Rights and Wrongs, by Brian K. Lowe

Sometimes when you speculate about the near future, events will overtake your story and render it irrelevant. So if you're going to write a story about the near future, write it fast.

"Rights and Wrongs," on the other hand, took five years. It started 9000 feet high in the New Mexico mountains, at the 2008 Taos Toolbox workshop, where Walter Jon Williams gave me some of the most valuable advice I've ever gotten: "Write what you care about."

What did I care about? I cared about being a writer. Why else was I spending two weeks at a ski lodge so high in the air it took two days before I could walk to my car in the parking lot? But stories about writers are a dime a dozen, so what else did I care about?

In 2008, the War on Terror was everywhere. Enemy combatants were being locked up for years without charges. Rumor was that the government might try to do the same with American citizens, shelving habeas corpus for the duration. And once the government can imprison you for anything, leaving you to rot without charges, democracy is dead.

Of course, it didn't happen, but that was my thinking when I sat down the next day and penned the first line of what you eventually read (or will read). When I was done, I had a story about an attorney for a shape-changing alien who might be a terrorist who had been given a sham trial and was about to be dragged off to be shot and/or dissected. In desperation, he switches bodies with his lawyer and tries to escape. But the lawyer manages to alert the guards to the switch, and the alien is killed attempting to escape. The lawyer comes out okay, but feels bad about the whole thing.

   The story bombed. Sure it did--it was depressing with a capital D. But even then, it received just enough positive comments for me to try revamping it. I re-wrote the escape scene. Still depressing, I changed the ending to a courtroom drama with a 2000-word explanation by an anthropologist about how the alien wasn't responsible for his own actions because he was driven solely by biology. Very science fiction. Very dull. But the esteemed editor of this magazine, showing the kind of faith that moves mountains, thought he saw something in the story. All I had to do was re-write a small part--as in, the entire second half.

It took two years of re-visiting the story every few months, beating my head against a wall, before I finally realized that to re-write the second half, I had to re-write the first half, too. I started almost from scratch, filling in some characters, re-engineering the plot, struggling to find a way to present what I cared about without making judgments and without being boring. And I did.

       But the important thing isn't how I came to write this story. It's that this near-future story took me five years to write, and unfortunately, it's still relevant.

--Brian K. Lowe

Camila Fernandes wins the Second Hydra Competition

With three female finalists and over one hundred and fifty entries, the second edition improves upon the success of the first...

Once again, the judges of the Hydra Competition received stories published by Brazilian authors during the last two calendar years (2011 and 2012) and chose three finalists to send to author Orson Scott Card, who defined the winner. This time around, the chosen tale was “The Other Bank of the River” by Camila Fernandes, announced last weekend during the Fantastic Literature Odyssey III, an annual convention held in Porto Alegre. The story will be published in both text and audio by Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show.

The winning story was first published in Camila’s single-author collection Reino das Névoas (“Misty Kingdom”) by Brazilian publisher Tarja. Camila is a writer, editor, and illustrator. She has published stories in many Brazilian anthologies, but “The Other Bank of the River” will be her first publication in English.

In second place came “Sun of the Heart” by Roberta Spindler, first published in the Solarpunk anthology by Editora Draco. Roberta is a publicist and audiovisual editor. She has written since her teen years, and along with many published short stories, co-wrote the novel  Contos de Meigan (“Stories of Meigan”).

The third place story, “Mary G.” by Nikelen Witter, was first published in the Autores Fantásticos (“Fantastic Authors”) anthology by Editora Argonautas. Nikelen Witter is a writer and history professor. She has published many short stories and one YA novel, Territórios Invisíveis (“Invisible Territories”).

IGMS editor Edmund R. Schubert writes: “I was greatly looking forward to this year’s contest—many thanks to Christopher Kastensmidt for translating all three finalists so I could read them as well (Orson is fluent in Portuguese but I am not)—and the quality and variety of ideas was a treat. It’s a privilege for IGMS to be involved in this partnership, to showcase the best of speculative Brazilian short stories, and we all send our heartiest congratulations to the winner, Camila Fernandes, as well as the other finalists, Roberta Spindler, and Nikelen Witter.”

