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

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.

Book plug: New Apex imprint releases queer zombie novella

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.

Glenn Lewis Gillette

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.

An Open Letter to Harlan Ellison

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)

"Sometimes life really does get in the way."

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

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.

The Ruins of Earth

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.

Weird Asimov dream

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.

Second-Person POV/ Theodore Sturgeon

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?

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.

Dhalgren on stage

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.

"Humans as individuals don't scale well."

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. 

Delany interviewed on Dragon Page

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've been reading Samuel Delany's About Writing which includes a few interviews with him. I was thinking about trying to hunt up some interviews with him online and, almost as the thought formed, someone Tweeted the link to this interview with him, a segment of the "Cover to Cover" podcast series on the Dragon Page.

During the discussion, Delany talks about his new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders which forthcoming later this year (huzzah!). Wikipedia has an article about it. He says that he is trying with this novel to straddle a space between literary fiction, science fiction and pornography. That's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking forward to reading soon.

New stuff on the book shelf

As a sort of Christmas gift to myself, I recently ordered a few new books that needed to have been on my shelves all along and which were conspicuous in their absence.  Shiny new copies, y'all, not even from the used shop. Currently, I am browsing through Samuel R. Delany's book of essays, interviews and letters About Writing. While I haven't read all of it yet and have been skipping around in it, I have been finding it very thought provoking. Aside from being one of the great spec fic authors, Delany is an English professor and this book occasionally takes me back to my days as an English major and the kind of reading that I did a lot more of back then, but it's generally a lot livelier than some of that was.

Also from Delany, I got this nice "deluxe edition" of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. This novel I have read a couple times before but was lacking a copy in the permanent collection. I first read it when I was a teenager and I know I didn't fully appreciate it back then. I got it from the library just last year and was blown away by it. This is an awesome, star-spanning sf novel of many worlds and civilizations and races. If anyone ever wants to know what I think is a great sf novel, then this is a good one to which to point.

I also scored these collections by Jack Vance and James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon). Most of the content of these I have encountered elsewhere before, but my own shelves were sadly missing these authors. Indeed, there is a sad and shameful paucity of Tiptree titles in print currently. She wasn't necessarily the most prolific writer ever, but she has a lot more out there than this one single title. But if there's only to be one, then this is probably the one to have. The Vance book collects the four Dying Earth books under one cover, and I am looking forward to returning to that soon.

I had also planned to get, at long last, my own copy of another long-time favorite, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination.  It's a classic and a really special, spectacular book and it appears to be entirely out of print! Crazy!

Pre-order special! THE 12 BURNING WHEELS!

Writer of weird and spectacular fiction Cesar Torres has created an astounding 12-item cycle of stories that he calls The 12 Burning Wheels, and somehow it has happened that I have the great privilege of bring these stories into print under a single cover. This beautiful book's official publication date is February 22, but I am offering some pre-order specials on it starting immediately:

1) The print edition of The 12 Burning Wheels will sell for on Amazon for $7.99 plus shipping, but order it now from M-Brane SF for only $7.99, shipping included. Purchase includes a free subscription to the PDF edition of M-Brane SF.


2) Buy the print editions of The 12 Burning Wheels and the queer anthology Things We Are Not (TWAN) for only $18.99, shipping included. This is a serious deal, since TWAN by itself sells for almost that. This option, too, includes a free subscription to the M-Brane PDF.

3) Buy The 12 Burning Wheels and the print edition of Ergosphere (aka M-Brane #12, edited by Rick Novy) for only $15.99.  The M-Brane subscription is included with this option as well.

These offers will likely expire before the publication date for The 12 Burning Wheels, so act soon.  Here is the Pay Pal link for them (a drop-down menu) accommodates the three options. One does not need a Pay Pal account to use Pay Pal: one may use credit and debit cards, and checks by way of their e-check system.

Choose an option...

12 BURNING WHEELS $7.99 12 WHEELS/ TWAN $18.99 12 WHEELS/ ERGOSPHERE $15.99

Antonelli's FANTASTIC TEXAS released

Prolific speculative fiction writer Lou Antonelli, whose story "Good News for the Dead" appeared last year in M-Brane SF #3, has a new book out, titled Fantastic Texas, from Fantasic Books/Wilder Publications. It can be found by way of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and some details about it are posted here as well. Lou's work has long been well-regarded by readers, and he has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies in recent years.

By the way, any M-Brane writers who have new stuff coming out are always welcome to let me know about it and I will try to put up a notice about it here. I used to make a better habit of keeping track by myself of new publications from writers who have appeared in my zine, but there are so many such writers and so many new publications anymore, that it's hard to keep up.

Michael Griffith's novel published!

Just a shout-out for speculative fiction writer, frequent M-Brane contributor and general ally Michael Griffiths and his new novel...

The Chronicles Of Jack Primus by Michael D. Griffiths is set in a contemporary world, but one far different than ours. Evil is not a concept for philosophical debate, but rather a strong force, made tangible and real, when it darkens and corrupts killers and madmen. These Chronicles document Jack’s attempt to not only keep his life, but also his sanity as he delves deep into the realm of the foul Xemmoni who seek to increase their own ends by draining the life force of their Human victims.

Jack discovers far more than how stay alive. His journey exposes him to terrors no man should be forced to witness, but unlike some poor victim in a traditional horror story, Jack not only fights back, but also takes the battle to his enemy. Armed with only the small weapons he can fit on his motorcycle, what was once a man fleeing for his life transforms into a hero out to save whomever he can from these foul creatures that few ever realize exist. Travel with Jack as he embarks, not only on the road to survival, but also struggles to unravel the foul mysterious of the evil race know as the Xemmoni. Just released by Living Dead Press, this is Michael D. Griffith’s first published novel.

