Here's a preview of who and what's coming at you when issue #4 releases on May 1:
Cat Rambo: "Boyz and Girlz Come Out to Play"
Rick Novy: "Plan R"
Gary Hewitt: "The Crumple Zone"
Alexander Curnow: "Rust Theory"
Therese Arkenberg: "Mother"
James Steimle: "Pair o' Docs"
Thomas Olbert: "Regeneration"
Kevin Bennett: "The Freundian Clap"
Jeff Kozzi: "Interstellar Sting"
Michael D. Griffiths: "Base Jumper"
Derek J. Goodman: "Northern Girls With the Way They Kiss"
It's a tri-national table of contents with reps from the US, Canada and the UK. It features a couple people you probably know from other mags and whom you've seen in M-Brane before, and a couple of names that may be new to you. Though the glow of our beautiful issue #3 is still hot around here, I am very excited about this next one. The range of imagination in this selection of stories is just crazy. It will rock. It spins me 'round like a record. So here's some music to listen to while viewing the M-Brane #4 front page and its table of contents...
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10 comments:
Needless to say, I can't wait :D
Although...my name ends with an E, not an A.
-Therese Arkenberg
Sorry! I'll fix that immediately!
Woo! It's coming!
Hey, just curious: where are you getting the art for the covers?
Derek, so far the cover images have been from modified from old 1920s-30s pulp mag artwork by means of cropping out a useful section and putting it through some modification in iPhoto to make it reasonably usable. It's an easy way to get some kind of graphic on that front page, but ideally I'd like to get hold of some "new" old-looking stuff like that if anyone around is drawing any. I occasionally get a query from an artist with some images to show, but they often seem to be very "computerish" in feel or too wizards-and-fairies in style or too horror-like for an sf zine.
Really? Is all that old artwork in the public domain?
A lot of it is in pub domain, yeah. In general a lot of the pre-World War 2 era stuff is. What's sad is that a lot of it went uncredited back in the day and its nearly impossible to track down an artist's name in many cases. That happened with a LOT of fiction as well as far as anyone keeping track of writers bodies of work and doing anything to preserve copies of it. A lot of stories (and some artwork too) show up on pub domain archive sites nowadays but so much of its origin is lost. I ran an old story by a writer named F.E. Hardart in issue #1 as a "classic reprint". That particular story showed up a number of times online, but it was impossible to find out much of anything about who he was or what else he might have written. I bet there are some other stories out there that may have just been lost in the dust decades ago.
That's sad, but interesting. You planning on running any more classic reprints like that? I'd love to see more.
I've considering running some more of those kinds of re-prints but haven't really scheduled anymore because I've stuffed the next few issues so full of new material. I discovered that there are for some reason pieces of short fiction of much newer vintage, say 1960s and by what we'd think of as recognizable name authors, that are in public domain for various weird reasons of copyright rules. For example, there are a couple of obscure short stories by Frank Herbert that ran in Analog in the early sixties that are out of copyright for some reason. Why these are out of copyright but everything else that he published is not, I'm not sure. So it would be tempting to snatch up something like that and make a big deal out of having a story by someone like Frank Herbert or Thomas Disch or someone like that. Then again, it would be a pretty cheap ploy, too. If I did run any "classics" again, I probably would stay with something like the Hardart piece from issue #1: obscure but notable and by a writer who has been largely forgotten or at least not read much in recent decades. (That story, by the way, had the first known instance of use of the word "earthbound" in it).
Nice ToC.
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