M-BRANE #4 RELEASED

Cheers, peace and love from the Brane: The new issue is published and it is so good. We need new subscriptions and donations to the writers' fund badly, but I suspect this new issue will get us some. The print edition via Lulu and single-issue orders of #4 in PDF form are available on Page 2. Hit the button over there.

Keep reading below: my interview with the great Robert E. Vardeman is in the previous post. It also appears in the new issue along with chapter one of his new novel The Genetic Menace, soon to be released by Zumaya Publications.

M-BRANE 4 PREVIEW: Q&A with Robert E. Vardeman

FROM TOMORROW'S ISSUE OF M-BRANE SF:

I am thrilled to publish, in collaboration with Zumaya Publications, the first chapter of Robert E. Vardeman’s previously unpublished novel The Genetic Menace in M-Brane #4 tomorrow 4/30! Bob kindly took the time to answer a few questions for me…

CF: I was fascinated to see that you were a nominee for the fan writer Hugo in 1972, but I didn’t manage to learn from research what, specifically, the nomination was for. Was it for fiction published in someone else’s zine, or were you personally publishing a zine?

BV: This was an oddity of the nomination system. Frank Kelly Freas once won a Hugo as best artist in a year where he had nothing published (one of many well deserved ones, I might add). My fan writing the prior year was probably what got me onto the ballot. I did a bimonthly fanzine Sandworm for several years. The title, of course, is taken from my all-time (still) favorite sf novel, Dune. I also wrote extensively for other fanzines, mostly LoCs (letters of comment) but also some articles. I miss a lot of the silly camaraderie of fmz days. There are still echoes, though, that I appreciate. Not a month ago I received a 1973 copy of Michael Dobson’s Random Jottings that had an article I had done. Like an old Ace Double, on the flip side was the explanation—The Alternate History Issue, March 2009. Dobson and Jim Young have actually gone back into print fmz or rather “The fanzine you hold in your hands doesn’t really exist.” Great fun.

I started a monthly apa (amateur press association) with Ed Smith back in 1969. SLANapa is still publishing and on the same schedule, though my activity has fallen to zero except when my turn as editor comes around every eighteen months or so. Forty years of a monthly apa is pretty amazing, at least to me. Besides myself, there are three other original members still cranking out monthly zines alongside 10 “newcomers.”

CF: Who were the writers that most impressed or inspired you as a young man? Also, what might we find you reading today?

BV: When I was eight, I had a Cub Scout project of reading a book. Argh. My mother bought the first three Tom Swift Jr. novels for $1 (a deal intended to get poor unsuspecting kids hooked on the series…sounds like a pusher, right? The first is free, then you pay and pay and pay) I loved the books and started haunting the bookstore every 6 months for new titles. I noticed other gaudy-covered books. SF. I read the Hardy Boys, of course, but sf was the drug of choice.

It’s a cliché but Robert Heinlein was and is the premier influence on my tastes in sf. That’s RAH prior to (and including) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The more popular he became, the less I could stand his books. The solipsism he toyed with in early titles predominated in his bestsellers. Asimov was never quite the favorite Clarke was, but I loved space opera. And still do. Later writers I found impossible to put down included Silverberg, John Brunner, a lot of fantasy writers like Fritz Leiber, Thomas Burnett Swann and authors with small sf/f exposure but huge production outside the field like John Myers Myers and George Stewart. Myers is a particular favorite since I got into writing westerns. I still specifically chase down his books. The Last of the Bravos was the last one of his I read. Fabulous history.

Today, I have drifted from sf, though I still meander back now and again (ok, it’s more than a meander), but I read a lot of mysteries. My favorite writer died in January (Donald Westlake) and Tony Hillerman who helped me as a writer and gave me great enjoyment as a reader died late last year. Lawrence Block and Robert Crais are both top-shelf writers, and I love the Kaminsky’s “Toby Peters” books. Being a fan of the Monk TV show, I picked up Lee Goldberg’s tie-in novel and discovered a new writer. Oldies but goodies have to be John D McDonald, Chandler and Hammett. I never had much liking for Agatha Christie or cozies.

