The Future Fire fundraiser!

Our similarly-abbreviated chums over at The Future Fire are planning a special anniversary anthology, The Future Fire 10 (TFFX for short), to celebrate the tenth year since they began publishing. It will feature reprints of some of their best material to date and new material to match, plus illustrations of a similar standard.

Because they have the funny idea that it's nice to pay contributors rather than extracting their publishing rights in late-night games of Cluedo or keeping them shackled in the dungeons until their writing hands have wilted, they are running a crowdfunding project at http://igg.me/at/tffx.

The stretch goals include increased pay for their forthcoming horror anthology, Fae Visions of the Mediterranean, and increased pay for magazine contributors for twelve months. (They'll give the small press a good name if they aren't careful.)

You can pre-order the anthology, or pick up ebook or paperback copies of their previous and forthcoming books, plus other perks like story critiques, custom art, and personalised knitted undead dolls. For just $12 you can get the ebooks of TFFX and The Lowest Heaven (from Jurassic London), which is a definite bargain.

Here's the link again. Click it!

Accessing the Future: interview with Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad

Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad are currently raising funds to publish a special anthology of disability-themed speculative fiction, Accessing the Future, to be published by Futurefire.net Publishing, and here is an interview with them. It sounds like it's going to be very interesting.

Hi Djibril, Kathryn. What made you decide to produce this anthology? What are your goals for it?

Djibril: Thanks, Stephen. This anthology will be the third produced under the aegis of Futurefire.net Publishing (after Outlaw Bodies and We See a Different Frontier), and all three are concerned with social-political speculative fiction from the perspective of under-represented viewpoints. The vast majority of the stories we have published reflect the understanding that oppressions are intersectional: so stories about imperialism recognize the fact that colonial oppression is closely tied in with gender oppression, with racism, homophobia and ableism. An anthology that takes as a starting point the marginalization of people with disabilities (both in reality and in literature), also from an intersectional angle, is a close fit to our aims as a press. We hope to raise enough money to produce a full-size, professional rate-paying, properly distributed anthology on this theme, with authors from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives.

We See a Different Frontier, edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad | review by Stephen Theaker

We See a Different Frontier (The Future Fire, ebook, 3447ll; Kindle purchase), edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, is an anthology of sixteen stories, and also a special issue of the magazine The Future Fire, which publishes fantasy work with a political edge. After a year’s hiatus, the magazine encouraged applications from potential guest editors. That led first to Outlaw Bodies, edited by Lori Selke, and now to this book. The submission guidelines set an interesting challenge: to approach science fiction from the point of view not of those pushing the frontier out, in their wagon trains to the stars, but from the perspective of those who have experienced the expanding frontier from the other side. When I read the guidelines, my thoughts went towards the alien experience of human expansion, but the introduction makes it clear that the editors were more interested in “us, the aliens from Earth. Foreigners. Strangers to the current dominant culture.” And so only a few of the stories are set in space, most being set here on Earth, using science fiction to address historical, contemporary and controversial issues directly, rather than retreating to the safe Star Trekkian distance of metaphorical alien planets.