Tiago Castro, competition organizer writes: “Brazilian speculative literature is making great strides in quality, diversity, and discovering new authors. This second edition brought us a pleasant surprise, with three female finalists. I’m glad to have been able to participate and organize this important prize for Brazilian fantastic literature.”

Christopher Kastensmidt, contest founder and translator of this year’s stories, says: “I’d like to thank InterGalactic Medicine Show, the participating authors, the judges, and this year’s organizer: Tiago Castro. Brazilian speculative literature is rarely seen outside the country’s borders, so every chance we have to make that literature available to readers of other cultures is a huge victory for our community.”

The Hydra Competition is a partnership between Brazilian website Universo Insônia, Christopher Kastensmidt’s Elephant and Macaw Banner, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, seeking to expose Brazilian fantastic literature to the English-speaking world.  This edition also counted on the participation of Brazilian judges Claudia Fusco (Nerdices - Superinteressante) and Daniel Borba (Além das Estrelas).

About Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show

Founded by multiple-award winning author Orson Scott Card, and edited for the past eight years by Edmund R. Schubert, IGMS is an award-winning bimonthly online magazine publishing illustrated science fiction and fantasy short stories, audio stories, interviews, reviews, and more. Authors range from established pros like Peter Beagle and David Farland to first-time authors making their professional debut.  IGMS can be found at www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com.

About The Elephant and Macaw Banner

The Elephant and Macaw Banner is a fantasy series set in sixteenth-century Brazil.  The stories tell the adventures of Gerard van Oost and Oludara, an unlikely pair of heroes who meet in Salvador.  News, artwork, and in-depth explanations of historical and cultural references from the series can be found at the website www.eamb.org.

About Universo Insônia

The site Universo Insônia (Insomnia Universe) publishes articles, news, and reviews on fantastic literature, cinema, comics, TV series, cartoons, and fantasy pop culture in general.  The site’s principal objective is publicizing and supporting professionals in the area of Brazilian fantasy culture.  The site also contains content about traditional and international productions.

The Sound of Death, by Gareth D Jones

The Sound of Death started life as a 600 word story in response to a flash fiction challenge – basically just the opening scene of this alien murder mystery. Right from the start I wanted the cause of death and the scene of the crime to be as non-human as possible. As I started expanding the story I realised this principle had to apply to the whole society, their social interactions and motivations. It was soon clear that everything I had learned from watching several seasons of CSI was also useless. I needed to invent entirely new forensic procedures and investigative methodology.

I found Inspector Ek-Lo-Don to be the most interesting character I have written, not only because of who and what he is, but because I was forced to give far more thought to him than I usually would to a human character. The story only briefly scratches the surface of his society – which is just as well because when I was writing it I wasn’t entirely sure what might be below that surface. Since completing The Sound of Death I have been back and analysed the story and put together detailed notes on every aspect of Ek-Lo-Don’s world as revealed so far. It’s all too easy when you’re creating a new world to get carried away and lose track of what you’ve already established.

I’m currently writing a second, longer, Ek-Lo-Don story that explores many more aspects of his world, and a third story is biding its time to be written too. Hopefully you’ll find it as intriguing as I have.

--Gareth D. Jones

High-Tech Fairies and the Pandora Perplexity, by Alex Shvartsman

It started on Twitter.

My friend Sylvia Wrigley posted something along the lines of “I’m having a difficult time explaining Cthulhu to Grandma.”

To which I responded by saying that “Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma” would make a great short story title.

Sylvia was kind enough to let me have it, and I came up with a family-run magical pawn shop (loosely inspired by the History Channel’s Pawn Stars), and named the protagonist Sylvia, as a thank-you to my friend for inspiring the idea.

The resulting story was one of the funniest I have written, and I was very proud that it became my first short story to be published in IGMS (you can read it in issue #33). This story has since gone on to receive some great reviews, and was even included in Tangent Online’s Recommended Reading List for 2013, with the maximum possible rating of three stars.

