The Life and Times of Digital Science Fiction

So once upon a time I sold a story called Black Sun to a new pro-rate market named Digital Science Fiction, and it appeared in their debut issue, an anthology by the appropriate name of First Contact.  It turned out to be a strong collection, considerably better and more professional than first issues are wont to be.  And so soon after that I sent them a second story, Across the Terminator, which was scheduled to appear in their fifth collection ... until circumstances got in the way and DSF was forced to close its doors.

This was a bad thing.  Not actually directly for me, since I eventually resold the story to Clarkesworld, but nevertheless, in the wider publishing-cosmology sense, a solid piece of bad news all round.  Good, well-paying markets don't exactly grow on trees, and even in a brief space of time DSF had shown itself to be something exciting and valuable.

Then, a few months ago, publisher Michael Wills got in touch to tell me that he was bringing Digital Science Fiction back in a new and improved format, and would I be interested in letting him reprint the story that would have appeared in anthology number five had it happened all those years ago?  Of course I said yes, because money obviously, but also because Michael had always been a pleasure to work with and the whole thing just felt right.  He'd been immensely positive about Across the Terminator back in the day and, as nice as it had been to have it in Clarkesworld (it really was nice) it still somehow felt like DSF was where it belonged.

Since then I've sold a couple more reprints to Michael: The Painted City came out a while back on its own and is now collected as part of the Infinity Cluster collection, out this weekend and on special offer until the end of today.  And Dancing in the Winter Rooms, originally published way back when in Electric Velocipede, is scheduled to appear in the not-too-distant future as a solo e-book and then, some time later, as part of anthology number seven, to be known as Ctrl Alt Delight.

Anyway, putting aside as much as I can the fact that they've published a fair bit of my work, I heartily recommend taking a look at what Digital Science Fiction - and for that matter its brand new sister company Digital Fantasy Fiction - are up to.  I've read all of their output so far and enjoyed, I would say, about eighty percent of it, which is considerably above what I'd normally expect, hard to please git that I am.  There's a definite leaning towards solid storytelling above overbearing style, and yet within that, an impressive range of approaches, subjects and attitudes that keeps any two books from feeling overly alike.  And on top of that, there's an appealing Pokemon-esque quality to the fact that these things are coming out weekly; it's weirdly addictive to keep picking them up, never quite knowing what to expect.

For that matter, I'd also recommend DSF and DFF as markets to fellow authors.  There aren't that many places that will pay for reprints, and there are considerably fewer that will do anything so lavish as putting them out as individual e-books with their own shiny covers.  All told, Digital Science Fiction feels to me like an interesting new corner of the genre publishing world, one excitingly different from anything else out there, and I suspect that if it gets embraced the way it deserves to then it's only going to grow in strength and scope over the next few months.

Oh, and if you should fancy a read of any of the works listed, all titles link to their respective stories / anthologies on Amazon...

More Power to the Electric Velocipede

In plenty of ways, Kickstarter might have been designed with the publishing industry in mind; or perhaps modelled after it, since the whole subscription concept is pretty much based on trying to sell your product before it comes out.  I've noticed Kickstarter being used quite a lot by the small press, and even the odd professional zine, and the results always seem to be positive.  It's interesting and a little exciting that something like that has come along to help our always-slightly-beleagured industry and that so many people are embracing it.  It's going to be interesting to see how this one goes, whether it's the beginning of a sea change in how magazines are funded or whether it'll peter out to nothing in a couple of years, like so many internet fads before it.

Anyway, the last time I talked about Kickstarter, it was in aid of an editor and a project I had plenty of time for, and that's equally the case this time around.  Electric Velocipede has had a troubled time over the last couple of years, with a lengthy hiatus while it shifted over from print to electronic status - but through all that it's remains one of the best and most deservedly Hugo-nominated magazines out there, under the editorship of John Klima and recently with the able assistance of world's bestest copy editor Anne Zanoni.  It very much deserves a new lease of life, and based on the results so far, looks set to get it.

Now, as usual I have a degree of bias here, since John published my story Dancing in the Winter Rooms not so long ago, and Anne hunted down and sorted out every last one of my dumbass mistakes and wild logical inconsistencies in Crown Thief while wearing her other, freelance copyeditor hat.  Still, that should only be taken as more evidence for the fact that EV is great and deserving of having money thrown at it.  And hey, if you pledge a thousand dollars, you get to travel back in time and witness the crucial and formative events in John's life that led to him becoming an editor in the first place.*  How cool is that?


* Sadly, not true.  Electric Velocipede in no way condones the abuse of time travel.

Dancing in the Winter Rooms Out in Electric Velocipede

A quick post for this one - it's my birthday, goldarn it! - but please don't let that make it seem like I'm not buzzed as hell about both story and market.

I think that if wacky, misguided aliens invaded and threatened to eradicate all my work from existence but for one story (and I realise this may be an unlikely scenario, but then again maybe it happens three times a week, because really, how would you know?) then Dancing in the Winter Rooms might just be that story.  We've been apart for a while, me and Dancing, for reasons we'll come to in a moment.  And usually, when I return to a story after a long absence, all I can see is the flaws.  Not so with this one.

Don't get me wrong, it has flaws all right.  I mean, when I first wrote Dancing, I thought I'd invented the whole Millennium Ship concept.  The harsh blow that this wasn't, in fact, the desperately original idea I thought it was set me off on a five year reading program that basically involved digesting all of the Gollancz Fantasy and SF masterworks series.  But that's another story.  Point is, Dancing in the Winter Rooms isn't the genre-inventing sci-fi revolution I once thought it might be.

I don't care.  I love Millennium Ships, I loved flawed heroes.  And I love the hell out of Doc, fool that he is.

As for Electric Velocipede ... it looked for a while as if John Klima's Hugo Award-winning baby might never make it to issue 23.  I've seen plenty of markets go down since I started selling fiction, and I have boundless respect for John for rescuing EV from that fate.  It takes a lot to come back from the brink, let alone to do it with such style.  It was a little over two years between Dancing in the Winter Rooms being accepted and it being published, and the wait was worth it.  Because the fact that I got to see this particular story published the day after I moved into the first home I can truly call my own is oddly perfect.

Dancing in the Winter Rooms with Electric Velocipede

As demented as it sounds, that title is a completely fair and accurate summary of my most recent bit of news, which hails from Saturday morning: my story Dancing in the Winter Rooms has been picked up by Hugo award-winning and World Fantasy Award-nominated magazine Electric Velocipede.

On a slight side note, I remember reading one of those 'how to write good' books - I think it was Lisa Tuttle's Writing Fantasy and Science-Fiction - and being utterly horrified by the author's comment that their usual approach was to write a story, and then scrap it entirely and write it all over again. What an unbelievable amount of work! And what would be the point, anyway? Just get it right the first time!

Perhaps needless to say, I haven't adopted the technique. But I did eventually realise that sometimes it really is the only way forward, and it's a method I've since used twice. The recently-accepted-by-Andromeda Spaceways The Painted City was one occasion, and Dancing in the Winter Rooms the other. It began as a weird, almost documentary-like non-story, which broke just about every rule worth breaking - it had no protagonist (or indeed characters of any sort), no real plot, no definite beginning, middle or end.

It took me a while to realise that, of course, but once I did it came down to a choice between binning it and starting again from scratch. In the end I kept almost nothing beyond the core concept: of a millennium ship divided into four regions, each corresponding to an Earth season, and of the nomadic human tribe that wanders endlessly through its corridors.

I'm very pleased with the final result, which does have a story, a protagonist, characters, a beginning, a middle and an end. And I'm even more pleased that it's going to be appearing within the winner of the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine.