Lie to me beautifully!

TFF #53: the LIIIES issue

For the fifty-third issue of The Future Fire (# LIII, due in April 2020) we will be publishing an issue in which every story, poem or essay is masquerading as something else. We would like to see book reviews or nonfiction essays whose content is fabricated, an excuse to tell a story. Invent a writer, artist, movement, activist, performer or studio, and write a short political-critical account of their life or work. Write a guest preface or glossary/appendix from an epic series that hasn’t been written yet. Write about a little known (because nonexistant!) historical artefact/archaeological site, or event, or culture, or mythological monster. This piece doesn’t need to be a narrative story told via the medium of letters or articles; the article or review itself is the story.

Alternatively if you could write an article masquerading as a piece of fiction or poetry, we’d love to see how that works. Or any piece of speculative fiction or art concealing itself in another form, like postmodern ekphrasis or an erudite party game.

Note: the difference between this call and any other story told through the medium of a letter or essay or review, is that the (fake) nonfiction piece should be both believable and something it would be reasonable for us to publish if it were real. (No speculative and/or social justice content, that's a harder sell…)

Given the uniqueness of this call, it’s probably best if you contact us in advance to pitch your lie before you spend the time writing it, and we can discuss it in more detail.

Deadline: December 31, 2019 (possibly earlier if the issue fills up already)
Pay rate: flat $10 (USD) per piece
Submit or query: fiction@futurefire.net, subject line: “LIIIES” + your title.

Interview with Siobhan Logan & Darragh Logan-Davies of Space Cat Press

Interviewed by Shellie Horst.

Siobhan Logan and Darragh Logan-Davies brought together their joint experience as author and editor to create Space Cat Press earlier this year. With a promise to bring readers “Star Struck Stories” Space Cat’s focus is space exploration. They are in the process of releasing their first publication, Desert Moonfire: The Men Who Raced to Space.

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Shellie: With small presses reporting difficult times, why do you feel now is the right time to start a new press?

Siobhan Logan: Is there ever a right time to leap off the cliff and try the small press adventure? Yet 2019 is exactly the moment to publish a book about the rocketeers behind the first Space Age. Our first title, Desert Moonfire: The Men Who Raced to Space, is launching our list. I’ve been a huge admirer for years of the role small presses play in the publishing industry and especially in writer development. They offer an important space for new voices to emerge and be supported. I don’t underestimate the challenges. But the presses that stick around do seem to find their distinct niche and forge a close bond with their readership. There’s a dialogue where readers tend to buy a particular kind of book from your press and that shapes your output over time. Quite a few indie presses are run by one or two people on a shoestring budget in a corner of the kitchen. We’re not approaching this on a commercial basis. It’s very much a passion project where we aim primarily to meet our costs and pay our writers. We have a modest Three-Year Plan, to schedule maybe two books a year, one of which will be an anthology. At each stage, we learn what’s working and tweak or jettison, exactly like rocketeers test-firing their engines. The more it takes off, the more we can vary our output and deliver what our readers enjoy.

Space Cat is to follow a non-profit business model. How and where do you plan to re-invest receipts and what does that mean for your readers?

Darragh Logan-Davies: I feel I need to explain the financial side of things a bit more. When I was at States of Independence Publishers’ Fair last year, I asked writers and indie publishers what would be the one thing they would change about the publishing industry if they could. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the answers I kept getting was money. Publishers on the whole are just not paying authors enough to survive on their craft alone. I understand why but it still doesn’t make it okay. So, we aim to pay everyone we publish a flat rate upon acceptance into an anthology.

What is the inspiration behind Desert Moonfire: The Men Who Raced to Space?

Siobhan Logan

SL: I wanted to get to know the individuals behind the century’s great adventure, the quest to turn humanity into a space-faring species. For me, the natural way to do that was to blend a historical narrative with a poem sequence that relives key moments and humanises the rocketeers’ story. I was surprised to discover how dark a tale that was. The space rockets were rooted in military technology and the rocketeers’ personal stories take us into concentration camps and gulags as well as the fields of war. The Space Race was very much another expression of the Cold War yet it galvanised thousands of people to achieve this extraordinary feat. Not just the Moon but from Sputnik and Gagarin through to the ISS and space probes, these missions pushed far into the solar system and opened a new chapter of the human story. I was especially intrigued to learn the role that science fiction played in inspiring the rocketeers and space theorists and eventually winning over the public to take fantasy for possibility. That cultural response to space exploration is a good starting point for Space Cat Press too.

Space Cat Press’s submission page lists a broad selection of forms: Poetry, Short stories, Creative non-fiction and Flash fiction. Is Space Cat Press aimed at any particular type of readers?

SL: Many writers dip in and out between different genres and forms. Magazines will often mix stories and poems say, but not poems and non-fiction. Space Cat Press is happy to ‘cross boundaries of genre’ as long as the wider story benefits. I’ve always loved mixing storytelling forms—fiction short and long, poems with non-fiction, performance and imagery, print and media. I really like the conversations that emerge when they are yoked together by a theme or narrative. And there is an audience for that if you find the right places and approaches to share those stories. Probably a niche audience but one that is enthusiastic and curious. So I’d say we expect to draw readers from three different but overlapping markets: science fans who like a narrative approach, poetry lovers who like to mix it up and readers from the SFF community who are inspired by space exploration.