I had so much fun playing in the magic pawn shop sandbox, that I knew I would have to come back to this setting and characters, again and again. In the first story, Cthulhu trapped in a snowglobe-like pocket dimension was brought into the pawn shop. So I got to thinking, what other interesting items might show up at its doorstep? Excalibur? Holy Grail? A mint Alf action figure, still in original packaging? The Pandora’s Box was definitely on the short list, and that’s what I went with.

Of course, I wanted the title to be as over-the-top as “Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma,” which is how I came up with “High-Tech Fairies and the Pandora Perplexity.” It sounds like an episode of the Big Bang Theory which, to my mind, is a good thing. I was especially pleased with the play on words – in addition to its popular meaning (bewilderment), perplexity is also a mathematical term, dealing with the probability of distribution. Which sort of makes sense for this story – you’ll know why once you read it.

I intend to keep writing funny magic pawn shop stories, so this hopefully will not be the last you’ve heard of Sylvia.

--Alex Shvartsman

Underwater Restorations, by Jeffrey A. Ballard

“Underwater Restorations” was born out my love of all things underwater.  As a kid, I used to spend hours snorkeling in Keuka Lake in upstate New York, until I was blue and my father had to pull me out for safety.  I often wished that our house was underwater and imagined how much fun it would be to snorkel and dive down into it—of course, I wasn’t a homeowner then, and now it isn’t something I would wish at all.

Right before I wrote “Underwater Restorations,” I had been attempting to write literary fiction and came to the decision that it wasn’t for me.  Undeterred from giving up writing, I thought back to all the stories I loved to read and movies I enjoyed to watch as a kid, which were all Science Fiction and Fantasy.  And there waiting for me after the genre shift, was the childhood desire to go snorkeling through an underwater house.  These two came together seamlessly and produced “Underwater Restorations.”

Writing “Underwater Restorations” was an easier experience than some I’ve had, and whole lot of fun—which was my intent in writing it: to just have fun.  It is my hope that the reader enjoyed in some of that fun and I plan to come back to Isa, Puo, and Winn sometime in the near future and see what they’ve been up to in my absence.

--Jeffrey A. Ballard

Into the Desolation, by Catherine Wells

There are stories that come to you complete, and there are stories that you have no idea are there until they play themselves out. "Into the Desolation" was definitely one of the latter.

I started off in third person past tense, as I usually do, and I thought the story was going to be all about the Imogene character and her adventures in the Time Wastes. Gus was just a tool, a point-of-view for the reader to see Imogene. But then his voice began to take over, and I realized the story would be better told with his vocabulary and rhythm, and that was first person present tense. I'm not a fan of present-tense stories, but for Gus, it just worked.

I still thought getting into the Time Wastes would be just the first part of the story, and then something would happen. But as I went about motivating Gus to go--as I remembered what it was like to grow up in a small town and imagined how it would feel if a smart kid like Gus stayed--I realized he was subconsciously aching for Imogene to convince him to go. He was a blister waiting to be popped. But I honestly didn't realize what the trigger would be until she asked him, "What makes you think I want to come back?"

I have a friend who lost a child. I've seen how that pain continues to haunt her. But what binds Imogene is the what frees Gus. I wonder what adventures they will have together in the Time Wastes? And how will they grow?

--Catherine Wells

Seven Tips to Enjoy Your Time in the Unreal Forest- Van Aaron Hughes

“Seven Tips to Enjoy Your Time in the Unreal Forest” is my most autobiographical story so far. Like my character Jordan Hudson, I grew up on Mercer Island, Washington, I went to North Mercer Junior High, and I waited for the school bus at a little clearing surrounded by a dense curtain of fog. My memories of that time and place inspired this tale, but just to be clear, all the characters in the story are made up. I never had a brother; my father is not the rat-bastard depicted here (sorry, Dad!); and if you happen to know a gorgeous woman named Traci who went to North Mercer in the late 70s, I never made out with her, much as I would have liked to.

