Silverthought Press

31 August 2013

31 August 2013 Silverthought Online update

The thing you're really going to hate me for, after reading how good the stories in this update are, is the fact that I accepted the earliest of these about a year ago. It's been a very, very busy year at the Chicago desk of Silverthought, but here they are in all their sci-fi glory. We're very pleased to bring you new stories by Marcus Day, Brenda Kezar, Steven L. Peck, and Blake Ervin. If the July update was all about social science fiction, this one is all about fear: a vicious time-stopping cyborg is caught in a trap and will kill anyone and anything to get away, a space cruiser to Mars finds itself the subject of an unpleasant infestation, a meteorite brings terrifying visitors to your hometown, and the new store across the street knows what you need, and what you'll do to get it.

Some new exciting things are happening at Silverthought as we move toward the Fall: our intern Mickey Kellam, who assisted with editing of this latest round of online fiction, will also be helping us conduct a long-awaited reading period of the full-length manuscripts in our submissions queue. If you've sent us something in the past 12 months and still haven't heard back from us, stay tuned.

I've also written a column called "How to Write Dystopian Fiction" that I'm going to be sharing with you over the next few months. It consists of a 10-part series of explorations of several lesser-known dystopian novels, fiction collections, and writers, and how their books can inform (or not) sci-fi writers that are creating new work today. Some of it is very new, and some is very old, and plenty of it falls somewhere between. These will be posted independently of our major site updates, so check back at Silverthought or follow us on Facebook and Twitter for details. Likewise, there may be rolling updates to our website and backend happening between now and our next update that will make Silverthought.com easier to browse, read, and submit stories to.

That's about it for this update, though more new projects and updates will follow as soon as time allows and the projects take shape enough to share with you. Keep writing, and we'll keep reading.

—Mark

* * *

And the thing you're really going to love me for, after reading how good the stories in this update are, is that this update contains only one reference to twerking, and this is it. Now go enjoy the voodoo curses, alien exterminators, space bugs, and cock fights. You're welcome.

Also, Mark is too humble to tell you that he has a new short fiction collection, Long Live Us, being released from CCLaP on September 9. The book is exceptional and you should buy it.

—Paul

How to Write Dystopian Fiction (Part 1): Sir Thomas More's Utopia

How to Write Dystopian Fiction is a ten-part series written by Silverthought Press editor Mark R. Brand during a two-month independent study with Miles Harvey, Assistant Professor of English, DePaul University. The series attempts to analyze what works in a variety of new and old speculative fiction texts with utopias and dystopias as central themes, and to offer advice to writers about how to use these narrative strategies most effectively. This is part one.

The book:

I was delighted to discover that this text, which in 2016 will celebrate its 500-year anniversary of publication, is more or less a template for all of the great social science fiction of the 20th century. More than that: it’s a pleasure to read. It’s neither stuffy nor limited by the unimaginative prose that I tend to associate with eras in history strongly controlled and influenced by the Church. The translation I read (Paul Turner, 1965) seems if anything to tone downthe colorful original Latin. I compared passages in Turner’s translation to their counterparts in Burnet’s translation available at Gutenberg.org and found this to be generally true. Burnet seemed willing to let the Latinate phrasings and vocabulary seep more fully into his English prose than Turner, who opted instead for a simpler, workhorse translation with ample notes and appendices, which I found helpful.

Likewise, knowing a bit about the reign of King Henry VIII and his immediate court (Thomas Cromwell and Hans Holbein came up in the notes, but not in the text) provided me with enough context that I could appreciate the secondary story in Utopia. This is where I think the book really shines, as does any good piece of science fiction.Utopia tells two stories: the overt and covert narrative.

