As we enter the
second year since the relaunch of SPJ and encourage our readership to retreat
into cosy bubbles of isolation to avoid the looming spread of a ‘novel’ contagion*,
it is sobering to contemplate that we are protagonists (or, at the very least,
extras) in a major SF scenario.
At the time of
writing, your co-editors are hunkering down to witness epic, planetary-scale
medical speculative fiction unfolding in front of our eyes. Fortunately, for
the time being, the events are mostly mediated by our screens, ensuring a
distance akin to that of a reader to words on a page. Or to the dispassion
wherewith an immortal being would regard the morbid curiosity of death (c.f.
Brian Stableford’s now-classic “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death”).
Which brings us
to our first departure from the usual mixture of speculative essays and
challenging fiction. The Q1 issue of 2020 is made up entirely of short stories,
all clustered around the theme of immortality, and various antitheses thereof,
from legislating a timely death to erasing one’s memory from the bookshelves of
history. These were selected from a rich spectrum of submissions, and we note
with relief that more and more authors ‘get’ the conceptual narrative and
world-building approaches to speculative fiction, and particularly the fictional
non-fiction (FNF) subgenre we strive to cultivate.
The time of the
fabled spring clean will be upon us soon, and fittingly our plans for 2020
include completing the process of making archived digital content from SPJ’s
previous incarnations available, which had previously languished behind a subscription
or paywall, and strive to clean up the tags and category markers across the
site.
Coinciding with the 2020Q1 issue is an update of our FNF bibliography, which we intend to continue expanding, grateful as always for further recommendations. We might explore the possibility of another thematic issue later during the year (depending on our means), but also hope to continue our series of articles on speculative fiction in less well-known regional literary markets. If you speak a language that is, perhaps due to lack of exposure or translations into English, less accessible to the international public, and feel inclined to write about the state of SF in that milieu, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Stay safe,
memento mori.
Speculatively
yours,
the co-editors
~
* In reference to the virus carrying the ‘novel’ epithet, we wish to reiterate our long-held opposition to fat literature.
Lectori salutem. Imagine a child growing up alone in a locked room, with no one for
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