I have mentioned here before, I rarely finish any fiction and haven't gone so far as to submit any for a long time until this story, so it feels great to be back at it.

In other news: Jeff and I successfully completed our move to St. Louis Thursday afternoon. TV and internet was blessedly restored to us yesterday evening, and we are very happy with the new place. We do still, however, have a great deal of unpacking and setting up to do. This image will give you an idea of the current condition of the new M-Brane SF office.

#16 RELEASED

2010-04-28T09:11:00.000-05:00

M-Brane #16 PDF edition was distributed to subscribers this morning. The print version is available in the Lulu store. Thanks again to the writers for their great stories, and to the zine's many readers for their continued support. I will be mostly offline for the next couple of days as I relocate.

M-BRANE #16 COMING...this week sometime!

2010-04-27T11:40:00.000-05:00

Sometime between tonight and Saturday May 1, I will release the terrific sixteenth issue of M-Brane SF. Sorry to be so indefinite about it, but I am now (finally) in the midst of the move back to STL and will need to fit in this project where I can. It's basically ready to go, just doing a bit more proofreading on it. It will feature amazing work by Glenn Gillette, Kay Holt, TJ McIntyre, Michael Andre-Driussi, Sean Eads and Bob Labar. In the meantime, here's a video to watch:

M-BRANE #16 contents announced

2010-04-22T09:28:00.000-05:00

M-Brane #16 releases in a few days with an exciting and unusual assortment of stories. Here's the table of contents:

"Why Look Down?" by Glenn Lewis Gillette
"Pieces of You" by Kay T. Holt
"This Electronic Life" by T.J. McIntyre
"Passion in the Year 2090" by Sean Eads
"Mad Dogs of Mercury" by Michael Andre-Driussi
"Wake" by Bob Labar

Glenn Lewis Gillette is the author of this zine's first story ever, appearing last year on page one of M-Brane #1, while T.J. McIntyre appeared in M-Brane #3. Michael Andre-Driussi has appeared twice recently in M-Brane. New to our pages are Kay T. Holt, co-editor of Crossed Genres; Sean Eads, a reference librarian and writer from Colorado; and Bob Labar who makes his print debut with his unusual and experimental story.

Dhalgren on stage

2010-04-17T21:57:00.002-05:00

I was astonished when I saw this review by Jo Walton of a stage play based on Samuel Delany's Dhalgren. I was dazzled by tbe very idea. I had that same feeling that I have while asleep in recurring dreams when I discover that there exist "lost episodes" original Star Trek. But evidently it's real, this on-stage reimagining of Delany's magnum opus, a play titled Bellona, Destroyer of Cities.

Dhalgren elicits a wide range of reactions. Writers that I admire almost as much as Delany, such as Ellison and Dick, said unflattering things about it, while others, like Sturgeon, heaped highest praise on it. It seems like a lot of people have started reading it and then given up on it. But I adore it. I don't know if I can say firmly that it's the single greatest novel I have ever read, but it would certainly be in the top five. It's not just a stunning achievement of speculative fiction, it is a towering triumph of American literature penned by one of the most literate and subversive writers ever to write sf.

That book maintains a sort of garrison in my imagination and I am always waiting and looking for the next thing that will astonish and thrill as deeply as it did. It's a fairly fresh memory, since I read it for the first time in the fall of 2008 in several intense sessions, patience fraying when I had to break to go to work or to sleep, needing to get back to it ASAP. Frequently, when I am between books, I consider rereading it, but I refrain because I don't always need the reminder of how small and inept my own imagination and writing are in contrast. But when I made my attempt at NaNoWriMo last November, I used Dhalgren as a sort of cultural touchstone for my characters, and inserted as a plot detail a fictitious readers' discussion of the book on the Diane Rehm Show.

Now that there has been a play, I wonder if there could ever be a movie? It would probably suck, but it's still fun to imagine.

