Pre-order THE AETHER AGE

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

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

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

M-Brane #21 RELEASED

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

An Open Letter to Harlan Ellison

Dear Mr. Ellison,

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

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

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

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

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

Announcing M-BRANE #21 writers and TOC

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

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

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

Thoughts on TREK's 44th Anniversary

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

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

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

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

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

M-Brane #20 released

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

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

M-Brane #20 ToC

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

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


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

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

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

"Sometimes life really does get in the way."

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.

2020 VISIONS contents announced

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

Mary Robinette Kowal – “Birthright”

Sheila Finch – “The Persistence of Butterflies”

Randy Henderson – “A Shelter for Living Things”

Jason S. Ridler – “Showing Light”

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

David Lee Summers – “The Revelation of Thought”

Jeff Spock – “Teh Afterl1fe”

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

Cat Rambo – “Therapy Buddha”

Jack Mangan – “Dead Rookies”

David Boop – “Organ Cloning While You Wait”

Spencer Ellsworth – “The Black Plague of Our Generation”

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

Alethea Kontis – “Pocket Full of Posey”

Alex Wilson – “Nervewrecking”

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

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

Comments on vanity presses

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

The "One Lovely Blog" Award

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

Book projects in motion this week

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

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

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

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

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

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

M-BRANE #19 released

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.