Futurismic

Hey, writer-types – remember when we plugged the soon-to-open Lightspeed Magazine, a new online science fiction magazine curated by the inestimable John Joseph Adams?

Well, Lightspeed won’t be publishing anything until June 2010, but for the fictioneers among you (especially those who find Futurismic’s pickiness on topics and sub-genres restrictive!) it’s worth noting that they’re already open to story submissions. To quote from the Lightspeed submission guidelines:

Lightspeed is seeking original science fiction stories of 1000-7500 words. Stories of 5000 words or less are preferred. We pay 5¢/word for original fiction, on acceptance. To see which rights we’re seeking, please view our contract template for original fiction.

All types of science fiction are welcome, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject should be considered off-limits, and we encourage writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.

We believe that the science fiction genre’s diversity is its greatest strength, and we wish that viewpoint to be reflected in our story content and our submission queues; we welcome submissions from writers of every race, religion, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation.

There are further details on that page, along with a link to their online submissions form. So why not give your latest masterpiece one final edit and send it off? Good luck!

Almost every short fiction venue worth its salt will have some sort of guidelines as to what sort of material they’re looking for… but I suspect almost every editor will confess that, when the story is good enough, the guidelines can flex a little to allow it through.

That’s exactly what happened with “Spider’s Moon” by globe-trotting star-ascendant Lavie Tidhar, which is set in a slightly deeper future than we usually deal with here at Futurismic. But its core concerns are closer to home, and it’s a strong tale well told – so we’re proud to be publishing it for you to read. Enjoy!

Spider’s Moon

By Lavie Tidhar

Night, a full spider’s moon in the sky; hundreds of lanterns hung along the river, and the smell of saffron and garlic and dried lemongrass filled the air; a warm night, candles burning on street corners with offerings of rum and cooked rice, the hum of electric motorbikes, the murmur of a sugarcane machine as it crushed stalks to make the juice.

Ice tinkling in glasses; on small plastic chairs people sat by the river, drinking, talking. A hushed reverie, yet festive. Hoi An under the spider’s moon, French backpackers singing, badly but with enthusiasm, while one of their number played a guitar.

Save me from the raven and the frog, and show me safely to the river’s mouth, O Naga, he thought. Frogs had never been his favourites. Green and slimy, and always too loud. Like rats, almost. Like green, belligerent rats. Continue reading “NEW FICTION: SPIDER’S MOON by Lavie Tidhar”

A few weeks back, all the major tech blogs were saying “well, Google Wave seems pretty neat, but we’re not really sure what it’s for”. Google themselves surely had a number of potential applications in mind, but whether using Wave as a platform for roleplaying games was one of them remains an unknown quantity. (It’s surely a cheaper option than that touchscreen table mod, though.)

The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who’s added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.

Unfortunately for those of us who are more into the tactical side of RPGs, it isn’t yet well-suited to a game that involves either a lot of dice rolling or careful tracking of player and NPC positions. Right now, Wave bots are hard to get working reliably and widgets are scarce, which means that if you don’t want to use the standard dice bot that Wave debuted with (dice bots are an old IRC favorite) then there isn’t really another convenient option; rolls are either made with real dice and then posted on the honor system, or they’re posted in batches and a GM then uses them in sequence.

In truth, this probably isn’t all that big a surprise – from IRC and email onwards, pretty much every internet communications format has been bent to the whims of gamer geeks. But it highlights a fundamental difference in the way people approach a new technology: a journalist goes in thinking “what is this meant to do?”, but the true digital native goes in thinking “what can this do for me?”.

Both questions are valuable, of course, but I suspect that it’s the increased penetration of the latter mindset that ensures I get the bulk of my news and opinion journalism online. Whether the difference in underlying philosophies that those questions represent is a function of network architecture or a cause of it remains, naturally, an unanswerable (but greatly entertaining) point for debate… maybe we could start a Wave for that?

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/10/google-wave-we-came-we-saw-we-played-dd.ars

Big up Matt Staggs, who i believe suggested this a few weeks back.