Another progress report

2010-04-13T22:13:00.000-05:00

Though a period of extreme day-jobbery followed by a period of out-town-travel and a grueling search for our new home put me well behind on all projects, I can report happily that the M-Brane slush-pile is caught up through April 10. Stories have been booked for the May issue, and I will announce the TOC soon. It's a really good one! Also, just today, I completed a sort of rough advance reader copy of The Aether Age for the multi-media crew to look at, and we are getting very, very close to being able to turn the final product over to our publisher, Eric at Hadley Rille Books. That print-out that I'm holding in my hand is something like the way first page of each story will probably be formatted. That element at the top is a segment of a timeline highlighting the main "historical" event of the story along with a couple of events that are thought to have happened before and after. This is a very fancy project!

In other news, I recently actually finished a short story and submitted to a zine. And it was accepted. I'm not sure if I am supposed to talk about it yet because I don't think they have announced their TOC yet, but I am quite pleased about it. I have so many works-in-progress that never get done and I haven't subbed anything to anyone in a long time, so it was very encouraging experience to finally do so and get a great response.

Progress report

2010-04-08T21:19:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I have not posted to this page since the release of M-Brane #15. I have a good excuse, however: we have been deep in the process of getting ourselves moved back to STL, and for most of the past week have been there working on finding a new home to rent. I'm happy to report success on that, and also on finding a decent new day job. We leave OKC by May 1.

To writers with submissions pending: I am sorry for my recent rather slow response times, but I intend to catch up within a few days. A few writers will be getting the exciting news that have had stories accepted for M-Brane #16. Yes, it's April 8 and I have not yet booked a single story for the May 1 issue. But I swear I will soon, and news of the next table of contents will show up right here in a few days.

M-BRANE #15 RELEASED!

2010-03-31T21:00:00.000-05:00

This was just released to the PDF subscribers. The print version is live at the Lulu store.

The April issue is marvelous. Here's the table of contents:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: "The Manticore"

Erica Hildebrand: "Aunt Eustace"

Kaolin Imago Fire: "Immersion"

Jason Heller: "The Prospect"

Deborah Walker: "Data Crabs"

Cate Gardner: "Treading the Regolith"

Prolific writer of strange fiction Cate Gardner is well known to readers from many venues, including a previous appearance in M-Brane (issue #3); Deborah Walker has appeared in M-Brane twice previously (issues #5 and #8), in our anthology Things We Are Not, and has stories forthcoming in other venues later this year; Jason Heller appeared in M-Brane #6 and is a regular contributor to The Onion AV Club. New to M-Brane's pages are Silvia Moreno-Garcia, publisher of Innsmouth Free Press; Erica Hildebrand, fiction writer and Odyssey graduate; and Kaolin Fire, well known to M-Brane readers as one of the editors of GUD Magazine.

AETHER AGE progress report

2010-03-23T21:03:00.000-05:00

If anyone's interested, there's a new post at The Region Between with some my thoughts and reflections at this stage of editing The Aether Age. It contains links to the book's TOC on the AeA blog and links to some of the other creative folks who are working with us on it.

AETHER AGE announcement soon

2010-03-22T19:19:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, we settled a few remaining details and finalized the table of contents for The Aether Age. We will be announcing it very soon at the Aether Age blog.

This is a bigger and more complex project than I had imagined it would be be when we started, and, because of the shared-world nature of the book, a lot different than compiling an anthology of unrelated short stories or even a themed collection. The stories selected for The Aether Age will comprise much more than a theme--they will open windows into an astonishing new world. This is going to be a very cool book.

Reminder: MACHINA pre-order deals

2010-03-17T20:06:00.000-05:00

In case readers missed it earlier, I want to point out that we are still offering some excellent pre-order deals for Derek J. Goodman's Machina over there on the books info page. Pre-order purchases of either the print or ebook versions will include subscriptions to the electronic M-Brane until April 1. The price for the print book includes shipping.

