Interview: Into the Sauútiverse

The Sauútiverse, a shared science-fantasy world inspired by African folklore (of which the first anthology, Mothersound, is already out) is a fascinating collaborative writing project born from the creative space Syllble. (Full disclosure: I'm currently involved with the development of another Syllble project.) I spoke with Ghanaian author Cheryl Ntumy, one of the founding members of the Sauútiverse, about the conception of this fictional world and the ideas behind it. In befitting Sauúti fashion, the answers came from the writing collective as a whole:

Who came up with the idea for the Sauútiverse?

The universe itself (the name Sauútiverse, the planets, etc.) was created by all the members of the Collective, over the course of several brainstorming sessions. We have prepared insightful FAQs that can answer some of your questions.

Was the project originally conceived within Syllble or brought into it from a previous idea?

The project was conceived when Fabrice Guerrier, founder of Syllble, Wole Talabi and Ainehi Edoro of Brittlepaper first met to discuss the possibilities for an African collaborative writing project. While Wole Talabi spearheaded Sauúti as an African-focused shared world, aligned to the Syllble mandate, Syllble was already hosting other shared world projects. Sauúti sprang out from that source, using a lot of the Syllble base framework even as we adapted and expanded it.

How long did the project take from first idea to first publication? What stages were involved?

We had our first meeting in March 2022, and saw our first published Sauúti story, "The Alphabet of Pinaa: An AI Reinvents Zerself On An Inhabited Moon," set on our invented planet Pinaa, released in July 2023 by Interzone Digital. Mothersound, the first Sauútiverse anthology, edited by Wole Talabi, was published in November 2023.

First we had a lot of brainstorming sessions, not just for the fictional world we were creating but also for the communal ownership model we would use as the Collective. We used the existing Syllble framework for collaborative worldbuilding. We spent a lot of time worldbuilding, then we each developed story pitches and shared them with the group. We started writing our stories and many of us ended up writing more than one because we were so inspired! As we wrote, we also developed a story bible to keep track of the world and to help new contributors easily understand the Sauútiverse.

Next, we invited other writers to contribute to the anthology. They submitted pitches, followed by stories. While the process of refining and editing stories was ongoing, we were also looking for a publisher. We found a home with Android Press. During the whole process, we took the opportunity to promote the project at book festivals and conventions, including the Ake Arts and Book Festival, The Nebula Conference and the Africa Writes literature festival.

What elements about the worldbuilding of Sauúti can be traced to real-life cultures?

Many elements of the Sauútiverse come from real African cultures. We all drew heavily from the cultures that we grew up in, as well as other African cultures. The word Sauúti comes from "sauti", which means "voice" in Swahili. Most of the words and names we use come from real-life languages. We also drew from real-life cultural practices, rituals, beliefs, etc., though we tweaked them to fit in with our inclusive, futuristic vision. The primary resource in the shared world is sound, and there is no written language in the Sauútiverse; that element is representative of the importance of oral history in real African cultures. The Sauútiverse Creation Myth reflects this pan-African inspiration, as indicated in Wole Talabi’s introduction to the Creation Myth “Our Mother, Creator” in Mothersound:

“...we took inspiration from North African communities who center themselves around a matriarch and goddess. From the Ijaw people and their creator goddess Woyengi. From the Egyptian mythological Nut. Nana Buluku of the Fon who gave birth to the moon spirit Mawu, the sun spirit Lisa. From so many more.”

How was the process of recruiting the various writers who contributed to the project?

Wole recruited the rest of us to the Collective. This is the email he sent out, seeking writers: The History of Sauúti.

How are decisions made regarding what locations and events are official in the shared continuity?

We meet fortnightly, and make all decisions as a Collective. Once a location or event appears in a published story, it is considered "official" and key points from it are added to the story bible, where relevant. In terms of events, anything that affects the wider universe needs to be discussed and agreed on by the Collective.

Does anyone supervise that one writer's additions don't contradict another writer's?

We are switched on as a collective. Pitches and reviews are key to helping us avoid contradictions. We submit pitches before writing new stories so that the rest of the Collective can give feedback, take note of any conflicting or contradictory ideas and find ways to resolve any story challenges. We also review the finished stories to check and give feedback as well. It's just also a great way to support each other's work.

Where did the concept for the magic system come from?

Once we settled on the power of sound as the focus of our world, having sound as the basis of the techno-magic system made sense. It happened pretty organically—one idea led to the next. Sound is already linked to the supernatural in terms of spells, chants, prayers, etc., so it felt right.

In a culture organized around the magical study and manipulation of sound waves, what is the social status of people born without the ability to speak and/or hear?

Inclusion is an important part of the world we're creating, and those without certain abilities have the same status as anyone else. We view sound in this world as something rich and complex—it includes all kinds of vibrations and mechanical waves, infrasonic, ultrasonic, all varieties of sound. So people can manipulate sound in more ways than speaking and understand each other without hearing. They can play musical instruments and tools, use signs, use technology, etc. We are open to every interpretation of sound in the Sauútiverse.

We have stories that feature Deaf/deaf/Hard of Hearing (HOH) and non-verbal characters, some of whom are incredibly powerful. Sign language is used widely across the Sauútiverse and has the same status as spoken language (in some cases it's even required or preferred). The story "Lost in the Echoes'' by Xan van Rooyen features a Deaf/non-verbal DJ with extraordinary magic. Xan had a Deaf friend provide a sensitivity read for their story, to make sure the representation was accurate and didn't play into any negative stereotypes.

It’s also important to note that the founding Sauúti Collective includes queer and neurodivergent people and the Sauútiverse is queer-normative, so LGBT+ characters are fully accepted in society (i.e. queerphobia would be the exception and not the norm). Similarly, neurodiversity is represented in Sauútiverse stories.

If it's not top secret, can you mention other authors who will add more material to the Sauútiverse in the near future?

If we tell you, we’ll have to kill you... but I guess we can take the risk with you! I’m co-editing our next anthology, Sauúti Terrors, with members of my Sauúti family Eugen Bacon and Stephen Embleton, and we're stoked to see that contributing members of Mothersound —Tobias Buckell, Somto Ihezue and T. L. Huchu— are interested in sending us stories, and we're starting to receive exciting pitches! We also have newcomers like Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Ivor Hartmann, Kofi Nyameye, Nerine Dorman and Tobi Ogundiran on track in this new project. It's an anthology by invitation, and we're also accepting poetry. We're thrilled to confirm that we have signed agreements with five-time Bram Stoker Award winner and recipient of the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award Linda D. Addison, Grand Master Akua Lezli Hope, and other prominent speculative fiction poets, including Miguel Mitchell and Jamal Hodge.

Members of the collective have also written and sold Sauútiverse stories to other venues outside of our own anthologies, so you can look out for them soon.

The plan for the Sauútiverse was always to have it expand beyond the original collective and keep growing—for it to be a sandbox of imagination for Africans and those of the African diaspora to tell new, complex and fascinating stories together and we are so glad that it seems to be right on track.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Interview with Malka Older

The Astounding-nominated author spoke with Nerds of a Feather about her writing process, her preferred readings, and our civilizational moment

Arturo Serrano: First of all, congratulations on the enthusiastic reception for The Mimicking of Known Successes. I must confess that the book's title biased me before I started reading, because romance stories don't typically have such a technical-sounding title. I suppose fans of hard SF don't mind, but did you worry at any moment that the title could scare away romance readers?

