Amazing Stories Summer 2019

By Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories, the home of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, publisher of the first stories of Ursula K. Leguin and Isaac Asimov, is back in print after an absence of more than a decade! This relaunch of the iconic first science fiction magazine is packed full of exciting science fiction, fantasy, and articles, all in a beautiful package featuring eye-catching illustrations and cartoons.The Amazing Stories Winter 2018 issue (the 617th issue since 1926) includes work by: Gary Dalkin • Jack Clemons • David Gerrold • M. J. Moores • Jen Frankel • Tatiana Ivanova • Cathy Smith • Brad Preslar • Brian Rappatta • Joanna Miles • Shirley Meier • Ricky Brown • Steve Fahnestalk

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amazing Stories
• Release date: May 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463774137

Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories was founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback. The magazine has passed through several owners hands over the years and is now published by The Experimenter Publishing Company, LLC - a company based out of New Hampshire, Virginia and Ontario (Canada).

Book preview

Practical Advice for Impractical Situations

By Ira Nayman

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Rejection sucks.

The worst rejection I ever received, the one that most broke my heart, was a slow motion nightmare that started out on a highly positive note. I had been promoting myself as a science fiction writer for almost a decade, and I was wondering if, maybe, I should be promoting myself as a humor writer instead, since that has always been my main project. Around that time, I read a call for an anthology of new Canadian humor, and decided that I wanted to be in it.

My first submission, which had a speculative element, was rejected. I decided to write something specifically for the anthology that did not have a speculative element. I waited a couple of months for the call to close, then another month for the editor to get in touch with me, but it was worth it, because the story I wrote was accepted.

Hurrah!

We went through the editing process, and everything seemed set, except for the fact that he hadn’t sent me a contract. When I asked about this, I was assured that contracts would be issued soon. A couple of months later, I asked again if we would be getting contracts soon, and was assured that we would. Hmm...

A couple of months after that, in my birthday month, the contributors to the anthology were sent a press release, including a cover image. Okay – this was getting serious! Almost like a real book! A week later...I received an email telling me that the publisher wasn’t happy with the tone of the volume, and had scrapped it. (Reading between the lines: if you aren’t happy with the tone of an anthology of humor, it’s because you don’t find it funny.)

But this was okay, the editor assured us, because the publisher had already asked a pair of people to edit the anthology, and they would be sending out a new call for stories: we could all resubmit the stories that had already been accepted once. Which, foolishly, I did. (If it had been rejected by the publisher once, what made me think it would be accepted a second time?)

Long story short, it took almost a year and a half for a story that was originally accepted to be rejected by an anthology I really wanted to get into.

Rejection sucks. But it’s a fact of life for writers.

They say you can’t consider yourself a writer until you’ve had at least one hundred rejections. By this criterion, I am a writer at least three times over. I’m not unique in this way. Douglas Smith (the author of Playing the Short Game, an excellent primer for new authors), who has sold over a hundred short stories (including one which will appear in a future issue of Amazing Stories), is, by this criterion, a writer eight times over. Unless you’re big, and I mean Stephen King big, rejection is something you have to learn to live with.

Most writers think that their job is to get editors to say yes. This isn’t exactly the case. A long time ago, I learned that the writer’s job is to keep the editor from saying no.

In the eight months after we opened submissions to the public, Amazing Stories received over one thousand, two hundred submissions. We had three issues in that time in which we could accept a total of thirty short stories (and a fourth issue made up of solicited stories). That meant we could accept one in forty stories; conversely, we had to reject thirty-nine out of forty stories.

Were all of the stories we have rejected terrible? Absolutely not. The hardest part of my job as editor has been to reject stories that I enjoyed and would have wanted to publish if I had had the room in the magazine to do so. (The second hardest is watching as the magazine’s readers have rejected submissions by good friends, but that’s a story for another time.)

Although the odds are not in your favor, there are things you can do that can put off the moment the editor says no.

Follow the guidelines. If a magazine tells you what they are looking for, make sure you give it to them. If they have a word limit, don’t submit a story that is outside of it. If they say they’re not looking for a specific sub-genre (for example: post-apocalyptic stories), don’t submit a story in that sub-genre.

You might think, Well, there are always exceptions, right? Right. I have accepted one story that was longer than our word limit, and am negotiating for a second. However, these were stories that were specifically solicited from well-known writers. Are you a well-known writer whom I specifically asked to submit a story? I’m guessing you’re not. So, you must follow the guidelines.

Is it really that important? Yes. Why? To send a submission to a magazine is to start a relationship. If you do not follow the guidelines of the publication, you are starting the relationship with an insult; it’s like taking somebody on a first date to a movie in a genre they have told you they aren’t interested in. Why would they go on a second date with somebody who did that? If somebody doesn’t respect a publication enough to follow its guidelines, it’s easy to say no, not only to the story they submitted, but any future story they might submit.

Read and follow the magazine’s guidelines.

In a perfect world, you should read one or two issues of the magazine you are submitting to. The best way to get a sense of what an editor is looking for is to see what the editor has already accepted.

How should you respond when you receive a rejection? Don’t.

You may feel you have good reason to argue that the story should have been accepted; hell, you may even be right. It doesn’t matter. You’ve already lost the argument: your story has been rejected. If you start a fight with the editor, you will only create bad feelings, which will make it less likely that the person will accept any of your future submissions. Worse: science fiction publishing is not a large community, and editors are known to talk among themselves. If you piss one off enough, you may start to develop a reputation as a troublemaker, which will make it harder for you to sell to anybody.

You have to consider the long game; this particular story is only one move. Make it wisely.

You’ve probably put a lot of work into writing your story; it is understandable that you would be hurt that it wasn’t accepted. Still: never take rejections personally. Well, unless the editor goes out of their way to insult you, your parents, your pets and your choice of clothes. But that rarely happens. The truth is that most editors do not know most submitters and, therefore, are not making a personal judgment about them; editors only know what they see on the page, and respond to that.

I used to teach new media at Ryerson University. When I taught production classes, I would tell my students that they should plan on building a career over a thirty or forty year period. I usually used one of two quotes to back me up on that: A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. (Richard Bach) and It took me twenty years to become an overnight success. (Eddie Cantor). New writers tend to fixate on the work in front of them; realizing that this is only one moment in what you hope will be a long career can take the sting out of a rejection.

Throughout that time, keep writing. Keep developing your craft. In the end, the best argument for a magazine to accept a story is great writing.

black-logo-on-white

Publisher

Steve Davidson

Editor

Ira Nayman

Art Director/Layout

Kermit Woodall

Poetry Editors

David Clink

Carolyn Clink

Readers

Herb Klauderer

Elizabeth Hirst

Judy McCrosky

Patty McNally

Chip Houser

Rebecca Partridge

Russ Scarola

Mat Woolfenden

Jennifer Crow

Copy Editing/Proofreading

Rhea Rose

Paula Johanson

Sally Fogel

John Park

Lloyd Penney

Cover Artist

Yoko Matsuoka

Layout

Tania Gonzalez Figueroa

Amazing Stories® is a registered trademark of and is published by The Experimenter Publishing Company™, LLC. P.O. Box 1068, Hillsboro, NH 03244

Amazing Stories, Volume 76, Issue 4, Spring 2019 #617 is copyrighted by The Experimenter Publishing Company, LLC. Contact Amazing Stories at its website at http://amazingstories.com to add or update your subscription. Submissions can be made at http://submissions.amazingstoriesmag.com

Some photos are used under Creative Commons and are from pixabay.com

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Amazing Cover Artist

Yoko Matsuoka

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Yoko Matsuoka has been a professional fantasy artist for ten years. She lives in the mountains of Akita, in northern Japan, with bears, crows, and amazingly good Wi-fi. Yoko creates evocative worlds and intense imagery for book covers, fine- art posters, games, and other products. By daylight, she is a full-time illustrator, but when night falls, she transforms into a metal-working steampunk hobbyist with a taste for hot sauce and Cheetos.

Yoko usually designs images on her Cintiq, although she sometimes draws with pencils for their ease of use and all-around traditional coolness. She enjoys working with oil paints for their depth of color and watercolors for their transparency and how they force the brain to block everything before-hand.

Yoko illustrated three children’s books for TRIkidsbooks, including A Sister for my Birthday and A Tiny Baby Brother. She also illustrated the children’s storybooks Rocco the Buffalo and the Lost Toothbrush and Bear Friends by Stuart and Kate Macklin.