Overtly, Utopia is about a world somewhat like our own with benchmarks of familiarity, that extends itself fantastically into the world of the plausible. There are sailors and ships and voyages to strange, exotic locales, all of which were very much a part of ordinary European life in 1516. The New World was a great unknown at the time, but its novelty was starting to give ground. Already explorers like Vespucci (mentioned by name in the story) had begun chronicling it and its strange inhabitants. Some early literature was circulating by then regarding the New World and various voyages to it, though I imagine the breadth of stories regarding it at the time were often wildly inaccurate or—at the very least—impossible to vet or confirm. In the overt narrative, More takes this partly-plausible story and winds it out in entertaining fashion, detailing a world that is recognizable but nevertheless substantially different than early 16th century England.

This alone might have made Utopia one of the notable books of its time, but More further complicates his construction of it with the covert narrative. It’s easy to see this as predictable from our 21st century-sensibility, informed as it is by London and Zamyatin and Huxley and Orwell and Atwood and dozens of other social science fiction writers, but More pulls off all sorts of interesting (and harrowing) moments of metanarrative here as well. He criticizes at length the nature of crime and punishment, the general lackey-ish nature of royal courts, several different social issues of the day such as land ownership and agriculture versus livestock cultivation, divorce (also relevant to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) and the petty wars and uprisings in which England was involved and had fared badly (the Cornish massacre is mentioned, for example, as are the various needless feuds between Henry VIII and Charles of Castile).

Perhaps he assumed offhand that a fictional work would be dismissed as the navel-gazing of a philosopher/academic, but it dawned on me slowly as I read it that as the head of a fairly large household he was taking a terrible risk by writing this. He casually refers to the affairs of princes, in frequently critical ways, during thetumultuous reign of Henry VIII, in a book published under his own name, in which he himself is a character. Saint Thomas More; patron saint of, apparently, enormous balls.

It was refreshing to note a number of familiar narrative strategies in Utopia, despite its advanced age. More begins the novel (or novella, or quarto, or whatever other designations Utopia has carried through the centuries) with an epistolary introduction. Intriguingly, the letters that introduce the story are written (or at least we are led to believe they were written) by non-fictional people. This might be seen as gimmicky today, but I’d be fascinated to know whether the same was true in 1516. Nevertheless, it’s a very accessible entrée to the story, and it proceeds to a chapter that details a lengthy conversation between the narrator (More) and his friend Peter Gilles, who introduces a third man (echoes of the eternal “a stranger comes to town” trope), Raphael Nonsenso. Nonsenso is the conduit of information regarding the Utopia of the book’s title. Through this tripartite conversation, More manages toavoid coloring too closely within the lines of the structure of Plato’s Republic, a more stylistically high-handed classical presentation of an ideal society.

In other ways, More does owe much to Plato. He uses a dialectic discourse narrative structure to squeeze in various arguments for and against certain lines of logic. The discussion between Raphael, the lawyer, and the Archbishop of Canterbury regarding the topic of widespread thievery is one example of this. Since More was himself a legal scholar (and he points this out even in the text of the story), it’s easy to imagine him carrying on all three parts of this conversation by himself, already knowing where he wants to go with it and patiently addressing the dissenting bits of logic one by one. I am only a dabbler in philosophy and my knowledge of the classics is incomplete, but this, to me, seems highly Socratic.

I was surprised overall at the extent to which More included himself in the story and kept the narrative very speakerly, intimate, and informal throughout. I suspect this is a combination of More’s classical influences and having written the original text in Latin, a language which I have studied and which lends itself particularly well to the first-person perspective. I think this closeness reaches out to the reader a bit more than a flatter, more matter-of-fact presentation would have, and it remains effective even 500years later. The overall tone of the book is quite playful and clever, despite, as I mentioned before, the underlying danger inherent in writing and publishing it where and when he did.
As a long-time writer of futurist speculative fiction, I was amused to find that even 500 years ago, More struggled with some of the same issues every sci-fi and spec-fi writer does. There are half a dozen or more moments where More’s logic breaks down and his prose too quickly dismisses parts of Utopia that are thinly plotted. In one example, Nonsenso argues at length regarding the uses of precious metals and gems as chamberpots and children’s toys to remove their facile importance in a capitalist culture, but he conspicuously glosses over a harder-to-swallow explanation of how it is that the Utopians tolerate all wearing the exact same style of clothing. Likewise, More crafts a Utopia that is fastidiously—even laboriously—humanistic, and yet there are several minor transgressions which nevertheless merit the death penalty or a life of enslavement. Contradiction and continuity, it seems, are the sci-fi writer’s eternal bane.