Malka Older: I honestly didn't think about it. I finished the book before without a title (the working title was "Rings and Rails," because that initial, vague, how would people live on a gas giant planet predated almost everything else in the book, except the mauzooleum, by literal years), and when I was reading through looking for one, that phrase jumped out at me. I was also in the mood for a slightly complex, enigmatic title, so it worked for me.

AS: In the creation of Mimicking, did you start by building the Victorian atmosphere and then come up with the planetary migration backstory, or did you first have the planetary migration in mind and then gave it the Victorian atmosphere? Or something else entirely?

MO: So as I said above, I had an idea many years ago about a gas giant encircled by rails to make it possible for people to live there, and that some of that space would be used as a kind of zoo. But it was really no more than that, a few sentences in a document. The other part of the book came when I was doing a lot of comfort reading during the early pandemic and thinking about how important that was for me and trying to analyze the elements of comfort reading for me and why I found them so appealing. "Sherlock Holmes retelling" is definitely one of those elements, and when I connected the two ideas it merged so well, and I went on developing from there.

AS: A core theme in Mimicking is the futility of trying to recreate an idealized prior state of affairs, and the consequent need for constant adaptation. What prompted your interest in exploring that idea?

MO: I find our relationship to the past fascinating—also our relationship to the future. When I was a kid, I once wrote a story called "If Memory Serves" about the way a hated despot was transformed into a revered leader over three generations of idealization. But this became particularly urgent to me, as a problematic, during those early days of the pandemic when I was thinking about and eventually writing this story. "Back to normal" was this almost talismanic thing, and it's a very understandable feeling in the midst of uncertainty and chaos and loss and suffering, to want to go back to what is known; but at the same time the "normal" was what allowed all that to happen in the first place, and those moments of disruption are also opportunities for improvement. It's a pretty common dynamic in disaster response, often coming from a place of authority: they'll give people money to rebuild but only to exactly what they had before—even if that leaves them open again to the same sort of damage the next time there's a flood or an earthquake, or leaves them in the same uncomfortable situation as before when it could have been improved. So I wanted to explore that in the book, hopefully in a complicated and nuanced way.

AS: You have frequently spoken of "narrative disorder" as a widespread condition of our century. Have you seen it evolve into different forms, compared to when you first proposed it?

MO: I don't think the disorder itself has evolved much—it's pretty broad and also it hasn't been that long since I defined it (probably most clearly in this essay). But of course the tropes and story patterns and so on have been evolving, almost continuously, if not necessarily in drastic ways (very sorry to see from summaries of recent movies the fridging trope for justifying extreme violence and transferring personal vulnerability to others arrrhhghahghghh). I'm sure, for example, that there is a whole set of conventions to various types of TikTok videos/reels, with expected beats that can be embraced or subverted for effect.

AS: Another frequent descriptor in your writings is "comemierdería." For the benefit of non-Spanish speakers, could you please explain its definition?

MO: "Comemierda" is an epithet that I heard a lot growing up, usually when my mom was driving. Literally it means "shit-eater" (derogatory), but like most such words there's a lot of connotation and shades of meaning. In Cuban, or at least my family's Cuban, "comemierda" is said with a tone of disgust and/or dismissiveness: it's someone who's careless, obstructive, or potentially actually evil and in a really annoying way, who does things that they really should know better than to do, who deserves scorn as well as irritation and anger. It has a very broad application, from minor irritation (cuts you off intentionally while driving) to major wrongdoing (using violence, oppression, and cronyism to maintain control over a country for decades, for example). Comemierdería, then, is the sort of stuff that comemierdas do. Like the appositive, it has a wide range; one of my uncles (qdep) once pronounced "La comemierdería es relativa"), it's relative, meaning that there's really bad comemierdería and less bad, and that might make the less bad seem better but it's still comemierdería. It's bullshit, it's bureaucracy designed to perpetrate evil, stupid rules and the people who use them, and lies and capitalism and communism and petty cruelty by those with power.

So it's a very useful word, but there's another reason that I employ it so much: it's pretty hard to find a personal epithet that doesn't rely on insulting a particular gender, sexual orientation, someone's parents or parentage, entirely blameless animal, or part of the body.

AS: On a related note: what's your position on writers from outside the Anglosphere using untranslated terms from their own cultures in books published in English?

MO: As my books probably attest, I'm totally in favor, both when reading and writing. As a reader, I love learning new words. I love learning them by context, which is probably how I got most of my vocabulary in various languages, and I don't mind looking them up if I have to. As a writer, I have a lot of languages floating around in my head, especially the words that stick and present themselves because they don't have adequate equivalents in other languages, and I want to make use of the best word in each situation, always while keeping the overall text comprehensible.

AS: In the Acknowledgments section of your novel Infomocracy, you describe it as "a global book." Beyond the simple fact that the novel has a protagonist who travels everywhere, and that it was written by an author who also travels everywhere, what do you think makes a global book?

MO: Oof, this question is making me feel like maybe it was too grandiose a claim. After all, there's a lot of globe out there, and a lot of variations within it. But for that book in particular, I was attempting to imagine a global system, something to supplant the fragmentation of our current geopolitics, our current attempts to solve problems that affect everyone on the planet, and so I was trying to present a wide variety of locations and societies to give at least a sense for that. Of course, it was also a way for me to enjoy the memories of some of the places I've been.

AS: Do you see yourself as a global writer, whatever that means?

MO: No, I definitely can't claim that. Like everyone, I come from a certain perspective, and while I've been lucky to have opportunities to expand it somewhat, all of that is still very specific—this influence at that point in my life, this place at that time in history, etc. And as tempting as it is to want something global—and I do think there's value in at least trying to look outside one's perspective of origin—at the same time I'm not sure that it's what we should necessarily be aiming for. When people say some piece of art is "universal," it always worries me a bit, because how can that be? How can any of us possibly speak to everyone, or represent everyone? I usually value specificity, rather than generality.

AS: The idea of centenals in Infomocracy and its sequels relies on a dissolution of the entire concept of nation states. What experiences shaped your skepticism toward nation states?

MO: Both the theory and the practice. When you read about the history of nation-states, and how it played into colonialism, and how, before external colonialism, it played into the sort of "local" colonialism of obscuring minority identities within the imperial nation (e.g., Welsh, Basque, Catalán, Calabrian, etc.), and look at the ways it has driven conflict throughout the last few centuries, it's very ugly. And in my own lived experience, I have worked in, lived in, or visited many countries with active separatist movements based on feeling like it was impossible to fit into the "nation" supposedly aligned with the "state" they had little choice but to belong to. And that's not surprising because it's hard to find a country that doesn't have a separatist movement (although granted some are more active than others).

To be clear, the concept of nation-states is not just countries as we know them today (although those are certainly problematic in a lot of ways on their own). It's the idea, which still underpins countries, that there is a "nation" of people, unified in some way, that belongs within the geographic boundaries and under the political aegis of a given state. This is, obviously, ridiculous in most if not all cases. There is no innate quality that makes all legal US citizens somehow "Americans," nothing that makes them in any way distinguishable from "Canadians" or "Botswanans" or "Bahrainians." It gets even more ridiculous when you factor in the statisticity of the concept: the idea that populations aren't constantly shifting, moving, changing, making families across borders, reimagining themselves.

AS: Do you wish Infomocracy's centenal system were implemented in real life, or do you have objections to the way it functions in your novels?

