m. c. de marco

VIa Futurismic: Jetse de Vries has announced a near-future science fiction anthology, SHINE, which will be open to submissions of (preferably) under 10,000 words in May and June 2009. Keep an eye on the guidelines until then.

It appears to be World Zombie Day today, at least in Pittsburgh.

Today on the Daily Zombie, just a few lighthearted zombie links:

• The Zombie Apocalypse in Lego from io9.com
• Better Zombies Through Physics, an ongoing comic at Tor.com
• More reviews of The Living Dead from Night Shade Books
• A zombie lolcat for your shambling pleasure:

In my ongoing zombie research, I came across a three-part YouTube video of Jan Sleutels expounding on Greek Zombies: not your average shambling undead, but Julian Jaynes’ pre-conscious ancient Greeks. If you don’t have time for all three parts, you can get a draft of the paper at his website.

I blogged last month about Clarkesworld Magazine reopening to submissions. Sunday is my new submission day, so today I picked a story of (barely) less than 4,000 words to send to them. Their new submissions system was surprisingly high-tech. It’s not just prettier than everything else out there; it even tells you where your submission is in the queue.

Via del.icio.us sf: Steampunk, an anthology by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, came out from Tachyon Publications in June. This month there’s an interview with the editors in Genre Chicks, which includes Jeff’s handy definition of steampunk:

Really classic steampunk is about a few things: the rise of the inventor or scientist as hero, the use of retro-technology (think, alternate history: technologies, like airships, that once seemed poised to be dominant), and then the introduction of irony to the idea of scientist as hero, in showing how unquestioning use of technology leads to disaster.

The Fix has an epilogue to “The End of Science Fiction” by Nader Elhefnawy, in which he makes some interesting connections between economics and scientific progress (the mother of science fictional content):

The “end of science” to which I referred is connected with this, certainly at its technological end. As economist Joseph Schumpeter (one of the earliest proponents of the long cycle theory) wrote, “an apparent absence of novel propositions of the first magnitude [is] part of the familiar pattern of any depression.”