CF: When I was a young kid, I was a huge Trekkie, and so my first encounter with your work was the Star Trek novels back when they were new. How did the opportunity to write those come about? I’m aware that at least a couple of the other 1980s-era novelists found their experience with the Trek franchise less than pleasant. Did you have a good time with it?

BV: The Star Trek books with Bantam were less than successful, in my opinion. They had the feel of failed novels with the original characters erased and ST ones penciled in. When S&S got the franchise, David Hartwell looked around for writers. I loved ToS, proposed two novels, he bought one—the first one bought for the series, by the way. Roddenberry’s novelization of the first movie and Vonda McIntyre’s novel killing off Kirk (got great ink in, so help me, The National Enquirer) were both published before mine for obvious reasons. A year or two later, Hartwell told me he wanted the second proposal I’d done. This was a real surprise, but I jumped at the chance. Over the last 25-plus years, these two books (The Klingon Gambit and Mutiny on the Enterprise) have sold steadily and well and both are still available as e-books.

Hartwell is a top editor and working with him was an experience I would jump at if the chance repeated. I suspect problems with authors/editors came later. I’m not sure how many editors have worked on all the various series, but sf is not a big S&S priority. Is there any sf other than ST there? My ST experience was great with one minor thing—some flunky at the studio (the movie folks had the right to copyedit) kicked back Klingon Gambit with the rather snippy note: there are no chairs aboard the Enterprise. There are only seats. I had never heard it referred to as the captain’s seat but I went along. I refrained from having the Seatperson call a meeting to order, also.

I changed agents between the first and second book and my career moved in a different direction. In 1984 I began writing westerns and let the chance to do more ST books slip away.

CF: You’ve written prolifically in several different genres. Creatively, do you find that you move easily among them or do you have phases where you lose interest in one for a while?

BV: I’m not sure that I lose interest in any one as much as deadlines from others elbow those aside. I’ve been doing a lot of westerns, some under my pen name of Karl Lassiter (Drifter was published in February by Avalon—my first hardcover western after 20 years of mass market pbs).

Having Zumaya reprint series of mine that were only partially published has sparked my interest again in both space opera and heroic fantasy. I can indulge some of this through the iTunes store for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, where Legends is publishing not only a new serial sf adventure Collider but also a new fantasy series, Along the Feathered Road. One sf short story, “Burn the Sky,” triggered a need to write more in the same transhuman universe and “On Wings of Plague” was published a couple months ago. In addition, five of the nine s&s novels I co-authored with Geo. W. Proctor are being reprinted there. Through the vagaries of publishing, only the first six were printed in the US but all nine were printed in the UK. The advent of e-books might be the best thing that’s happened for writers (and readers) since the printing press.

Along the way, I find my time to write is being eroded by various editing projects. I edited a local bimonthly magazine until it folded last year, have done five annual fantasy football magazines for years and recently was offered the chance to edit a major sf anthology. The contracts are still in the pipeline, so hatching your count before he chickens, etc. But I am really excited about working with all the authors in this one.


CF: What about the pseudonyms? It’s no secret, of course, that you are also Karl Lassiter. Does it help with marketing in the sense that your sf/fantasy readers are probably different people than your western readers?

BV: Donald Westlake pretty well explained the use of pen names, even in the same field. Using Karl Lassiter keeps sf fans from being startled if they’d pick up, say Sword and Drum or First Cherokee Rifles. But Westlake used different names in the mystery field since his Dortmunder books were wildly different from his Parker novels. He compared it to looking for a Mercury or a Ford. Same company, different product, different market. My f/sf pen names were used for a different reason. When I was turning out a lot of sf, there would be times where I had two or three titles coming out in the same month from different publishers. I put the Star Frontier series under a pen name for this reason (ditto with the fantasy series After the Spell Wars). This difference in pen names soothed publishing feathers that I wouldn’t be competing with myself. “I’ll buy one Vardeman book this month, but two? Never! I’ll buy that Edward Hudson book instead. Maybe the FJ Hale book, too.”) I have no idea if this is reality, but the publishers liked the notion.