But there are moments of brilliance, too. Such as this passage in Book Two:

“The fact is, even the sternest ascetic tends to be slightly inconsistent in his condemnation of pleasure. He may sentence you to a life of hard labour, inadequate sleep, and general discomfort, but he’ll also tell you to do your best to ease the pains and privations of others. He’ll regard all such attempts to improve the human situation as laudable acts of humanity; for obviously nothing could be more humane, or natural, for a human being than to relieve other people’s sufferings, put an end to their miseries, and restore their jois de vivre, that is, their capacity for pleasure. So why shouldn’t it be equally natural to do the same thing for oneself?”

In one paragraph, just four compact and coolly rational sentences, in the middle of a conversation about something else, More positively shreds the entire notion of asceticism, and makes it seem like something a thinking person could no more believe in than unicorns. This is one of the more impressive examples of his intellect, but Utopiais full of moments like this.

What have we learned:

Much of what I would steal from More for my own work are the same things I would steal from his literary successors: connect early with the audience, keep the point of view narrow, intimate, and empathetic, use the edges of real-world knowledge to extrapolate logically into the future, have fun wherever possible, take personal risks, and above all: say something important about what’s happening right now.

EDITOR UPDATES: August 2013

I've also written a column called "How to Write Dystopian Fiction" that I'm going to be sharing with you over the next few months. It consists of a 10-part series of explorations of several lesser-known dystopian novels, fiction collections, and writers, and how their books can inform (or not) sci-fi writers that are creating new work today. Some of it is very new, and some is very old, and plenty of it falls somewhere between. These will be posted independently of our major site updates, so check back at Silverthought or follow us on Twitter for details. Likewise, there may be rolling updates to our website and backend happening between now and our next update that will make Silverthought.com easier to browse, read, and submit stories to.

That's about it for this update, though more new projects and updates will follow as soon as time allows and the projects take shape enough to share with you. Keep writing, and we'll keep reading.

—Mark

31 July 2013

EDITOR UPDATES: July 2013

I’ve just sent out happy news to six short fiction submitters for our summer updates. As always, I received a few emails from accepted and declined submitters and a couple of people said something like, and I’m paraphrasing, “Seriously, dude, what the hell took you so long?” I kid, everyone was generally polite about the long wait time for responses, but hey, they’re not wrong and maybe it’s time I said a few words about what I’ve been up to by way of explanation.

I’ve just completed an M.A. in Writing & Publishing at DePaul University. For the first year I was able to keep up with it all fairly well, but I was offered an assistantship the second year and a job in the administration of the University Center for Writing-based Learning (one of the largest peer-tutor writing centers in the world). So this was all awesome; free tuition! Fame! Fortune! Well… free tuition at least. But there were some predictable side-effects: I was forced to take a hiatus from producing more episodes of Breakfast With the Author, and the Online portion of Silverthought has been subordinate to the academic calendar since then. I ended up reading submissions mostly during breaks from classes in the summer and winter instead of every month or two like I did before.

Silverthought has gone through a number of iterations over the years, but currently Paul and I run the show ourselves and we’re both busy dads with day jobs. Many companies have “reading periods” and “submissions periods” that are essentially strict windows when these things happen, or they farm out their reading to associate editors, or they charge reading fees to make it worthwhile for the (usually unpaid) editors to sort through the enormous piles of submissions. We agreed that rather than make any radical changes to Silverthought to adjust, we’d just keep on doing what we’ve always done: reading and accepting the best new work we can find, and bringing it to you, the reader, all for free and the highest quality we can make it, no matter how long it takes us.

