Toward Ecosophy

I'm delighted to announce that several fiction projects in which I've been involved to one degree or another are now available. First of all, Vintage Worlds -- an anthology of SF tales edited by me and the indefatigable Zendexor, set in the Old Solar System, the wholly imaginary but utterly entrancing realm of classic science fiction -- is now available in both print and e-book formats.

Think of it as space fantasy: tales of two- (or more-) fisted adventure set in a solar system that's chockfull of intelligent species, inhabitable worlds, and spaceships that look like something other than random collections of hardware -- yes, we're talking tail fins here. The mere fact that we turned out to inhabit a much less interesting solar system doesn't take anything away from the delight readers still get from the solar system tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, and the other great authors of science fiction's Golden Age, and there's no reason not to set new stories there -- after all, how many people quibble about the fact that Middle-earth and Narnia don't exist? 

This collection includes seventeen stories, including my "Out of the Chattering Planet," and amounts to 120,000 words of interplanetary adventure. You can pick up your copy here. 

There's also good news for readers of fantasy. The first two volumes of my epic fantasy with tentacles, The Weird of Hali, are heading into print in new paperback and e-book editions, with the others scheduled to follow over the course of the next year. The first volume, The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth, is already available in e-book format and can be purchased here, and the paperback edition is in press -- it can be preordered now (use the same link) and will be in print on December 17. The second volume, The Weird of Hali: Kingsport, will be released in print and e-book editions that same day; it can be preordered here. 

Those of you who haven't been following this end of my writing may want to know that, while these novels use the tentacle-ridden horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft as raw material, they're not horror fiction. Lovecraft was a brilliant fantasist as well as a capable horror writer, and I've long felt that the fantastic end of his work has been neglected for far too long; the worlds of his imagination are also just too tempting a venue for fantasy for me to pass up.

The twist, of course, is that we're not getting your standard tale of how tentacled horrors out to devour the world, with the aid of their sinister human cultists, get stopped at the last minute by some combination of square-jawed investigators and sheer dumb luck. (That's been done not merely to death but out the other side into a couple of further reincarnations.) Au contraire, there's always at least two sides to any story; these tales are from the point of view of those awful cultists -- the ordinary men and women, that is, who discover the forbidden truth about those tentacled horrors (aka the old gods of nature) and get drawn into the ancient and terrible struggle between archaic gods and their all too modern, efficient, and up-to-date adversaries. It's a conflict on which the fate of the world does indeed rest, but, ahem, it's not the old gods of nature who are seeking to turn the living Earth into a smoldering, lifeless waste strewn with plastic trash...

So here are the first two volumes -- the stories, to be precise, of how the two main characters of the series find their way into a wider and more eldritch world. The third volume, The Weird of Hali: Chorazin, which launches those characters and several others on a desperate quest to awaken a sleeping goddess, will be out early in the new year.  The others -- The Weird of Hali: Dreamlands, The Weird of Hali: Providence, The Weird of Hali: Red Hook, and The Weird of Hali: Arkham -- will be in print by the end of 2019. Stay tuned for more announcements! 

The latest issue of Into the Ruins has just been released by Figuration Press. For those of my readers who aren't familiar with Into the Ruins, it's a magazine of science fiction stories about the future we're actually going to get -- as in, wave goodbye to the hackneyed, done-to-death mandatory orthodox interstellar future of mainstream SF, say hello to futures here on earth as people deal with the aftermath of the Industrial Age and the emergence of new cultures in the far future. I think of Into the Ruins as the ongoing quarterly successor to my four volumes of postpetroleum SF, the After Oil series, and it features some of the most thought-provoking science fiction being published today. Pick up a copy here, or better still, subscribe. 

Since this journal seems to have attracted a lot of people who are interested in writing, it's probably also worth mentioning that editor Joel Caris is always, as in always, looking for new stories suited to Into the Ruins. You can find the submission guidellines here -- and remember the tried and true advice from the old days of SF pulp magazines: always read an issue of a magazine before you submit a story to it.