Zumaya Publishing is reprinting both Star Frontiers and After the Spell Wars under my name. Of the two trilogies, two in Star Frontiers were never published and the final one in After the Spell Wars never saw the light of day (complicated story but it had to do with antitrust violations on the part of Waldenbooks and losing the lawsuit—I think the Morton Salt decision entered into it, for you law wonks.)

CF: Your bibliography is quite lengthy. Do you have a particular personal favorite among your series or stand-alone stories? Or do you love all your “children” equally? Also, what new projects do you have in the works? Or anything that you are particularly excited about that we should be looking forward to?

BV: The Swords of Raemllyn series is special for me since I got the chance to work with my best friend on it [novelist George W. Proctor]. We were about as opposite as two people could be and yet were friends for close to 40 years. Geo. died unexpectedly last August, so getting these reprinted on the iTunes store as e-books is something of a tribute to him as much as a chance for me to remember how much I love s&s. So, lots of emotional bindings on these.

The usual answer to a question like this is “my favorite is what I’m working on now.” Which is accurate. I usually look forward to new projects rather than back on what I have written. I have agreed to do short stories for a Jean Rabe anthology about a tourist time travel agency (look for Jean’s anthology Terribly Twisted Tales out in a couple weeks—it was a theme anthology doing a turn on fairy tales. My story, “Jack and the Genetic Beanstalk,” was, of course, sf.), I am working on a new story for the next MZB’s Sword and Sorceress anthology, though I might be pushing the deadline a bit too much there, plus a new zombie story for James Lowder. A friend and I are working on a mystery story using a technique impossible without the web, and I have a new story in the “Burn the Sky” universe bubbling up that fascinates me, not to mention plotting out a new hard sf near future novel. And and and….

I am delighted that Genetic Menace is being printed. The Black Nebula will follow, completing the trilogy. Likewise, after Ogre Castle in the After the Spell Wars trilogy, In the Sea Nymph’s Lair will be followed by the still to be printed The Wizard’s Spell Mirror. I had no expectation of these books ever seeing the light of day until now. Modern technology is wonderful.

E-books are also great for keeping work in print—all over the world. It is easier for fans in Rumania or Indonesia or New Zealand to buy a story now than for someone who has to go to a bookstore. I have 14 short stories and six novels (fantasy, sf and mystery) on the iTunes store, with more (both reprint and new) coming all the time. Check out them along with my blog there, plus other New York Times bestseller authors, at www.zapptek.com/legends .

Find Robert E. Vardeman online at www.cenotaphroad.com, which contains links to his blog and many other items of interest. —CF

Save the Semiprozine Hugo

Evidently there is a desire among some involved in Hugo Awards nominating and voting to eliminate the category of "Best Semiprozine" from the awards. The issue is explained well by Neil Clarke (editor of one of this year's nominees in that category, Clarkesworld) on the site pictured to the left and on the Tor site by John Klima. I won't rehash everything they say there, so if you're interested in this issue, please visit these links.

The fact that Locus nearly always wins in this category is stated as one of the reasons for eliminating it--it doesn't mean as much, they say, if one publication is the winner every year (would that be true of the Fan Writer category, too, won nearly every year by David Langford?).  Another complaint about the category is that it is difficult to define and therefore identify which zines qualify for it. It seems to me that this would be where to make the change. Look at the rules for the category on the Hugo Awards website. They attempt to define how  "semipro" is different from a "pro" zine like Analog or a "fanzine" like M-Brane, but it seems overly complicated. For most purposes, isn't the difference among pro and semi-pro defined by pay rates for writers?

Some people also think that the number of Hugo categories in general should be reduced. Why? I see no problem with having an award with some stature to recognize people who do the good work in these perhaps lesser categories. It seems good for the genre, good for the fans, good for everyone, and doesn't hurt anyone at all. Leave it be. Save the Semiprozine Hugo.