MO: I definitely want more innovation and experimentation in how governmental jurisdictions work. I would like everyone to have more flexibility in choosing what kind of government they live under; and I would like immigration to be freer, on principle and also because the international system recognizes that population is more important than territorial size and acts accordingly; and I would like the system to reflect that citizens are more fundamentally important to countries than countries are to people. And I would like lots of other things, like the responsibility to protect (R2P), and a less power-hierarchy-driven international organization, and generally humans being more important to everyone with power, and so on. I definitely do not think that the centenal system is the only way to get there, or even that it would guarantee all these things. I wrote it more as a way to point out that the way we organize government jurisdictions and citizenship is, if not exactly arbitrary (rather, path-dependent), certainly not inevitable.

AS: For your own reading, do you prefer science fiction that warns "let's not do this" or that offers "here's what we could do"?

MO: I tend to like inventive visions of what we could be doing, but that's me—absolutely no shade on anyone who likes to read, or write, other things! We need all sorts of approaches and moods and visions!

AS: What are you reading these days?

MO: I just finished Paladin's Faith, the latest in T. Kingfisher's incredible Paladin series (and actually reread the Clockwork Boys duology immediately afterwards, very worth it), and now I'm reading The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo, which is (so far at least) a very fun alt-history noir. Lately I've also really enjoyed Lavender House—another noir, although not alt-history—; a reread of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong, which held up rather better than I expected; Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall; Grave Expectations by Alice Bell; and Starter Villain by John Scalzi, all of which were very fun.

Thank you, Malka, for taking the time for this interview.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

DYSTOPIAN VISIONS: Writing a Way Out

When thinking about dystopia recently for an essay (which can be read here), our conversation raised the question of whether writers have responsibility in how they depict dystopia and apocalypse. Is dystopian writing a “warning system?” The question intrigued me, as both a reader of and a writer of dystopian fiction, I wanted to think about it deeper. I also wanted to take the question to some writers who tackle dystopia. So I sought out some of the most interesting emerging SFF writers I know, and then barraged them with a series of questions, which they were all considerate enough to answer in deeply thoughtful ways. The writers I talked to were Kate Dollarhyde (SFF writer and co-editor in chief of Strange Horizons), Brontë Wieland (SFF writer and co-editor of the solar punk anthology Sunvault), Phoebe Wagner (SFF Writer and co-editor of the solar punk anthology Sunvault), and Tony Quick (SFF writer).

The first question I asked tackled the question head on. It was a question I struggle with (as I work on revising a dystopic sci-fi novel that tries to be hopeful): where is the line drawn between being didactic (a quality I hate when I read it) and being honest about what people have done to themselves and others? I also have some pretty hard drawn lines when it comes to responsibility in terms of horror: violence should never be depicted for strictly entertainment purposes for example (y’all should hear my very long rant against the torture-porn genre).

What responsibilities do we, as writers, have in depicting dystopia and apocalypse? Should we spend as much time considering the socially conscious aspects of our work as much as the narrative aspects?

KD: I believe writers have a responsibility to reflect an experiential truth in their stories, whether real or imagined. The reality we depict is, I think, a combination of the dystopia or apocalypse the writer is working with and the social reality of their point of view characters.

If a writer's apocalypse is one based in climate collapse, for example, the resonance of the depiction of that event or its aftermath depends so much on the position—both physically and socially—of the protagonist. A rich white man in post-water California and a working class Cuban woman in post-coastline Florida will experience wildly divergent realities, both valid as points of narrative inquiry, informed as much by their social position as by the lack or abundance of water in their particular setting. The reader might not have any experience with climate collapse, but they know what it's like to inhabit a social reality, and one well-crafted will only make more relevant and vital the narrative.

All of that is a roundabout way of saying that if a writer is considering the narrative aspects of their work, they should by necessity be considering the socially conscious aspects of their work. Calamity fiction is about the collapse and radical restructuring of social order. It's my opinion that the writer can't really have a coherent dystopic narrative that leans hard on one and not the other.

BW: I believe that our responsibility is to create depictions of the world as we see it, as we feel it, as we want it to be, and as we believe it may become. Often the issues facing us feel incalculable and insurmountable, and that’s where I believe dystopia has its roots: those moments when the world is overwhelmingly shitty and we begin to believe there’s no other path than something so dark. In that way, yes, I think we are responsible for telling these stories, for depicting the world how it presents itself to us.

The narrative and social aspects of our stories are inseparable, and we should always consider the impact our writing will have.

TQ: I want to be careful about assigning any specific “responsibility” to authors because I’m afraid litmus tests can be limiting. The dystopian and apocalyptic subgenres includes grim, somber novels in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or José Saramago’s Blindness but also includes chaotic carnivals such as Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist novel Cat’s Cradle or the psychedelic dreamscapes of J.G. Ballard’s novels The Unlimited Dream Company and The Drowned World. We’re standing under a wide umbrella here. We should definitely give serious thought to the socio-political underpinnings of our works but contemporary fiction shouldn’t be a soapbox. The contemporary audience becomes defensive and closed off once they sense unpolished propaganda. As artists, we’re challenged with hitching our larger societal concerns to plots featuring smaller, intimate narratives our audience can relate with. Fiction challenges us to show readers the ramifications of our society’s slow decline and turn statistics into stories.

PW: That's the balance isn't it--which comes first, social issues or narrative? How does one balance those ideas? I don't know. I'm always fighting with being preachy. Dystopia seems to do that well, though. Mad Max: Fury Road always comes to mind when thinking of social consciousness and narrative. While there are differing opinions on Fury Road, I loved the film for its high-octane moments balanced with critiques on everything from gender, human trafficking, capitalism, big oil, environmental issues--the list goes on. I personally believe writers have a responsibility in all their work. If I'm reading a dystopia and they aren't taking into consideration that yes, while rape or torture or INSERT AWFUL THING HERE might happen in an apocalypse, the writer must consider how those ideas will impact the reader. If the writer is casually using the horror of an apocalypse landscape just for its shock value without considering the social implications, I won't keep reading. Conversely, a dystopia offers a canvas to explore the dark side of humanity, which if done ethically and with empathy can be an enlightening experience.     

The next question I asked went back directly to something Philippe had asked me in the previous essay: is the technical accuracy of these depictions important? Again, it’s a question that I struggle with in terms of my own writing. My thought is that good science-fiction should be able to see the steps of how we got to the point depicted, even if those steps are not directly spelled out on the page.

 How much realism (in terms of how the dystopia/apocalypse comes about, but also the fallout of it) is needed in a dystopic depiction? Why? 

KD: I think the writer only needs so much reality as is required to make a dystopia feel truthful to the reader. The rub there is that every reader has a different threshold for what feels true based on their own social reality and how similar to or divergent from the social reality of the point of view character they are.

Reality is, I think, an argument the writer makes to the reader. A woman living in the United States today might not need much of an argument—that is, injection of reality—to find The Handmaid's Tale convincing; Atwood can take her dystopia to extremes of plausibility because her audience doesn't need much help to follow her there. But a cisgender progressive man might take more convincing. (Incidentally, I think that's why Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy has such broad appeal—everyone who lives under capitalism recognizes bits of their life in that dystopia.) You could, I think, make a similar argument for white people in general and Butler's Parable of the Sower. Could things really get that bad? To convince a reader who might ask that question, who might doubt, the writer needs a more exhaustive argument.

So, in short, I believe the level of realism required in a dystopic narrative is answered in who the author is writing for.

