Tag Archives: anthology

Blog

Oil Spill Fundraiser Anthology from Book View Cafe

Breaking Waves anthology coverWhat’s better than good quality reading material? Good quality reading material that supports a good cause, of course!

So whether you’re a fan of genre fiction and poetry, concerned about the environmental impact of the Deep Horizon oilspill or both, you should take a look at Book View Cafe’s Breaking Waves anthology:

Edited by Phyllis Irene Radford and Tiffany Trent, Breaking Waves offers up glimpses of maritime splendor, poignancy, and humor through the works of poets, essayists, and Hugo and Nebula-award winning authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, David D. Levine, and more.  All proceeds from the sale of this anthology will go to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund of the Greater New Orleans.

Available in four DRM-free formats – epub, mobi, pdf, prc – and just US$4.99… sounds like a bargain to me!

(Thanks to Nancy Jane Moore for the tip-off.)

Blog

SciFi Strange: online short sf ‘dream anthology’ curated by Jason Sanford

1 Comment

Subgenres proliferate in fecundity, their fuzzy edges perpetually osmosing* into one another. Or something like that, anyway… however you want to look at, Jason Sanford’s trying to describe and categorise an identifiable strand of modern science fiction short stories:

SciFi Strange isn’t a label. It isn’t a definition.  Instead, it’s an attempt to describe the science fiction being created by some of today’s most exciting writers. These stories combine the literary standards and cultural understandings of the New Wave movement with the basic strangeness and sensawunda from the golden age of science fiction–all seen through the lens of today’s multicultural world, where diversity and difference are the norm even as basic human values and needs still bind us together.

SciFi Strange also flirts with the boundaries of what is scientifically–and therefore realistically–possible, without being bounded by the rigid frames of the world as we know it today.

(Which may be why no Futurismic stories made the cut. Sad face… 🙁 )

But don’t call SciFi Strange fantasy. This is pure science fiction. It’s merely an updated version of the literature of ideas. A science fiction for a world where the frontiers of scientific possibility are almost philosophical in nature.

However you define it, Sanford’s got a great list of stories by some interesting authors rounded up on that page: fourteen tales, all free to read on the web or download as a PDF, from some of the most reputable publications (dead-tree and digital) in the business. Should keep you busy for the rest of the weekend, eh? 🙂

[ * Not sure is this is the correct way to conjugate osmosis as a verb, but by hell, it should be. ]

Blog

Anthologize: plugin exports WordPress blogs as ebooks

2 Comments

Here’s a heads-up for fellow webzine editors and publishers, fiction writers publishing their own work online, and other interested (or indeed interesting) parties: the Anthologize plugin for WordPress generates EPUB, PDF and “other mobile formats” from content stored on the blog in which it is installed. Dan Cohen, head of the team that produced it (in just a week, no less, using a funding grant from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University) explains in a bit more detail:

[This plugin] converts the popular open-source WordPress system into a full-fledged book-production platform. Using Anthologize, you can take online content such as blogs, feeds, and images (and soon multimedia), and organize it, edit it, and export it into a variety of modern formats that will work on multiple devices. Have a poetry blog? Anthologize it into a nice-looking ePub ebook and distribute it to iPads the world over. A museum with an RSS feed of the best items from your collection? Anthologize it into a coffee table book. Have a group blog on a historical subject? Anthologize the best pieces quarterly into a print or e-journal, or archive it in TEI.

[…]

I suspect there will be many users and uses for Anthologize, and developers can extend the software to work in different environments and for different purposes. I see the tool as part of a wave of “reading 2.0″ software that I’ve come to rely on for packaging online content for long-form consumption and distribution, including the Readability browser plugin and Instapaper. This class of software is particularly important for the humanities, which remains very bookish, but it is broadly applicable. Anthologize is flexible enough to handle different genres of writing and content, opening up new possibilities for scholarly communication.

So, obviously intended for a userbase of humanities academics, but this could be a real kick-start for us fiction webzine types to start reaching out to the ereader audiences on a webzine budget*. All I need now is a few extra hours in every day of the week to investigate it further… *sigh*

Hopefully some smart people will retool it for some of the other open-source CMS platforms as well. I could very easily and quickly find a use for a ModX version….

[ Hat-tip to Alex “Xander” Ingram, Third Row Fandom’s in-house ebooks boffin. Big up yerself, Xander, and thanks for the notification. 🙂 ]

[ * Webzine budget (compound noun, colloquial) – (1): small change and used paperclips. ]

Reviews and Criticism

BOOK REVIEW: Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction by Jetse de Vries (ed.)

2 Comments

Shine: an Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction by Jetse de Vries (ed.)Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science-Fiction by Jetse de Vries (ed.)

Solaris Books, April 2010; 416pp; £7.99 RRP – ISBN13: 978-1906735661

I’ve been talking about Jetse de Vries’ Shine project for a long time now, for a number of reasons: not only is Jetse a good friend and former colleague, but I’m a sucker for manifestos and movements that attempt to turn against the grain within their chosen field. I supported the call for optimistic science fiction for the same reason I supported the Mundane SF movement, in other words, and in the same manner – not in hope of seeing one hegemony replace another, but in hope of seeing the landscape change a little.

Only time will tell whether Shine will cause more than a momentary blip on the stylistic timeline of science fiction, of course. But a number of the stories contained within it seem to prove Jetse’s thesis, namely that you don’t have to write a dystopian or post-apocalyptic future to create an engaging science fiction story. Continue reading BOOK REVIEW: Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction by Jetse de Vries (ed.) →

Blog

Shine anthology contributors interviewed

1 Comment

The SF Signal gang have turned over the microphone (er, keyboard) to Charles Tan to publish a set of interviews with the authors whose stories appear in the Shine anthology of optimistic science fiction, mentioned here many times previously. Shine features a decent number of Futurismic fiction alumni, and hence regular readers may be interested to see the interviews with Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Jason Stoddard which have already appeared.

I’ll be reviewing Shine here at Futurismic just as soon as my life circumstances have handed me sufficient time to read it and bash out some words in response (things are still a little fraught, in case you were wonderin’). In the meantime, have any of you lot bought a copy of Shine and, if so, what did you think? And if you’re not interested in buying a copy (for any reason other than not having the money spare), why is that?