Podcast review of Burrage novel live

I have, just for fun, recorded a review of Luke Burrage's novel Minding Tomorrow, borrowing his own podcast book review concept.

M-BRANE SF Podcast #1

Chris Fletcher's Podcast

Science Friday: Dinosaurs, Moon footage

I basically stopped doing the Science Friday series of blog posts some time ago, but I feel like picking it up again today in light of my two favorite science items of the week.  First, go read this BBC Earth News story about the the discovery of an incredibly old dinosaur burrow which adds some evidence to speculation as to what some kinds of dinosaurs did to survive harsh weather conditions, particularly nearer to the poles. 

The second item is this lovely imagery from lunar reconnaissance orbiter currently flying over the moon. Eventually it will photograph the Apollo landing sites.

Shared World: some cultural considerations

I am considering compiling in one place a timeline of real-world events from the ancient histories of our shared world's major civilizations (to build on what Brandon suggested in an earlier post) and invite the group to brainstorm about some of the points of historical divergence in each one, so we can start getting our timeline together.

I found one possible glitch with our plan of including a Mesoamerican civilization in the mix: if it's to be one that exists roughly concurrent with Ancient Egypt, then we may need to abandon the Aztecs and go all the way back to the Olmecs. This should be fine, since what little is known about the Olmecs seems to indicate that a lot of their culture was carried forward into the culture of later groups like the Aztecs. I'll read up on it some more later.

It's occurred to me that this whole universe is going to be, almost by definition, full of non-white people, which I think is great. One thing we might consider when handling Egypt is that something of a controversy exists regarding the race of the ancient Egyptians. The prevailing scholarly consensus seems to be that its anachronistic to talk about race in the black versus white terms we have now when discussing the Egyptians, as they were probably neither. Many people adhere, however, to an Afrocentric approach to the topic and insist that the Egyptians were black people in the same way that most sub-Saharan Africans are now. This point of view is understandable as a reaction to old-style racist European treatments of history which tended to assume that any people who had an impressive civilization must have been more or less white and the result of Indo-European immigration. The historical evidence seems to support neither extreme but offers a lot of indication that there were both black and olive-complected people in ancient Egypt. Just something to consider when we get to the point of imagining ancient Egyptian characters.

Status updates: various projects

Shortly after Rick Novy and I came up with the plan for him to guest edit M-Brane #12, I realized a couple of fortuitous things about the timing of it: the submission period coincides with the weeks that I will have the most work to do on the GLBT anthology; and I'm sure I can find a few extra minutes here and there to keep compiling and coordinating information on the Shared World project as that accumulates.

Those of you interested in the Shared World may have already looked over the summary document that I posted on Box a few days ago. If not, you can grab it from the previous shared world post. We've gotten a lot happening with it already, so I think it might be reasonable for us to strive toward having the universe in fairly "ready to use" in a few weeks, and then by perhaps the end of August be ready to start to thinking about some actual fiction for it.  Though a couple other topics are covered in this post, I will label it as a Shared World post so that its recallable with the rest of them, and if you want to make Shared World comments here, that's fine (or they can still go on the previous one, too--I'll re-summarize as needed). 

Some time remains before 7/15, so any writers who still wish to submit to the queer antho have a few days to get their stories in. Once the deadline passes, I expect to fairly quickly finish selecting the stories and then get to work on the editing and production of the book. I'm considering trying to hit up a "celeb" of some sort to contribute an introduction or essay, but haven't decided on that yet.

As to my personal writing projects, not a lot has changed since my last post on that topic, but I have polished a bit on the all the short fiction items, and they are looking a little shinier. I also started a new short story, but I have no idea what it's about yet: a beginning basically wrote itself using my fingers to operate the keyboard, but I have no idea where it's going yet. I have done a lot more staring at Shame (my novel) but no appreciable new writing on it yet. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about it while I am at the day job and thinking up all kinds of good solutions to the many missing scenes and good revisions of existing ones, but once I get home and actually face the page, I slow to a crawl. I think I will use the 8/31 end of the #12 submission period as an arbitrary deadline on myself to have the first draft completed. It would only amount to maybe 3 or 4K new words a week which should be easily doable. So I say now.  I also have another idea cooking that I think calls for novel-length treatment, but I may defer any work on that one for a few months. I am considering doing National Novel Writing Month in November (which confirms that I am crazy), and maybe it will be the project for that.