BW: For me, a dystopia is most effective when I can see clearly how it was once related to the world we live in. In the sense that I want the dystopias I read to be believable extensions of the society they stem from, I think writers should take great care to connect to a world their readers understand. In apocalypse narratives, I think there is greater leeway in the origin of the disaster event, but I still need to feel the way that the apocalypse informs and impacts our idea of the present and its trajectory.

TQ: Realism is subjective. When I read 20^th century fiction, I’m  constantly reminded how alien the stories seem in our present day context. Look, I was born in the 20^th century but when I read about these characters whose misunderstandings could be cleared up with a text message or read plots that would be resolved with a high speed internet connection and a search engine, I wonder if I have more in common with the science fiction protagonist who navigates a society transformed by new, disruptive technologies. Beyond that, social media has revolutionized how much insight and communication we have with people outside our immediate orbit. We are learning via Facebook and Twitter and comments sections across the internet that many of us don’t share the same reality.

But despite the age of “alternative facts” that dawn’s orange on the horizon, we all should be able to agree that our actions have concrete consequences. Chloe, I think you hit the bull’s eye with the word “fallout.” More important than adhering to an imaginary consensus of realism, we should aim to provide the audience with a sense the character’s actions matter. By proxy, the audience may come to believe their actions have an impact and maybe we can avoid the hammer’s fall. Maybe.

PW: I see that decision as belonging to the writer. Dystopia/apocalypse settings can fall under any of the three major genre branches (fantasy, science fiction, and horror) in my opinion, so the level of realism depends on what the reader needs in order to believe the story. As a reader and writer, I do need realism when it comes to the characters' reactions to the landscape. The environment needs to influence them. If the environment isn't impacting the characters, then why write a dystopia at all?

Finally, I asked the question that gets to the root of all good writing. Why do you do what you do? Why is this important to you? Dystopia is important to me because it shows a path not to take, a warning. It also shows that we do go on, despite all of this, we go on. Dystopia to me has always been a hopeful genre, because it shows we keep trying.

Why do you choose to write about dystopias?

KD: For me, dystopia's appeal lives in the braiding of hope and hopelessness.

Every person's present day—from 50,000 years ago to right now—is all fucked up. Our societies teeter always on the edge of ruin. Our individual lives teeter always on the edge of death. One person in the right place needs only to make one wrong choice to send us careening over the edge of oblivion. Someone launches a nuke. Someone mows me down in a crosswalk. Dystopias reflect that reality, that ever-present possibility of the end of everything. Dystopias say your hopelessness is not insane. You are not alone in being afraid.

But dystopias are not a nihilistic surrender to the uncaring smackdown of the universe, because hope is as much baked in to their narrative structures as hopelessness. A successful dystopic narrative is to me at least in part a promise: we can fuck everything up and still make it out alive. Even The Road, the most relentlessly depressing apocalypse story I've read, ends with hope. Not hope that everything will be as it was, or that everything will be okay, or that we won't lose everything that matters to us along the way, but that it's possible to keep going.

BW: When I write dystopia, what’s on my mind is usually a single action or behavior or sight that has struck me as unexpectedly and scarily oppressive. Often, it’s an everyday occurrence that presents itself in a new light, or it’s something I haven’t stopped to think about before, and I try to see the extension of the action and its consequences. Where will we go if we never stop to consider the ways we behave and let ourselves be influenced? That’s the question I try to answer in writing dystopia.

TQ: There’s this quote by William Gibson I keep coming back to time and again: “Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.” Despite my tendency to draw dark futures, I’m actually optimistic about humanity’s chances of survival. We are a stubborn species who have harnessed nature to the point that survivalist tales are our entertainment rather than, you know, our daily lives. Whether we continue on as tribes of neo-cavemen scattered across a bombed out landscape, as space-faring refugees colonizing the solar system, or genetically altered shades of ourselves retrofitted to fit our new environment, we are not going down as a species without a fight.

I’m concerned about our immediate present and near future, what ways we might maim ourselves on our road to that future and how we might rise above ourselves. Recently, one of my advisers expressed his exhaustion with the sheer pessimism of post-apocalyptic science fiction and a desire to see a return of optimism in the genre. There’s something to be said for this: writers can lean heavy on diagnosing society’s issues and genre’s unique capacity to imagine alternatives allows our fiction to do more. But that said, I don’t see dystopia and apocalyptic settings as a popular, waning trend but instead a subgenre that speaks to a wartime generation raised on Y2K scares, 9/11 fallout, 2012 Mayan calendar predictions, random acts of domestic and foreign terrorism, 24-hour doomsday prophets, and seismic societal changes all streaming to us live. Why are we surprised the generation who has been told “the end is nigh” since we were knee high write about futures where those predictions bear fruit?

Our contemporary society has a number of pressing issues: institutional racism, indoctrinated sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, class inequality, violations of rights, and so on. No one science fiction writer could ever tackle all these issues with depth and sincerity: we need an army. Science fiction is a useful tool for indirectly interrogating how society is organized without limiting ourselves to what “is possible” and “isn’t possible.” Those who are most impacted by society’s problems and are only now gaining a foothold from which we can speak aren’t ready to abandon the dystopian genre when it’s so useful to portraying shades of our unacknowledged reality.

PW: I write about dystopias as a way to explore the near future, a future which seems to be coming closer and closer. What happens when humanity is pushed to the end of existence? What breaks down, what survives? Now, working backwards from those depictions, how can I as an individual work to stop that degradation of society? For me, dystopias aren't fun an games but a way to explore big problems--climate change, the collapse of capitalism, gender, human and nonhuman relationships. If my dystopia isn't dealing with social issues, I usually avoid the setting. There's enough depressing literature out there, I'm not interested in adding to it unless some good might come from it.  

So dystopia creators and consumers, what are your thoughts on these questions (and the thoughts on them here)? I’d love to hear other voices on this, commenting here or discussing on Twitter (@PintsNCupcakes and @nerds_feather). You can also tag in any of the lovely writers above (Kate is @keightdee, Tony is @tonyquickpov, Bronte is @beezyal, and Phoebe is @pheebs_w).

Microreview [book]: The Flesh Made Word, ed. Bernie Mojzes

 There's probably a "the pen is mightier" joke I could make here but I'm classier than that.

There are collections that I would recommend to people to highlight just how much fun speculative erotica can be. And then there are collections that I would recommend to people to highlight just how heartbreakingly beautiful speculative erotica can be. This falls into that later category. Not that some of the stories aren't fun, but the collection as a whole foregoes the more conventional happily ever afters for stories that hit, that sink like the weight of history, that rise like a phoenix to burn for a brief, glorious moment before descending into ashes again. These stories are no doubt erotic, but they are also no doubt incredibly literary and inky in their depth and focus. If you ever wanted to weep openly while reading a collection of erotic stories, well then this anthology is for you!

The subtitle of the collection, "Erotic Tales About Writing," provides a solid theme as well as a heavy dose of meta-ness. After all, these are written tales about the act of writing as erotic. Typewriters become needful ghosts, and tattooing becomes entangled with touch and resistance and betrayal. Playwrights will their characters into existence to disastrous results and prophecies bloom in aches finally eased, frustrations finally released. The stories all blend the theme in with their speculative elements in wildly imaginative ways, creating worlds of beauty and darkness, pleasure and pain. The anthology as a whole maintains a balance between happy stories and more tragic ones, but this is not a light read. The stories are almost entirely dense, challenging, and very good, but not what I'd call appropriate beach reading. As such, the stories flit between incredibly sexy and, well, not so much. "Rival Pens" by Benji Bright, for instance, maintains a rather charming voice and solid pacing in a story about two competing playwrights whose ambition and spite and arrogance destroys more than they know. It is definitely an erotic work, but for me it struck much closer to devastatingly disturbing than fun-sexy-times-go, though still very much worth the read.