DLD: We did the same thing in the literary journal I was involved in during my masters. ROPES accepted poetry, art, short stories, essays, and plays—even more forms than SCP. We had a great time arranging the various submissions so there would be something for everyone. Because SCP books will be a mix of genres and forms, we hope our readership will be similarly diverse.

Darragh Logan-Davies

Editor Darragh will be looking at a wide range of sub-genres across all these formats, is there a particular thing she’s looking for?

DLD: Well first off, everything we do here at Space Cat is a collaboration so we will both be reading the submissions. As for what we’re looking for, I’d like to see how far contributors can push the boundaries of speculative fiction and other genres. Do you write poetry about steampunk goblins living on Mars? Excellent, send it to us. Do you write short stories where damsels in distress turn badass and lead intergalactic raids? I, for one, would love to read it. Step outside the box and see where your imagination takes you. Rather than one specific voice, we’re looking for as many diverse voices as possible. We’ll release more information on our website closer to the submission call but take the Space Race theme as a prompt rather than a set of instructions.

The first submission call will go out in November. What kind of voice will you be looking for?

SL: I think the key to a good anthology is a strong theme and then let multiple voices speak to each other in interesting ways. The first anthology will be literature that is inspired by the Space Race. But we want writers to interpret that widely. There might be memoir pieces that evoke that moment of 1969 as children experienced it. Poems about the moon or astronauts. Pieces that explore what the Space Race means to young people in 2019. We want very diverse voices and stories. I’ve been reading SFF authors like Tade Thompson, Jeannette Ng or Aliette De Bodard. Through alien xenospheres, missionaries in the land of the Fae or Vietnamese water-dragons under the Seine, they’ve subtly deconstructed sci-fi’s colonialist mindset whilst having huge fun. I see poets too reflecting on our ecological moment or strewing collections with apocalyptic dystopias and rogue robots. Collections that are both intimate and social. You can get an idea of our tastes by reading Space Cat blog Reviews. But it’s down to what writers send us and how we arrange a narrative out of disparate pieces. We definitely want new voices to make it through. To that end, we’re offering a free Space Cat workshop as part of Leicester’s Everybody’s Reading festival in October.

What has been the biggest challenge so far with regards to Space Cat Press, and how does that compare to your experiences as writers/editors?

DLD: The biggest challenge so far has been simultaneously handling so many parts of this project at once. When I’m editing, I can just focus on the text and how I can help the author make it as readable as possible. With Space Cat, I will take a break from typesetting to talk to printers, or I will finish up some complicated work on the website and reward myself by designing new merchandise. It has been a bit insane but thoroughly enjoyable and having Siobhan to soundboard ideas with has been an immense help.

SL: There’s no point in undertaking a small press adventure if it’s not enormous fun. The collaborative nature of Space Cat Press means we play to our strengths and combine different tastes. So we do content-edits together. Then Darragh brings her copy-editing skills to bear and she’s also done the cover design and typesetting for Desert Moonfire—everything needed to get the book print-ready. Afterwards, I come in more on the marketing side. But we learn from each other, and from other small presses, at every step of the way. Lots of café meetings with the laptop!

There’s been faffy technical things which Darragh is great at fixing. She’s the Kaylee to our Firefly. But looking ahead, the major challenge is to find our readership. And begin a dialogue where we listen to them and become responsive to who our audience is and what they want. For me, that’s been the same challenge I faced in publishing poetry collections or stories with small presses. I knew then my main sales would be face to face by going out to events and engaging readers. We plan to take Space Cat Press to book fairs, poetry events, libraries and SFF cons, as well as into on-line spaces. It’s about connecting our passions and obsessions with yours. We can’t wait to hear from you, both writers and readers.

And returning to space at last—if you could own any planet, which would it be and why?

DLD: Hmmm, I am generally against colonisation, but I would have to say that if I could, I would own Earth just so I could make climate change the number one global priority.

SL: I agree. We had enough of that with the military impetus behind the Moon Race. I’m more interested in exploring imaginatively and vicariously through space missions and fiction. But I’d love to write about Pluto—that drop-dead gorgeous planet (yes, you heard me) and the mysterious rock-worlds of the Kuiper Belt. Or the Voyager space probes. When you see their mind-boggling images, you know we could fix our planetary mess. We have the ingenuity. We know our blue dot in the dark is unique and precious. We can do it and it’s all to play for.

Thank you for answering our questions, Siobhan and Darragh, and good luck with your explorations into publishing, Space Cat.

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Space Cat Press can be found on Facebook, their website spacecatpress.co.uk or on Twitter @SpaceCatPress.

Interview with co-editor Regina de Búrca

For the occasion of our fiftieth issue, we’re joined by TFF associate editor Regina de Búrca, who looks both back and forward, as we do at milestones like this. We’re having this chat to think about where we have come from, and what social-political and speculative fiction might be in store for us. Regina’s been co-editing for about ten years now, so she knows where a lot of the bodies are buried…

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Regina de Búrca is a writer and editor from the West of Ireland. She is interested in feminist speculative fiction, especially for young adults. She's currently experiencing a resurgent Gothic literature phase and is working her way through the works of Ann Radcliffe for the second time, after a gap of twenty years. Her biggest influences remain Ursula le Guin and Isabel Allende but in relation to TFF stories loves to see authentic and strong voices, coupled with fresh ideas. She can be found procrastinating on Twitter @Regina_dB.

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TFF: How did you first get involved with The Future Fire magazine and Futurefire.net Publishing?