Oddly enough, the key to getting this story to come together was the title. I outlined the whole piece and started writing, even though I feared the story was too episodic and missing something at the end to give the reader a sense of resolution. Also, I didn’t have a title.

Looking for something to seize on for a title, I researched fog and stumbled across this passage from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which I had read years ago and long since forgotten:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

I proceeded to rip off T.S. Eliot shamelessly. The opening line of my story is paraphrased from this passage, there are several other allusions to “The Waste Land,” and most importantly, Eliot gave me the idea that the unreal forest was a place the dead might reappear. I added that near the end, hoping it would create the feeling of resolution the story had been lacking.

Continuing to lean on Eliot, I made my working title “The Unreal Forest.” But somehow I wasn’t satisfied with that. I started thinking about how to embellish it, and hit upon the idea of adding to the title the concept of “tips,” pointers that the narrator is giving to someone else who encounters a similar “unreal” location. I liked the title better with that addition, and it prompted me to divide the story into seven specific tips, hopefully turning the episodic nature of the narrative into a strength. I’d love to hear what people think!

--Van Aaron Hughes

Big Al Shepard Plays Baseball on the Moon—Jamie Todd Rubin

There comes a point in your life when you realize that you will never play baseball in the majors. I’m not talking about in high school, or even college. I’m talking about when you turn 40 and watch a game on TV with your 4-year old and think, “He still has a shot one day, if he wanted to play, but me, not in this lifetime.” You are resigned to watching the game, wishing you could play, but aware that your decades of baseball knowledge, to say nothing of your curveball, will go untapped by the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, or let's face it, even the Royals or Astros.

There comes a point in your life when you realize that chances are pretty good you won’t ever make it to the moon. In my twenties I decided I wanted to be an astronaut. I got as far as earning my private pilot’s license. In the course of educating myself on what it took to be an astronaut, I learned that most of the astronauts NASA selects into its program are over-achievers, even by the standards of mainstream over-achievers. It wouldn’t do to have just a pilot’s license. You also needed 3,000 hours in 20 different types of aircraft. Having a Ph.D in some physical science might improve your chances a little. Two Ph.Ds and a medical degree and now you might be in the running. Throw in competitive rock climbing and HILO parachuting, and you’re probably a shoe-in.

All I had was a pilot’s license.

But the great thing about being a writer, and specifically, a science fiction writer, is that age and decrepitude are inconsequential. My characters can be young. My characters can be experts in their field. They can play baseball, and they can fly to the moon.

It isn’t often that a writer gets to write a pure wish fulfillment story and see it published. For me, telling a good story is my most important job, and that sometimes means setting aside what I wish would happen, and allowing the narrative to unfold in such a way as to make the best possible story. In the case of “Big Al Shepard” I tried my best to tell a good story, and it turned out to also allow me to play for the Red Sox and fly to the moon.

I spent much of 1998 reading all I could about the Apollo moon missions, and marveling at the fact that men walked on the moon before I was born. (Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt, the last two men to walk on the moon, did so when I was 9 months old.) At the same time, I’m a lifelong baseball fan, and thinking about how Alan Shepard swung a golf club on the moon got me thinking about an alternate history in which he might swing a baseball bat instead. A title popped into my head, “Big Al Shepard Plays Baseball on the Moon” and I imagined it as a headline on the New York Times or Washington Post. That was all I had. I sat down to write, and the story emerged mostly as you see it.

I’d never written an alternate history before, and I had more fun writing this story than I’ve had on any previous story. It was wonderful creating an alternate timeline where Apollo 1 doesn’t end in disaster. I wanted one of the original Mercury astronauts to be first on the moon--something that Deke Slayton, in his role as director of crew operations, really wanted as well.

The baseball angle was just as much fun to write. Although I’ve made baseball references in my stories before, I’d never written a scene that involved any sort of sports drama. Writing the scene where Big Al Shepard is attempting to break Joe DiMaggio’s record was some of the most fun I’ve had as a writer. It also took me out of my comfort zone. As a lifelong New York Yankees fan, could I write credibly and positively about the Boston Red Sox? Or New York Mets?