And many of the stories center on loss and longing and healing or the inability to ever fully heal. In "All the Spaces In-Between" by A.C. Wise, which kicks off the collection, features a man who tries to repair typewriters, not just of their physical problems but psychically as well, finding in them the ghosts of those who used them. And by exorcising their pain, their history, their loss, he seeks to exorcise himself as well, his drive an attempt to fill with words the hole inside him, the hole a war made in people disappeared, lives destroyed. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the book, Sunny Moraine's "Capitalia" reveals a story of bodies and the power of writing your own story, your own identity. Because words can be prisons and words can be keys and words can fail and words can set free. It's a delightfully sensuous story about crossroads, about change, and it's an satisfying way to end the collection, a spice of rebellion and resistance and a lingering promise that words are tools and that we can wield them to tell the stories we want. And, to further highlight that fact, the collection leaves space after the last story for the reader to write something of their own, to add their voice and mark to the chorus, to the call. To engage in writing as an erotic act. It's a very nice touch, though I might be too much a book-purist to actually write something in my copy.

I'd say most of the stories in the collection tend toward the fantasy side of things, which I have absolutely no problem with. There's a great amount of second world settings with strange and richly-built societies and situations. "Paper Skin" by Sasha Payne, creates a world ravaged by war and sustained by resistance. Karl is a man whose skin can bear messages in tiny scars that fade quickly, and his story is one of despair and longing, hurt and betrayal. His world is overrun, brutally controlled, and so Karl lives for his small resistances, his moments of stolen pleasure. The setting is vivid and crushing, the story erotic and heartbreaking, Karl's heart as fragile as paper, as strong as iron. "The Prophet Scroll" by Delilah Bell builds no less intricate a world, ruled by ceremony and starring Zia, a woman with no real interest in court politics or magic until she discovers she's the Scroll, the intended mate for the Prophet, who is part leader and part spiritual figure and entirely a rather frustrated man because of the…restrictions of his office. What follows is a sexy and elaborately rendered story that mixes performance, prophecy, and pleasure.

All in all, the collection succeeds not only in capturing a truly impressive range of stories tackling the erotic act of writing, but also in demonstrating just how deep and meaningful speculative erotica can be. For readers who enjoy deep and lyric prose but are hoping for a bit more explicit eroticism than most short speculative fiction markets put out, this collection will not disappoint. For those looking for a fun and sexy read…well, that's not really what this collection sets out to do. The stories carry with them a pervasive darkness and grapple with despair and loss and emptiness. They look at what it means to write, what it means to have sex, and what it means to write about having sex.

The Math:

Baseline Assessment: 8/10 

Bonuses: +1 for a very dense collection of speculative erotica, +1 for a great range of stories and great use of the theme

Negatives: -2 for breaking my heart (numerous times!) and making me cry while reading erotica

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 "very high quality" see our full rating system here.

--
POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

Reference: ed. Mojzes, Bernie. The Flesh Made Word [Circlet Press, 2015]

AiIP: Let's Talk

Grab a seat. We need to talk. It's about something I usually avoid talking about, for a variety of reasons. But it's something that should be addressed, so we're going to talk about it.

First, though, story time. This is a third hand story, so take it with appropriate grains of salt and/or the spice of your choice.

Back before 3024AD came out, I was talking to a co-worker at that time, telling him about my goals. He related the story of a relative who wrote a book, and was offered a book deal with a solid five-figure advance- on the condition that the protagonist was male- not female, as she had written. She refused, and her book remains unpublished.

For a lot of people, for a five-figure advance, they would change their main character to a cucumber. Hell, if you've sent off fifty or sixty queries, you might do it for a whole lot less than that.

There is a lot to be said about the cons of self-publishing- I've covered a ton here, and on ye olde Deanfortythree(e) blog- editing issues, cover art, overall stories- but there are some definite pros, and this is one of them.

Hear Cap's immortal line "I'm always picking up after myself!"

Because- for whatever reason- there is a fantastic lack of diversity in publishing. The optimist in me (he's in there, I promise) wants to think this is unintentional, just coincidence, but... come on. People will talk about how we should read more diverse authors (correctly), but walk into a bookstore and grab one hundred random books. How many are written by non-straight-white-men? Twenty? Maybe forty if you grabbed a bunch from the romance section? The problem lies higher up than the reader, or the bookstore. It lies with publishers who select what gets published, what gets marketed and how much. The ones who decide that, no, that protagonist just won't sell.

But if you're publishing your own work (or working with a smaller press), you don't answer to those people. You answer to yourself, and to your readers. You can write what-who-ever the hell you want.

Because, here's the thing: I'm a straight(ish) white dude. I'm kind of (totally) in the majority here. But I can't change that, and I'm not going to stop writing, either, so what can I do? The same thing anyone can- write something. Write something diverse, something other than the same thing that's been written for a looooong ass time.

I'm probably not perfect at this, but I doubt there's a perfect formula at all. Stories and books will lose a lot if all you worry about if the literary equivalent of affirmative action. But stories will gain much more if authors take a few moments and make their characters more diverse. It will make for richer backgrounds, deeper characters and better books.

And no one will tell you to change it.

-DESR

Dean is the author of the 3024AD series of science fiction stories. You can read his other ramblings and musings on a variety of topics (mostly writing) on his blog. When not holed up in his office
tweeting obnoxiously writing, he can be found watching or playing sports, or in his natural habitat of a bookstore.

BLOGTABLE: Impending Doom!

Welcome to this month's Blogtable! I'm Dean E.S. Richard, and I will be your host this month. For those of you who may not know me, I write (primarily) science fiction, including the 3024AD Short Stories and the short story 'Far', which you can read for free this week over at QuarterReads. I also love to drink and cook, and even venture outside to snowboard or kayak. Primarily, I am obnoxious on Twitter. But enough about me. Time to meet your respondents:

Respondent the First: SEAN E. WILLIAMS is the NEW YORK TIMES best selling writer of FAIREST: THE RETURN OF THE MAHARAJA for Vertigo, THE VAMPIRE DIARIES and SENSATION COMICS for DC Comics, ARTFUL DAGGERS for Monkeybrain Comics and IDW Publishing, and more. He co-founded the comics publishing company Comicker LLC, which launched with its Comicker Digital label in 2015. You can find him at seanewilliams.com, or on Twitter at @sean_e_williams. Comicker Digital can be found at ComickerDigital.com, or on Twitter at @ComickerLLC.

Respondent the Second: E. Catherine Tobler's fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and SciFiction.  She was a Sturgeon Award nominee in 2013, and is currently senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. Her first novel, Rings of Anubis, is now available. For more visit www.ecatherine.com. Buy her book here.

Respondent the Third: Scott Whitmore Scott is an avid reader, and his most excellent review blog can be found here. He is just past what some may consider the midpoint of life (51 53), but likes to think he is still open-minded and (at least) partially aware of what’s going on in the world of pop culture. He has also written two three novels, his most recent being Green Zulu Five One. (ed: Update your blog bio, Scott)

In Which Dean Ponders the IMPENDING DOOM of publishing!

