Here’s your first look at the cover for FUNNY FANTASY. Art by Tomasz Maronski and layout by Emerson Matsuuchi.
Submissions for Funny Fantasy are closing tonight. (Guidelines.) You can send stories while it’s still February 29 anywhere on the planet, but anything received later than early tomorrow morning Eastern time will not be considered.
Tune in at 10am tomorrow, when the cover for UFO5 will be unveiled (and other exciting things will happen!)
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
I spend way too much time watching television. Time that could be better spent writing, editing, or venturing to what most people call “outside.” However, I’m aware of my vices and I might as well share the outcome of all the research I thus conducted with you. Late last year I participated on the Mind Meld about best genre TV shows of 2015 and I had a fun time writing my portion of that post, so I decided to update it here with the shows that have launched in early 2016:
You, Me, and the Apocalypse
Like FOX’s Last Man on Earth from last year, this show starts off with an apocalyptic premise. The show is part comedy, part horror, and part soap opera. It’s full of crazy twists, but it manages to make the combination work.
You, Me, and the Apocalypse uses the device popularazed by Breaking Bad: they open each episode with a scene that takes place moments before an asteroid is about to destroy humanity. We see the narrator in a bunker with a group of very unlikely characters (including a monkey and someone trapped in a wooden box) while the opening credits roll, then each episode tells the story of how all of them managed to end up there (some from half a world away.)
This is a limited run series. The show, co-produced by NBC and Sky 1, already completed its run in the UK, so I cheated and got my hands on a complete set. It was very satisfying, even if the show lost some of its comedic elements and grew progressively darker in the later episodes. The show’s plot is rather susceptible to spoilers, so don’t spend too much time or effort looking into the details about it online or you might ruin some of the fun for yourself.
It’s unclear whether another series will be produced (there are plenty of intentionally unresolved and tantalizing bits in the finale) but even if the ten-episode run is all there ever is to the series, it is definitely worth watching.
The Shannara Chronicles
This one is a mixed bag. It really doesn’t live up to the Game of Thrones, the success of which it is so clearly trying to emulate. It seems clearly designed to appeal to the MTV demographic, which is definitely not me. Having said that, there’s precious little epic fantasy on TV. If you enjoyed The Sword of Truth or Xena: Warrior Princess, you will probably like this one as well, but don’t expect complex plots, complex characters, or complex anything. Just a bit of well-produced, mindless fun.
The Magicians
As I wrote at SF Signal last year, I really enjoyed the pilot. I only managed to catch a couple more episodes so far, but I’m really digging the show. It’s sort-of a gritty Harry Potter for the ’90s generation, with the action taking place in New York City and a school of wizardry university that teaches magic in upstate New York. I like both the vibe and the characters, and look forward to watching more.
Overall I’m pretty happy with what SyFy’s been doing over the course of the last year.
Lucifer
Based on the comic book character created by Neil Gaiman and others, and eventually a star of his own Vertigo comic book, Lucifer becomes bored with reigning in hell and decides to spend some time hanging out in Los Angeles.
I liked the first episode and really enjoyed Tom Ellis’s portrayal of the main character, but since then the show has fallen into a predictable procedural pattern which is less interesting. To be fair, there has only been a few episodes. Person of Interest spent much of the first season in procedural format before it became really excellent, so there’s hope for Lucifer yet. I’m willing to give it a few more episodes but if you aren’t on board already, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.
The only other new SF/F series I can think of that I tried was Second Chance. Another procedural, and pretty well made at that, but it’s almost certainly getting cancelled due to poor ratings, so likely not worth becoming invested in.
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TL:DR version:
You, Me, and the Apocalypse – Must watch!
The Magicians – Very solid so far.
The Shannara Chronicles – Meh.
Lucifer – Meh.
Second Chance – Dead show walking.
Have you seen anything good that I missed? Please post a comment. If there’s interest, I will post an update later in the year with my takes on Colony, Preacher, and any other new genre shows that I get a chance to watch.
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Lucifer, The Magicians, The Shannara Chronicles, TV, You Me and the Apocalypse | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman
The Hook:
Akuba needs to get rid of her client’s face if she plans on living past the week.
She sees herself from above, the image floating in front of her eyes. She’s in a gondola, high above the canal. Isaac is with her.