Independence Day thoughts

I’ve been at work on Independence Day every year of my working life, and will be again tomorrow, so I don’t give much thought to the traditional recreational activities associated with it, and generally take the grouchy view that the holiday is little more than a flimsy excuse for non-service sector people to get an extra day off from work (even when it’s on a Saturday). I do, however, like to affirm my patriotism which expresses itself in two major forms: 1) my appreciation for and willingness to fight for our country’s remarkable and resilient Constitution, and 2) my concern and compassion for our military personnel abroad who are in increasing danger as both of the wars enter new phases. Things I don’t do: festoon the house in flags and placard my car with “support the troops” stickers. The first is a phony me-too gesture and the second is useless.

A(nother) moronic political event has happened in my temporary home state that seems well-timed for this holiday. It’s often said that the people get the leaders they deserve. If that is true, then the people of Oklahoma must be some real scumbags. Or at least two thirds of them, the percentage of the electorate that tends to vote for the likes of Jim Inhofe and Sally Kern. Let me tell you about Sally Kern, because you will not have heard of this slavering beast since you do not live here. She’s an OKC-area state legislator who made some news last year with her insistence that homosexuality is a worse threat to America than terrorism. Yesterday she conducted a press conference unveiling her Oklahoma Citizens Morality Proclamation. If you can stand to read this prose-form turd (it’s torture), and if you can get past the first paragraph with all the lurid religious boilerplate, complete with eighteenth-century-style capitalized nouns as if it’s the Declaration of Independence, you will notice two things:

1) It is laced with both direct and indirect references to homosexuality. This is my favorite passage: “WHEREAS, deeply disturbed that the Office of the president of these United States disregards the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior.” Aside from the gibbering dumbassity of that statement’s apparent meaning, please note also its clunky syntax, its amateurish style, its near incomprehensibility. The whole document is like that.

2) It is one of those typical, ever-more-common attempts to make a raving nutcase Christian fundie statement sound like it would be endorsed by the Founders by means of cherry-picking quotations or creating dishonest paraphrases of things that people like Thomas Jefferson said. It has become a standard line from the fundies that America is a “Christian nation” founded by “Christians” (and so should always be a country only for Christians, by which they means racists and homophobes—make no mistake: this is a publicly acceptable cloak for white supremism and neo-fascism with all their attendant prejudices such as anti-Semitism, gay-bashing and Muslim-baiting).

Here’s something that Thomas Jefferson—the Founder of Founders, non-Christian deist and the author of the document that Kern’s proclamation parodies—said about it: “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.” Here’s something else: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” And he said many, many other things about the topic, not one of which ever endorsed a position the likes of which Kern and her baboons in human guise proclaim. In fact, he was so doubtful about the usefulness and veracity of the Bible, he famously created his own version of it by excerpting the passages that he liked and discarding the rest. Jefferson was no fundamentalist and neither were his contemporaries. Yet this myth persists and is propagated once again by Kern’s stupid proclamation. No real American historian (and by “real” I mean a PhD-holding published professor at an accredited non-sectarian college or university who has studied history from primary sources) advocates or would even be bothered to consider this fundie revision of American history. Let me say that again in a slightly different way, just to make sure that my meaning is clear: the exact number of real scholars who believe in the Kern concept of American history is as follows: zero. It’s one of these made up, phony-baloney debates that the extreme right makes their whole domain of discourse. They make up a debate topic and then blab about it on the 700 Club and their silly grunting radio shows until the general public starts thinking that it’s a real debate. Another example: Creationism. No debate exists about this among scientists—none at all—and hasn’t for a century, yet the fundies have created one and have convinced the majority of Americans (who don’t study it and don’t really know much about it) that there is some kind of epic debate in the realm of science that will be settled in their favor any day now. Another example: Torture. No debate exists about this among people who have studied it, yet the majority of people have been persuaded that torture is a valid debate topic and that on Independence Day, our great nation can somehow remain great if we engage in such behavior.

On Independence Day this year, I am making my own proclamation, or maybe it could be called a secular prayer: “WHEREAS Stupidity has beset and overwhelmed the Nation and the People and eaten out our Sanity, we strive for the Restoration of Reason to the Land.”

[The images are of Marines in Helmand Province (Afghanistan) and Sally Kern in OKC (Dumbfuckistan) asserting her Constitutional rights...that those troops are defending. Hardly seems fair.]