Yoko has created the cover for such novels as R.J. Timms’ David and the Scavenger

Prince and Hámori Zsófia’s Perennrose.

You can find Yoko and samples of her work at http://www.m-y-designs.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/yoko.matsuoka.98 ■

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Interview with Rachel Armstrong

By Gary Dalkin

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Rachel Armstrong might be considered a Renaissance woman: a doctor of medicine, a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Professor of Experimental Architecture at Newcastle University and director and founder of the Experimental Architecture Group. Her work has been exhibited and performed at the Venice Art and Architecture Biennales, and at the time of this interview, she was preparing an installation of living bricks at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Last year, she made her debut as a science fiction novelist with the highly acclaimed Origamy (NewCon Press). The same company has now published her second novel, Invisible Ecologies.

Gary Dalkin for Amazing Stories: When I interviewed you before, you talked about how you discovered architectural technology, and how this had many resonances with science fiction, which you’d grown up reading. Could you begin by saying something about what experimental architecture is, how you went from being a doctor to working in this field, and how your research feeds into your science fiction writing?

Rachel Armstrong: Experimental Architecture is a branch of architecture concerned with the development of conceptual projects that challenge conventional practices. It explores alternative paths of thought to develop innovative design tools and methodologies.

As a junior doctor, I witnessed a radical transformation in the way people lived through the application of simple technologies in a leprosy village just outside of Poona, in India, where people with profound sensory loss had fashioned new tools and prostheses that enabled them to provide for their families, restore their dignity, and prevent further damage to the infected parts of their bodies.

Having seen this holistic outcome from relatively simple tools, I wondered how the same principles could be applied in my Western medical practice. Finding that I needed a more extensive understanding of culture, place, and society than my training as a doctor gave me, I started working with artists to explore the impacts of advanced new technologies on the body.

While giving a presentation at a conference in Warwick, I was invited by architect Neil Spiller to tutor some architectural students in these emerging toolsets. Finding the fusion between science and architecture fascinating – why people would want to use such devices, how they used them, and what this meant for society as a whole – it was not a great stretch to follow through the narrative possibilities and ramifications of these ideas, bouncing them off characters and situations along the way to form a coherent story as a kind of thought experiment.

To appropriate Paul Klee’s observation that drawing is taking a line for a walk, Experimental Architecture is science fiction taking design for a walk.

DALKIN: Thought experiment is an excellent way to describe your first novel, Origamy. I’ve not read Invisible Ecologies yet, but from what I know, it would appear, at least on the surface, to be more conventional, taking place in Venice in the near future – the same setting as the story you wrote for my anthology, Improbable Botany. Tell me about your work in Venice, and then something about Invisible Ecologies.

ARMSTRONG: Venice became a setting for many of my first architectural thought experiments as it has a unique infrastructure – based on a relationship with water – that is medieval rather than modern. The importance of this is to re-think how a technology may have evolved without the assumptions made by modernity. In turn, this is significant as we need alternative stories to our modern outlook, so that the world doesn’t get destroyed by its side effects.

All this was important when thinking about one of the first autonomous units of design that I was exploring – protocells – as they could be read without being framed through modern tropes, which have brought many welcome advances, but whose side-effects are damaging our planetary systems. These self-moving and self-assembling soft robots, or artificial cells, were both experimental and theoretical agents capable of making structures. In this way, Venice became the location through which the long-term cultural, social, and environmental impacts of their potential use could be discussed; by contextualizing the emerging technology within a globally familiar place that was facing significant problems about its longevity, the conversation became less abstract, more practical. New kinds of futures could also be proposed that circumvented modern narratives. For example, giving the protocells freedom to move and receive food from the lagoon, a thought experiment was designed with an artificial reef where these artificial cells acted as tiny computers laying down mineral deposits that acted as scaffolding for biomineralization. These ideas were tested in very small aspects in the laboratory, and also on the side of the lagoon, with support from Red Bull and architecture students from IUAV University of Venice.

The issues raised through this experiment went way beyond how to nurture, control and contain the technology, asking questions about its potential long-term impacts. In Invisible Ecologies, the same technology features in a rite-of-passage story about a young boy who grows up around the Venice Lagoon. Taking inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Invisible Ecologies takes an ecological, international view of Venice through semi-fantastical stories about islands and the strange in-between spaces