“Well good,” you’re thinking. “Now that you’re done with all your fancy book learning, you can get back to promptly accepting my short fiction submissions!”

Er… sorta. Here’s the thing: I graduated with distinction from DePaul’s M.A. program and in the process I was accepted to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s PhD program, which I will start in the Fall. The setup is a little different; there’s not a desk-job that comes with my funding, but I will be commuting from Chicago to Milwaukee 3-4 days per week and I’ll be teaching introductory English as well while I complete the degree.

“Does that mean it’s going to take forever to hear back?” you ask.

I’m not sure, to be honest. I’d like to think that I’ll have loads of time between the homework for three courses per semester and teaching my first non-internship classes, but I’ve got to level with you: my reading times for your work are probably going to continue being on the slow side for the foreseeable future.

“But… But your guidelines say—“

I know, they’re out of date, and we’re working on that. Here’s some easy things to remember about our Online division, as we update the info on our main site:

-Short fiction subs are all read and responded to by me personally. If you’ve sent something a long time ago and haven’t heard back, there are two possibilities: (1) I haven’t had time to read it and respond yet or (2) I’ve read it and decided to delay responding because I may be interested in publishing it. Let me say that again, so we’re clear: No matter what Duotrope or WriteCafe or any other site says, I will respond to every Online division submission eventually. Unless you get an email from me directly, your Online submission is not considered rejected.

-We accept simultaneous submissions and it doesn’t hurt my feelings a bit when someone withdraws because they get a story placed elsewhere. In fact, I even send out congratulations emails occasionally when it’s a story that I liked but had to sit on for too long. Someone mentioned that even though we accept simultaneous subs, other places don’t and this delay affects their submissions to other places. Silverthought has always been a company that champions the writer first, and in that sense, companies who don’t accept simultaneous submissions are kidding themselves if they think their submitters aren’t sending work out to anyone and everyone who might publish it. If you’re feeling nervous about it, remember: if Daily Sci-Fi or whoever wants the first shot at your story, all they have to do is read their submissions faster than me.

-I got a lot of submissions this time around that were sent in .rtf file format. I CAN HAS DOCX, YES? SMEAGOL? YES? Seriously, I know you well-meaning cheapniks like to stick it to the Microsoft Man, but it's time to put on our big girl and big boy pants and send in your manuscripts in .docx. If you must use .rtf, we understand, but when your work gets accepted, we're going to start asking everyone to go through the editing process in .docx so we can track the changes from revision to revision. An editor that has to read two versions of your story in two windows is an unhappy editor, and you don't want me to be unhappy when I'm editing your work, do you?

-I recieved a few earnest submissions recently with cover letters that said things like “would you comment on the quality of my fiction?” by way of letting the submitters know what’s good or bad about their work and even if they should continue submitting their fiction to other sites. While I’m flattered that you’d ask such a thing of me, I unfortunately don’t have time to respond to these in depth. I occasionally offer comments on work that I accept or reject, but I try to keep this relevant to the process of either publishing it or telling the author why it was almost-but-not-quite accepted so they can hit the mark the next time around. If you ask for a response like this and get a form decline email, don’t be offended. It’s not personal. Advising you about the publish-ability of your work is the job of an agent, but there are easier ways to get some feedback. Having just been a coordinator of one, I’d suggest contacting your undergraduate university and asking if alumni can use their writing center. Even most small colleges have writing centers, and their tutors are trained to offer advice about how to strengthen and evaluate writing objectively.

-Read our most recent short stories and this blog to get a sense for what we want. I’m still getting a lot of faux-detective stories and vampire-premise stories, and I think it’s my job as editor to make sure you understand: I will say no to these almost the instant that I realize what they are, no matter how well they’re written. It’s just not the way we want to go with our fiction these days, and as a sympathetic writer, I’d rather you send them to someone who will actually publish them than to wait through my submissions queue to hear the disappointing inevitable.