Rick Novy to GUEST EDIT M-Brane #12

I'm excited to announce that writer Rick Novy will be the guest editor of M-Brane #12. Regular readers of the zine will remember him from his short stories "Road Rage" (#1), "Plan R" (#4), and the just-published "The Trouble With Truffles" (#6). Aside from his frequent appearances in M-Brane, he has to his credit approximately thirty other published short stories and has lately been producing the entertaining and informative Novy MIRror video podcast. For more information on Rick, go to his website and also check out this interview with him that we just published in M-Brane #6.

Yeah, it seems like issue #12 is pretty far away since #6 was just released a couple days ago, but there is a logic to it: by the time Rick and I decided on this plan, I had already started booking stories as far out as #10, and it seemed a good idea to allow a bit more time for this special issue anyway. Also, time flies. When I published issue #1, issue #6 seemed impossibly distant, yet now it's slightly in the past already.

Submission details:  This involves a slight modification to normal routine with reading and replying to submissions. I will continue to be open for submissions as normal but all stories received between July 15 and August 31 will be automatically forwarded to Rick for consideration specifically for M-Brane #12. (I'll update the guidelines on Page 2 accordingly). Which means that I, myself, will not be reading for other issues during that time frame save for any stories that Rick may choose to decline for his issue but thinks that I may want to consider for a different issue. Final decisions on stories for the issue will be made by Rick shortly after the end of the submissions window. Overall, this will slow somewhat the formerly rapid clip at which I was responding to submissions (which has, admittedly, been slowing anyway. Ahem.). So writers should expect somewhat slower response times for a while. This isn't a bad thing, though (at least for me), because I am still booked out a bit farther than I'd like even with that submissions hiatus that we had in May. So some catch-up time is good. Also, the reading period for M-Brane #12 happens to start on the deadline for the queer anthology, so this will free some more time for me to concentrate on making the selections for that without having to process general M-Brane slush at the same time.

I had mentioned possibly dedicating #12 to the Shared World Project...but now I think that will either be pushed back to #13 or quite possibly be produced as a separate special issue. Details on that will follow once we are further along on the world-development for that project and when we have a better sense of when any stories can start getting written for it. That thing needs to be top-notch anyway, so some extra time there won't hurt anything.

SHARED WORLD: Summary document online

We are still making great progress on developing the shared world. Anyone new to this topic who would like the details, please call up all the related posts using the "Shared World" label at the bottom of this post. They each have extensive, interesting comments on them as well.

In an effort to get our main ideas so far about the Shared World project into a single place, I have made what I think is a reasonably easy document to look at. I'm not sure how useful it will really be, and there may be some stuff missing from it, but it seems like backtracking through all of our comments on the posts is getting rather cumbersome. Everyone involved in the shared world already, or anyone else who like to get in on it, is welcome to download this document from Box and look it over. (The document is a two-page PDF, with four columns that each run from one page to the next. That's not a great design, since I could have just made it one giant page, but it occurred to me that if someone wanted to print it, then it would work better split onto normal size pages.)

Then let's continue the discussion in comments with attention to some of the areas that need it most, like, perhaps, aliens.

Then, as we make more decisions and refine some of the details, I will do additional updates to the main document and eventually use that as the basis for "official" writers guidelines for this universe. We've done so much so quickly that I suspect within a few weeks we will have a very well-imagined background and people can start thinking about what sort of stories they may want to tell.

SHARED WORLD update

Things ran late today, and I guess I am not doing any kind of big re-cap or synthesis of this discussion with this post, as I had planned.  More than anything else right now, I am trying to start another sequence of comments before the previous thread gets too long to read. For reminders of what we have discussed and what it's all about (especially for anyone who is just joining the discussion), refer back to the earlier posts. This one and those can be called up together using the "Shared World" tag at the end of this post. I will eventually start compiling a more orderly guide to what has been put forth for discussion.

