M-BRANE #19 released

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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.

Move completed; New story published!

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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"

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.

A little bit of well-earned recognition

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

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!

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

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

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."

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!

"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!

Select format

PDF MOBI (.prc) EPUB

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...

MACHINA/12 BW $14.95 MACHINA/ ERGOSPHERE $15.95