Regina de Búrca: In 2009, I started a job in Dublin where I met then TFF co-editor Leoba, and we quickly bonded over our love of speculative fiction. Leoba introduced me to TFF and I enjoyed reading through back issues. Before long, Leoba asked if I’d like to help out with the slush pile. At first, I was a bit daunted by the idea; back then I was writing for kids but had little commercial success—who was I to judge anyone else’s writing? But I think it was because I took the submissions so seriously that Leoba and Djibril wanted me on board. The first story I gave feedback on was Frank Ray Ard’s “Wings So Foreign” for issue #16. Since then I’ve read through hundreds of stories; and have been rooting for their authors. Speculative fiction, in the broader sense of the term, is a tough genre. There’s nowhere to hide when you have to craft new worlds, as well as structure compelling plots and create engaging characters. There’s nothing like the feeling of identifying a powerfully resonating story and then watching its journey from my inbox to the magazine. It’s been a privilege to read authors’ hard work and I’m enormously proud of TFF’s high standard.

Illustration for “Wings So Foreign”, © 2009, Arianna Ciula

Has editing, revising and slushreading had a measurable impact on your own writing in the meantime?

RDB: Not so much. I think it’s because I work in very different genres. There is a connection between my writing and the work of TFF writers, though. My own adventures in writing and submitting impact my approach as an editor. I’m often on the querying side of the equation, and like most of our writers, I work full time while trying to improve my fiction. So, I know firsthand how much work is involved in crafting stories and what if feels like to put your writing and hence yourself out there. I understand what it’s like to be limited to writing in short bursts while on work breaks or commutes or whatever. I get it! Because of that, I’m a slow reviewer. When I get pieces to review that don’t immediately resonate but I can see what the author is trying to achieve, I tend to err on the side of ‘maybe—let’s find someone to take a second look’, rather than ‘didn’t do it for me, let’s pass.’

If you could run a themed issue or anthology, what topic or slant would you pick?

RDB: I’d really like to see an anthology with a considered and sensitive focus on common mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. It would nicely counteract the media’s portrayals of people experiencing issues—research shows that’s at least one in four of us!—that depict MH experiencers as dangerous or weak. I think an exploration of issues would be very interesting in a speculative fiction framework: how much does discrimination and inequality in society impact our cognitive wellbeing? How much does politics? Economics? I reckon this theme would make a super interesting speculative fiction anthology. I’d love to see what our writers could come up with—the level of innovative thinking that I’ve seen from our anthology submissions is staggering.

You also collect rare books. Do physical books, especially old books, have a particular life that can never be replaced by any other medium (audio, e-book, even film)?

RDB: There will never be a digitized / digital version of a rare book that excites me as much as the original. Sorry! (*Ducks and runs from digital humanities community*). It’s the tactile, multisensory experience that makes reading a rare book far more pleasurable for me than spending time on its digital equivalent. I also find the story of the physical book itself interesting—where it started from, whose collection it belonged to. It’s rarely possible to trace these histories, of course, but I do marvel at how some of these works have survived. I’ve often bought a book for its journey as much for its content. Inscriptions, doodles, newspaper clippings—all things I’ve found in rare books that have taught me something, given me a glimpse into someone else’s past. Also, on a more prosaic level, I spend most of my time staring at a screen at work, so I don’t find the idea of engaging with screens in my spare time very appealing.


What else are you working on at the moment?

RDB: I’m in between drafts of a novel for adults that explores complicated friendships at the moment. My story has had four beta readers and I am at the point where I am not sure whose feedback to follow in the broader sense of theme. Clarity always emerges eventually between drafts eventually, though. As my story progresses, it gets harder to stay motivated. My absolute favourite part of writing is the first draft, the one only I ever see, where I get to call the shots!

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Thanks for joining us, Regina!

TFF #50 author and artist microinterviews

As you may know, after each issue of TFF we like to post a series of micro-interviews with the authors and artists—just a couple of questions each, and short answers of 2–3 sentences. Because not all of you use or follow FB where these go up in the first instance, I’ll collect here links to a few of the posts as they go past. I'll try to keep it updated. It’s always fun to read what people have to say about their own work, and what else they’re up to in the meantime.

• Rebecca Buchanan, author of the poem “Not a Princess but (Yes) There Was a Pea”
• L.E. Badillo, illustrator of “My Plastic Heart, My Metal Hand”
• M.L. Clark, author of “And You Will Know Us by Our Monsters”
• Rachel Linn, illustrator of “Fairest of All”
• A.Z. Louise, author of the poem “Germination”
• Grace P. Fong, illustrator of “The Furious Chisel”
• Jo M. Thomas, author of “Goodbye, Snow Child”
• Carmen Moran, illustrator of “Not a Princess but (Yes) There Was a Pea”
• Benjanun Sriduangkaew, author of “Where Machines Run with Gold”
• Valeria Vitale, illustrator of “And You Will Know Us by Our Monsters”
• Ada Hoffmann, author of “Fairest of All”
• Martin Hanford, illustrator of “Germination”
• Jeana Jorgensen, author of the poem “Walking on Knives”
• Cécile Matthey, illustrator of “Goodbye, Snow Child”
• D.H. Kelly, author of “The Furious Chisel”

If you have any questions for any of these artists, poets or authors, or would like to say anything nice about their work, please feel free to leave a comment below this post, and we’ll make sure it gets seen.