Uncircumcised M-BRANE origins

Writer Brandon Bell ("Do Men Dream of Bloody Sheep, M-Brane #1 and "Abraham Discovers an Object Impenetrable to All Harm," #5 forthcoming), in the April 26 post on his blog, discusses a recent discussion with some friends about religion and the nature of "god," the universe and multi-verse. Strangely, just minutes after reading this item by Brandon, I hit upon the curious website of Noesis, the Journal of the Megasociety (a high-IQ society of some sort).

One Richard May says in an article called "Universe Had No Unique Beginning" on that site:

"I’ve always suspected that both atheists and theists were partially correct and now also perhaps to degrees varying over time. Presumably some proportion of the Multiverse beginnings were entirely naturalistic, occurring according to various physicalistic M-Brane scenarios, which for convenience we may call uncircumcised M-Branes origins. The remaining unknown proportion of the Multiverse beginnings occurred according to every conceivable and inconceivable theistic scenario. Some Multiverse beginnings were Created by Osiris, others by Zeus, others by Ahura Mazda, yet other Multiverse beginnings were Created by the adorable Yahweh, which for convenience we may refer to as circumcised M-Brane origins." [italics mine]

Well then. Hmm.

Baby Blue Eyes (film), 1987

A couple nights ago, after dinner and drinks, Jeff and Pat and I had the idea to invent a wholly fake movie from the past with the idea of creating a little on-line hoax. As these kind of ideas always go, it was a lot funnier (and more fun) at the moment of conception than it seemed just minutes later when we considered how hard we would actually have to work at it to get the thing out there. Nonetheless, I am still rather amused at what we came up with. So I present our partial phony article below for your amusement (and don't tell me you wouldn't think for at least a moment that it could be real if you saw it on Wiki!)...

Baby Blue Eyes (film), 1987

Baby Blue Eyes is an American film, written and directed by Sam Raimi (based on Raymond Chandler's novel of the same title). The film is considered to be the first example of the “San Francisco New Noir Genre,” which remained popular for the next decade. It is the first of several such films pairing Susan Sarandon and Al Pacino in starring roles.

Sarandon portrays Kay Quinn, the wife of a murder victim, who seeks the assistance of a private detective Victor Caranza (Pacino) to investigate the death of her husband. During the course of events, passion flares between Quinn and Caranza. Soon the detective is heartbroken when evidence begins to point toward Quinn herself as the murderer. He eventually engages in a plot to frame Quinn’s sister, who had been having an affair with the murdered husband. Caranza ultimately decides to let Quinn’s sister go to the gallows for the crime.

Though the film was well regarded by critics, it never received a wide theatrical release and was largely snubbed by the Academy. Natasha Kinski, however, received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her manic portrayal of grocery store clerk Sasha Knieling. Also given an Oscar nomination, for Best Song, were Joe Jackson and Patty Smyth for their duet “In Your Baby Blue Eyes” which reached number 21 on the Billboard Pop Chart in July of 1987. The winner of the song Oscar that year however, was the band Mike and the Mechanics for their theme to Oliver Stone’s Christmastown...

LeGuin wins Nebula

Ursula K. LeGuin, author of astonishing imaginative power and a real literary heavy-hitter who has amazed readers for decades, has won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award for Best Novel of 2008 for her book Powers.

LeGuin is also a member, along with Vonda McIntyre and a bunch of other female writers, of Book View Cafe, an interesting project that I have mentioned and recommended before on this page. (Another member happens to be our friend Sue Lange whose sexy story "Zara Gets Laid" will be a highlight of M-Brane #5 in June). 

"Multi-vortex wedge tornado" possibly approaching

Here's a few seconds of raw video of us assessing the condition in our back yard ahead of tonight's expected horrific storm! I had imagined it would look very windy, but actually things have calmed rather eerily in the last few minutes. If we can capture any Twister-style footage later, you know we will.