Prompt: Nearly any commentary on publishing these days reads like a 1950's science fiction movie poster. AMAZON! INDIE PRESS! INTERNET OUTRAGE! LACK OF DIVERSITY! Lost in that mess, it seems, is the fact that people actually read a lot. It's fairly safe to assume people will keep doing so. But in what fashion? Is there a way all the present options can coexist?

Those questions come with myriad options, so let's attempt to narrow them down for the purposes of this post:

1. With the massive variety of reading options out there (ebook stores, WattPad and the like, etc), is there a way to ensure the average reader will get a quality product, or does the medium benefit from a near-total lack of gatekeepers?

2. How, in said mess of options, can authors effectively reach and build an audience for their works?

To our respondents!

Sean: The lack of gatekeepers is a huge benefit in a lot of ways, as it allows for series that might not exist otherwise to reach the marketplace. For example, there's a large call for more diversity in YA fiction (well, in every storytelling medium), but publishers are slow to change their ways, partly because they don't know how well they'll sell, but also because they don't know how to market diverse titles.  I've seen this firsthand as a creator.  Luckily, the tide is starting to turn, like with a majority of the top-selling titles in Marvel's Buy-One-Get-One sale at comiXology being female-led series.  Things are getting better, and having an open marketplace showed that that was possible, and that it was needed.

As far as the quality question goes, readers know what they can expect quality-wise from larger publishers, such as DC or IDW.  It's something we're going for at Comicker as well.  But regardless of if it's self-published or published by the Big 2, user reviews are what people look to nowadays - either in comments, ratings, or via social media. If something's bad, people will let other people know.  It's the whole Yelp phenomenon - people will post a review if they don't like something, but they won't necessarily if they DO like it.  That's why I personally aim to only make recommendations via social media - there's so much negativity out there, I'd rather lift up the quality books than try to cut down books I don't enjoy as much.

One of the reasons I co-founded Comicker, and one of the reasons we launched with our Comicker Digital label, is because digital offers the biggest audience, and one that's growing. There are huge swaths of this country (and the world, in fact) that don't have a good comic shop or book store within driving distance, but tablets are becoming commonplace.  There's no shortage of readers out there, and from what I can see, there's no shortage of quality creators either.  There's room for everyone.

E. Catherine: "Quality product" can be defined in many ways, of course--what one reader finds to be quality, another may not. I would point anyone toward recent Hugo Award controversies as evidence of recent battles over quality, what does and does not "deserve" to have a place at the table. What one editor does not care for will find a home with another; the same is true of readers. What one person loves, another will loathe.

If gate-keepers are defined as editors and publishers, I don't think those are going to vanish any time soon, even among those who choose to self-publish. Certainly there are authors who won't bother, wanting to get their work into the market as soon as possible, but fortunately we live in an age of being able to read a sample before we purchase (oh gosh, we can do that in bookstores, too!), so readers can still determine if a work meets their own definition of quality before purchase.

If I knew the answer to the second question, about authors building and reaching an audience, I would surely be rich by now. I think audience attention is divided now more than ever--there's so much of everything. Video games and TV shows and movies and comics and tabletop games and apps and music. When everything and everyone is striving to be on top of the pile and have their voice be the loudest, it's overwhelming. I think authors have to trust that they will find their audience even if it takes a while. Love what you do, because that will come through in how you promote and speak of it to others.

Scott: I don’t think it is possible to *guarantee* readers get a quality product. First off, everyone has their own opinion on what constitutes quality. I dislike typos, but honestly if I’m paying $1-3 for an Indie author eBook I’m a lot more tolerant than I would be of a traditionally published eBook costing $10-15. As long as the story is good, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to the Indie writer because I know what it’s like facing the choice of hiring an editor or paying your mortgage. (PS: I find typos in Trad Pub books all the time, too.)

The wide-open nature of the field these days certainly favors Indie writers. Anyone with a computer and a little knowledge can publish a book (eBook or paperback) and sell it on the web. Anyone lacking the computer and/or knowledge can hire someone with those things to publish a book for them. I’ve helped a couple people do it for free. Personally, I like that it has become easy for people to express themselves creatively.

Now, for readers this is a Good News/Not So Good News situation. There are many, many more books to choose from, some exploring topics previously ignored by Trad Pub (which usually focuses on playing it safe over being inventive) and this is Good. But having so many options can be overwhelming, paralyzing readers who just want to easily find a good book, and that is Not Good. Generally Indie books are much less expensive and that is Good. Stories that are poorly written or technical deficient, and there will be some (many?), are Not Good.

Now may be a good spot to discuss reviews. Ideally, reviews should help readers and writers equally, steering consumers to works they are likely to enjoy while letting substandard authors know they need to work harder. Unfortunately, we all know there is a lot of “gaming the system.” Recently, I’ve seen a surge in the number of websites offering glowing reviews for a fee, and I have been contacted a couple times by writers suggesting a “5-star swap” in which I praise their book and they praise mine. There are even books on how to set up “review circles” and create false personas for writing multiple reviews of the same book. Looking past these ethical lapses, even honest reviews from readers can be misleading and/or useless. My favorite is a one-star review of a novella featuring space ships on the cover: “Too much sci-fi.” One may wonder why the reviewer bought the book in the first place but the bottom line is the review tells me nothing about whether the book is worth my money. 

As to the second point, if I knew, I’d be driving a much sexier car than my 2007 Dodge (Ed: Yeah, right).

Ok, seriously, I think it starts with the writing. The cliché is “the cream rises to the top.” Your story must be compelling, inventive, exciting, mind-blowing, engaging, cool — pick an adjective. What comes next is a bit of a “chicken or the egg” deal. When the story is good enough, you’re going to get readers who will want to tell someone they know about it, and maybe write a positive, useful review, too. But to create that lovely word of mouth you’ve first got to get the story in front as many mouths (and eyes) as possible. Social media blitzes, free giveaways, contests, and targeted adverts are all options. But remember how egalitarian the whole deal is these days? Yeah, everyone else is doing the same things. How to stand out in such a crowded field? I just don’t know (see above re: my Dodge).

AiIP: Story Time!

For those of you who have been following this space for any length of time, you probably know this Adventure has been mostly commentary on publishing in general, and something of a diary for my own publishing adventure. Recently, printed copies of the second edition of 3024AD: Short Stories Series One arrived, the production of which has been chronicled in this space.

So as a thank you for sticking around (or further penance), I offer you Unforgiving, the first short in the collection. Enjoy:

Corey White stared at the poster, regarding it thoughtfully as he had every day for the last several weeks. At first, he had merely given it a passing glance while walking by on his way home. He lingered, then stopped. Now he stared at it, chewing his bottom lip.

Eighteen year old Corey was almost done with school but lacked purpose and direction. His home life was certainly not helpful; his father was barely worth the title, his mother more concerned with her looks than whether of not her son had a future.

The stocky youth stared at the poster of a skull and crossbones emblazoned over a tattered Union Jack with a call to arms against pirates that preyed on British trade routes stenciled in lettering above and below it. His dark eyes shifted from the poster and rested on the glass door to his left. He chewed his lip a moment longer, then set his jaw and charged in. The door slid aside at his approach and he paid no mind to the words Recruitment Center as he passed them.