Interview with Chloe N. Clark

Back in 2015 we published a lovely, dark, surreal, horror-kitsch-dystopia-escapist adventure short story titled “All Along the Mall” by Chloe N. Clark (which is well worth pausing here and going to read, by the way). Now Chloe’s second poetry collection is available from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, and she has come to speak to us about speculative fiction and poetry, beauty, dystopia and art.

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Chloe N. Clark’s Your Strange Fortune is our good fortune. This debut volume of rare sympathy and imagination leaps easily from myths to monsters, ghosts to zombies, fairy tales to the Apocalypse that, for this poet and so many today, is “just/the fact of life.” Clark’s inventive, unforgettable voice ranges widely—from up-to-the-moment poems like “Googolplex,” in which curiosity becomes dark compulsion, to the far future when museums feature the relics of our own time: “the things we could not bear/to leave behind us:/ pieces of highways, signs/ …one single spike from Lady/ Liberty’s crown.” Clark understands that time speeds forward and that myth and popular culture are close kin that offer the songs of ghosts who once were us, “the ones who/ had such beautiful voices but only when/ they thought no one was listening.” Like the poet’s “clockwork nightingale” whose song is both dystopian and beautiful, Chloe Clark’s voice rises above the usual din to bring us a debut volume that is rich with unsettling questions but always unflinchingly alive. (Blurb by Ned Balbo, author of The Cylburn, Touch-Me-Nots and 3 Nights of the Perseids.)

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Chloe N. Clark is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of The Science of Unvanishing Objects and Your Strange Fortune. Her work has appeared in Booth, Glass, The Future Fire, Little Fiction, Uncanny, and more. She is a founding co-editor-in-chief of online journal Cotton Xenomorph. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes or her website chloenclark.com.

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TFF: Your Strange Fortune is a diverse, wide-ranging collection of poems. Did you just bring together a selection of your best poems from other places, or was it conceived as a single, coherent piece of work from the start?

Chloe N. Clark: This question sort of has multiple answers. Almost everything I write has some connection to something else I’m writing, even if I don’t sit down with that intention (my brain works in large pictures and patterns, it’s why I’m so fond of interconnected novel-in-stories). So I found that I was writing a lot of poems centering on apocalypse and disaster (large scale and personal). As I realized this, I began to picture a plot arc for the poems and then began to put them into a single cohesive overall book. Something I’m very concerned with, always, when putting together poetry collections is “how is this telling a story?” I want the poems to stand alone, but when put together also serve a larger purpose. The best poetry collections, like story collections, novels, or albums, should be able to be read as one piece and have that work on some level (whether it’s an emotional arc of an actual plot driven one).

TFF: Both Wallace and Balbo’s blurbs note that your work combines themes of horror/dystopia/apocalypse along with beautiful or hopeful tones (which I think is true of “All Along the Mall” as well). Do you think we need to see the joy and the hope in the world to cope with and indeed fight back against the dystopia galloping towards us?

CNC: Absolutely. The world is a not-great place, for so many reasons, and I think the things that help us to cope with that and to fight back against the not-great things are hope and joy. If you’re hopeless about the future, you don’t really have the drive to make it better for yourself/for the next generation/etc. I write about a lot of darker subjects and so I think I try to be very purposeful about lacing those subjects with light. I need to be able to see a way out and I think it helps to show that in writing as well. It’s one of the reasons I teach, as well, I focus on injustice and rhetorics of violence in my classes, but I’m always careful to think about solution-based approaches to these problems—to show why we keep fighting. Being hopeful and finding joy are not at odds with being realistic about the world, if anything they keep you more able to understand what’s at stake.

“All Along the Mall” illustration © 2015 by L.E. Badillo

TFF: Poetry is almost by definition non-realist, in the sense that imagery and analogy are such ubiquitous techniques; does this make it an especially powerful medium for science fiction, or is “speculative poetry” a tautology?

CNC: I think this goes both ways honestly. In my mind, all writing is in some ways speculative (even non-fiction because it often is based out of the writer seeking answers and also having to incorporate their own view/analysis of those answers and questions). I think poetry is a great venue for sci-fi though because it allows the ideas room to be ideas, rather than needing maybe the plot or explanation behind them that a story might require. So it’s a great playground for those ideas and images without binding them to something larger.

At the same time, I think all my poetry is speculative, even the realistic pieces. I’ve never been able to view the world without seeing the strange inside it. There’s so much miraculous in the everyday of life, that it sometimes seems hard not to write things in a way that comes off as speculative.

TFF: What, to you, most essentially characterizes the difference between “literary” and “genre” fiction?

CNC: This is a question that always gets me fired up, because I think it’s in many ways a question that’s already been broken. Many of the best “literary” writers today are ones who fully incorporate genre techniques into their work (Colson Whitehead, Kelly Link, Victor LaValle) and many of the best “genre” writers are ones who write work that is also very literary—in that it focuses on character and writing as much as it focuses on plot momentum. Sometimes, the distinction that I think works best is: do you want to read it for the story or for the writing? If it’s both, it’s probably good literature. If it’s one or the other but not both, it probably falls into “genre” or “literary.”

TFF: Have you ever seen a statue or a piece of art that you wished was alive?

CNC: I think I wish this of a lot of art and statues, when I really like a painting, I often wish I could climb inside it and see it from another angle. Good art is an invitation—to wonder and wander in. But, if I had to pick a single piece, I would definitely go with the works of Dr Evermor, an outsider artist from Wisconsin. I grew up going to see these pieces and now I take my nephews there. They are strange and wonderful and filled with all the magic of what I think childhood dreams feel like—giant insects made of old musical instruments, a telescope to the stars, pieces of trash and discarded junk turned into something new and strange. I don’t think the giant insects would become menaces, if alive, they feel too kind and filled with delight to do so.