He tweaks something on his phone. “Getting it?”
She nods. Her new airhud keeps the video in the same spot, in the upper left of her field of vision. She slides down the bench to get a look at the city’s dark skyline, making the gondola sway. They’re too far away from downtown to see any people, but the haze of drones is just visible in the fading light. The airhud puts bubbles above the buildings, recommending places she can spend her daily.
“Can’t believe you bought that thing,” Isaac says with a petty grin. He told Akuba once that his teeth are so very white from sucking on sugar cane as a boy back in Gulu. He tells her lots of things. “What’s wrong with your phone?”
“I got a bunch of kiz from the last job. And it’ll be useful.” It won’t really be all that useful, but that’s the kind of thing people say about money. Responsible people. And airhuds are getting so popular now. They’re not as expensive as they used to be.
Isaac sniffs. “Tell that to Shaky. He’d rather you paid him than bought yourself pretty toys.”
Alex Livingston writes:
Glitch Rain is cyberpunk gone mobile. Phones, drones, self-driving cars, shipping container homes. It’s about privacy as a commodity, the nodes on the consumption chain, and the psychological effects of being broke and alone.
I love it when a first sentence doesn’t make any sense. This can be done with words invented for the story (e.g. “droogs”), but when the writer depends on unexpected word usage or an odd sentence structure, it makes a puzzle out of that initial line. And I do love to solve a puzzle.
In the first line of Glitch Rain, I wanted to accomplish two things: make the reader wonder what I was talking about and present the stakes Akuba is living with. The story starts with two people playing with some tech in a near-future city, all familiarity and easy friendship. But Akuba has to keep her cash flowing or the guy she owes is going to kill her. She and Isaac are talking like they’re planning dinner with friends, not going on a hacking mission and hoping to make enough money to keep Shaky from sending his assassins. Weird, right?
The dissonance between a dangerous situation which would be completely crippling to many people (myself very much included) and Akuba’s casual demeanor is a big part of what makes her who she is. How can someone just shrug off that kind of pressure? What kind of person lives like that? The intent is to make the reader want to find out.
About the Author:
Alex Livingston grew up in various quiet New England towns before moving to Buffalo, NY to study English at Canisius College. His fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Bastion Magazine among others, and his interactive fiction can be found at Choice of Games and Storynexus. He self-published the novel Rhymer, an Irish wonder myth told as an exciting sci-fi space opera. He lives in an old house with his brilliant wife and a pile of aged videogame systems. Visit him online at galaxyalex.com.
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
I’m happy to report that UFO Publishing titles are now available for sale at Baen e-book store. baenebooks.com
Baen has been an early adapter in the e-book space, and their site reaches a large number of loyal and voracious readers. I’m very excited and thankful to Baen for providing us with an opportunity to introduce the UFO titles to those readers.
You can find the UFO Publishing titles at Baenebooks by clicking here.
Public submissions for volume 5 of Unidentified Funny Objects will be open during the month of April. We’ll be asking authors to submit just one story per person, so please get your best funny work ready! This year we’ll be moving away from the e-mailed submissions, and utilize the CW Submissions system designed by Neil Clarke (who was extremely kind and patient in letting us use the software and installing it on our site.) Frequent short fiction submitters will recognize it as the same submission system used by Clarkesworld, Asimov’s and Analog. The link to the form will be posted on April 1.
Submissions will remain open until the end of February for Funny Fantasy reprint anthology (still using the old-fashioned e-mail method.) See guidelines here.
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
The Hook:
Imagine the sweetest-smelling perfume, something candy-like, perhaps worn by tweenaged girls. Now, pour a bottle of that into your eyes. Welcome to the joys of fairy embalming.
I stood beside a stainless-steel worktable on which a fairy’s parakeet-sized body rested, in the familiar chill and antiseptic smell of our family’s basement necrotorium—a mortuary for the magical.
Randy Henderson writes:
“So,” I said, “What do you think of the hook?”
Finn shrugged. “Well, I think it’s safe to say you’re not the world’s greatest hooker.”
“Huh, I feel weirdly defensive about that that on multiple levels, but okay, fine, what’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing I guess, it’s just strange seeing my life written out. I don’t suppose you’ll tell me how this all ends?” Finn asked.