SF in the age of the irrational: Shall we fight?

Writer Ian Sales recently posted on his website a thoughtful article titled Science Fiction: last bastion of the rational in which he examines whether or not sf as a genre ought to be didactic. He says he never subscribed to the Hugo Gernsback attitude that sf ought to be about "educating the public on the possibilities of science," and he also initially doubted the "Mundane SF" movement  of writers like Geoff Ryman as well as the call from Jetse DeVries to have sf be a deliberately optimistic genre.

"To me, sf is a literary mode," says Sales, "not a teaching tool, not futurism." But he goes on to discuss the continuous attack upon science, reason and fact by the right wing in the US and the UK and wonders if perhaps sf should take a stand against this and play a real educational role. He also takes a swipe at the fantasy genre and its current popularity as something that supports or is maybe symptomatic of the retreat from rationalism in our cultures. That may be overstating the case since, while there are currently a lot more avid fantasy readers than avid sf readers, the total reading population of all books of any kind at all is incredibly tiny in this country (I think reading remains more of a habit in the UK, but I'm not sure). The genre that is more popular by far than even fantasy is, sadly, right wing political screeds by douchebags like Bill O'Reilly and sociopaths like Ann Coulter. 

I wish I knew if there was a productive role that our genre could actually play in blunting the march of lunacy and denialism and bugfuck craziness that seems to be overwhelming every discussion in the US and (I hear) in the UK as well. We live in a world where not that many people do any long-form reading and where so many people are simply not interested in facts or reasonable arguments. People pick their facts, or simply invent them, to support their opinions. 

Here's a recent example of people making up shit: A few weeks ago NPR reported that some gun nut group (not the NRA, a different smaller one, can't remember name, something like Gun Owners of America) sent letters to all of the United States senators asking them to not support health care reform on the grounds that it would be an assault on gun owners' rights. How so? Well, first the evil Obama would presumably decree that having a gun in the house is a health risk. But how would the health system itself have knowledge of who owns guns? Because the Big Government would somehow enter this  information into the "national medical records data base" created  earlier this year by "the stimulus package." Senators who support this, these gun nuts warned, would face some consequences, because this groups next action would be to focus their efforts on those states with the best chance of recalling their Senators.  Ok, well, here's just some of what's wrong with that: 1) There is not now nor is there likely to ever be this national medical records data base. It doesn't exist and 2) it certainly was not created by the stimulus legislation; it's paranoid fantasy, delusion, totally made up, no such goddamned thing, and probably even impossible or at least discouragingly difficult to do; 3) And about recalling the Senators?  Can't be done. No provision exists in the Constitution to recall a United States senator. Very few ways exist to remove a Senator aside from death in office or losing an election, and one of those ways is not voter recall. 

So the entire thing is a fiction designed to shore up a ridiculous political position and insert still more hysterical propaganda into the "debate." It should be embarrassing to the people behind it. But it's not. They don't care. They're True Believers in their own made-up "facts." And now there are probably a lot more people running around this benighted land thinking there is a Big Government Medical Database with notes in it about their bloody guns. What can the remaining rational people do against a giant phenomenon like this? Will reason and fact perish forever or will there eventually be a backlash? Does science fiction have anything important to say about it? I hope so.

Signal Boost: Keep a geek in training

I have never met Caren Gussoff in person, but I know her as a colleague and an ally. She is a brilliant writer (I've published her once in M-Brane already, in issue #5, and will again in #12--the Ergosphere book--in a few days). She is also a brilliant editor, as is evident from her webzine Brain Harvest. I don't know her spouse, the artist Chris Sumption, at all. Never even exchanged an email or tweet with him. But I hear that he is doing his best to further his education and employability in this shitty economy, and that he and Caren are a mere $600 short on making his tuition payment. His Pell grant ran out. What? The Feds run out of money? Why? (Look no further than Afghanistan and Iraq...don't get me started...) Anyway, they need the money by December 21. That's in just a few days, y'all. So go to Caren's website and see what she has to offer in exchange for a donation to their cause. She's not just begging over there. She's offering some fine services in trade. She'll write you into her novel--her real novel that she has grant money for--or critique your fiction. Or, what the hell, just throw her a donation in return for nothing but that good feeling. As many of you know, I just recently completed successfully a little fund drive to help my guy Jeff do some school, and it breaks my heart that so many people are being so completely fucked over by such petty amounts of money. I know people in the online spec fic community (especially my readers, jeez!) get burned out on being shaken down for donations all the damned time. But there it is. Once again. Help if you can. 

M-Brane SF Presents...MACHINA

M-Brane SF is proud to announce a new story collection by author Derek J. Goodman.  Machina will contain four short stories and novellas centered around machines and the way they affect the people around them.  Sometimes they are part of the background, sometimes they are heroes and villians, but they always have a bigger impact than it would initially appear.

At the center of Machina  is Derek's story "Dea Ex Machina," the story of a man who has sold himself to a factory and been turned into a mindless drone through magic.  But as the magic begins to wear off, he questions the reasons he ended up in the factory to begin with, and starts to wonder if there might be some truth to the stories that, among the magic of the factory, there really is a goddess in the machines.  This story is currently being adapted as an opera, and will be performed by the Crucible in Oakland in January 2011.

We will release this book in April 2010 with an introduction by Mark Streshinsky, the producer and librettist for Machine, the opera adapted from "Dea Ex Machina."

The accompanying image is not necessarily the real cover art. I would be interested in having something more directly inspired by "Dea Ex Machina" as described above. Interested artists should email me at mbranesf at gmail dot com. The gig doesn't really pay much of anything, but I might be able to come up with a modest honorarium or perhaps a royalties share.