Some major developments have happened, however, that I think can be declared to be Established Facts about our shared world:  

1) The timeline begins somewhere when Egypt is a major civilization, and so other civs will be determined with reference to that, though Greece and China are almost certainly in it. We also like Aztecs or at least some kind of meso-American civ. Does anyone know offhand where their dates fall in?  A topic for more research for sure; 

2) Over time, these people become space-faring, multi-world civs; the Moon, Mars and Venus are all inhabited at some point (with the Moon certainly first, but also due to the "ether" situation (see item 4 below));

3) The technological divergence happens in large part due to some some level or manner of alien influence, though the details need to be discussed more; 3a) These people may have just somehow had some tech earlier than what happened in the real world, such as the printing press, even without alien help; we like this because mass-literacy is aided by it;

4) their physical space is different than what we know: a cloud of gas, which we have been referring to as "ether," hangs around the immediate neighborhood of Earth, at least in the earlier centuries of the timeline. Its properties are rather amazing and cool: something like air pressure, it's breathable, and is also a zero-g environment once you get away from Earth's gravity well. It has been proposed and decided that this is a local phenomenon that does not exist very far beyond the Earth-Moon area and is somehow attached to the Earth, so that it moves through space with it as the Earth orbits the Sun. It could be a thing of originally alien origin, or not. As I write this there is another line of ether-related thought cropping up on the  previous post (see Rick and Derek and Brandon's remarks re: "proto-planet"). Also it has been proposed and probably generally agreed to that this ether phenomenon dissipates gradually for some reason as the centuries pass, possibly necessitating climate control measure on the Moon.

5) We seem to be in agreement, or at least with a majority opinion, moving against famous historical figures being aliens. We're still early in the discussion of exactly what the alien deal is, but seem to all agree that there is an alien factor that is important.

So maybe let's talk some more about aliens. Also, any kind of society-related thoughts might be good.

M-BRANE 6 PUBLISHED

As Stilgar says in the David Lynch film version of Dune when he observes Paul Atreides conquer the worm, "Again, it is the legend!"  

M-Brane #6 is published in PDF and POD form as of this moment (the Kindle and Mobi versions are not quite ready but will come online probably within a couple days). 

The new issue features fascinating, weird, strange and fine new fiction by the likes of Rick Novy, Derek Goodman, Jason Heller, Mike Griffiths, Jeffrey Wooten, Stephanie Scarborough and many others. To subscribe or buy the single issue in PDF or POD form, click one of those "subscribe" buttons over on the right for details.

As an added bonus, this month we have a theme song!  Oh yeah, no kidding! John Anealio composes and plays and sings and records fantastic songs inspired by speculative fiction, and he offered one of them as a bonus feature with this new issue. You will all, of course, go at once to his blog to learn more. But first, click right here where this link is and enjoy "Rachel Rosen," a song inspired by Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I'm going to give it the informal title of "Love Theme to M-Brane # 6."

Matt Staggs: ENTER THE OCTOPUS

Make it an ongoing practice to visit Matt Staggs' blog Enter the Octopus. Matt is a lit publicist specializing in spec fic, and his site is loaded with a wealth of interesting stuff to read in terms of reviews, excerpts, recommendations, links to stuff you ought to know about, and all kinds of other fascinating things.

Currently available via his site is the first installment of his new podcast, consisting of an interview that he did with the charming Charles Tan, Filipino book-blogger and spec fic booster best known for his excellent Bibliophile Stalker blog (Charles is @charlesatan on Twitter--I would guess that nearly every reader of this blog who is also on Twitter probably follows him already). 

Matt and his blog are, for me, an excellent example of the usefulness of Twitter. I knew of Matt first via Twitter as @deepeight (his Twit-name, from the name of his publicity agency). Either he followed me and I followed him back or vice versa (don't remember), but I just knew of him for a while as this Twitter personality. Anyway, I quickly figured out that I liked him because he seemed to be (like me) a person who puts up with little hypocrisy, injustice or general douchebaggery, and who is also very tuned in to what's happening in the spec fic world. It was only much later that I learned that he was writing this awesome blog (which teaches me to be more prompt about actually looking at the websites of people I know via Twitter). So go check it out, and be sure to listen to the podcast with Charles Tan.

Novy MIRror #4 released, features Cat Rambo

This news is already a few days old and I'm running behind schedule. But in case you weren't already aware of it, the fourth installment of Rick Novy's video podcast Novy MIRror is online and can be watched at his website. 

The new installment features Rick's interview with spec fic writer and managing editor of Fantasy Magazine Cat Rambo (whose short story "Boyz and Girlz Come Out to Play" appeared in M-Brane #4 in May). For the writers among you, this interview is well worth listening to. Cat gives some great insights resulting from her persistence and success as a writer and her experience as an editor. In fact, it's so good (and Cat is so cool generally) that I am going to just go ahead and assign this episode as homework to everyone who comes upon this post. You will also find a link to Cat's site in the M-Brane writer's links list (down in the that right-hand column, three or four kilometers down). 