“No, not in detail. Too much knowledge of your own future is dangerous.”
“Okay, Doc Brown, whatever. Just lay it on me.”
“Well, suffice to say, there’s lots of magic and adventure, drama and romance.”
“No doy!” Finn replied. “How about the next one you just make a straight up Romance novel?”
“I hate to break it to you, but even Romance novels put their characters into physical and emotional peril.”
“Fine. How about you make the next one a sex guide? The Finnasutra?”
“Dude, you’ve had sex, like, twice thus far, at least as written. I hardly think you’re qualified to teach on the subject.”
“Awesome.” Finn said. “Thanks for telling the world. So why did you start off with me sucking in fairy stench in a basement? Why couldn’t you start off with me laying around on a beach somewhere? Or playing some awesome new game on my Commodore 64?”
“Well, this is book two in a series. My whole goal with this book overall was to dig deeper into the magical world and into the characters introduced in book one, to really lay a solid foundation for the rest of the series, and to do so in as fun a way as possible.”
“And putting me in a basement with a dead fairy does that how?”
“Well, specifically, I put you in a situation where it was easy to reintroduce readers to the world and characters from book one, and then build on that in an entertaining way. You sitting alone in your room playing Genesis or Commodore 64 games wouldn’t really do that.”
“You know what else me sitting around playing games wouldn’t do?”
“What?” I asked.
“Suck. I mean, in the first book, I get back from twenty-five years of exile in the Fey Other Realm, and you immediately send me running for my life. I thought here, you’d at least give me a chance to chill out, enjoy the rewards of not being deadified in book one despite your best efforts.”
“Well, this one starts three months after that, so if you want to imagine you spent that time laying around playing video games, I’m fine with that.”
“Great. So you start me off with a dead fairy who looks like a parakeet. You could have spun that as a Monty Python reference, and sent me off to retrieve the grail from a castle filled with lonely maidens. But no, instead you send me off trying to find true love for a sasquatch, and get me mixed up in a feyblood rebellion.”
“Yeah, well, you wanted to make the world a better and brighter place with your adventures and all.”
“Uh, no, that was you.” Finn said. “I didn’t really have a choice in the matter, oh Great Puppet Master of my fate.”
“Oh. Right. Well — oh gosh, look, here comes the link. I guess we have to go!”
“What? Wait! No! I meant to ask you the meaning of — ah, bat’s breath.”
About the Author:
Randy Henderson is an author, milkshake connoisseur, Writers of the Future grand prize winner, relapsed sarcasm addict, and Clarion West graduate. His “dark and quirky” contemporary fantasy series from TOR (US) and Titan (UK) includes Finn Fancy Necromancy, and the sequel Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free. His website is www.randy-henderson.com.
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
The Hook:
The demon is crouched in the corner, between the Cheetos and the onion dip. It’s a small one, only about four feet tall: a low-level creeper. I flick my gaze over the spot like I don’t see it and open the cooler door to get a Coke.
I watch the cashier behind me in the security mirror as he finishes ringing up a customer. He notices me—eyes my ratty hoodie, grungy backpack, scruffy jaw, tattooed fist gripping the cooler handle—and reaches one hand under the counter, probably to grab the butt of a shotgun or a bat he’s got hidden there. He’s totally oblivious to the real danger that’s hanging out in the junk food aisle.
The bell on the door rings as the customer leaves.
I walk past the demon casually, hoping it doesn’t sense my awareness. It’s not here for me, though; its bulbous black eyes are trained on the cashier. Its scarred and misshapen wings twitch and knock at the shelf as its leg muscles tense, like it’s ready to pounce. Clawed feet dig into the linoleum floor, surrounded by traces of black ash and sulfur that seep from its skin.
I set the can of Coke down on the counter and toss a Snickers up there too—dinner of champions.
“Hey,” I say to the cashier. The chill of being too close to the demon crawls over me, but I clench my jaw and ignore it.
Rachel A. Marks writes:
My debut YA Urban Fantasy series The Dark Cycle begins with DARKNESS BRUTAL, where we get to know the homeless seventeen-year-old, Aidan, and learn about his very strange abilities, which he’s been using, up until now, to try and keep his little sister safe. It’s based loosely on the idea that the underbelly of society could hold the greatest treasures of humanity; you know that bum walking past talking to himself? He might be just the guy to save the world. Think of it as Dickens’ Oliver Twist meets TV’s Supernatural in the gritty streets of Los Angeles.