TFF: Would you like to visit another planet?

CNC: I want to answer this question in all-caps, so: YES. My obsession with space and the universe began as a small child, watching Aliens for the 400th time and listening to audio plays of Ray Bradbury stories. And it was a joy and fascination with space that grew even more when I began to actually understand what space and planets and the ways we get there actually meant. Nothing delights my brain as much as reading some fact about the difficulties of space exploration and the ways in which we seek planets away from our own. I love Earth and I’m not a person who thinks colonizing other planets is the way to save the world, but what I wouldn’t give to take a step on another planet—to see some new beauty of the universe in front of me. What a wonder that must be—I don’t think there’s enough poetry in the world I could write to come close to what that must be like.

Thank you for joining us, Chloe!

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Check out Chloe N. Clark's new poetry collection Your Strange Fortune from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, also sold at all online booksellers (and some shops). Her previous poetry chapbook The Science of Unvanishing Objects is still available from Finishing Line Press.

Reprint: ten years of The Future Fire

Reprinted from TFFX (2015, edd. al-Ayad, Matthey and Vitale) [purchase links] as part of our celebration of The Future Fire issue #50 in 2019. Four more years may have passed, but this history of the first ten years, and what we’re trying to do with the zine, still stands.

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This anthology celebrates ten years of The Future Fire magazine (futurefire.net), by both reprinting a few highlight stories from the first thirty-one issues, and including several new, experimental, unusual or aspirational pieces to give a taster of what we’d like to see more of in the next decade.

Issue #1 appeared in January 2005, after a bit of preamble and experimentation the previous year, and apart from a short hiatus to rest up and take stock about halfway through, we’ve been publishing an average of three to four issues per year ever since. We always wanted TFF to be challenging, experimental, progressive, inclusive, political, revolutionary—even if to start with maybe we weren’t sure what we were rebelling against!

The first thing you would notice if you went back in time ten years (or just used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine) to look at the TFF website in 2005, would be how god-awful-shitty the web design was. I like to think that’s aesthetics having changed, and it wasn’t quite so ’90s-looking to a 2005 eye, but I’m lying to myself. Still, the evolution from CBBC-quality flames in 2005, via a slightly darker, smoky aesthetic in 2007, to the cathode ray tube Unicode-soup we know and love today in about 2009, echoes the growing confidence we started to have in our niche in the speculative fiction market.

We launched in 2005 as a cyberpunk market (words like “chrome,” “postmodern” and “hyperfiction” peppered our tagline, manifesto and first story contests), but through an accident of community we knew more writers of horror and dark fantasy, and there was almost no conventional scifi in the first several issues. You can hear a bit of diffidence about this in our early editorials, and our craving for that elusive cyberpunk is almost tangible…

But once our slushpile was deep enough that we could reasonably select on genre and theme as well as quality (we were always uncompromising on quality) then our niche was under our control, and we didn’t have to be shy about the geeky, retro, techno-noir look we imagined for ourselves. Not that we ever stopped publishing horror, fantasy and surreal stories as well, of course; and never will.

You might also notice the evolution in our one-line mission statement: “New writing in Dark Speculative Fantasy!” we proclaimed in 2004. “Speculative Fiction, Cyberpunk and Dark Fantasy!” we boomed in 2007. “Social-Political and Speculative Cyberfiction!” we have cried since 2009. Always the line, “An experiment in and celebration of new writing” has sat somewhere in the first paragraph.

We’ve had a thorough turnaround of collaborators too: In 2004 we were Bruce, Joseph, Equus and myself; Joseph and Equus left within days; by 2009 we had been joined by Leoba, David, John and Lois; by 2011 it was just me, which is part of the reason TFF took a year’s hiatus. Now, as of 2015, we are joined by Regina, Kathryn, Tracie, Valeria, Cécile (who has illustrated stories since 2006), Serge; plus Lori and Fabio who have guest-edited anthologies and continue to be valued collaborators.

We have attracted a fabulous team of artists, a critical and generous cohort of reviewers, and a community of support that we plug into via social networks and occasional conventions. We’ve had a huge amount of support, both financial and in-kind, during the crowdfunding campaigns for the last three anthologies, and we engage both productively and cordially with several other small presses, publications and writing communities. In 2005 it was mostly me, sketching and photoshopping, reviewing whatever junk I found lying around, bribing and threatening people to send us their stories, funding the whole thing out of my pocket.

I measure the success of TFF by such intangible things—legends who turn out to have heard of us; people who can publish professionally nonetheless sending us their stories; the generosity and excitement of new and potential collaborators. But if you want more measurable criteria, no less than eight stories first published in our pages have been shortlisted or honorably-mentioned in awards and year’s bests; ten stories have been reprinted in some of the most prestigious and high-quality anthologies such as Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best, Lethe Press’s Heiresses of Russ, the Apex World SF and Mammoth’s SF Stories by Women.

We hope to drive this success ever onwards. Our aim has always been to publish progressive ideas, underrepresented voices, socially important stories, and people clearly think that’s a worthwhile goal. We’ve learned a lot about what all of these mean over the years as well—learned to check our own privilege and be much more sensitive to issues of gender, race, class, ability, language, and so many other facets of oppression. We’re able to be selective now on features above mere quality, fit and taste; in addition we filter by features such as respect, not punching down, lazy stereotypes that we might have missed before we had such an inclusive team able to share their judgements of privilege and oppression with us.