Several months passed by swiftly. The training was constant and arduous. He even excelled, and found that structure and discipline, now in his life for the first time, suited him well. While he was no leader, he didn't pretend to be and took his orders well. Over time his formerly pudgy body became a stocky, muscular build.

He wrote to his mother once. She answered with a note, suggesting in a generic manner that he not get hurt. He did not reply. He got on well enough with his fellow recruits, but made no friends. He thought perhaps he should, but while no one shunned him, no one reached out to him. He found he didn't mind and so in the end left those at basic training behind as quickly as he had those on Earth.

 The docking bay of the training station was expansive, with a shuttle connected to boarding tubes, waiting to take the new soldiers to the far reaches of the galaxy. Nervously, Corey stood in line, with black hair freshly cut short, and a duffel bag slung over his shoulders,. The others were glancing about wide-eyed with puzzled expressions that told of their wonder at which shuttle they would be told to board and where it would take them. Corey silently glanced at the line ahead of him, and listened to the sergeant give each soldier an assignment.

“Infantry, Atlas, gate three.”

“Spaceman, HMS Victory, gate six.”

“Spaceman, Compass Rose, gate twelve.” Corey came to the front of the line, and presented his papers, stating his name and serial number. His instructions followed the same pattern as all the rest. 


“Gunner, HMS Daring, gate eight.” Corey pulled himself along the handrail to gate eight, presented his papers again and boarded the shuttle. It was already close to full and they were soon under way, leaving the station and the Earth far behind. The recruit next to him was tall and thin, with a meek face. Corey wondered how the man had made it through basic. On his other side sat a woman who showed considerably more promise. She was short with blonde hair tied in a ponytail. Her chin was set in a determined fashion, and her blue eyes stared straight ahead.

“Know anything about the Daring?” Corey asked her.

She started, as if he had interrupted her train of thought. Before he could apologize she answered. “She's brand new, that's why there's so many of us headed there.” She nodded to the full transport. “Destroyer. We get to hunt pirates,” she finished in an excited tone.

“You know your stuff,” he said.

She shrugged dismissively. “I did my homework. I asked to be assigned to a ship that would see action.”

“You can do that?” It had never occurred to him.

She laughed, her voice light and airy. He smiled. “Kendall Hood,” she held out her hand to him.

“Corey White.” They chatted the rest of the way to Mars, small talk that occasionally shifted from their shared experience at basic to their curiosity for the future. The ship slowed and the announcement that they had reached Mars came on.

“Ready?” she asked him with an excited smile. 

“Absolutely,” he replied with a grin. 

* * *

The Daring was long and tall, her hull a tapered V-shape, wide at the top, and completely enclosed. Two banks of engines were aft and set out from the hull, which allowed them to fire forward or behind. Maneuvering engines had been placed along the hull, so she could navigate in any direction. 

The gun deck was uppermost and hosted twenty heavy laser cannons, ten facing in each direction. At the moment they were hidden behind the heavy blast doors that slid aside when needed, allowing them to fire outward. There were two additional chin-mounted cannons that could fire forward.

As the shuttle closed in towards the dock, Corey could see the bridge protruding above and aft. The shuttle passed in front of it to enter the docking bay of the large station.

Inside they were filed along to their bunks, which were on the lowest desk. The room looked bizarre to Corey, who had spent his whole life planetside. The 'bunks' were vertical metal slabs that stretched from floor to ceiling. There was a sleeping bag attached to either side, flapping open in zero gravity. 

Above that was a small locker for stowing their gear. Corey stopped and looked around, unsure what to do. He felt an elbow in his back, shoving him forward.

Available now!

“White, grab a bunk and stow your gear!” A sergeant barked at him, and he hurried to obey. He only wondered briefly what sleeping like that would be like; the bunks had been much more traditional during basic.

A gruff-looking officer appeared in the doorway, clad in full armor. It was blue-gray with a bright Union Jack on the shoulder. The officer held his spherical helmet in one hand.

“Gunners, briefing room, now,” he shouted gruffly and turned around to pull himself along the rail in the opposite direction. Corey fell in behind the others as they exited, hoping they knew where to go.

The briefing room they were heading to was down the hall, and the recruits found it with ease. The officer who had ordered them there stood in the center of the room, a holoprojector beside him. A row of railings was arranged around it for them to hold onto in zero gravity.

“I am gunnery sergeant Leary,” he began. “Welcome to the Daring. The lot of you will make up the gun crews of this ship, two of you to a gun.” Corey glanced around at the thirty-nine other gunners in the room as the sergeant spoke on. “For the most part, our mission will be to escort GalSpan and other Imperial ships and protect them from pirates. For our first mission, though, we have an opportunity to help capture a dangerous fugitive. He is working with a crew of French Pirates. Special Services has set a trap for him and we are to provide firepower to stop his pirate cohorts. Mission details are in your inbox. Get familiar with them, we leave in two days. Dismissed.”

Corey returned to the bunks for a while before he explored the ship, the rec areas and the gym. Each crewmember was required to spend three hours a day in the gym in zero G conditions, and Corey was fine with that- he enjoyed letting go while he worked out.

He went up to the gun deck, where he had been assigned to Saber Three, the third gun aft. It was a massive double-barreled laser cannon, which sat back on a track that it would slip forward on when the gun port opened. He slid into the seat, staring down the barrels and past the dim heads up display, to the cooling tubes at the cold steel of the closed gun port. For the first time, he wondered what battle would be like. He had heard stories of people who spent their whole tours on escort duty, never so much as sniffing a pirate- he was pleased his first mission held a guarantee of combat.

“You look nervous, White.” He glanced over his shoulder at the speaker. It was Kendall, holding herself steady on the raised platform in the middle of the gun deck.

He released his grip on the controls, floating upward and pivoting, pulling himself over the seat towards her. “A little,” he replied, grabbing a handle on the ceiling. “Are you?”

She smiled. “A little.” She looked at the massive cannon behind him. “Gunner, eh?”

“Yeah. I guess I tested well for it. First time for everything. How about you?”

“Navigation.”

“Oh, high class,” he said with a touch of sarcasm.

“I tested well for it,” she replied with a smile. “I doubt that's the first time you tested well for something, though.”

“Not really.”

“Are you nervous?”

“A little. It will be different, going straight into combat instead of just patrols and escorts.” Her voice went quiet. “I have to go. Take care of yourself, okay?” He nodded and she turned and pulled herself forward. He floated in the empty gun deck for a long moment before he headed below. He turned his mind from the coming combat to other things.

* * *

Two weeks later, the Daring hung in space an hour from where the trap had been set. Corey sat in the seat of his cannon, the straps holding him fast. He wore his combat gear, a lightly armored space suit with a helmet that offered him a wide field of vision. An information display feed came from the cannon, ready to calculate targets for him. He glanced around at the other gunners, similarly in their places waiting for the gun ports to open and offer them a mark.

Leary held fast in the center of the gun deck, saying nothing for a long while. Then the ship lurched, moving forward quickly. “They've taken the bait,” he informed the gun crews. “Stay on target, men, concentrate, and do your job.” He offered no other inspiring words and lapsed again into silence.

The hour of travel dragged by. Corey felt as if he had aged decades before they arrived. Abruptly, the ship jerked before beginning to slow. The gun port split before Corey and slid apart to reveal the battle already in progress. His digital targeting array came to life, and the sensors scanned for weak points on the pirate ship that was separating from the now derelict British craft.