This story was different in one other way. Usually, I have an idea, a “what if,” as well a good idea of how the story will end. Then I just write. In “Big Al Shepard” I had the idea, “What if, in an alternate history, Al Shepard was a major league baseball player before he landed on the moon?” But I had no idea of how it would end. Discovering that ending  was a big part of the fun I had with this story.

Finally, I want to give a shout out to my friend, and trusted beta-reader, Ken Liu. Ken read this story in an earlier draft, and identified things that helped make it into a much better story.

-- Jamie Todd Rubin

Light Crusader’s Dark Dessert, by James Beamon

The idea for "Light Crusader" came to me in Afghanistan.  I was in Helmand Province, where landscapes range from rugged mountain streams to sparse, flat desert.  It was both desolate and beautiful.  Nothing new existed; the entire populace seemed to be experts in the art of gerry-rigging, giving the place a reassembled, post-apocalyptic feel. 
I wanted to bring this feel back to the States, so instead of a convergence of cultures on the other end of the world we have a convergence of gods at the end of the world.  All I needed was a spot to stage the story when I ran across the Dismal River on Google maps, with the small town of Tryon sitting twenty some odd miles down.  Yep, all the places in the story exist today in some form; since I've never been to Tryon in person it'd be nice to know how close (or far) I came to depicting it here.
Research and inspiration aside, what I like most about "Light Crusader" is the world as a host for all doomsdays.  We tend to imagine the end of the world as an instantaneous, nuclear flash bang or a two minute infectious bite frenzy.  I like the end of the world on the timetable of the gods, beings unconcerned with age or years or fitting all the action into a single movie scene.  Life still goes on for a humanity forced on an immortal schedule, forced to deal with a multitude of pantheons the world over and their competing notions of what the end is.  Like the province of Demeter, it feels like fertile soil for my imagination.

--James Beamon

Heading Into Convention Season

Starting 2014 with a flurry of activity, I've got conventions on back to back weekends. This coming weekend I'll be at IllogiCon, along with GOH's Mary Robinette Kowal and Lawrence Schoen, plus other luminaries such as James Maxey, Misty Massey, Ada Brown, Gail Martin, Mark Van name, John Kessel, and Gray Rinehart.

IllogiCon is held Jan. 10 - 12, though I won't be there on Sunday because of another commitment. It's at the Embassy Suites Raleigh-Durham/Research Triangle, which is actually in Cary, NC (just a smidge south of Raleigh).

The following weekend I'll be at MarsCon, which is at the Fort Magruder Hotel and Conference Center in Williamsburg, VA, Jan. 17 - 19. I will be at the whole con, no conflicts. Guests at MarsCon include YA GOH Carrie Ryan, who got me invited in the first place (it's important to know who to blame for these things), as well as Princess Alethea Kontis, Mike Pederson (who helps run RavenCon in Richmond in April), and a whole slew of people whom I've never met before. This is my first time at MarsCon, so I'm looking forward to meeting lots of new people.

Actually, it's also my first time at IllogiCon, but that one is close to where I live and I already know a lot of those folks... which is a whole other reason to look forward to going.

Hope to see you there. Or the other there. Or both. (I'm flexible.)

Edmund

At the Old Folks Home at the End of the World, by John P. Murphy

Like many avid readers, I harbor some small secret desire to live forever. Maybe not forever-forever, but enough time to get through that growing stack of books on my bedside table, y'know? And my Amazon wishlist. And maybe catch up on Doctor Who, and... Look, long story short, I always kind of identified with those fantasy villains who are, shall we say, in it for the long run.

Feeling that kinship, I started to wonder at some point how many immortality seekers in a given fantasy world might have succeeded. Statistically, some of them had to, right? And what happened to them? I figure, under all the skull fortresses and forbidden tomes and dramatic armor, deep down they're really just people like me with too many good books on their bedside tables. So what would I do?