But we’ve also always wanted to have fun, to push the boundaries, to play games that Borges, Kafka, Calvino and Eco would be tickled by, and people seem to enjoy that too. We feel it’s important to treat authors and artists with respect, which among other things means paying them properly for their work, and we have some ideas for improving our finances to do better on that front in the future.

But most importantly, my co-editors Valeria and Cécile have done a great job helping put together this anthology of old and new stories, and we hope you enjoy reading them. If you do, keep coming back to futurefire.net; we plan for there to be plenty more where these came from!

New issue 2019.50

“I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

—Greta Thunberg

Issue 2019.50: Jubilee issue

• Cover artist: Pear Nuallak

Novelettes

• ‘The Furious Chisel’, D.H. Kelly (illustrated by Grace P. Fong)
• ‘And You Will Know Us by Our Monsters’, M.L. Clark (illustrated by Dr. T. Eratopo)
• ‘Goodbye, Snow Child’, Jo M. Thomas (illustrated by Cécile Matthey)
• ‘Fairest of All’, Ada Hoffmann (illustrated by Rachel Linn)
• ‘Where Machines Run with Gold’, Benjanun Sriduangkaew (illustrated by Laura-Anca Adascalitei)
• ‘My Plastic Heart, My Metal Hand’, Susan Jane Bigelow (illustrated by L.E. Badillo)

Poetry

• ‘Walking on Knives’, Jeana Jorgensen (illustrated by Eric Asaris)
• ‘Not a Princess, But (Yes) There Was a Pea’, Rebecca Buchanan (illustrated by Carmen Moran)
• ‘Germination’, A.Z. Louise (illustrated by Martin Hanford)

This issue is free to read online

• Full issue and editorial
• Download e-book version: PDF | EPUB | Mobi
• Goodreads page for TFF#50

Interview: Evelyn Deshane and L.E. Badillo

A couple years ago we published a lovely speculative flash story by Evelyn Deshane, “The Cryptographer’s Body,” which due to scheduling issues at the time, was published without an illustration. Now, the superb L.E. Badillo (profile) has provided an image to accompany the story, and I think you’ll agree it works beautifully with it! To celebrate this, and to remind people to read the story again, we invited Evelyn and Lou to come and chat about the process of writing and illustrating. This conversation turned into a bit of a mini-interview, and we’re delighted to share it here.

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Evelyn: When you illustrate something from someone else’s mind—such as a short story—do you focus on the details of the piece, or the tonal message you think it’s sending?

Lou: The tone is most important. How a story makes me feel is the foundation of the work. I hope to convey what the story makes me feel and I hope the illustrations can act as a primer for the reader and make that connection on a more visceral level. Details bring credibility and make the illustration cohesive with the story. I hope a reader can then look back on the illustration and identify things from the story.

Lou: Do you know anyone who has gone through transition like Kylie in the story? I do and I can’t imagine what they went through. If you don’t know anyone who went through this, how did you make such a deep connection with the characters in the story?

Evelyn: Yes, I do; I’ve known many trans people and they’ve all played large parts in my own life. My empathetic skills have also been honed especially well through my academic study of transgender people and their lives.

One of the reasons I wrote “The Cryptographer’s Body” was because I was in the middle of my comprehensive exams for my PhD, studying trans writing and social media, and one or two articles mentioned cryptography. One author (can’t remember now) called it a kind of translation—and I immediately thought of someone in a future landscape who was both decoding signs/language and also themselves. So hurrah for exams!


Evelyn: Describe your artistic process in three adjectives. Why have you selected these?

Lou:

1. Many: I need to filter out the scenes envisioned.
2. Exciting: Watching the idea come to life is always thrilling. Commissions often pose surprising challenges.
3. Relief: Completing the work and knowing it is done having met the criteria and my expectations is a great feeling.

Lou: What is the main takeaway you want readers to experience by reading “The Cryptographer’s Body” in today’s social environment?

Evelyn: I see it as a love story more than anything. Kylie’s relationship with Scott has absolutely nothing to do with the social climate in which they live—it is a pure connection between them—but of course, it does end up meaning something within a larger culture (as this story surely does), since we all must participate in some way with the world we live in. So I suppose the main takeaway is that connection is what matters more than ideological message. When we actually face people and talk to them, we have so much more common than we first may believe.

Evelyn: When you draw something from your own imagination, does it come to you as a finished product that you must then find, or is it an experience of discovery?

Lou: Sometimes an idea is so powerful it carves itself from my imagination and into reality. Other times it is like hunting the elusive White Stag through a shadowy forest and sometimes on that hunt I find something even better along the way!

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Thanks to both Evelyn and Lou for joining us! Please check out Evelyn Deshane’s professional site and L.E. Badillo’s DeviantArt gallery for more great work from both of them.

Guest post: The Tildenville Skeleton

The Tildenville Skeleton
Guest post by Ari Kaness

Came across this while doing research on something else and thought it might be of interest to readers here:

Tildenville skeleton, Lake Apopka, Florida

Discovered in 2018 by kayakers, this immense skeleton—approximately 23 meters (75 feet) long, with a wing span of about 15 meters (50 feet)—was originally identified as a previously unknown pterosaur species, tentatively placed in the Azhdarchoidea group. This identification was cast into severe doubt by later radiocarbon dating, which estimated an age of around 8000 B.C.—well past the age of the dinosaurs. DNA and mDNA tests proved unhelpful in identifying the species. Bones found near and over the skeleton were successfully identified as human from about the same time-frame. Reports of fire and smoke rising from the bones have not been independently verified.

