So what if I published it myself. At least I did it properly. See:
That’s 100 paperback copies and 100 hardback copies of Whippleshield Books’ first, er, book: Apollo Quartet 1: Adrift on the Sea of Rains. Well, that’s what I ordered. There may be more, and sometimes the printers do over-run. It looks like more. But I won’t know the exact number until I actually count them.
Anyway, I’m really pleased with how it’s come out. Not bad for a first effort. The cover art is actually more effective than I’d expected:
Having said that, I’ve spotted a few things I’m not completely happy with, but… lessons learned. I shall make sure not to make the same mistakes when I come to publish the second book of the Apollo Quartet, Wave Fronts.
For now, I have 75 copies to number and sign before the Eastercon…
The Fiction Desk has just announced that their new anthology, The Maginot Line, will be published on 7 April. This is important because it contains one of my stories. ‘Faith’ is another of my alternate Space Race stories, and was inspired by a very strange dream I had.
There are eight other stories in the anthology. So that’s nine very good reasons to buy a copy. You can pre-order it for £9.99 from here.
It has been said that current science fiction is not especially relevant, if at all. It fails to address or comment on the concerns which face us on a daily basis. As we watch the world around us change for the worse, so science fiction fails to either document it, or perhaps chart a way out of it. When it does try to offer object lessons and thought experiments, they always lead to dystopias, while ignoring the fact that we’re already heading in that direction. We don’t need sf to tell us what can go wrong. We can see what’s going wrong in the world about us.
This is not true of all science fiction, of course. There are some sf writers who write about the world we know – Ken MacLeod, for example; or Bruce Sterling.
I have even tried to do the same myself, write stories about the abuses capitalism and the super-rich perpetrate upon everyone, stories about the climate, the economy… In ‘Human Resources’, I posited a world in which the free movement of labour followed the same rules as the free movement of capital, and described some of the ramifications of that. In ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’, I described a post-wealth world created by a billionaire’s catastrophic attempt to “fix” global warming. In ‘The Contributors’, I wrote about the effects on people when they’re treated as nothing more than dispensable components in an economic system.
But no one wanted my stories.
Two of them were published by M-Brane SF, after numerous rejections from other magazines. One I published myself here on my blog.
People want stories in which spaceships get blown up. They want stories about wars against humanised aliens… while in their daily newspapers the human enemy their armed forces are fighting are othered and demonised. They want stories about privileged heroes making their mark on the world around them. They want stories where violence – something which requires no talent or intelligence – solves seemingly intractable problems and makes lives better. They want simple solutions, not complicated problems.
It could be, of course, that my stories were crap. No one wanted them because they thought they were rubbish. Which does suggest that only good stories get published – but you’d have to be a real idiot to believe that. There is a lot of crap that gets published. Some of it even becomes popular.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. For every Leviathan Wakes, there’s an Embassytown (for every A Game of Thrones, a The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms). Not that any of those four novels are relevant. Science fiction (and fantasy) is a broad church, and the most popular sect will always be the least sophisticated. Most sf readers – most sf fans, in fact – don’t contribute to the genre conversation. They just consume. And it’s their levels of consumption that dictate in which direction the genre travels, not the commentary by those actively engaged with science fiction.
Take, for example, the Arthur C Clarke Award. Yesterday at noon, I started a thread on this year’s shortlist on SFF Chronicles. As of 8 am this morning, there were no comments on it. No one’s interested. They want to discuss the latest installment of A Song of Ice and Fire, or some fifty-year-old piece of crap that’s set firmly within their comfort zone and does little more than reinforce their prejudices
How can science fiction combat that willful blindness? No matter how relevant the genre is, if it’s preaching to an empty room it can never succeed.
Look what arrived in the post yesterday: my contributor copy of Where Are We Going?, an anthology edited by Allen Ashley and published by Eibonvale Press. It looks very nice indeed. And it has an excellent line-up too.
And here’s my story, ‘The Way The World Works’. It’s my bathypunk one – see here. It’s good to finally see it in print.
The anthology was launched in London on 2 March. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it, but judging by the write-up and photos here, it went very well indeed.
Some of you will already be aware of this, but many perhaps won’t. These days, everyone seems to be doing it, though they might call it different things. I mean self-publishing, or so-called “indie” publishing. There are many reasons why an author might choose to publish one of their books themselves. Hoping to sell a million copies of it obviously isn’t one of them. For my part, I didn’t think the “infamous moon base novella” (see numerous mentions on this blog previously) would be accepted by a magazine or small press editor in the form I wanted it to appear. So I decided to publish it myself…
But more than that, I chose to set up an imprint specifically for the type of fiction I think my novella epitomises, and which I felt was not being published elsewhere. And so…
This April, Whippleshield Books will launch its first book, Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales. This 20,000-word novella tells the story of an attempt to return home by a group of military astronauts stranded at a base on the Moon. Described by Adam Roberts, author of By Light Alone, as “written with an expert blend of technical precision, descriptive vividness and emotional penetration”, and by Kim Lakin-Smith, author of Cyber Circus, as “as poignant as it is impeccably researched”, Adrift on the Sea of Rains is the first in a thematic quartet. The remaining three installments will also be published by Whippleshield Books.
Whippleshield Books was founded by Ian Sales in order to focus on a type of science fiction which no one else seems to be publishing – ie, stories of high literary quality with extremely strong scientific and technological content. Whippleshield Books plans to publish some two to three titles a year, as signed limited hardbacks, trade paperbacks and ebooks. Submissions will open in May 2012, but bear in mind the acceptance criteria are extremely high.