Also, in other Rick Novy news, he is appearing in M-Brane once again in a day or two when #6 releases with his story "The Trouble With Truffles." As a special feature in that issue, Rick becomes the subject as I interview him, and I expect readers will find it quite interesting.

[The image is of Cat Rambo, in a screen capture, while I was watching the interview.]

Shared World Project: Summary so far

I’d like to try to gather together what we have so far in a more organized fashion and then continue the discussion. The previous post ran almost to almost 40 comments and is getting somewhat unwieldy. If you have just come upon this shared world discussion and would like to join it from the beginning, skip down a couple posts and read the first one (which also links to a post on Brandon Bell’s blog—the idea of doing a shared world was his initially). This post and the original one can be called up together using the “shared world” label at the bottom of the post. You’ll also find another post related to this at Clifford Green’s blog (which is fun to read generally) in which he points out quite correctly that some of us largely ignored/forgot about what he and Kaolin Fire were saying during the initial Twitter discussion on this topic (they are @SatansPuppet and @kaolinfire on Twitter). We certainly did not intend to ignore anyone’s input, and everyone is welcome to come right here and get involved.

So I will summarize what I think we have so far, and then we will continue discussing ideas. Also, I may miss some major points here, so add/correct as needed in the comments. Keep in mind that this summary is only of what we have so far, resulting from the comments on the original post. It’s not to say that any or all of it is set in stone yet. If anybody has new or different ideas, please express them. Anyone at all who may want to write in this shared universe or possibly create other art based on it is welcome to join in the discussion.

THE PROJECT: Create a shared world as the setting for a group of short stories that will fill a future issue of M-Brane. The world itself will be made available under a Creative Commons license for anyone to create in, and hopefully this will inspire a lot of good work in a lot of venues in the future.

THE WORLD: Alternate historical Earth where a technological divergence (possibly/probably influenced or accelerated by extraterrestrial contact) from what happened in our real history enables ancient civilizations to rapidly advance into the space age. The cultures we are considering using include, so far: Egypt, Greece, China, Aztec or some meso-American civilization. Others that have been suggested include Indians, Romans, Moors and some sort of sub-Saharan African civilization. They can’t all exist in the same timeframe, so nailing that down will answer some of these questions.

THE SOCIETY: We have said little about this yet, but these suggestions have come up:
1. Ancient social/governmental structures persist into the space-faring era. Egypt has a Pharaoh, China still has its dynasty, etc.
2. A plethora of different cultures exist on Earth and the inhabited off-world areas, some of them more and some of them less under the sway of the major Earth powers; possibly the Great Powers don’t necessarily rule the whole Earth or all the off-world places directly; a possibility that there exist enormous technological gaps between the Great Powers and less powerful cultures.

TECHNOLOGY: We’ve said more about this so far than some other things. Everyone in the discussion so far seems to agree that this alternate Earth is a space-faring world with settlements off world, perhaps fully inhabited long-established other planets. Whether this is a “recent” or “long ago” development is unclear. Also, one contributor has proposed establishing a canonical time-lime spread over centuries, so possibly some stories will be set in pre-space flight times, some during (for example) the colonization of Mars, some centuries after, etc. We seem to like these technological things so far:

1. A general sense of the old and new and weird existing side-by-side, possibly with a good deal of steampunk vibe. One contributor suggested such things as dangerous, unreliable space travel methods, states armed with nuclear weapons that are carried around by zeppelins, steam tech co-existing with nuclear/computer age stuff, maybe some radically different direction for computers than what happened in the real world.

2. Everyone appears to agree that the Moon, Mars and Venus are inhabited, and possibly some other locations as well. There may also be artificial structures in space. So these places need to be inhabitable somehow. Here is a summary of what’s been said on this, and keep in mind that these are only ideas, they are not necessarily all mutually compatible:

a) The other planets have been terraformed with the aid of giant heaters to maintain temperature and gas generators that need to constantly pump out an atmosphere (this idea seems to be gaining ground in the group);

b) some sort of breathable “ether” encompasses the Earth/Moon neighborhood and it’s possible to travel between them in rickety, non-pressurized vehicles; this idea seems to be losing traction, and perhaps wouldn’t be applicable to the further away worlds anyway;

c) A third idea: The other planets such as Mars and Venus were “living” all along in this universe and never required massive terraforming to make them inhabitable; if so, did they have any kind of important native life already?