M-BRANE #15 PREVIEW

2010-03-12T09:59:00.000-06:00

The April issue will charm, stun, dazzle and blow the minds of M-Brane readers. Here's the table of contents:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: "The Manticore"

Erica Hildebrand: "Aunt Eustace"

Kaolin Imago Fire: "Immersion"

Jason Heller: "The Prospect"

Deborah Walker: "Data Crabs"

Cate Gardner: "Treading the Regolith"

A little bit of well-earned recognition

2010-03-11T22:35:00.000-06:00

I was delighted to see that M-Brane SF rated a couple of mentions in this Tangent Online list of reading recommendations for short fiction published in 2009. Cheers to Sue Lange ("Zara Gets Laid") and Edward W. Robertson ("Steve Kendrick's Disease"), both in issue #5, June 2009. A few months ago, we did get a quite favorable review of that overall issue from Tangent. I believe that's the only issue of our eleven last year that was seen by a Tangent reviewer, so it makes me wonder if we might have received a couple more nods if more stories had been reviewed. I should probably make a better effort to get these issues in front of more reviewers. In any case, getting these mentions for M-Brane and a couple of my writers gave me a nice feeling of legitimacy, a sense that I have, in fact, made some good decisions with the zine. The second year, already about to see its third issue, is going to be even better. My decision to decrease somewhat the number of stories per month is actually making it easier rather than harder to put together some really solid monthly collections, and I think we will see a lot of M-Brane stories and writers showing up on a lot of lists in another year's time.

Sue Lange also appeared in M-Brane #9 with "The Kangaroo War" (there's a link in the right-hand column to get #9 for free), and Ed Robertson will appear soon in The Aether Age.

New anthology forthcoming from M-BRANE SF: 2020 VISIONS edited by Rick Novy

2010-03-10T22:31:00.000-06:00

Read this post at Rick Novy's blog. He will be editing an anthology of very-near-future sf titled 2020 Visions (as in the year 2020), which I will be publishing. We do not have a publication date set yet, but we are definitely planning to get it out in 2010, a mere ten years before the time period of these visions of 2020. It's a cool concept in that most of us will presumably (hopefully) still be alive in 2020, and it will be fun to look back and see if any of the writers foretold anything about the near future.

THE LITTLE DEATH of CROSSED GENRES to be edited by Jaym Gates...and me!

2010-03-10T20:31:00.000-06:00

After that post from a couple days ago (linking to Tycho Garren's blog) about scaling one's projects and managing one's time, I took a big cleansing breath and decided that I ought to add another magazine to my editing duties. That's not quite what happened. A couple months ago, writer Jaym Gates and I offered our assistance to Bart Leib and Kay Holt of Crossed Genres as slush readers for their new erotic sf/f quarterly. Yesterday, Bart and Kay informed us that time constraints were making the project unwieldy for them and asked Jaym and me if we would like to step up and actually edit and produce the zine. And, of course, we said yes. We're excited about it, and it should be a very cool (or, probably hot) zine.

Length

2010-03-09T20:09:00.001-06:00

Charlie Stross posted an interesting entry today wherein he reviews the history of the length of sf novels and how length has evolved through a series of things not to do with writing, such as distribution channels and printing/binding methods. As examples, he explains why his Accelerando was made to fit into a few score fewer pages in its US edition versus its UK edition, and why his Merchant Princes series consists of more volumes than he had originally envisioned. It's interesting reading if that's the sort of thing that's your bag.

He speculates that if ebooks become the major sales channel, this could aid in a revival of fiction formats that have been eclipsed by what we see as the "regular"-length novel, such as the novella, the Dickensian serial and the "gigantic shoebox-sized monster." This interests me because I, too, have been thinking that a revival of the novella in particular would be fun as a development for sf. I don't know if there's a lot of future for it in print, but I am trying a couple of projects this year (they'll be in ebook formats as well): Derek J. Goodman's Machina (pre-order info on the books page) which is a 236-page trade paperback short fiction collection with just four stories in it, one of them a nearly-30K novella. The next will be the first (and hopefully not the only) "Double." The two stories that will comprise the first one are, by word count, novellas rather than novels, and that was the case with plenty of stories in the old Ace series, too. Future volumes may have longer stories, but I will probably cap them at perhaps 50K. This is a decent yet reasonably short chunk of reading, a nice length for a lot of sf stories. It offers more to delve into than a short story but without being an epic. Not that I don't like a big, long epic just fine, but I think there's room for mid-range material, and if the new methods and the smaller publishers (like me) make possible getting more of it published, then I think that's probably a good thing for the genre.

