Author Announcement: Keith Brooke

We are very pleased to announce that author Keith Brooke will be contributing a reprint for the War Stories Table of Contents with his story War 3.01.

Keith published his first novel, Keepers of the Peace in 1990, and has alternatively worked as a full time writer, editor and teacher since that time. In 2010, he earned his PhD from the University of Essex, where he teaches creative writing at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In 1997, he founded the Infinity Plus website, which was relaunched in 2010 as an ebook imprint. His next novels, Expatria and Expatria Incorporated were published in 1991 and 1992, and a fourth, Lord of Stone, came in 2001, marking a resurgence in novels: Genetopia was published in 2006, The Accord in 2009, and The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie in 2010. His latest, alt.human (Harmony in the US), was published in 2012, and was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award.

Author Announcement: T.C. McCarthy

We are very pleased to announce that T.C. McCarthy will be contributing a story to the War Stories Table of Contents with ‘Black Butterflies’.

T.C. McCarthy’s debut Military SF trilogy The Subterrene War (Germline, Exogene and Chimera) appeared in 2011, and its first entry, Germline, earned the 2012 Compton Crook award, presented for best first novel by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. His short fiction has appeared in Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas, in Story Quarterly and in Nature. He is also a PhD scientist (Geology) and a Fulbright Fellow.

Author Announcement: Jake Kerr

We are very pleased to announce that author Jake Kerr has been drafted for the War Stories Table of Contents with his story Mission. Suit. Self.

Jake Kerr is a science fiction author of short fiction whose works have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Escape Pod, the Chinese literary journal Zui Found, anthologies, and other publications. His first published story, “The Old Equations,” was nominated for the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and the StorySouth Million Writers awards. He lives in Texas, with his wife and three daughters.

 

Author Announcement: Janine Spendlove

We are very pleased to announce that author Janine Spendlove has joined up with the War Stories Table of Contents with her story Coming Home.

Janine is an author and active duty KC-130 pilot in the United States Marine Corps. She is best known for her War of the Seasons (The Human, The Half-blood and the forthcoming The Hunter) and her stories have appeared in Time Traveled Tales, A Hero By Any Other Name and Heroes! anthologies among other locations.

Update on Progress

Attention, troopers!

At our last update, we had hoped that we’d be getting started with our Kickstarter in September, and we wanted to provide you with an update on our progress before we launch.

Authors:

Earlier, we announced two additional authors to our TOC: Jake Kerr and Janine Spendlove. They’re joining Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Linda Nagata, and James Sutter. We’ve got a couple of others that we’re going to be announcing shortly.

Kickstarter:

Everything hinges on our work here. Currently, we’re working on setting up and verifying our Kickstarter. We’ve pretty much locked in our rewards, and we’re awaiting on a couple of technical things outside of our control to fall into place with both Kickstarter and Amazon, which is taking a little longer than we thought.

We’re also working on getting our video finished up (we’re pretty excited about this!), and getting all the words in the right place.

In short, it’s coming along, slowly but surely.

Cover:

As we previously announced, our cover artist Galen Dara has won a Hugo award! She’s been hard at work on the art for War Stories, and we’re stunned at what she provides us at each update. It’s going to be excellent, and we’re excited to have it covering our stories.

Submissions:

We’ve started having some people ask about submissions to War Stories. We will be accepting unsolicited stories and that’ll start when we have the Kickstarter open. We’ll have some further instructions at that stage. In the meantime, take a look at our submissions page.

The History of Starship Troopers

As I’ve been reading a lot of Military SF recently as I’ve been working on War Stories, I’ve been interested in exploring some of the background to Robert Heinlein’s popular and controversial novel Starship Troopers. It’s a favorite book of mine, despite some of the political issues that I have with it. So, in conjunction with the SF History column that I write for Kirkus Reviews, I decided that it would be a good time to delve a little deeper into what prompted the book in the first place.

Go read Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers & The Cold War over on Kirkus Reviews.

 

Counting Down with some Updates

We haven’t been blogging much, because there’s been quite a bit of awesome, behind the scenes work that’s been going on with getting War Stories up off the ground. Our Kickstarter Page is being constructed, and we’ve begun reading up on some of our already-submitted stories. We’ve begun to get some questions about when we’ll be open wide for submissions: that’s coming soon! If you’re interested in submitting to War Stories, please take a look at our guidelines, and start polishing them up. We’ll be open once we launch our Kickstarter.

Regarding the Kickstarter: We had originally intended on opening on September 9th, but we’ve since moved that back, tenatively to September 16th, provided planning and everything else goes well. We’re at work on our video, and we’re getting our reward tiers in order.

We’re also awaiting the final version of our cover art: the released snippet you’ve seen thus far is just that: a snippet, and we’re excited to show you what Galen has done. We hear she does Hugo-Award Grade work.

There’s also been some rumblings about the place that science fiction has in the community. (Oh, John Ringo, no!) I’ll take this as a moment to reaffirm what we’re trying to do with this anthology: put together a collection of stories that are thoughtful, powerful that concern the impact that warfare has on those involved. There’s a lot of ground to cover there.

In the meantime, while we’re waiting, we do have one request: please tell someone who you think might like this. Word of mouth is incredibly important for a project like this. Crowdfunding campaigns are the most successful in the first days, and the more eyes we have on target, the better! But more than that, we want to make sure that as many fans of Military Science Fiction (and Science Fiction depicting war), have the opportunity to get involved from the first opportunity. A tweet, facebook mention, e-mail, or conversation goes a long way. We really appreciate it!

 

Thanks for waiting!

Galen Dara, Hugo Award Winning Artist!

 

We’re thrilled to pass along word that our esteemed cover artist, Galen Dara, is now the recipient of a Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist! Galen won in a very good field of artists, but there’s no doubt in our mind that she would do anything but win this time around. Her artwork is consistently excellent, and we’re looking forward to unveiling the final War Stories cover art.

In short, we’re proud and honored to have her on the War Stories team.

Congratulations, Galen!