Lake Apopka

Cool, right? Especialy since I couldn’t help thinking: what would you have to go through to fake something like this? To start with, how do you gather 10,000 year-old bones (assuming that radiocarbon dating info is accurate)—enough to cover a 75-foot skeleton? (For those reading along, that’s about half the width of a football field, more or less.) How do you then ensure that those bones won’t have enough DNA and mDNA to be identified as, well, horse bones or something like that? (I assume horses of some sort were around 10,000 years ago, though it’s completely possible that this is just a false impression I’ve gotten from watching too many movies.) Why throw human bones into the mix? Where do you get the human bones? Do you, well, go hunting in graveyards—and if so, how do you guarantee you won’t get caught? (As I’ve found out while researching various true crimes, Florida has some tough laws against desecrating graveyards. Not recommended.) How do you age the human bones so that they have the same radiocarbon dating? (That can be faked, right? Wrong? Physics: not my thing.)

And then, how do you ensure that it will be found by random kayakers? And if that’s your goal, why Lake Apopka? One of the most polluted lakes in Florida, the water is usually so brown people can barely see Florida bass in it, let alone faked skeletons. I feel like the fakers were taking a real risk here.

Though it is quite shallow, which would make putting a fake skeleton into it much easier, I guess.

And also, where is the thing now? Google seems to indicate that the skeleton was taken to one of those tourist trap wax museums—you know the ones—or to someplace on I-Drive, between the theme parks, which seems probable. More probable than a suggestion from some anonymous person on Reddit that the skeleton was snatched up by people in Hazmat suits and taken to some top secret location in Georgia. Georgia doesn’t have any top secret locations. Or an even less probable legend, also found on Reddit, that the skeleton burst into flames during an attempt to remove it, killing everyone involved, keeping its current location a secret—something that would be just slightly more probable if Google Images and the Wayback Machine didn’t show several images of happy and very unsinged people standing or wading right next to the huge bones, and lifting some of the smaller bones—apparently from the wing—high into the air with their hands.

And yet, diligent checking on my part (that is, clicking through Google results while drinking coffee) doesn’t disclose where the skeleton might be now.

A definite mystery, and one I do intend to solve—but first, to track down more info about those other mysterious deaths on Lake Apopka.

TFF #49 author and artist mini-interviews

As we do after the release of each issue of TFF, we’re currently running a series of very short interviews (2–3 questions, couple sentences per answer) with the authors and artists who were featured in TFF#49, our poetry themed issue. Interviews are appearing on Fakebooc every couple days, but we'll also collate the links here.

• Kim Whysall-Hammond, author of the poem “Lights”
• Jeana Jorgensen, author of the poem “Moon”
• Eris Asaris, illustrator of “Falling Out” and cover artist
• Jennifer Bushroe, author of the poem “Shrouded”
• Petra Kuppers, author of the flash fiction “Salamander Love”
• Fluffgar, illustrator of “Not Far Enough”
• Dawn Vogel, author of the flash fiction “I Believe”
• Jennifer Crow, author of the poem “Cleopatra Diaries”
• Toeken, illustrator of “Lights”
• Michael Díaz Feito, author of the poem “Red Tide at the Finca”
• Rebecca Buchanan, author of the poem “The Wolf's Tale”
• Valeria Vitale, illustrator of “Shrouded”
• Paige Elizabeth Smith, author of the poem “Not Far Enough”
• Victoria Feistner, author of the flash fiction “Ganymede Riots”
• Cécile Matthey, illustrator of “Salamander Love” 

Thanks again to all poets, authors and illustrators! Please check out their work. We’ll post more interviews here as they appear.

Interview with Hûw Steer

We welcome to the TFF Press blog author Hûw Steer, who wrote the charming “The Vigil of Talos” in the Making Monsters anthology, and now also copy-edits and sets our e-books for TFF magazine. Hûw has a novel out this month, a fantasy adventure heist caper with a dashing archaeologist/tomb-robber protagonist, and he dropped by to answer a few questions.

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The Boiling Seas are the mariner’s bane—and the adventurer’s delight. The waters may be hot enough to warp wood and boil a hapless swimmer, but their scalding expanse is full of wonders. Strange islands lurk in the steamy mists, and stranger ruins hold ancient secrets, remnants of forgotten empires waiting for the bold… or lying in wait for the unwary.

On the Corpus Isles, gateway to the Boiling Seas, Tal Wenlock, the Blackbird, seeks a fortune of his own. The treasure he pursues could change the world—but he just wants to change a single life, and it’s not his own. To reach it, he’ll descend into the bowels of the earth and take ship on burning waters, brave dark streets and steal forbidden knowledge. He’ll lie, cheat, steal and fight—but he won’t get far alone. The ghosts of Tal’s past dog his every step—and one in particular keeps his knives sharp.

The Blackbird will need help to reach his goal… and he’ll need all his luck to get back home alive.

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Where did the idea for this story come from? Did you start from the setting or the characters?