The Dream Journal

2010-03-08T19:08:00.000-06:00

I don't know how many people who look at this blog also ever read my Live Journal (The Region Between)--I seem to have cultivated a couple different followings that overlap a little bit but not completely. That's okay, and that's why I started the LJ in the first place, to keep some my non-M-Brane business off of this page so that it wouldn't annoy people. But I thought I'd mention here to writers in particular, that I recently started a fun (to me) project of using the LJ to take notes on weird dreams that I have. I think I've mentioned before that images and narratives from dreams frequently stick with me and inspire fiction. Nearly everything that I have attempted to write in recent memory has had its origin in a dream.

A lot of people say that they never remember dreams, or at least seldom recall any detail. I think, however, that one can cultivate the habit of remembering them. For me, the ones I recall best generally happen in that period of sleep not long before I am about to wake up for the day or in the early part of sleep (like when I doze for an hour on the couch and things that I am hearing on the TV weave their way into REM state). What I usually do upon awakening is simply think about it for a minute, just review whatever I can remember as immediately as possible upon awakening, and generally the main points stick in memory. And even if the narrative sense of the dream is lost, sometimes images and scenery will linger, and those can be interesting in themselves.

I've often seen the recommendation that one keep a notepad next to the bed to take notes on dreams, or even speak some observations into a recording device right away upon awakening. In my case, the former would never work (I can't handwrite anything for crap--not even a brief note), and the latter would certainly annoy my partner. Indeed, he has little patience for it when I try to tell him about a dream under any circumstances...because he thinks they are intensely boring. So instead of boring him, I will try the patience of my LJ followers. One can peek in on my dream journal using the dream journal tag. There are only four such entries so far, and they probably are fairly dull. But sfnal geekiness surfaces constantly, which suggests that my subconscious is wonderfully marinated in it.

"Humans as individuals don't scale well."

2010-03-08T18:17:00.000-06:00

Demands on my time--which have grown in recent months--make it so that I have not been reading some of my favorite blogs as often as I would like. One that I try to make a few minutes for, however, is "Tychoish: Dialectical Futurism," a very thoughtful series of essays on a far-ranging series of topics that together indicate the configuration of the vast intellect of multi-talented Sam Kleinman (aka Tycho Garen). I'd like to point everyone to this post, "Conceptualizing Scale." It gets right at a source of frequent anxiety for me, namely a nagging sensation of being underwater or out of the loop with information that I suspect I need or with projects that I think I should be giving some more time. Each of the items on his list makes a lot of sense to me, and it strikes me that there is a tremendously useful congruence between his forth and sixth points: "ignore everything you can possibly stand to" and "use technology and media to build relationships rather than accumulate information." It's all good stuff to consider for people like me who try to be publishers and fiction writers in the world as it is with its endless web content and social media opportunities.

Pre-order Goodman's MACHINA!

2010-03-04T14:11:00.010-06:00

"We so rarely give thought to the machines that surround us, but just because we ignore them does not mean they don't have stories to tell. Monolithic factory machines might just hide a divine presence, robots from a forgotten war lay in wait in the sewers for a time when they can rise again, creatures of steel and steam patrol the skies, and a metal giant made for destruction learns emotions from a teenage boy. In these four tales, Derek J. Goodman shows us just what mysteries the mechanical world may hold."

In a few weeks, M-Brane SF will publish Derek J. Goodman's collection of sf novelettes and novellas Machina. The book starts with the spectacular "Dea Ex Machina," which has been adapted as an opera for an upcoming production by the Crucible in Oakland California, and also includes the amazing steampunk novella "The Twister Sisters"; the loving homage to 1980's-era sci-fi and teen movies "Those Were the Days," and the stunning manga-influenced boy/machine love story "As Wide as the Sky, and Twice as Explosive."

Mark Streshinsky, the librettist and director of Machine, the opera based on Derek's story, provides an introduction to the collection. The cover art is by Dan Galli.

The book will become available in print and as an ebook from Amazon on April 1, but we are offering several direct-from-M-Brane pre-order deals starting immediately. These will also appear on the books page.

1) Buy Machina in print (trade paperback) for $12.95 (shipping included!). Get a complimentary one-year subscription to the PDF edition of M-Brane SF!