Via BigDumbObject, some excellent news in the short fiction publishing sphere: Prime Books are launching a new science fiction magazine called Lightspeed in the summer of next year. Fiction editing duties will be handled by John Joseph Adams, who will leave his current assistant editor post at F&SF to take up the reins; non-fiction will be handled by Andrea Kail.

Lightspeed will focus exclusively on science fiction. It will feature all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and writers will be encouraged to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope. Each week, they’ll post one piece of fiction and one piece of non-fiction. They’ll debut with four original stories, and then move to two new and two reprint stories each month thereafter (all of the non-fiction will be original).

Lightspeed will open to fiction submissions and non-fiction queries on 1 January 2010. Writers’ guidelines are expected to be posted by 1 December 2009. They plan to pay five cents per word for fiction, one hundred dollars per article for non-fiction, and variable amounts for art.

Isn’t launching a print magazine in the sf short fiction domain a mite quixotic in the current climate? Possibly so, but it looks like Prime have thought carefully about ways to make the magazine pay its own way:

[Publisher Sean] Wallace said “The website will be free, but the hope is that the magazine should be making money by its third year, if not sooner, through multiple-revenue streams, including advertising, ebooks, merchandise, and more.”

Three years doesn’t sound like an unreasonable time-frame for a business model to bed in, but things change fast in the content industries these days; hopefully Prime have some smart people at the wheel who can roll with the punches of a fluctuating marketplace. Having John Joseph Adams at the helm is a promising start; I’ve been impressed by the visibility he’s brought to the numerous anthologies he’s edited in recent years, and I think he’s got the enthusiasm and foresight to try new ideas in order to make it work.

Definitely one to watch… and great news for writers, too. More pro-rate markets can never be a bad thing.

Wondering what’s happening with the Shine anthology of postive science fiction that was announced last year?

Well, editor Jetse de Vries has more good news; not only is Shine still on the roster of forthcoming releases from the recently-rescued Solaris Books imprint (April 2010), but there will be a whole bunch of teaser stories posted on DayBreak Magazine, a free-to-read webzine. Tell it to ‘em, Jetse:

With the Shine anthology now slated for an April 2010 release, and with exuberant SF as thin on the ground as bankers without bonuses, DayBreak Magazine will alleviate the waiting and fill the gap. Simultaneously quenching your thirst for upbeat stories while also whetting your appetite for the main uplifitng dish, DayBreak Magazine will feature a positive, forward-looking story every second Friday until the print Shine anthology is released, or possibly even a bit beyond that date.

The launch is on Friday October 16, on the eve of Diwali, with “The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram” by Jeff Soesbe. The second story will be released on Friday October 30, the eve of Halloween: “Horrorhouse” by David D. Levine. More to be announced. A new story every two weeks: stories set all over the world, all depicting a future in which you would actually love to live. All for free, and all for your delectation.

Please note that these online stories are different from the ones in the print Shine anthology: It’s just that I liked them so much I’ve decided—after negotiations with the authors—to put them online as a free showcase for upbeat science fiction.

Free fiction is always good news! That first story is up right now:

“The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram” by Jeff Soesbe

It is Diwali in Bangalore, but not everyone is partying as Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram and his colleagues are working overtime to keep certain things from escalating:

• There will be helicopters, wobbling!
• There will be children, rebelling!
• There will be elephants, marauding!
• There will be monkeys, harassing!
• There will be the third eye of Shiva, watching from the sky!
• There will be song!
• There will be dance!
• There will be party!
• There will be the ghost of Dev Kapoor Khan, the Indian Elvis!

Will Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram overcome the increasing madness around him, or will he become mad, himself? Confused? You won’t be, after reading “The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram”, an exuberant tale of a near-future India that puts most Bollywood pictures to shame!

Well, that’s your weekend reading sorted, anyway!

Leave a comment at DayBreak if you take a look, but feel free to pop back here and discuss, too. Has Jetse delivered on his promise of solid stories with a positive outlook?