I had all that in the back of my brain at the start of the yearly Weekend Warrior flash fiction contest in the Codex writers group. One of the weeks, I got the prompt, what if everyone in the world had the same super power? I thought about immortality, and realized that even if only a handful of people had it, eventually they would be everyone. I remembered the character Ed the Undying from the online game Kingdom of Loathing, and then a friend of mine's father-in-law who retired from business only to start fights in his homeowners' association, and it all kinda clicked. The story came together quickly as a series of mental images of people thrown together by virtue of being the only ones left, lonely and bored and ornery and just sort of making do. As I jotted them down, I liked the effect, and with some polishing and going back-and-forth about a few passages, I wound up with something very close to this end result.

I guess "At the Old Folks Home at the End of the World" is at its heart a "be careful what you wish for" story. Even so, I think some of Old Folks aren't yet all that sorry. As they might say, it beats the alternative.

--John P. Murphy

The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Olizewski, by Ferrett Steinmetz

The Sturdy Bookshelves Of Pawel Olizewski is a unique story in my pantheon, mainly because I live-wrote every single draft of it live, to raise funds for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.

Now, let me explain what Clarion is to me; at age 38, I’d been writing for twenty years, and despite four novels, at least a hundred short stories, and some poetry that’s just as soon well forgotten, I had only published three stories in very small venues. My total writing revenue was just over $15 – which, at less than a dollar a year, not promising.

Then I got accepted into the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, a six-week intensive where the best writers in sci-fi train you to be better. And I learned exactly how terrible I was. Which was traumatic but a good thing. And since graduating in 2008, I’ve sold twenty-five short stories, many to markets where (like this one) I’d read for years and am now proud to be a part of.

(In 2012, I even got nominated for the Nebula, which still feels like a weird dream I’m going to wake up from any day now.)

So every spring, I live-write stories to raise funds for my alma mater in a closed community called “The Clarion Echo,” which you can only get access to by donating $5. I write, post what I wrote - and then more importantly I explain what I liked and what I didn’t like about my work. Basically, I’m critiquing my own prose, explaining all the shortfalls I’m going to have to fix on the next draft.

Except that the Sturdy Bookshelves story was written entirely for Clarion Echo. I didn’t plan it that way, but over the three years, every spring I went back to that story and said, “Well, time to rewrite it,” and so I did. So if you feel like donating $5 and emailing me at theferrett@theferrett.com, you can get access to the archives and literally see this whole story come together, with about 4,000 additional words of commentary.

Which isn’t a pitch. I’m just saying, is all.

The hardest thing to get about this story was, weirdly enough, the voice. Because the initial draft was 2,800 words, very tight, and almost character-free – more like a news report than a story, focusing on Pawel. I soon realized a tale with no character arc is really hard to do unless you’re Ted Chiang, and so I wrote a 5,000-word version of this which focused on the Nameless Narrator (or, as I took to calling him, the NN) but lost a lot of the oddball details that people found compelling. It felt bloated, and the NN really isn’t interesting enough to carry the tale.

Yet I loved the internal arc of this – and why wouldn’t I? If you think about it, the tale is really about me spending twenty pre-Clarion years writing and making the same old mistakes over and over again, hoping like heck that I’d somehow ignite my inner spark. Yet I struggled to find a narrative tone that matched. People loved this one, asking about it more than any other Clarion Echo story that I’ve written – “Did you finish it? Did that one sell?” – but I didn’t feel I’d really nailed it.

And it’s a hard balance to get. Because the NN is boring, but the story cannot be. And so in writing this you have to walk this high-wire act where the prose is snappy enough to pull you along and get you invested, but not so snappy that you could never believe that the NN was once a nebbish. Eventually, I realized that I had to err more on the side of “quirky prose and weird characters,” pulling Agnes out as a major character to counterbalance the NN, and making her oddball enough that she could tug us past a little dullness, and making the dullness not part of the prose but part of the way other people react to the NN.

