A POC/non-white/mixie nerd scrapbook. Because we’re awesome.
Just a friendly reminder that the deadline to submit your work to the Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond anthology is May 1.
Our goal is to have somewhere between 25 and 30 short stories. We’ve already accepted some works by authors like Nisi Shawl, Eden Robinson, and Junot Diaz. We hope to soon be looking at something by you (and yes, previously published material is fine).
http://mothershipconnect.com/index.html
Submissions open April 1st, but Crossed Genres folks decided to post the guidelines first!
Who can submit
We welcome stories by authors from all walks of life. We especially encourage submissions from members of marginalized groups within the speculative fiction community, including (but not limited to) people of color; people who are not from or living in the U.S.A.; QUILTBAG and GSM people; people with disabilities, chronic illness, or mental illness; and atheists, agnostics, and members of religious minorities. The protagonists of your story do not have to mirror your own heritage, identities, beliefs, or experiences.
We also especially encourage short story submissions from people who don’t usually write in this format, including poets, playwrights, essayists and authors of historical fiction and historical romance.
Submission deadline and publication schedule
All submissions are due July 31, 2013. If it’s still July 31 in your time zone, you’re good. Acceptance notices will be sent by October 1. The anthology is tentatively slated for a February 2014 release.
Pay and rights
We pay USD 5¢/word for global English first publication rights in print and digital format. The author retains copyright. Payment is upon publication.
Story criteria
- Length: 3000-7000 words (FIRM)
- Your story must be set between the years 1400 and 1920 C.E., and take place primarily in our world or an alternate historical version of our world. (Travel to other worlds, other dimensions, Fairyland, the afterlife, etc. is fine but should not be the focus.)
- Your protagonists must be people who were marginalized in their time and place. By “marginalized” we mean that they belong to one or more groups of people that were categorically, systematically deprived of rights and/or economic power. Examples in most times and places include enslaved people, indigenous people, queer people, laborers, women, people with disabilities, the very young and very old, and people who do not share the local dominant religion, language, or ethnicity. Many people belong to multiple marginalized groups, and many are marginalized in some ways and privileged in others. Your story should acknowledge the complexity and intersectionality of marginalization.
- Your story must contain a significant element of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the weird, without which the story would not work or would be a substantially different story.
- All submissions must be in English.
We will not accept any story containing the following:
- Gratuitous or titillating depictions of violence.
- Gratuitous descriptions of bodies or body parts, or people described only in objectifying ways.
- Horror that relies on shocking or grossing out the reader.
- Stories that are all about how someone non-marginalized became an enlightened champion of marginalized people.
- A protagonist from a societally or technologically powerful group who happens to be temporarily or situationally powerless (e.g. a peasant who’s really a prince, a representative of the British East India Company shipwrecked on Ceylon).
- Depictions of marginalized people as being doomed to hopeless misery.
- Depiction of any group, no matter how powerful, as universally, inherently, or irredeemably evil.
Handle with care
If you decide to incorporate one or more of the following elements, please do so with caution and awareness of the ways that they can be problematic or difficult to write about.
- Violence, particularly sexual violence. We recognize that sexual violence is frequently used as a weapon against marginalized people, so we are not issuing a blanket prohibition against it, but please consider very carefully whether you need to include it in your story; and if you decide that you do, please consider very very carefully whether your story needs to show the violent act itself.
- Consensual sexual encounters. We’re not averse to sexual or erotic content, but it needs to further the story and incorporate awareness of the ways real-world power relationships affect sexual behavior and decision-making.
- Stereotypes and clichés.
- Alternate history that drops magic powers or anachronistic technology into a historical setting.
- A protagonist who is the only marginalized person in the story.
- Revenge fantasies.
- A setting that’s already very commonly used in speculative fiction, especially one that’s often associated with stories featuring members of privileged/dominant/colonizing groups, e.g. Victorian England, the American “Wild West”.
What we do want
Your story doesn’t need to have all these elements, but we’re especially interested in stories that have at least some of them.
- Intersectionality.
- Accurate depictions of life on the margins.
- Thoughtful, sensitive incorporation of religion, superstition, and folklore.
- Depictions of historically accurate societal attitudes in the context of an authorial voice that does not condone or espouse bigotry. (For example, your female characters will probably have to deal with societal sexism, but your descriptions of them should not rely on sexist stereotypes.)
- An understanding of how economic, technological, political, and religious influences shape a time and place, especially in alternate historical settings.
- Research bibliographies and suggestions for further reading.
- Integration of friendships, family relationships, and community into the story.
- Protagonists who make conscious choices and take conscious action.
