Suddenly, Zombies

I first became aware of Amanda C. Davis's writing through the Zombonauts anthology, the dreadful piece of nonsense we both inadvertently sold work to* and - this being what caught my attention - which Amanda owned the hell out of.  I mean, I'd like to think that my Fear of a Blue Goo Planet** was one of the less awful pieces contained therein, in that it had been edited and used real words and had a start, beginning and end; but Amanda's Two Things was about the only tale that could genuinely be called good.  "Some lovely, witty writing ... and a slyly understated ending," I said at the time, and I think that about sums it up.

I'm normally far too self-absorbed to notice what anyone else in this industry does, but Amanda's name kept catching my eye.  We appeared in an issue of Redstone Science Fiction together - her On the Sabbath Day Be Ye Cleansed was (and is) entirely great - and I remember noticing that she'd racked up a load of great sales since the last time I'd looked.

Then Amanda got in touch a few days back and asked if I'd be okay with her quoting me on the cover of a mini-anthology she was putting out - Zombonauts having been dire beyond reason, it hadn't garnered a great deal of reviews - and obviously I said yes, because I love seeing my name on stuff even when it's stuff I can't rightly take any credit for.  Said mini-anthology turned out to be called Suddenly, Zombies, and there's the wonderfully lo-fi cover above.  As you can probably extrapolate, asides from the zombies-in-space story there's also a giant-zombie-gorillas tale in there, the perfectly titled Escape From Ape City, which is also both lovely and witty and which gets more mileage than you'd think would be possible from the simple joke of refusing to refer to Giant Zombie Gorillas as anything other than Giant Zombie Gorillas.

(It's to her credit that Amanda acknowledges this fact.)

Oh, and there's a third story too, which is exceedingly short and just the right ending for such silly zombie fun.  And look, 99 cents!  That's hardly even real money.  I mean, I don't know much about American money but I'm guessing that wouldn't even buy you a packet of peanuts, or a Winnebago.





* Not to say that I inadvertently sold the story, because that wouldn't make much sense.  No, my mistake was in thinking you couldn't possibly go wrong with an anthology about zombies in space.

** Which you can listen to in podcast here, should you so wish.

Passive Resistance in Redstone SF

Have I really hit my two hundredth post?  Two hundred posts!  Bloody hell!  I feel old.

Oh well.  To cheer me up, there's the fact that Redstone Science Fiction have just published my story Passive Resistance.

Passive Resistance sure had a troubled time making its way out into the world.  But since this is post two hundred and all, let's accentuate the positive!  Anyone who's interested can finally experience my high speed cyberpunk-for-the-computer-illiterate sci-fi oddity for themself.  I got to do my first interview that's actually about me, rather than a particular story, and thus managed to warble ill-informedly about such diverse topics as the London riots, the highs and lows of writing in far too many genres at once, and ... well ... me stuff.  On top of that, I got to be published alongside Amanda C. Davis again.  I decided a while back that Amanda was one of the best genre writers working today, pretty much solely on the basic of her story being the undeniable highpoint of that awful Zombonauts anthology we were both in.  What do you know?  Turns out I was right.

So there we are.  Two hundred posts.  A long and bloody road travelled since Monday the 2nd of July 2007.  What will post four hundred be?  I hope I have a cyborg arm by then.  Or at least a condo on Mars.  I'd even settle for one of those hoverboards that got passe before anyone even had time to invent them.  Of course, at the rate I'm going, I should hit four hundred somewhere in 2015, so probably a cure for the common cold is way too much to ask.

Passive Resistance Sold to Redstone ... and Other Excitements

I mentioned a looooong time ago that my cyberpunk-for-people-who-can't-work-computers story Passive Resistance had been picked up for an anthology, the title of which escapes me, by a publisher called Mythica Publishing.  Well, that was one bit of excitingness that fell flat on its face, what with Mythica turning out to be the kind of unscrupulous self-publishing type outfit that couldn't put out an anthology if ten thousand copies of it materialised from nowhere and proceeded to sell themselves to an unsuspecting public.

Which seemed like bad news at the time.  What I obviously couldn't have predicted is that it was in fact completely brilliant - since if Mythica hadn't keeled over like a geriatric donkey, I couldn't have just sold Passive Resistance to Redstone Science Fiction.  Since Mythica were planning to pay me precisely nothing, (and would probably have picked my pockets given half the chance), and Redstone just gained their SFWA professional market pointy magic hat, it's hard to see this as any other than a profoundly lucky escape.  Which, funnily enough, is precisely one of the things that Passive Resistance is about.  At times like this, it almost feels like the universe isn't a big chaotic bubble of meaningless crazy!

In other news ... I knew on a vague intellectual level that there was probably going to be a Lightspeed Year One anthology, including my Jenny's Sick, but the discovery that it was both real and a mere four months away still set me bouncing round the room like a trained seal.  Halfway through the day, it struck me that a significant percentage of that excitement came not from the promise of more exposure for what I consider one of my better stories, but from the prospect that I'd be spending my Christmas holiday reading a year's worth of fiction from Lightspeed.  Of the many 'zines out there, it's high on my list of ones I wish I had the time to follow, so I can't help but look forward to the prospect of catching up on twelve months worth of Lightspeed goodness.

Lastly - and only leastly in that it doesn't directly involve anyone paying me money - I discovered yesterday that Digital Science Fiction's issue #1 anthology First Contact (which included my Black Sun) recently hit the number one sales spot in Amazon's science fiction anthologies kindle list, and is still riding high in the top ten.  Hats off to DSF for not only putting out an excellent first issue but for actually managing to persuade a sizeable number of people to read it.