Second Anniversary Notes and Acknowledgements

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

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

Some Second Anniversary acknowledgements:

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

An assessment at the two-year point…

This does not suck

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

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

Of quantity and quality

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

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

Expansion

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

Collaboration

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

Future

And so it goes.

Issue #24 contents announced

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

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

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

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

M-Brane #23 released

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

M-Brane SF #23

Seth S. Marlin "Era Solaris"

Erich William Bergmeier "The Miracle Cure"

Patrick Whittaker "The Skitterlings"

Jeff Kozzi "A Pediatrician in Wartime"

James Ward Kirk "Butterfly"

Margaret Karmazin "If Truth Be Told"

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

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

Announcing issue #23 contents

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

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

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

TWAN gets nice write-up at new Rise Reviews site

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

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

Amazon's ebook lending scheme unsettles the usual suspects

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

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

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

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

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

Issue 23...still late!

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

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

Book plug: New Apex imprint releases queer zombie novella

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

The blurb:

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

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

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

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

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

an unstable DJ.

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

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

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

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

FU #1 RELEASED

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

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

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

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

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

Personal writing update: New story out now

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

2020 VISIONS released!

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

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

AETHER AGE goes on sale today!

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

See the Aether Age trailer.

Glenn Lewis Gillette

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

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

M-Brane SF #22 released

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

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

Issue #22 contents announced

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

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

M-BRANE SF QUARTERLY #1 in print on Amazon

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

Zine publishing schedule update; slight delay with issue #22

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

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

2020 VISIONS US pre-order begins

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

Site construction update

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