Micro-interview with Carmen Moran

Welcome to Carmen Moran, artist of “Collective Bargaining” in The Future Fire #67, and our long-time illustrator and collaborator, to the micro-interview season.

Art © 2023 Carmen Moran

The Future Fire: How did you go about illustrating “Collective Bargaining”?

Carmen Moran: Very slowly. It took me quite a while to work out what I was going for. The image that struck me most from the piece was the fourteen thousand eyes, so I wanted them to be a prominent feature, while also showing the erasure that sets in when someone doesn’t fit the shape of the "standard human".

TFF: You're not a fan of spiders yourself. What small animals do you like, and do you think you can communicate with them?

CM: Well, when I say I'm not a fan, I mean them suddenly appearing in my field of vision freaks me out a little (or a lot, depending on size), but of course I love them as very cool parts of our ecosystem, and in their symbolic role as creators of art and weavers of tales—how could I not? As for communicating with them, there is actually a fleet of cellar spiders in my house that I have a contract with: I leave them alone as long as they don't suddenly drop from the ceiling into my face (which they sometimes do for some reason), and in turn they eat the really scary massive spiders that wander in from the garden. It's working well, for both parties as far as I can tell.

TFF: What else are you working on now?

CM: Mostly random personal projects at the moment. One of them is my random knowledge zine Emmeline (@emmeline.zine on Insta), which I've been publishing with a group of friends since 2003. I only just worked out this week that that was twenty years ago… There were some breaks in the middle, but we resuscitated it in 2019 and it's been going strong since then. It's my longest running project, and I love how it's brought a bunch of people together that wouldn't otherwise be connected, and that it teaches me new things all the time. Most recently it caused me to learn about grasshopper mice (Onychomys). If you've never heard of them, I suggest you look them up.

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Reminder: You can comment on any of the writing or art in this issue at http://press.futurefire.net/2023/10/new-issue-202367.html.

New Issue: 2017.40

“One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.”

—Ben Okri

Issue 2017.40

Flash fiction

• ‘Seven Choices’, Rachel Rodman (illustrated by Cécile Matthey) (cn: abortion; sa)

Short stories

• ‘The Thinnest Veil’, Peri L. Fletcher (illustrated by Miranda Jean)
• ‘Changer's Wood’, Stephen Taylor (illustrated by Pear Nuallak)
• ‘Sometimes I Am Drowning’, Louise Hughes (illustrated by Katharine A. Viola)
• ‘On Your Wings’, Omi Wilde (illustrated by Rachel Linn)

Poetry

• ‘Proven Strategies in Human Public Relations’, Davian Aw (illustrated by Carmen Moran)

Full issue and editorial

Download e-book version: EPUB | Mobi

New Issue 2015.34

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”

—Maya Angelou

Issue 2015.34

• ‘Causeway’, A.J. Fitzwater (illustrated by Pandalion Death)
• ‘The Day the Books Left’, Simon Kewin (illustrated by Michael Csontos)
• ‘Godwin's Law’, Curtis C. Chen (illustrated by Miguel Santos)
• ‘It Kills Your Heart’, Anthony M. Abboreno (illustrated by Carmen Moran)
• ‘Crescendo’, Omi Wilde (illustrated by Martin Hanford)

Download e-book version: PDF | EPUB | Mobi

Review this issue on Goodreads.

Flyers for Accessing the Future fundraiser

As we go into the second half of the Accessing the Future fundraiser, and the last few weeks of the summer convention season, we're calling on the army of TFF supporters and allies to help spread the word in the offline world. Are you going to a con in the next three weeks? Do you work or hang out in a library, a genre bookstore, a creative writing or literature department, a trendy café, or anywhere else where potential readers, writers or supporters might pick up a colorful flyer?

Would you be willing to print out a few copies of the flyer to the left, and put them on a leaflet table, hand them out to fellow con-goers, or airdrop them over a receptive crowd?

(Background artwork by the wonderful Carmen Moran, by the way; flyer design by Valeria Vitale.)

We've also uploaded a PDF with 4 copies to a page, which is how I prefer to print them and cut them out. I took a couple hundred of these to #NineWorlds and #LonCon3 this month and practically papered the halls with them!

Shout if you want another format, or if you're in London and would like me to give you a handful of paper copies in person to save you printing them. We'll be eternally grateful either way!

Let's make this happen!

Announcing cover artist for WSADF: Carmen Moran

We’re delighted to be able to announce the identity of the artist who will be providing book cover art for the We See a Different Frontier print anthology: an illustrator who has worked with TFF for some years by the name of Carmen Moran. As you know, the Peerbacker campaign is still open for a couple more weeks, and we’re keen to raise as much money as we call, so as to fill the anthology with as many great professional-rate stories as possible. Among the rewards, if you’re feeling flush, is the original signed piece of artwork that we’ll use on the cover. Carmen is a professional and exhibited (and as you can see, talented) artist, so owning a unique piece of her work will be a great privilege.

Carmen has been regularly illustrating stories for TFF (samples) since 2007 when she provided the wonderfully bright and quirky, yet powerful, images to accompany Mark Harding’s irreverent and political cyberpunk satire ‘Art Attack’, one of which (an airship exploding and giving birth to sparkling pink nanobots) we also used as the cover art on TFF #9. Her illustrations have ranged from flawlessly executed simple and gritty sketches, to extravagant and joyful cartoon-like celebrations of insane majesty. Most recently she created two heartstoppingly poignant and evocative illustrations for S. Ali’s fantastic and fierce Arab Spring parable ‘Bilaadi’, including the spine-chilling piece to the left.

In addition to SF illustrating, Carmen works in a wide variety of craft and design projects, a lot of which can be found in her portfolio. She makes and sells everything from stuffed monster toys and printed teeshirts to greetings cards and gift tags via her online store and at craft fairs, and has been commissioned for children’s books and educational exhibits. Some of our favourite examples of her work include this Tigershark print (right), monster bookplate (below), and the tattoo design (bottom).

We’re still in the drafting stage of working on the We See a Different Frontier cover art, so nothing to show yet (but watch this space for updates). One idea that Carmen is playing with is to create a stylized map, in the colours and style of an old atlas, but with the coastlines and contours and frontiers suggestive of folk art and symbols rather than the conventional borders and outlines we’re used to seeing on our maps, through western eyes and on a Mercator projection of the Earth's surface.

Another idea that always comes to mind from the POV of a Third World citizen is the concept of gambiarra. This word (maybe of Portuguese or Italian origin, but of etymology actually unknown) means something like “jury-rigging”, but with the passage of time it came to mean more than that—the poor people’s “McGiverish” power to, say, create a spaceship from junk, spit and paper clips. We thought of a “Frankenstein” spaceship of sorts, all made of different metal plaques welded together, showing different colors and different origins (a CCCP radar antenna here, a porthole design with Indian motifs, names of Brazilian and South African defunct corporations in a few scattered bits of equipment, all this decomissioned stuff, apparently junk—but a junk that works. A gambiarra spaceship made by competent people not from NASA or the European Space Agency. An alternative spaceship that takes off the ground and does its job better than a space shuttle. This has a kind of old cyberpunk flavor, but most of all it represents the post-colonial zeitgeist. The time for a true global SF has come, and we’re ready for it.