- Side characters who are real people.
- Personal triumphs and successes.
- Making us laugh, think, cheer, and weep.
We’ll make the submissions form available on Monday and post a link here. Again, the deadline for submissions will be July 31!
One more update for today: This is a piece I did for Crossed Genres’ CG Magazine 2.0 Anthology. (Well, technically it’s a personal piece I’d been working on that I finished up for them to use). An adventurer makes a discovery in an ancient temple!
Trying this again cause last time it only got 7 notes.
Clicky on the link or the pic to go to the full TOC!
Ooo, cool. Doesn’t say when it will be out though.
It’s out!
DID YOU SAY ALL POC ANTHOLOGY?????
WITH POC EDITOR
I know u guise love anthologies, let’s plug this some more.
It has such cool names as Nnedi Okorafor, and OUR FRIEND COSMICYORUBA IS IN IT TOO!!!!!
From here:
We’re delighted to be able to announce the beautiful table of contents for the We See a Different Frontier anthology of colonialism-themed speculative fiction co-edited by Fabio Fernandes. We’re really looking forward this hitting the bookshelves at the beginning of July 2013.
- Preface by Aliette de Bodard
- Introduction by Fabio Fernandes
- The Arrangement of Their Parts, Shweta Narayan
- Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus, Ernest Hogan
- Them Ships, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- Old Domes, J.Y. Yang
- A Bridge of Words, Dinesh Rao
- The Gambiarra Effect, Fabio Fernandes *
- Droplet, Rahul Kanakia
- Lotus, Joyce Chng
- Dark Continents, Lavie Tidhar
- A Heap of Broken Images, Sunny Moraine
- Fleet, Sandra McDonald
- Remembering Turinam, Nalin A. Ratnayake
- Vector, Benjanun Sriduangkaew
- I Stole the D.C.’s Eyeglass, Sofia Samatar
- Forests of the Night, Gabriel Murray
- What Really Happened in Ficandula, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
- Critical afterword by Ekaterina Sedia *
I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE
Me too :D
And it needs more than 24 notes darnit! It’s got Sofia Samatar you guys she’s made of awesome! And Rochita and Lavie and Gabe and Joyce and probably everyone else too I just, those are the ones I know….
Conceived in an effort to more judiciously represent ethnic and cultural diversity in YA fiction, this provocative collection, edited by SF author Buckell and literary agent Monti explores dystopian themes through multiple lenses. Instead of the usual white faces, the stories feature protagonists from a broader spectrum, all doing their best to survive in hostile or frightening settings. While there’s not a single misfire in this anthology, particular works stand out. Ellen Oh’s “The Last Day” takes place in a world torn apart by a decades-long war, while K. Tempest Bradford’s “The Uncertainty Principle” sees time travel constantly altering one girl’s surroundings. Malinda Lo’s “The Good Girl” is a prickly love story set against the desire for a better life, and Cindy Pon’s “Blue Skies” is almost painful in its longing for escape. Not only do these stories feature racially diverse casts, set all over the world or in space, some have gay and lesbian protagonists, giving readers plenty with which to identify. Happy endings are infrequent, but readers will eagerly immerse themselves in each vividly constructed world.
(Via like everyone on Twitter.)
Publisher’s Weekly review: Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace L. Dillon
Dillon’s superb anthology, the first devoted to indigenous SF, highlights long-overlooked authors alongside better-known figures such as Nalo Hopkinson and Leslie Marmon Silko. The categories include “Slipstream,” a genre Native American SF helped create, and “Apocalypse,” something many Aboriginal populations feel has already happened to them. Gerald Vizenor’s “Custer on the Slipstream” (1978) is the first of several stories dealing with Custer and Crazy Horse. Native views of space and time and reversing the notion of first contact are likewise recurring themes, with both appearing in an engaging excerpt from Gerry William’s 1994 novel The Black Ship. Another regular visitor is the Ghost Dance, meant to drive whites from the Americas; Sherman Alexie shows a world where this worked, albeit delayed, in “Distances” (1993). Every piece is a perspective twister and a thought inducer built on solid storytelling from ancient and newer traditions, and the anthology will encourage readers to further investigate indigenous speculative works.
This looks really good and might actually get me into reading comics again. I always did like a lot of Vertigo stuff.
Afro-Future Females is the first combined science fiction critical anthology and short story collection to focus upon black women via written and visual texts. This anthology, published after the New York Times Book Review declared that Toni Morrison’s Beloved “is the best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years” (Scott 17), emphasizes that the black writers who chart science fiction’s newest new-wave trajectory share the enterprise of lauded black great American novelists.