2) Buy the electronic version of Machina in either PDF, .prc(mobi), or .epub formats for $4.95. Get a complementary one-year subscription to the PDF edition of M-Brane SF!

3) Buy Machina together with Cesar Torres' The 12 Burning Wheels (both in trade paperback) for only $14.95! Or with Ergosphere, ten stunning stories from the pages of M-Brane SF, for $15.95! Shipping included, as well as a complimentary one-year subscription to the PDF edition of M-Brane SF!

Choose an option...

For Duotrope users...

2010-02-25T15:37:00.008-06:00

If you're a writer and use Duotrope to find and follow markets for your stories, writer Glenn Gillette has a new app that you may be interested in. He says:
Diligent writers working markets ask, "1. What's changed since I last looked? 2. How do I skip a market I've already decided about?" Duotrope's RSS feed helps with #1 (as far as I know, the only market clearing house that does), but not #2. I've written a desktop app that 1) reads Duotrope's RSS feed since the last time I ran it, 2) looks in my existing buckets for each market mentioned, 3) pops up a dismissal when it finds it already labeled, or 4) lets me work new ones (look at Duotrope's web-page & make a decision). I use these buckets: not pay enough, closed or cancelled, no story matches, and follow-up. Is anybody else interested in using this desktop app, called "siftMarkets", as a free download? If you're interested, Glenn may be be contacted here.

M-BRANE #14 RELEASED; comments on e-books and the print edition

2010-02-24T17:37:00.001-06:00

A few days early, I have released the PDF edition of the March issue. Also, a print version is available here.

This issue is grade-A super-fine. With new stories from Cat Rambo, Rick Novy, Derek J. Goodman, and Michael Andre-Driussi, it will amaze and delight. We also have first-rate entries from Michael C. Lea and Scott H. Andrews, as well as the fine sf debut of Ben Phenicie. Subscriptions to M-Brane and single copies of the issue #14 PDF can be ordered here.

As with the last issue, #13, there is not yet a mobi or other non-PDF ebook format ready to go. Long story short: I am suspending at least temporarily most of my involvement with the Kindle store save for some current and upcoming book titles. This is due to a couple of annoying facts about the Kindle store, and I'm also trying to not wear out my friend Dan Tannenbaum with constant requests for help with ebook formatting. But I am in the process right now of reworking the ebook format situation for M-Brane and will have news of that shortly. I'm still learning how to do it, but I believe I will soon have the in-house ability to generate epub-formatted books and then render those into other formats as well. When that process is mastered, I will be able to offer electronic subscriptions to M-Brane in more formats than just the PDF, including getting it available for the Kindle again (though possibly not sold through Amazon...we'll see).

I've gotten a couple of queries in recent months about the likelihood of there ever being a print subscription to M-Brane rather than having to buy it issue-by-issue as it has been so far. The problem with that is that there is no "print run" as such. There aren't copies sitting around here or anywhere waiting for buyers. I offer it by way of a print-on-demand service, and those per-copy prices that one sees there are literally as cheap as they can get doing it that way (I think my royalty on #14 is maybe fifty cents). I may switch fully over to a different service in the next few months, and that will probably bring the per copy cost down. But still, it's never going to get much cheaper than 5 or 6 bucks/copy...PLUS shipping. If I believed that there were even a handful of people that actually want to spend something like a hundred dollars or more per year to get M-Brane in print, I'd consider setting it up. But I don't think there is even one person who wants to do that. But let me know if I'm mistaken!

12 BURNING WHEELS Release Day! And listen to the author's playlist!

2010-02-22T19:04:00.001-06:00

Today is the official publication date for Cesar Torres' The 12 Burning Wheels. Order info is on the books page and on this page a couple posts down. We are extending all the pre-order deals indefinitely. Cesar has placed a fun extra on his site: his music playlist, 12 songs to accompany to the stories. So go check that out, too. If you would rather buy it from Amazon than avail yourself of one of my direct offers (maybe you're buying other stuff on Amazon anyway), the print version is available there, but there has been a delay with Kindle version going live (we have it here, however, as well as an .epub edition). I won't rain on this great day by complaining about Amazon, however, so I will save my gripes about dealing with Kindle store for another time. The image is of the author and his fine book. Get a copy now!