Noir Fire: Cover reveal

The observant and deductive among you will have noticed that Futurefire.net Publishing have been plotting a noir-themed speculative fiction anthology for a while. The print and e-book anthology of 14 stories will appear in a few weeks time, and there will be a sneak preview of a few of the pieces in the next issue of TFF magazine at the beginning of April. Watch this space for announcement of the table of contents. In the meantime, we are excited to share with you the fabulous cover image, which was painted for us by the stunningly talented Saleha Chowdhury.

We wanted a cover image that captured the Noir aesthetic, but with a bit more of a progressive, cosmopolitan, inclusive feel to it; an image ambiguous enough to evoke science fiction or fantasy, but with an explicit cyberpunk ambience; perhaps a female or gender-nonconforming character who was not just a victim or motivator for a mourning male protag.

Saleha gave us all of this in spades, and so beautiful and with layers of creativity to boot! We couldn’t be more chuffed! As excited as we are to share the lovely stories with you, this is just the icing on the cake.

Just wait til you see the glossy high-res version on the cover of the book itself.

Making Monsters cover reveal

The Making Monsters anthology now has a full complement of stories, poems and essays, and will very shortly be producing the first ARCs (with a scheduled release date of Sept 1, 2018). All of the authors are listed at the press page, and we plan to post the full table of contents very soon, once all contracts are signed. In the meantime, although this is something of an open secret, let’s have the official cover reveal here…

As you’ll immediately recognize if you’re as much of a fan of her work as we are, this is an expanded version of Robin Kaplan (aka “The Gorgonist”)’s Lonely Gorgon, which you can buy as a poster print from her Etsy store. We’ve worked with Robin before, and she produced the covers of our Outlaw Bodies and Accessing the Future anthologies, as well as half a dozen issues of The Future Fire over the years. This is the most appropriate cover image for all sorts of reasons—I’ll let you read the anthology and figure out why for yourselves!