You’ll notice there’s no new short story for the month of December here at Futurismic.  The reason is quite simple:  time has outraced our inventory.  We just haven’t been able to find appropriate, high-quality stories faster than we’ve been publishing them.

This is not for lack of trying by our contributors, and I am continuing to work through the submissions as quickly as I can.  A lot of good material has come in, but we’re looking for great, and this month we didn’t quite find the story we were looking for.

Another issue is that a considerable amount of what’s been submitted hasn’t been a perfect fit with our guidelines, which I strongly encourage potential writers to review thoroughly to get an idea of what we’re looking for.  I’m aware there’s a school of thought out there that suggests:  when it doubt, send it and let the editor decide.  I’m not entirely on board with that approach, though; here at Futurismic we really are looking for a particular type of story, so writers who spend even just a little time researching what we’ve published in the past and what excites us at the blog can save themselves some wasted effort, and us a lot of time, by targeting us appropriately.  For my part, I plan to contribute more to the blog in the coming months in an attempt to improve the general idea of what Futurismic is about as a fiction market.

Of course, many of our potential contributors are reading the guidelines and targeting us appropriately.  We really do appreciate that!  And thanks to all the writers who’ve been submitting to and supporting Futurismic over the past five years.   I look forward to working with many more of you down the road.

At any rate, since we clearly haven’t made our deadline this month, we thought it would be best to take a month off to recharge and hopefully restock our inventory, so that we can get off to a running start in 2010.

And yes, we’re definitely still open to submissions!

Since they started a few years back, the Mundanes have been quietly providing the science fiction field with one of its few non-SFWA-related controversies. By challenging writers to imagine realistic futures stripped of many of the field’s standby tropes–most of them deemed scientifically unlikely by their manifesto–the Mundanes seem to have pissed off a lot more people than they’ve inspired.

I’ve always felt they’ve been on to something. Now they’ve posted a Guest of Honor speech by one of the movement’s chief progenitors, Geoff Ryman, which I think provides plenty of important food for thought about SF literature and how science fiction writers treats the future. In my opinion it provides a pretty cogent argument for more Mundane SF. I’m guessing others will see it as an affront. What say Futurismic readers?

Potential fiction contributors have surely noticed by now the absence of a submission webform at the new site. This is one of the features of the old site that didn’t get transferred over. Rest assured we are still open for business as a fiction market; this is merely a brief hiatus while we get a new submission process in place. I’ll continue to review the stories we received before the shut-down, and we’ll be back accepting new submissions shortly. Thanks for your patience!