For me, the secret of Clarion is revising. Like Pawel, I was making the same bookcase over and over again with each story I wrote, never learning, just sort of doubling down. What Clarion taught me was to dismantle my bookshelves, break them up and make new things out of them. If you could see all the revisions, you’d see how radically this story changed, rotating around the central heart of it.

And I hope, if you’re wandering around like Pawel, like me, some day you’ll realize how to rearrange that workshop to produce an entirely different kind of magic.

--Ferrett Steinmetz

Once More to Kitty Hawk, by Greg Kurzawa

"Once More to Kitty Hawk" began as a simple "what if?" What if people didn't really die? What if they simply faded out of this existence, leaking their selves and their memories into the world around them? Its original title was "Transitions," and in the earliest draft it was a young couple suffering the transitioning of the fellow. Right away I thought that was too maudlin, so I rewrote it as a father/son relationship. Upon reflection, I don't think that made it any less tragic.  I'm not ashamed to admit that I shed a tear or two while writing it.

I've only been to Kitty Hawk once, but I remember enjoying it.  I'd very much like to go back someday.

--Greg Kurzawa

The Saltwater Wife, by K.C. Norton

"The Saltwater Wife" has its origins in the selkie legends, wherein certain seals could turn into beautiful women. Men could 'catch' these inhumanly beautiful creatures by stealing their sealskins, and thereby trapping them in their (did I mention incredibly beautiful?) human forms.

I wanted to tell a story in which some of these women retain their agency, but I also wanted to tell a story about being human. This isn't a story about some battle of the sexes; it's a story about personas. In my experience, we are all pretending on some level. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, just that it gets complicated. I don't like to tell stories about Strong Female Characters. I like to tell stories about human nature. Even if my characters aren't always, you know, technically human. Thus, selkies and shifting identities were in. Sexy fish-ladies were right out.

One final note: In reality, eels and groupers do hunt together. They're one of the few common inter-species hunting pairs found in nature. The eel swims into tiny crevices to flush out prey; the grouper snaps up the victim, leaving some nibbles for the eel. They're an insanely efficient hunting team. Is this a metaphor? Perhaps.

--K.C. Norton

Now Live - IGMS Issue 36

Ready for your reading pleasure, IGMS issue 36.

IGMS Issue 34 & 35 now on Kindle and Nook, etc.

The ebook version of the last two issues are now ready.

If you have a subscription, just go to your account page and select the version you'd like delivered.

IGMS Issue 36 cover teaser

Couldn't resist (not that anybody said I really ought to)...

Almost Ready: IGMS Issue 36

Coming soon: Issue 36 of IGMS, my favorite number for any issue we’ve ever published.

Our cover story this issue is "Escape from the Andromedan Empire” by Ian Creasy. “Escape” is a smart SF extrapolation of the current digital piracy landscape, projecting the theft of not just an author’s work, but of authors themselves—in a digital sort of way.

 

"The Saltwater Wife," by K.C. Norton continues the theme of very personal kinds of theft, except this time the story is dressed up in the garb of fantasy (both literally and figuratively) and explores not just the theft itself, but questions of identity.

John Murphy’s "At the Old Folks Home at the End of the World" takes a brief but deft look at the pros and cons, the light and the dark, of mortality, but turning it inside-down and upside-out.

In "Once More to Kitty Hawk," Greg Kurzawa also explores the theme of end–of–life, but in a quieter way, fading to almost nothing…

"The Light Crusader's Dark Deserts" is a rollicking adventure through the lands of many kinds of death, right up to the point where the protagonist has to sit down to dinner with his deceased wife and child, which answers several necessary but unpleasant questions.

We also have several bonuses for you this issue. First is an audio production of "At the Old Folks Home at the End of the World," read by none other than Orson Scott Card. We’re always tickled when we can get Uncle Orson reading our stories.

Second, we have an additional audio production, “The Sturdy Bookcases of Pawel Oliszewski,” written by Ferrett Steinmetz and performed by Philip Powell. “Sturdy Bookcases” is a sneaky story that repeatedly asks the simple but compelling question, “Are you interested now?” There’s only one way to know what it all means: Read the story. Or else listen to it. You decide. “Are you interested now?”