Definitely the setting. I had the original idea during a production of The Comedy of Errors. As tends to be the case with university drama, it was a bit weird—we had a chorus onstage at all times playing background characters and it was set in 1950s Yorkshire—and so for most of the play I was sat stage left at my greengrocer’s stall eating grapes and occasionally reacting to the plot. We had to be idle in character; we read, played cards… and I brought a sketchbook. During one of the monologues, I started drawing a map of some islands. Maybe it was the play that did the rest, subconsciously. The Comedy of Errors opens with a shipwreck, it’s filled with inversions and subversions of expectations—I think that bled over into my thoughts while I was drawing that map, building that world, and so I ended up with this inverted ocean and all the perils that came with it. It’s a strong enough setting that I’ve been seriously considering trying a D&D campaign in it for years…

Oh, and bonus points if you can tell me where the name ‘Port Malice’ came from!

Are there creatures living under the hot waters of the Boiling Seas? What do they look like?

(Disclaimer: little of this will bear any resemblance to actual science)

So the Boiling Seas are hot because of massive volcanic activity on the ocean floor—there are rivers of molten rock and iron constantly heating the water. This also means they have a much higher mineral content than normal, minerals like copper, iron, carbon... see where I’m going? The fish in the Boiling Seas are sleek and shiny and mean; they have literal iron-hard scales to help reflect the heat and stay alive! It’s the same story with ships—anything without a metal hull won’t last long, because the caulking between planks just melts. There are no squids or octopi; they’d cook in seconds; but there are steel-scaled sea-serpents—huge things, big enough to take on warships by themselves. And there are proper flying fish too—they’ve evolved to breathe the steam from the water for extended periods so they can glide for much longer! It’s a brave fisherman who tries to make a living on the Boiling Sea.

…and now I’m wracking my brains trying to figure out how to do an underwater sequence in the sequel without killing my protagonists…

How fine do you think is the line between deciphering the traces of an ancient civilisation and imagining a fictional one?

Often very fine. I’m no archaeologist but I’ve studied enough Greek and Roman history to know that when you’re going through ancient sources there are always fascinating facts and snippets that, on closer inspection, turn out to be completely fabricated. Some of the most celebrated ancient historians—Herodotus, Ctesias, etc.—lied all the time about places they’d been and things they’d seen. I recall one passage of Herodotus where he states that the people of ancient Libya were “all wizards,” and more besides. Even when things are heavily documented it’s still easy to interpret them in a romanticised or otherwise distorted way—I know I’ve been guilty of this! If you’re not careful then you can build up a totally fictional image of an ancient society from reading the wrong sources… or even the right ones.

Which ancient artefact or object has the most amazing story, in your opinion?

There’s a Micronesian island called Yap that once used limestone discs as currency. Some of them were only a few inches across, but some weighed over 4 tonnes! They were quarried on another island and brought back by boat, and it took so much effort to move the big ‘coins’ that everyone agreed to just remember who owned which stone, regardless of where it actually was. Why was this important? Because one 4-tonne coin, en route back to Yap, got hit by a storm and sank to the bottom of the sea. Obviously there was no way to get it back, but that didn’t matter—as 4 tonnes of stone wasn’t going to get up and walk away the islanders just carried on trading with it. So there’s a piece of currency that’s been at the bottom of the ocean for centuries, and it’s still legal tender!

Whenever I get all existential about how ephemeral modern money is, it helps to remember that there’s one economy that’ll never crash completely.

What was your favourite fairy tale when you were a child?

Probably Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I had (still have, in fact) a CD version of the Arthurian mythos by Benedict Flynn, narrated by Sean Bean of all people, and some passages are indelibly etched in my memory. Gawain’s journey of self-discovery about his own courage was important to me because it showed his flaws, in a way that the other heroic stories I read (and there were a lot of them) never did as well. He was a Knight of the Round Table, but the whole way through the story he was scared, falling to temptation, quaking in his armoured boots—but he kept his word, and did the best he could, and won respect for it. Sean Bean’s last words in that section, as Arthur, always stuck with me: “None of us are perfect. We can only try.”

Thanks for joining us, Hûw.

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Hûw Steer is an author, historian and sketch comedian from London. He’s previously been published in Making Monsters (Futurefire.net Publishing, 2018), and the UCL Publisher’s Prize anthologies for 2018 and 2016. This is his first published novel.

You can purchase The Boiling Seas: The Blackbird and the Ghost for Kindle from Amazon US or Amazon UK (and all other local Amazon stores).

New issue 2019.49

“It won't be any of those things,” J.D. [Sauvage] said. “I don't know what it will be, but it will be something different.”

—Vonda N. McIntyre, Starfarers

Issue 2019.49: Poetry Special

Flash fiction

• ‘Ganymede Riots’, Victoria Feistner (illustrated by Miguel Santos)
• ‘Salamander Love’, Petra Kuppers (illustrated by Cécile Matthey)
• ‘I Believe’, Dawn Vogel (illustrated by Katharine A. Viola)

Poetry

• ‘Not Far Enough’, Paige Elizabeth Smith (illustrated by Fluffgar)
• ‘Lights’, Kim Whysall-Hammond (illustrated by Toeken)
• ‘Cleopatra Diaries’, Jennifer Crow (image courtesy MMA)
• ‘Falling Out’, Hayley Stone (illustrated by Eric Asaris)
• ‘Moon’, Jeana Jorgensen (illustrated by Joyce Chng)
• ‘Red Tide at the Finca’, Michael Díaz Feito (illustrated by Jason Baltazar)
• ‘The Wolf’s Tale’, Rebecca Buchanan (illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith)
• ‘Shrouded’, Jennifer Bushroe (illustrated by Dr. T. Eratopo)

Download e-book version: PDF | EPUB | Mobi