Review copies of Adrift on the Sea of Rains as PDF, MOBI or EPUB available on request.
I hope to have a website ready some time in late April / early May where people can buy the book, though copies of the ebook will also be available from other sites. The second book of the Apollo Quartet, Wave Fronts, should be out before the end of the year; and perhaps there’ll be something else available if someone submits something I want to publish.
The Future Fire, the online magazine of “social-political and progressive speculative fiction”, is back after an 18-month hiatus. And their new issue includes a flash fiction story by Yours Truly. It’s titled ‘ A History of the 20th Century, with Illustrations: Atonement’ and it’s about… Well, go and see for yourself. You’ll find it here. And while you’re at it, you might as well read the other excellent stories in the issue.
News this week that the Eibonvale Press anthology Where Are We Going?, edited by Allen Ashley, will be launched in London on 2 March 2012. Details here. And look at the lovely cover:
This is the anthology which contains my bathypunk story – see here – so I’m especially pleased to see it. Looks like it has a top line-up too: there’s some very good names in that TOC.
It would have been nice if I could have made a New Year’s resolution to buy no books in 2012. But that was clearly impossible as there were a number of 2012 releases I wanted. I’ll just have to try and limit my purchases instead. Sadly, I’ve not been entirely successful in that regard – only one month into the year and look what’s been added to the bookshelves all ready…
Three for the collections: Homage to QWERTYUIOP, Anthony Burgess, which is signed; The Steel Albatross, an underwater thriller by Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, which is also signed; and Selected Poems, Lawrence Durrell, from 1956, which is not signed.
Two books for this year’s reading challenge – world fiction (see here): The Fat Years, Chan Koonchung, from China, and which you can see from the bookmark that I’m currently reading; and The Door, Magda Szabó, from Hungary. High-Rise joins the other nice 4th Estate paperback editions Ballards on my bookshelves.
Some science fiction… A pair of SF Masterworks: RUR & War with the Newts, Karel Capek, and Sirius, Olaf Stapledon. Colin Greenland’s Spiritfeather, one of the volumes from the four-book Dreamtime YA series published in 2000. There was a bit of a fad for Brit sf authors contributing to YA series at that time – not just Dreamtime, but also The Web, which boasted books by Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, Peter F Hamilton, Eric Brown and Pat Cadigan. And, finally, Mission Child, Maureen McHugh, a charity shop find I plan to review for SF Mistressworks.
And here is The Monster Book for Girls, an anthology of dark fantasy and horror from theExaggeratedpress, which looks very nice indeed, but also…
… contains my story ‘Dancing the Skies’, which is the ATA/Spitfire story, which required much research on the Air Transport Auxiliary and WWII fighters and bombers.
In 2011, I had six stories published, and published one of my own on this blog. That makes it a slightly better year than 2010. The stories were:
– ‘Barker’ in BFS Journal: New Horizons, January 2011
– ‘Disambiguation‘ on the Alt Hist website, May 2011
– ‘The Contributors‘ on It Doesn’t Have To Be Right…, July 2011
– ‘Words Beyond the Veil’ in Jupiter 33: Euanthe, July 2011
– ‘A Light in the Darkness’ in Alt Hist #3, November 2011
– ‘Dancing the Skies’ in The Monster Books for Girls, edited by Terry Grimwood [theExaggeratedPress], December 2011
– ‘Wunderwaffe’ in Vivisepulture, edited by Andy Remic & Wayne Simmons [Anarchy Books], December 2011
For someone who characterises themselves as a science fiction writer – and appears to be seen chiefly as a writer of hard sf – that’s a varied selection. ‘Barker’ is one of my alternate takes on the Space Race, ‘Dancing the Skies’ is dark fantasy. ‘A Light in the Darkness’ and ‘Disambiguation’ are alternate history; and ‘Wunderwaffe’ is, well, it’s Nazi occult science, which is probably a genre all its own. ‘The Contributors’ is a sort of New Wavey anti-capitalist story. Only ‘Words Beyond the Veil’ is your actual hard sf – and it’s also the world’s first death metal hard sf story that quotes from the lyrics of a real death metal album.
But, of course, the big project in 2011 has been Rocket Science. I’ve taken a break from it over the past few weeks, but I shall be cracking away at it in earnest in the New Year. I think I’ve got an excellent table of contents, and anyone expecting a one-note ultra-hard sf anthology is in for a big surprise. Rocket Science will be launched at Olympus 2012, Heathrow, London, in April.
I’m also planning to launch ‘Adrift on the Sea of Rains’, the first book of the Apollo Quartet sequence of novellas, at Olympus 2012. The text is currently being edited, but an advance reader has already described the level of detail as “insane”. I took that as a compliment…
Still, I have so few laurels that resting on them would make for an uncomfortable seat, so in 2012 I plan to write and submit much more. I already have four stories due to be published during the year, but if I’m to beat 2011’s record I need more. I have several currently in progress – again, a varied selection of genres and modes – and I need to get them finished and start sending them out.
So here’s to 2012. And let’s hope it’s a good year for all.
Well, okay, it’s a bad pun for a title. But look here. It’s a very complimentary review by the Pornokitsch cabal of ‘A Light in the Darkness’, my story in Alt Hist 3. It’s fascinating seeing what others pull out of your stories – whether you consciously put it in there or not.
Having said that, I agree with everything the review says, and I salute the reviewer’s excellent taste…
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 