UNNATURAL update…
In Unnatural Order news:
- Yay we got funded and hit our $4k stretch goal (woo hoo)!
- clockbirds sent me through the thumbnails for the cover design and sweet tentacly void it is going to be A H M A A A Z I N G…
Buh-byyyyeeeee…
The Campbells are gone (or at least renamed).
Also big shout-out to the announcement post’s hand-wringing description of Campbell’s provocative editorials and opinions on race, slavery, and other matters
, which.
Naturalness.
The entire process seems simple and natural, i.e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism.
Karl Marx in Capital, Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital.
This is probably the sickest burn I’ve heard for a long time and I now suddenly understand why libertarian douchebros hate Marx so much.
UNNATURAL ORDER interview season.
So those of you who’re CSFG members or Kickstarter backers will’ve seen this last week, but as it’s now opened to the public: Lyss and I answer a bunch of questions about the Unnatural Order anthology. Including some Hot Tips for those of you thinking of submitting a story!
We’re also down to the last week for our Kickstarter, and though we’re funded it would be awesome to be able to hit our first stretch goal (and an increased payment for our contributing authors). We still have plenty of awesome rewards like pins, art, and even the last few tentaplushies so… grab them now or never!
Campbell dunking season.
Because ’tis the season, archive.org apparently has a scanned copy of Collected Editorials from Analog, a selection of John W. Campbell’s op-eds collated by Harry Harrison—he’s the guy who wrote the novel Soylent Green1 was very loosely based on—seemingly for the purpose of… dunking on John W. Campbell. Content warnings for the usual Campbell garbage, especially virulent racism.
For the tl;dr version, James Davis Nicoll did a review back in 2014 and, well. The title alone really should give it away.
I mean, y’all know I kinda side-eye so-called “hard” science fiction in general, but… ye-ee-eah. Given that this is the sort of garbage believed in by its so-called “father”…
- It’s people! [↩]
Obligatory Hugos winner posts.
So the results are up. Some of you may remember I did some drive-by commentary on some of the nominees (novels, novellas, novellettes, short stories), so… meh. Biggest (pleasant) surprise here is Zen Cho’s win in the novellette category; I really loved that work but didn’t think it would win. So… yay for being wrong on that one.
Adventures in booth manning.
So last weekend was GAMMA.CON, and for my sins I ended up manning the CSFG‘s booth through most of Saturday. We had a shared table with Conflux and it was, uh. An experience. Part of it was possibly the placement; we were up in the back corner near all the sword and prop manufacturers, when we’d probably have been more suited to being in the author’s alley segment. And part of it was straight-up lack of planning; our notification was very, uh. Short. So it was definitely a last-minute scramble to organize things to actually put on the table. We did okay—anthologies were sold, tentaplushies were squeezed—mostly thanks to the arrival of Kaaron Warren, who’s much better at this sort of thing than yours truly.
UNNATURAL ORDER: The Kickstarter!
We-ee-ee-e’re li-ii-ii-ii-ive!
Monsters! Monster stories! Enamel robot pins! Plushie tentacle guinea pig beasts! Do we have it? Yes we do! Can you get it? Yes you can! So… go do!
/flails, screaming into the void
Adventures in Kickstarter.
… is it really only like three days until we launch the Unnatural Order Kickstarter? Eek!
Kickstarter is hard, y’all. Like, my husband literally had an MBA from Harvard and his childhood best friend (and our neighbor) is a professional modeller for a Big 4 firm and it’s still hard to work out exactly what money we need and what rewards to offer. Like… I think we’ve got it. But… yeah. Phew. Yikes.
Sekret project reveal: UNNATURAL ORDER!
Hey, y’all. You remember these guys? And how they were from a totally “secret” project I couldn’t announce yet?1 Well now I can announce it; I’m editing an anthology. About monsters!
The dragon on her hoard. The horror in its void. The word-spanning AI. The demon reaping souls. Too often fiction portrays the non-human as Other; as a threat to be destroyed, to be conquered… or to be “saved”, assimilated back into the teeming throngs of humanity.
Not this time. This time, it’s the non-humans’ turn. What is life like, to be imperfect. To observe humanity from without? What does it mean to be seen as horrific, to be rejected… and to overcome that? Or embrace it? To embrace it or reject it? And what does our love of these stories tell us can we, as human readers, learn from that about ourselves?
Unnatural Order is an anthology for strange days and grotesque beauty, as the monstrous seeps out from the dark, and makes the light its own.
Sounds awesome? OF COURSE IT DOES! Monsters, man! Monsters! I can’t believe someone gave me and Lyss the opportunity to make an entire goddamn short story anthology of monsters.
Oh, and did I mention we’re looking to launch this at next year’s WorldCon? Because we totally are.
Because that’s a super-tight timeframe, submissions are open, like. Now. Until October. Next month we’ll also be launching a Kickstarter, managed by Rivqa, who you may remember from the totally awesome, multi-award-winning Mother of Invention anthology. The base project is funding (i.e. there’ll be something at the end), but the Kickstarter is for things like paying authors more, commissioning interior art,2 and actually paying the people we’ve currently got volunteering on services like copyediting and layout. For you guys, however, the Kickstarter is a way to, a) pre-order copies of the final anthology, including an exclusive hardback edition, and b) get sweet, sweet monster-related merch. So… definitely keep an eyestalk out.
And, finally, to celebrate: Liesmith will be free on Amazon for the next week. So… monsters! Eee!
- Though, confession, totally talked about anyway on Mastodon. [↩]
- We already have a cover artist lined up and I… might just be a teeny tiny bit excited about it. [↩]