3. Other items that may or may not exist include: space stations, space elevators; we need to also consider what the method of space travel itself is like, but that may resolve itself when we decide some more stuff about the planet issues above.

4. A lot more consideration needs to be given to how the technological revolution happens. The discussion so far seems to be heading toward a combo of real historically plausible innovations that are then impacted by humans gaining knowledge of (and perhaps direct intervention by) something extraterrestrial (see Brandon’s proposed timeline toward the end—about the 34th comment—of the comments on the original post).

BASIC RULES: It seems we have settled on a more or less rational/scientific world as opposed to a fantastical/magical one, so we’ll assume that anything that is proposed in stories ought to be explainable by science, or at least in a way that is in-universe consistent scientifically. Once the world is fleshed out, we’ll have it be a rule that major structure of it can’t be destroyed (like it won’t be “canonical” if a story depicts the complete annihilation of one of the great powers, etc.). That’s about it for the rules so far, unless I missed something.

That seems to be most of the major elements from the conversation so far. I would like to note that Brandon, near the start of the comments on the earlier post, proposed an entirely other scenario that we didn’t pursue any further after the alternate history thing got going. I wonder, however, if there aren’t some useful elements there that could be transplanted—it has a lot of freaky weirdness that might be worth another look.

Let’s contemplate all this and keep throwing out ideas, perhaps with special attention to technological matters (how the other planets get settled, what sort of computers these people have, what travel on Earth is like) and the what/if details of the alien intervention. Also we may want to settle more firmly on when exactly in history this alternate world spins off so we know who we’re talking about as far as major players (as I said before, Egypt seems the popular favorite, so maybe we’ll continue to plan around that).

Thoughts on the Q antho and avoiding QueerFAIL

Worry not: I do not wish to take everyone’s attention away from the Shared World project for even a minute (see the post below this one if you haven’t been there yet), but I need to talk about this today, and then I'll get back to the more fun thing!

Some comments that I saw on someone else’s blog recently, which were sort of indirectly related to M-Brane’s upcoming queer anthology, made me wonder if I was going to inadvertently wander into a minefield of FAIL. I reflected on other imbroglios of recent months centered around issues like racial diversity or gender in sf, and wondered if I risk touching off a mini-controversy centered around LGBTQ issues if I somehow make a mistake with the stories that I select for the book—or if by the very act of assembling such a thing, I am failing at handling the subject matter judiciously.

What things could go wrong for me as its editor? They are, as I see it, these: 1) Content or theme of the stories could be interpreted as insensitive or laden with clichés and stereotypes about sexual orientation and/or gender; or 2) Some people may question the entire premise of the project, wondering why it needs to be that something like sexual orientation or transgender status or some new sfnal kind of queerness needs to be highlighted at all. Let me ponder these one at a time:

1) I don’t think that this is the kind of mistake that I would make even if I weren’t thinking hard about trying to avoid it. I have a lot of sensitivity to the subject matter and I am able to detect tired stereotypes about it pretty easily. That being said, I don’t consider sensitivity to necessarily mean that any and all LGBTQ characters are going to be models of heroism and virtue anymore than I would expect that of str8 characters. Also, I do come to this from a male perspective and could possibly—just maybe—have some shortcomings as far as understanding, say, a lesbian or a transgender character…but again, I don’t think what limitations I have in this area are any different or more serious than any limitations I may have in understanding str8 female (or str8 male) characters. I’ve read enough books, have formally studied enough literature and history, and have lived enough real life to get these things. Basically, I don’t think I really have any serious limitations in this area, and I think I will avoid giving offense when the finished book is released. Or rather, if its content offends, it will not be because I have failed in this particular area. It will be because I am deliberately publishing some possibly discomforting fiction and mean to push some buttons.