And be sure not to miss Darrell Schweitzer’s InterGalactic Interview with author John Hemry, who you may know better by his nom de plume, Jack Campbell. 

Plus the next installment of our newest feature, an article by our regular movie-reviewer, Chris Bellamy. Be sure to check out his next At The Movies, Extended Cut.

Issue 36, chock full o’ goodness, as befits the issue featuring my favorite number. ;-)

Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

Tangible Progress, by Edmund R. Schubert

For several years now I’ve been turning over in my mind an idea: a mythical race of people who trace their origins back to ancient Rome and even beyond, to Rome’s founding legend of Romulus and Remus. These people are werewolf hunters, cursed by the Roman gods. Under this curse they will find their tangibility waxing and waning with the moon, until they have hunted and killed every last werewolf. That is the big idea. I think it has the potential to be a series of novels.

Of course, a series of novels will take years to write, and I wanted (needed, really) to start smaller, exploring these people and their lives, so I’ve begun writing several short stories set at different points in time. “Tangible Progress” is the first of these. I’m also working on one set in modern New York City, with some subtle but not unimportant difference. We’ll see which, if any of them, strike a chord with readers.

Regardless of the specifics, I also knew I wanted to start with the people, the Rem’n, but without the added baggage of werewolves. Werewolves are everywhere and, frankly, of limited interest to me. We’ve all seen plenty of werewolves during recent years, along with plenty of vampires and zombies. Even the first idea I had for writing about these people that was big enough to be a novel was actually set after the last werewolf had been killed. It seems odd, I know, even extreme, but I was fascinated by the idea of a werewolf-hunting people far more so that by the werewolves themselves.

As for Gabrielle and the gang in “Tangible Progress,” it took many drafts and help from several people (including but not limited to key input from Brad Beaulieu, Faith Hunter, and Scott Roberts) to get to a final draft. It was also balancing act of weaving in the necessary information about this race of werewolf hunters (that readers had never seen or heard of before), along with an actual story with a narrative arc and characters with their own agendas. Whether I’ve succeeded in that or not is up to the reader, but without Faith, Scott, and Brad’s help, this first story would only have been worse, not better.

I chose to set the story during the Great Depression because in addition to taking the werewolves out of the story, I also wanted to take the technology out of the story. I’m not sure that I can fully articulate why I wanted to do that, only that my instinct was to focus things as much as possible on people and nothing else. I suspect, however, that the time period is one I will revisit, regardless of which aspects of the mythology I am creating I choose to keep and which I choose to jettison. 1938 in particular is a year that intrigues me. So much happened that year, from the first Superman comic book and H.G. Wells radio “War of the Worlds” broadcast hoax, to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II.

As for the individual characters in “Tangible Progress,” I hadn’t originally intended to revisit them after I started finished this particular short story, but having now spent time with the Rem’n children Gabrielle and Dianna and Celia, as well as her parents, tribal elders, and the some of the humans they encounter, I can easily see their story expanded and continued (though their story in IGMS is entirely self-contained). I particularly like Gabrielle’s independence of thought, even as she recognizes in the end her dependence on the Rem’n around her.

On a much broader note, I also feel compelled to mention that although I am the editor of IGMS, I have not and never have, selected my own work for inclusion in the magazine. I’m not delusional enough to claim that my role here doesn’t play a part in getting published in our digital pages, but any time I have a story that I’d like to see published, it goes first to our managing editor, who them passes it along to Uncle Orson. I’m comfortable saying that if he didn’t think that the story was good enough, he would at least send me some notes and say “Fix this up before you embarrass us all.” ;-)

So that’s the story behind my story. I’m hoping there will be many more, but first and foremost, I hope you enjoy this one all by itself. It has quite a load to carry, bearing the weight of this writer’s hopes and dreams for many future projects.

-Edmund R. Schubert