“Wow, you got all serious on us there for a minute,” you say.

I know. It’s like that time Dad sat you down and told you where condoms came from. Above all, we’re working hard to do what we’ve always done, and we appreciate your patience. We’ve got a great lineup of short fiction coming your way including awesome new stories about space travel, aliens, men and women in the future, dystopian medical experiences, supernatural shopkeepers, hilarious drug-peddling idiots, and a cyborg that can halt time.

31 July 2013 Silverthought Online update

Silverthought Online's July 2013 update includes short fiction by ST newcomers Tara Campbell, Nik Klima, V. Moody, and J. Rohr and features longtime contributor Victor Giannini (contributor to Silverthought: Ignition and Thank You, Death Robot and author of Scott Too) in two videos: a Q&A from the Writers Speak series in Manhattan, and a reading of an excerpt from Scott Too. If you haven't picked up a paperback or Kindle edition of our latest print release, check it out.

With Mark now finished with his MA and heading on to PhD land and Paul off waging endless battle against the wholesale corporate pillaging of our educational system, we've been working closely with our summer intern Mickey Kellam from Keystone College in PA to clear out our various slush piles and streamline our submission/update process. Mickey has been a tremendous help and we can't wait to show you some of the great stuff we've been working on. Our August update will introduce some new features and we'll announce some upcoming publications, site changes, contests, and maybe even free books. Stay tuned.

http://online.silverthought.com

24 November 2012

24 November 2012 Silverthought update

The November 2012 update of Silverthought Online includes short fiction by C.R. Esaryk, Steven Grassie, R. A. Harris, Regan W. H. Macaulay, and Samuel Piccone, interviews with Michael Gold, author of the Silverthought Press release Suicide Sons, and Jim Bainbridge, author of the Elm Ridge Books poetry collection Cloud-Glazed Mirror, a new episode of Breakfast with the Author in which Mark R. Brand interviews Patrick Somerville and Kyle Beachy, and an excerpt from the upcoming horror novel The Mills.

Since our last update, we have released trade paperback and Kindle editions of Suicide Sons by Michael Gold and Cloud-Glazed Mirror by Jim Bainbridge. In December, we will be releasing the novella Scott Too by Victor Giannini, described by Roger Rosenblatt as "fiction of the highest order" and by Kaylie Jones as "a tour de force that echoes the best speculative fiction of Philip K. Dick and the magical realism of Jose Saramago." That sounds good. I'll have that. Soon we'll be giving you a sneak peek of some upcoming 2013 releases including The Beauties by Lauryn Allison Lewis and the risen-from-the-grave Nightblind project.

You can expect an announcement soon in regard to our intentions of beginning to produce a yearly compendium of the fiction we feature in our online division.

And it's that time of year again. Which time? Oh, just time for our 75th Annual WIN EVERY SILVERTHOUGHT BOOK EVER giveaway. How do you enter? Just buy a book from our Silverthought Bookstore from now until the end of 2012 and you'll be automatically entered into a drawing to win a copy of every Silverthought book ever released, past, present, future, AND BEYOND. That's currently a retail value of just about $451.

So please enjoy this update. The shorts are fresh, the breakfast is delicious, the interviews are compelling, and the books are dynamite. Spread the word, tell your friends, buy some books, leave some reviews, and above all, you keep reading and we'll keep giving you things to read.

28 June 2012

June 2012 Silverthought update

The June 2012 update of Silverthought Online includes short fiction by Bryan Carrigan, Alexandra Fresch, M.R. Jordan, David McAodha, and Curtis Waugh, an excerpt from Silverthought's upcoming print and digital release Suicide Sons by Michael Gold, and a new episode of Breakfast with the Author in which Mark R. Brand interviews James Tadd Adcox and Rebekah Silverman.