2) It’s from two directions that doubt about the whole premise of the book comes. The first can be dispensed with easily: the objection that “gay stuff is gross/annoying/non-Christian etc.” I assume that anyone with that attitude won’t be reading it anyway, and that’s fine. I’d prefer they ignore it and not bother me about it. The other direction of objection is more nuanced. Some readers who may otherwise be sympathetic to the concept wonder why it needs to be highlighted in ways like this book. Generally, such folks would rather it just be a normal, incidental thing in fiction that there’s a gay person here and there like there is in real life, no big deal, nothing to worry about. Or even if the main character is a queer, then maybe it would be best that the trait not be made a big deal of or dwelt upon too heavily. Because wouldn’t it be best if we could all accept or even look past each other’s differences and not zero in on them like that? Well…maybe, but that’s just not how it seems to work in the real world or in the literature of the genre as it currently exists. These theoretical incidentally gay characters are precious few in the written genre (and virtually non-existent in the film/TV version of the genre, if we want to even get into that). Whole eras of sf, like the 1950s and the 1980s in particular, have virtually none at all save for in the work of a very few rebellious writers. And where queer characters do crop up, is the trait really ever incidental or normal? It’s always just incidental and everyday-business, of course, when it’s a str8 character. Think about it. Do you ever read a story (or see something on a screen) where a male and a female have some kind of marriage or romance or sex and think, “Huh. Look at that. I guess they’re heterosexuals. Well, whaddya know!” But I guarantee you it would stand it out if it were a samesex interaction in a venue where you're not expecting to see one. It’s unavoidable.

Consider also the complete contents of M-Brane’s five (soon to be six) issues thus far. The zine is about as hetero-normative as anything else being published in the genre. I have not published a single story yet with what I would call significant samesex content. The only one I can think of where non-hetero activity really comes up at all is Derek Goodman’s issue #4 story “Northern Girls With the Way They Kiss” where the predominately female group of characters evidently engage in some samesex intimacy, but even in that story, this seems to be more a result of their relatively male-free post-apocalyptic life circumstances than that they are all just casually a bunch of everyday lesbians. Another story that gets pretty queer in its sexuality, even while not having samesex content, is Brandon Bell’s “Abraham Discovers an Object Impenetrable to All Harm” in issue #5, what with all the freaky-deaky android goings-on. There’s also Mike Griffith’s Skinjumper stories which feature a dude and his girlfriend who is actually a male persona inhabiting a female body (in, I guess, a sort of transgenderism enabled by high tech). But those few stories are about it. So, I think I’d like to see some more representation of non-mainstream identities in something that I publish, and I think it’s a cool and fun thing to make it a focus of a whole anthology. Not everyone will agree that it needs to be done, but I hope I at least do a good job of presenting it.

[The image, by the way, is of an ad that (I think) I have circulating in another venue shortly; it's to encourage some last minute submissions. I adapted the art from one of those weird 1950s-era pulp porn novels that were popular in the gay underground back in those days. I think it had a lurid title like Homo Holiday or The Fairy Within or some such nonsense.]

Shared World project

Today on Twitter, Brandon Bell (@nithska) made a suggestion that I think is terrific: that some future issue of M-Brane be devoted to tales set in a shared world, the nature of which will be determined collaboratively by whoever wants to get involved in it. The world itself would be an open-source, Creative Commons-license thing that anyone could work in. Go read Brandon’s blog post about this and then come back here. I’ll wait for you…

…So, what do you think? I like this idea a lot, and I am inclined to reserve the complete space in an M-Brane issue for the results of this. Perhaps #12 (January 1 2010) would be a good time for it. I have nothing already booked that far out, and it would leave a few months for the world-building and story-writing.

At this very early stage, maybe a good way to proceed is for people to start thinking about what kind of interesting, fun, weird, compelling traits that a new world could have and start posting some thoughts in the comments here. My guess is that some natural conversation will develop and people will play off each other’s ideas and, after a week or two, we might have the beginnings of something. We might even want to think about some questions that need to be answered about the new world and use those as starting points. I will label this post and any future posts related to this project with the label “Shared World” so that it will be easy to recall them together if it eventually gets to where there are a lot of posts about this spread out over a long time. I could easily set up another page just for this, but I’ll let it get started here and over at Brandon’s page and we’ll see how it goes.

One other thing: if this special Shared World issue of M-Brane happens, I will not act as the editor of it in the sense of personally selecting its content in the way that I normally do for a regular issue. We’ll instead arrive at some other way to put it together—don’t know what yet, but it will get figured out. I can also imagine doing a lot of promotion of the issue by posting stories or story teasers on everyone’s blogs and maybe coming up with some stuff in other media like podcasts, visual art, videos, operas, whatever.