I want to go to Austin!

I am considering attempting to get down to Armadillo Con this year. I am still trying to arrive at an estimate of what this will cost. Whatever the figure is, I don't have it, nor do I expect to anytime soon. So, I am going to resort to literal begging for new donations and subscriptions to M-Brane! I will apply $2.00 of any new subscriptions received between now and June 1, the total money received for single-copy PDF sales during that period, and 50 percent of any donations to the M-Brane Writers' Fund to a new fund to send me (and Jeff, of course) to Austin in August. 

So, what's in it for anyone else? This: it will be a terrific chance for me to promote this great zine and its elite clique of sf writers!

If this fund-raiser does not reach goal, then I will re-direct whatever funds are received into some other project aimed at increasing M-Brane's exposure and stature. There are many options. The grand vision of the future will be realized.

Science Friday: Mars rover having "amnesia"

From the Science Friday website today: "Last Friday, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit suffered what team managers are calling a bout of temporary amnesia. Then, on Saturday, a computer onboard Spirit rebooted itself. The rover has had several other unexplained memory lapses and reboots, and the mission planners are searching for the cause. They're also hoping that changes to the rover's operating protocols might allow the rover to work around the bouts of amnesia, using different memory resources to keep operating reliably."

What's most wild and fabulous about the Spirit rover is that it's operating at all anymore! These things way exceeded their expected lifespan. I guess most people just aren't that interested in space exploration and probably think robotic exploration is the dullest, least sexy kind of all, but it blows me away every time I think about a human-made device like Spirit even successfully getting to Mars at all, much less successfully landing and then operating as intended. Now here's what would be really wicked: Spirit's "amnesia" and weird re-boots are being caused by some kind of ancient Martian consciousness that is reawakening in the planet's cold red dust!

Updates on GLBT antho

On Page 2, I have posted a few more details regarding the proposed GLBT anthology, including deadline and probable payment terms. I'm also, just for fun, inviting suggestions for a title for it. The "house" name for the project so far has become "Q-Brane." I may use that, but it might be cool to have a more clever title or subtitle for it. Yeah, you can ahead and offer "joke" suggestions too (I know my readers...).

Planting days

Yesterday I accomplished nothing on either M-Brane or my personal writing, but I had a fine and productive afternoon with Jeff helping him move some of our house-plants outside for the season and planting herbs and flowers. I am posting a few pictures to indicate what we were working on. Unfortunately, Jeff harshly censored the photos, deleting nearly every single one in which he appears. He also deleted the video that I was surreptitiously shooting at one point. So he will be extremely suspicious of me this afternoon when we plant the chile peppers.

Amazing Cassini mission continues

Check out these beautiful images from the Cassini probe's visit to Saturn. The one I included here shows the moon Mimas and a section of the planet's rings. 

Just getting that spacecraft out there and capturing these kinds of images is such a spectacular technological achievement for humanity.  After the ugliness and misery and stupidity that I discussed in the previous post, seeing something like this once in a while really makes my day a whole lot nicer.

And now some "real" world crap...

Regular readers know that I don't do this every day--talk about things out of the real world that trouble me--but I need to get this topic off my chest here since no one I know personally wants to listen to me talk about it.  I'll do another post about something fun later today to make up for it.

It's no secret, even in the mostly non-political M-Brane world, that I like President Obama a lot and that I hope and believe that he is making the correct decisions toward fixing the stupid old Bushed-up world.  But here's a couple decisions that he'd better be right about or I will be very disappointed: 1) the increase in our "investment" in Afghanistan and the implied support for its outrageously inept and corrupt government; 2) the slowness of our military withdrawal from Iraq and our continued support of the Iraqi government.