Since Silverthought's last update, we've released paperback and digital editions of The Damnation of Memory by Mark R. Brand, Drink for the Thirst to Come by Lawrence Santoro, Blood: The New Red by David S. Grant, moon chalk by David LaBounty, and I'm pleased to announce that Suicide Sons by Michael Gold will soon be available in paperback—and while I was writing this, it became available in Kindle edition. You can check out the pre-order page for the paperback and read an excerpt of the book. A decidedly darker turn than Michael's previous Silverthought publication, Horror House Detective, Suicide Sons is a compelling story of religion gone wrong.

Back to Kindle editions, the majority of Silverthought's back catalog is now available in Kindle format. Don't have a Kindle? Download the Kindle app for your computer, mobile device, or tablet, or you can use Amazon's Cloud Reader to enjoy our titles. We've had some surprising successes in the e-book arena—Jim Bainbridge's 2010 novel Human Sister has quickly become the best selling and best reviewed book in the history of Silverthought, both designations the book richly deserves. To follow up Human Sister, our Elm Ridge Books imprint will be releasing Jim's poetry collection Cloud-Glazed Mirror in July. It is a collection described by Paulette Bates Alden as "fresh, vital and precise. Whether tender, playful or meditative, the poems are fully engaged with the world of the senses, nature, emotion and consciousness, calling us to a deeper level of awareness of what it means to feel and experience life fully. Beguiling and luminous, these are poems to savor and return to." The collection includes the Pushcart-nominated "Blood" and eponymous second-place winner of the LaNelle Daniel Prize in Poetry.

Another surprising success in Kindle format has been my Silver trilogy, which were the genesis for this little web site. Without Enemy, An End, and Broken, there wouldn't be a Silverthought. I've received so many encouraging responses to these books, which have gone largely ignored for the greater part of a decade. I've also learned that apparently a lot of reviewers hate my books, hate me, and think I should stop writing and all copies of my books should be burned. I guess that's what I get for rejecting many, many tens of thousands of writers over the last decade. But after my feeling stopped hurting, I redoubled my efforts and now have a horror novel, a scifi collaboration, and the conclusion to The Grange on my writing to-do list. Take that, reviewers! In related news, thanks to the speed and ease of Amazon KDP, my next three books are already available for download, and I haven't even written them yet. And hey, they already have a slew of one-star reviews! Go figure.

I'm also working frantically to ready books for print including The Beauties by Lauryn Allison Lewis—whose fantastic scifi work solo/down is now available from our friends at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography—and Scott Too by Victor Giannini, a novella Roger Rosenblatt described as "fiction of the highest order. Giannini uses his device of confused identities to get at basic questions of what it means to be one's self, to be human. In spare, restrained prose, he gives us a taut, intense novella at once mysterious and moving. This is a work of humane imagination."

On the structural and logistical side of Silverthought, avid visitors will note that the forum has been deactivated. In terms of simple practicality, we must follow our community to the social media sites they use and let the older forms of interactivity go for now. We may resurrect the forum at some point, but Facebook and Twitter will receive the majority of our attention, so like and follow Silverthought if you haven't already done so. We have also incorporated a new (old) Silverthought blog into our main page. Mark has already posted some great suggestions for submitters there, and we intend to use this blog as a place for quick posts between major site updates, giving you all the Silverthought news and minutiae you can bear to read.

And speaking of bearing to read, we're going to be shutting down submissions to our Silverthought and Offense Mechanisms print divisions for the rest of 2012. Submissions to our online division will continue as usual. We have a considerable print submissions queue and it must be shoveled out before we can take on any more. Thank you for your patience. If anyone wants an unpaid internship rejecting vampire books, let me know. Not kidding.

And oh yeah, Mark has been included on CBS Chicago's list of "Five Indie Chicago Authors And Publishers For Which To Watch Out" or something like that. So congratulations to Mark—and WATCH OUT FOR HIM. Seriously.

I hope you enjoy this update, and stay tuned for more books, more shorts, more breakfasts, and more snarky responses to one-star reviews. Viva la guerra!

—PEH