I wrote this opening after several missed attempts, since I was trying to decide where Aidan’s story really started. I wanted to reveal him and his world in a way that would allow the reader to see his everyday life while still providing enough information and action so it wasn’t boring. And so, I imagined the most mundane thing in the daily life of Aidan, and plopped a demon on top, which he would see as an “everyday” thing but the reader certainly wouldn’t.
Demons and snack foods. It’s an opening line that people seem to attach to and instantly want to understand and know more about. I also wanted them to see how the rest of the world saw him. So when the store owner looks on in suspicion we know Aidan is a little ratty and not fit for “good” society. He’s an outsider. And he’s more worried about the demon knowing his awareness than the store clerk suspecting him of criminality. He avoids his abilities. And so in this scene, we watch him fail to stay in the shadows like he wants.
As the story progresses Aidan begins to realize what he’s really running from, and why, and we see that he’s not alone in these strange abilities, even if he thought he was, as other young people crowd around him. Without spoiling it, one thing that makes this series unique in the UF world, are the ties it has to legends and history. Time is a central theme as the story reveals the ancient battle that follows Aidan and his sister, which will soon have them looking at each other across a chasm of their parent’s mistakes.
Book two, DARKNESS FAIR, releases today and is the second part of the siblings’ story. It takes the reader even deeper into the legends and magic that Aidan has to traverse to help his sister, and gives us the story from another perspective. We see Aidan settling into his new role and attempting to use and grow his abilities rather than hide from them. Just before it all goes wrong, of course.
About the author:
Rachel A. Marks is an award-winning author and professional artist, a cancer survivor, a surfer and dirt-bike rider, chocolate lover and keeper of faerie secrets. She was voted: Most Likely to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse, but hopes she’ll never have to test the theory. You can usually find her hanging out with her four teenagers, reciting lines from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or arguing about which superhero rocks the hardest, while her husband looks on in confusion. Find out more about her and check out her art at www.RachelAnneMarks.com
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Many fine magazines with my stories in them arrived today.
ON SPEC #101, Canada’s premier SF/F digest, includes my humorous quantum physics story “One in a Million.”
NordCon XXIX convention booklet features the Polish translation of “Spidersong”
And Informator has been running my Tales of the Elopus mini-stories for close to a year, also in Polish translation. Pictured above is the second batch of the magazines — I think they ran all of them at this point.
Contributor copies make for a happy author. #SFWApro
1 Comment | Acceptances & Publications | Permalink
Posted by Alex Shvartsman
There’s a major blizzard crawling along the East Coast this weekend, and what better way to fight snow and ice than with fire?
Until end of day Sunday, Jan 24, UFO Publishing is offering 25% off all paperbacks (including the brand-new Funny Science Fiction which will begin shipping as of January 29!)
Click here to browse the selection of books. Enter the discount code FIRE at checkout to activate the 25% off discount. Shipping is always free on all orders within the United States.
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
A mini crowdfunding campaign started today on Moozvine. This website, launched last year, seeks to make excellent short science fiction and fantasy e-books available for all. Some stories are posted for free — readers are encouraged but not required to tip the author. You can read my “Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma” in that fashion. Other stories have a funded threshold. This means that if the funding goal is reached, the story will become available on the site for free, and users are welcome to share the e-books and the web version for free under the Creative Commons license (non-commercial.)
Since this is a short story rather than a novella the threshold is set reasonably low at $400. Anyone who pledges $10 or more will immediately receive the e-book for themselves and the free-for-all option will unlock as soon as full funding is reached. So please take a look, and help me share the project.
I also have two more Europe-related bits of writing news to report. I can now share that my Cthulhumor story “Recall Notice” is going to appear in the Tales from the Miskatonic Library anthology from PS Publishing. Also, my flash SF story “Grains of Wheat” will appear on the Concatenation‘s Best of Nature list later this year. Very pleased and honored to have my story selected!
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Funny Science Fiction, UFO Publishing’s most successful anthology to date in terms of month-to-month sales, is now available in paperback! I’ll have copies at 2016 conventions I attend, but you can also snag copies here.
Happy Friday!
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction 