m. c. de marco

Via twitter: Razib at Gene Expression digresses from gene expression to the question of religion and fantasy. He manages to dig up more Jewish fantasy writers than Michael Weingrad did for his article in the Jewish Review of Books, Why There Is No Jewish Narnia:

To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion.

Via twitter: nominations for the Nebula Awards are up at sfwa.org. I think the only thing I’ve read this year is Michael Burstein’s “I Remember the Future,” but several of the shorter works are linked so I can catch up.

Via @sfwa and SFScope: Pyr has announced they’re slushing unagented fantasy doorstops—uh, novels.

Pyr is only reading unagented submissions in “the subgenres of epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, and contemporary/urban fantasy.” Their needs for horror, science fiction, and slipstream are being met by agented submissions, so they’re not opening up those subgenres to the great, unagented masses.

The editors of Fantasy Magazine bring us more steampunk links, including eye candy, an overview of steampunk, a web comic, and a forthcoming novel from Pyr.

Via @sfwa on twitter: Strange Horizons now has a blog where contributors can read status, stats and advice from the fiction department.

I found the Wall Street Journal article on The Death of the Slush Pile that’s making the rounds, via a mailing list. As an aside in a very long thread about agents, Dean Wesley Smith pans it. The whole thread is worth reading, but here’s the short version: agents should not be used for marketing, only accounting.

My shortest story yet was published today at Thaumatrope, an sf/f/h twitter fiction magazine. I dimly recall submitting it, apparently in response to a call for steampunk and/or holiday stories, but I figured Bad Elf had killed little Timmy and buried his body in the slush pile.

To submit your own 140 characters of immortal speculative prose, all you need is a twitter account.