A science fiction blog featuring science fiction book reviews and with frequent ramblings on fantasy, computers and the web.
Editor Mike Allen has posted the the table of contents for the final print issue of Mythic Delirium — a retrospective covering the first 11 years of our 16-year life span.
Here’s the table of contents…
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Mythic Delirium has posted the table of contents for the next issue:
Mythic Delirium has posted the table of contents for the next issue:
Mike Allen‘s first novel, The Black Fire Concerto, came out in July from Haunted Stars Publishing. Tanith Lee, this year’s recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, calls the book “a prize for the multitude of fans who relish strong Grand Guignol with their sword and sorcery.” By day, Mike works as the arts columnist for The Roanoke Times. His horror tale “The Button Bin” was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. He’s also the editor of the critically-acclaimed Clockwork Phoenix anthologies — the latest volume, Clockwork Phoenix 4, was funded by a $10,000 Kickstarter — and the fiction and poetry webzine Mythic Delirium.
by Mike Allen
Hello, folks! Thanks for reading. When John DeNardo offered me the chance to write a guest post about my first novel, The Black Fire Concerto — the story of a pair of traveling musicians battling ghouls and sorcerers in a grim post-apocalyptic world — I polled friends and colleagues about what topics would be best to talk about. In foolhardy fashion, I’m going to tackle just about all of them, because they all intertwine. Let’s start with how this book came to be published.
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[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]
Inspired by such so-called “Greatest Horror Writers” lists as this and this — which include zero women — I asked our esteemed panel the following questions…
Here are some of my favorite women writers who write horror:
Mythic Delirium has posted the table of contents for the next digital (0.2) and print (#29) issues:
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The final story from Mythic Delirium 0.1 (with cover art by Danielle Tunstall) has been posted online:
Mike Allen has posted the cover art and synopsis of his upcoming book The Black Fire Concerto.
Here’s the synopsis:
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Mike Allen has posted the table of contents for issue #28 of Mythic Delirium:
Mike Allen writes that a new Mythic Delirium is coming!
Sez editor Mike Allen:
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Editor Mike Allen has posted the table of contents for his upcoming anthology Clockwork Phoenix 4:
Mike Allen is the editor and publisher of the anthology series Clockwork Phoenix and the poetry journal Mythic Delirium. He was a Nebula Award finalist in 2009 for his short story “The Button Bin,” and his first collection of short fiction, The Button Bin And Other Horrors, is forthcoming from Apex Books. He and his artist wife Anita live in Roanoke, Va., where he writes the arts column for the daily newspaper.
One of the wonderful things about the genre community, if you’re a creative type, is if you have an idea and it’s not something you could ever get a major publishing house to line up behind, you can do it yourself and folks respect you for it. Heck, it’s almost expected.
So how did I end up editing the Clockwork Phoenix trilogy, and why have I launched a Kickstarter for a volume four?
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Mike Allen has posted the table of contents for Mythic Delirium 27:
Editor Mike Allen has posted the list of stories appearing in his upcoming anthology, Clockwork Phoenix 3 (order as yet to be determined):
[Note 12/14/09: updated based on latest info]
Short fiction anthologies come in many flavors: some contain original fiction and some are comprised of reprints; they can be themed or non-themed; they may restrict themselves to a certain sub-genre of speculative fiction… But one thing they all have in common is that it’s Editors that put them together.
Continuing from Part 1 last week, we asked a handful of Editors the following question:
Read on to see their illuminating responses (and check out Part 3 when you’re done!) …
We have edited three reprint anthologies; the genesis of each was different. Jacob Weisman at Tachyon Publications approached Jim to do a slipstream book and he enlisted John as his co-editor; the result was Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. We proposed a book about post-cyberpunk and Jacob greenlighted Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. And it was Jacob and the perspicacious Bernie Goodman who suggested the idea for The Secret History Of Science Fiction; the book is due out next month.
We’ve a long history of collaboration and we’ve shared a similar vision for these reprint anthologies. In each of them we were trying to put forward an argument about the recent history of the genre. So we first had to gather our thoughts about slipstream and post-cyberpunk and the divide between mainstream and genre sf. Creating reprint anthologies like these involves figuring out what we think about a subject, or what we can credibly say about it. Selecting the stories has involved a couple of methods: (1) we decided on who we wanted in the book and then read intensively for stories that best illustrated our thesis, and (2) we decided what kind of stories we wanted and then cast the net widely to see who might have written the sort of thing we needed to support our thesis. In each of the books we have had some disagreements that have involved negotiations between us, and the final table of contents has been affected by practical considerations that made the end result different from our initial intentions.