“Open fire!” boomed Leary. Corey's gun slid forward along the tracks, until he was even with the hull of the ship. He aimed for the engines and squeezed the triggers. The two gun barrels pounded like giant pistons, a red line tracing from the barrels to the opposing ship. He could see the glowing red marks where his shots tore at the opposing ship’s armor.

It drew closer and returned fire. From the top of the ship came missiles, trailing blue flames. One detonated just fore of the gun deck. Shrapnel and flames bellowed in all directions. A piece of the hull tore off and blew into the gun port of Saber One, spinning rapidly. Corey watched it, seemingly in slow motion, as it flew into the gunner, slicing through his armor and neck with grim efficiency. Globs of blood flew through the vacuum, splattering Corey’s helmet. He felt sick as he saw the decompression freeze and strip the corpse as it was sucked out into the void.

He swallowed hard and turned his attention back to the fleeing pirate ship. Bay doors opened aft and a smaller, sleek ship flew out. He pivoted the cannons as far as possible, squeezing the triggers. He hit it once, but the craft was too nimble. It accelerated rapidly as it passed the speed of light, winking out of sight.

He pivoted the guns back to the larger ship, caught between the Daring and the Adventure. He poured fire into it, his lasers cutting a glowing red swath into the engines. Seconds later, the armor was breached and the fuel cells detonated in spectacular fashion. The pirate ship began to tear apart as her munitions ignited, and moments later all that was left was a hollow husk, burned out and riddled with holes.

Corey leaned back in the seat, relaxing his grip and feeling the ache in his hands. He wiped the blood off his visor and looked around. The gun deck had taken quite a bit of damage; scorch marks from the explosions scattered across the deck, several pieces of shrapnel floating in the midst of it.

“Damn fine shooting, son,” Leary congratulated Corey, and it dawned on him how quiet the whole exchange had been in spite of the tremendous violence. Leary's words seemed deafening to him.

“Thank you, sir,” he replied, unstrapping himself. He wondered how escort duty would compare. 

I hope you enjoyed it. If you want the rest, you can grab the ebook & paperback here.

Dean is the author of 3024AD and the ongoing SciFi Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, The Venturess. He is an engineer, and geek about many things. He lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. You can listen to him ramble on Twitter and muse on his blog.

AiIP: The Times They Are A-Changin'

But first, a message from our sponsors:

 Well, not a sponsor, exactly. But as A) an author and B) someone who pays quite a bit of attention to publishing in general, and self-publishing in particular, I see a lot of book covers. And, man, do I see a lot of bad book covers. I want to take a moment here and plug the guy who did the cover for 3024AD, over at Atomic Covers. If you're an author looking for an artist, here's why you should consider him:

• The look. Books are judged by their cover, and literally everything I've seen from him is top quality, and that's of utmost importance.
• The price. $999 buys you everything you need. You'll find vastly inferior covers for twice that price. 'nuf said.
• The time. Turnaround in fourteen days, and in my personal experience (and his) it's been much faster than that.
• Professionalism. Working with Johnny has been the smoothest, easiest process you could ask for.

I'll leave it at that. Suffice it to say that if you need a cover, you could do a lot worse, and you'd be hard pressed to do better.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

 Recently, on this very blog, a few of us discussed a few pieces by Jonathan McCalmont, wherein he makes the statement that:

the genre short fiction scene is becoming a literary niche in which readers are entirely optional

Which, I think, is 100% true (he, incidentally, seems to have misunderstood my points in that post. Suffice it to say, while I found his tone somewhat off-putting, I agreed with what he said, and basically said we need more of that. But I digress). Readers have become optional in many ways, as short fiction authors sell and read other short fiction authors.

But, we live in the fun* age that we do, so there are options. One option that has recently appeared is QuarterReads. Basically, you pay $0.25 per story, and you get to pick what you read with it. But it's not and open field like, say, Amazon- there are some basic editorial standards, for quality and basic subject matter. You can read their whole 'about' page here.

Founder Ian was kind enough to take a few moments and answer some questions about QuarterReads for us:

1) What gave you the idea for QuarterReads?

Like most great and terrible ideas, this one came up over drinks with friends. We were lamenting the fact that short story publishing felt like a binary choice: submit to the professional markets or self publish. We started talking about what something in between those poles might look like, and eventually came around to the idea of a market for individual stories, sold at a low price with most of it going straight to the author. Everything grew from there, and that simple idea is still central to every feature we add to the site.


2) Where do you see QuarterReads in a year? In five?

I am a terrible prophet, but here goes. We are about two and a half months old right now, so a year is a long time and five feels like an eternity. In a year, I'd like QuarterReads to be a more mature market, with not only many more writers and readers in the system, but with features that make the very most of every story. That includes things like smartphone apps, the ability for readers to interact more with writers, etc. In five years, at the rate that we change, the site itself might be completely unrecognizable from what it is today, with the exception of the mission, which is carved in very solid stone. Sell stories for a quarter, 22 cents of which go to the author. Everything other than that is negotiable and subject to change based on what is best for our writers.

3) The process is extremely author-friendly, and you listen to feedback and implement it quickly. Can you speak a little to your working process and philosophy?

Everyone who works on this site is a writer first. Before I do any development work on QR each day, I make sure to hit my word count goal as a writer, and I'm a stickler for everyone who works with us having at least one story for sale on the site. We can talk about being writer-friendly all we want, but the best way to stick to that is to be constantly seeing the process from the writer's side as well as the business one. Our philosophy, if we have one, is very simple and absolutely unoriginal. Yog's Law is our first unbreakable rule: money flows always to the writer. If we make a cent, we make sure that one of our writers has made about seven cents first.

4) Do you foresee a longer-form version of QuarterReads, or always stick to the 2,000 word limit?

If we ever deal with longer stories, it will be with a partner site, and I think that very well might happen. But QuarterReads itself will always be for flash and the shorter end of short stories, as well as poems and essays. I won't guarantee that 2,000 will never turn into 2,500, but for the most part, we are happy with our limits. To go back to your previous question, I can all but guarantee that a year into the future, we will still have a 2k limit in place.

5) Much has been made of the Terraform launch, and the market for short fiction- How do you plan on attracting more readers?

That's certainly the big question. We have taken the strategy of being very good to our writers first and letting the readers follow. We're well aware that this only works to a point. One of our biggest challenges, which we share with every single market on the planet, is reaching out to readers and convincing them that their $5 is best spent with us. Our advantage, I think, is a low barrier to entry in terms of price, and a huge variety of content. Show me another place where you can choose 20 stories from a catalog of 600 that gets bigger every day, encompassing everything from high fantasy to romantic poetry, for five dollars. I think we've created a good product, but can we get the critical mass of readers to join? We'll certainly try.

On a slightly less rambling note, we will be making one story each week free to all visitors, starting in the next week or so. This was a somewhat controversial move, because it threatens our core value of always paying writers. But I think we've done it in such a way (paying the writer ourselves and encouraging tips) that Yog is still satisfied, and I hope that will help new visitors see what we do and convince some percentage to join up.

Thanks for the chance to talk about QR. If your readers have any questions, I'd love to hear from them by email at ian [at] quarterreads.com.


We now conclude with another message from our sponsors:

Actually, from me! Just a reminder, in line with the above on the changing face of publishing, that I have an ongoing (free!) choose-your-own-adventure running over at The Venturess! I'd love it if you read it & voted!


-DESR

Dean is the author of 3024AD and other stories, engineer, and geek about many things. He lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. You can listen to him ramble on Twitter and muse on his blog.