My reason for concern is the same in both cases. Aside from the probable ongoing waste of American "blood and treasure," I find it grossly inappropriate that American troops' lives are put on the line for governments that appear to have values as repugnant as those of the regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, or which are at least heading that way. Two examples, one from each country:

1) The Afghan government, apparently conceding that it stands no chance of having legitimacy and asserting authority over its country, is caving in to nutty whack-job demands that a little thing that we usually call "marital rape" (or just "rape") be legal among Shia Muslims in the country. Or what the law actually says, as I understand it, isn't just that a man is not breaking the law when he rapes his wife, but that she is breaking the law by resisting him (thus "making" him "need" to rape her, I guess?). This is ridiculous. This is the sort of thing our troops are fighting for? Really? Fuck that. I know they are never going to come up with what we would recognize as a Western-style democratic society--and Obama has acknowledged that--but this is way too much to stomach. 

2) The Iraqi Interior Ministry, law enforcement and their government at the highest levels seems to be doing nothing at all about the wave of torture/murders of gay men and boys in Baghdad. This, of course, was incited by a whack-job issuing a crazy decree, including announcing on satellite TV channels that "sodomy" must be punished by death. I will not describe (nor show the photos) of one of the methods used to torture to death these boys, some of whom apparently survived the attacks but then were denied care at the hospital. Again, as in the above example, what are Americans doing there if this how things are to be? Granted, there are plenty of other societies where atrocities like this go on, but we didn't pay for all of them in blood and money like we did for this one. And it's not just an expected feature of it being a Muslim society (before anyone starts telling me about that, Mom and Fox News): while homosexuality is far from popular in any such societies (fundamentalist Christian compounds like Oklahoma don't dig it either), people who are gay don't always have to live in fear of being literally murdered in an ongoing serial murder campaign in more moderate places like Jordan and Lebanon. 

J.G. Ballard dies

The Collins English Dictionary includes the adjective "Ballardian," defining it as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental development." The great mind that encompassed this singular vision is no longer among us: J.G. Ballard has died at age 78.

Perhaps best known for the bizarre and controversial Crash and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, Ballard produced a large body of novels and short stories noted for their imaginative scope and serious literary quality. Though Ballard himself eschewed the term "science fiction," preferring to call much of his own 

work "apocalyptic" instead, he was nonetheless a major figure of the British New Wave, his first science fiction short story "Prima Belladonna," appearing in New Worlds in 1956. Edward Carnell, editor of New Worlds, went on to publish most of Ballard's early stories. 

I own an old book club two-in-one edition of Ballard's novels The Wind From Nowhere, and The Drowned World. These were his first two novels, published in 1962. They are lovely, mesmerizing little books of great strangeness and and mystery. They were the first of what we'd now call "Ballardian" fiction. Like Philip Jose Farmer, who died a few weeks ago, Ballard is a writer who left an undeniable mark on our genre. Whether you like his work or not, or have even read it or not, we live in a world that was changed in a real way because J.G. Ballard was in it.

EXTRA: Brand new Vardeman to appear in #4

A little amendment to the issue #4 contents preview from the other day: I'm thrilled to announce that I will, in conjunction with Zumaya Publications, publish the first chapter of Robert Vardeman's previously-unpublished novel The Genetic Menace in M-Brane #4 on May 1. I will write much more about this later, but I just wanted to start getting the word out now. Vardeman is a writer that I first learned of when I was a little Trekkie kid because he wrote a couple of the first few Pocket Books Star Trek novels, so I am positively star-struck that I get to be involved in a small way with the publication of a brand new Vardeman book. Zumaya Publications, operated by Elizabeth Burton, is a super-cool indie publisher and has been re-releasing some of Vardeman's earlier stories as well as this new material. Publication of the complete novel from Zumaya is scheduled for shortly after the M-Brane preview. 

Strunk and White: 50 years

Here's an appropriately dorky topic for today's Brane blog. Evidently, the famous and even beloved bible of the grammar police, The Elements of Style, turned fifty today (roughly). Originally written by Strunk circa the Great War-era and much later reworked by his student E.B. (Charlotte's Web) White, this little style guide has been a bossy mainstay of the academy and the cudgel of copy-editors for decades.

During my college days, I found it utterly tiresome and have to confess that I have never been able to find the kernel of its English-major appeal anywhere in it. So I was delighted today when NPR's Talk of the Nation interviewed linguist Geoffrey Pullum whose new article "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" is available from The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was refreshing to finally hear someone debunk the notion that a split infinitive is some sort of cardinal syntactical sin and to finally explain to me why the hell the grammar check in Word wants me to change every single "which" to "that."

Issue #4 contents announced

Here's a preview of who and what's coming at you when issue #4 releases on May 1:

Cat Rambo: "Boyz and Girlz Come Out to Play"

Rick Novy: "Plan R"

Gary Hewitt: "The Crumple Zone"

Alexander Curnow: "Rust Theory"

Therese Arkenberg: "Mother"

James Steimle: "Pair o' Docs"

Thomas Olbert: "Regeneration"

Kevin Bennett: "The Freundian Clap"

Jeff Kozzi: "Interstellar Sting"

Michael D. Griffiths: "Base Jumper"

Derek J. Goodman: "Northern Girls With the Way They Kiss"

It's a tri-national table of contents with reps from the US, Canada and the UK. It features a couple people you probably know from other mags and whom you've seen in M-Brane before, and a couple of names that may be new to you. Though the glow of our beautiful issue #3 is still hot around here, I am very excited about this next one. The range of imagination in this selection of stories is just crazy. It will rock. It spins me 'round like a record. So here's some music to listen to while viewing the M-Brane #4 front page and its table of contents...

M-BRANE writers' links updated

I added a couple more upcoming M-Brane writers to the links list (down there in the right column a ways down). If you have placed a story with the zine, and have given me a website on your contract, you should be there. Let me know if you're not there, and I'll fix it. The list is alphabetical by first name.

Redactor's note: something weird

During a routine scan of "mbrane sf" on Google, I found this peculiarly-worded post about M-Brane SF #2. It seemed familiar and yet unlike anything I had read before. Here is the text:

"The 2d issue of M-BRANE SF has merely hit the Net with a March edition to expire for. It Holds a strong-growing locale with a positive hereafter before of it. Some nice authors hold already submitted thereto, like Wrick Novy and Cat Rambo. I hold a narration in Issue # 2, and not merely is the mag well-formatted and really low-cost for this economy, but I believe it is available in a few formats. I urge seeking it out. The PDF is justly $12.00 for a whole twelvemonth! For twelve issues, how can you vanquish that cost? Christopher Fletcher gives his personal rundowns, excessively, on who Holds who and what Holds what affecting the genre. Not simply Hard Science Fiction. Love the retro 60 's feel! Featuring Work by: David McGillveray, Michael Griffiths, Lawrence Dagstine, Tim Mulcahy, Abby Merc ' Rustard, Laurentius Barker, Jannett Grady, James Hartley, and Jeffrey Sims. Redacted by Christopher Fletcher."

After a minute of staring at this in confusion, I realized that it was a re-post of something from Lawrence Dagstine's site though strangely altered (click here to read the original). So...what's all this then? Was it maybe translated into another language and then rather clunkily translated back into English, perhaps by software? One thing I know is that I am now tempted to no longer call myself the "editor" of M-Brane but rather its "redactor!" The post is correct in one major point: it's a great deal at justly $12 for a whole twelvemonth. Really, how can you vanquish that cost?

Briefly closing to submissions

Writers: I  hate to resort to this annoying behavior, but I need a brief break from new fiction submissions.  I am closing for a few weeks, until June 1, to give myself time to get some other important M-Brane-related work done. Once issue #5 comes out in June, I will be ready to start reading for future issues again. This will also get us caught up a bit on the publication schedule--I've been worried that I've acquired stories too quickly and have us booked out for too many issues. I really dislike having closed periods, but it will get my operation in a bit better shape going into summer. I still have a few submissions in the in-box as of today that I will reply to this week (this closed period does not necessarily apply to the "Q" antho, but I probably won't be deciding on acceptances for that anyway until after the deadline in a few months).