Long Live Us All

"Immortality has been the goal of mankind since the beginning of time. We sing of it in song and write of it in legend. We strive for it because we fear death and the uncertainty it brings. Everlasting life is the holy grail of both science and religion.

But what if we really achieved that goal?

Now, the world watches as the last man who will ever die slowly slips away. His is the last heart to stop beating. His is the last time breath will cease.

What happens now?"

Additional submission guidelines thoughts:

Since we've not received much in the way of submissions for Loki's Journal, Craig and I have decided to make it a semi-annual review publication that will come out in print. There won't be any subscriptions to it; it'll just be like an anthology.

We're still looking for submissions, so please do send them our way if you have anything you think might fit.

Also, if you haven't visited the new Staffs & Starships magazine website, please do. I'm interested in folks' opinions of the layout and design of it.

Cheers,
Boone

There's a new Staffs & Starships magazine website. It's still a little in the construction phase, but it'll get the kinks worked out soon enough. We've streamlined the submission process with an online form (which will make things easier for everyone). If you have any questions about it, please feel free to contact me.

Website: www.staffsandstarships.com
Contact me: editor@jbdrydenco.com

Cheers everyone.

Boone

Hello everyone. To the Americans in the room, I hope you had a nice Independence Day weekend. To everyone else, we had a three-day weekend :-)

Sheer Speculation Press is running semi-smoothly now. I'm working on getting out all of the subscription copies out to folks (the print ones). Please let me know if you haven't received yours yet; I want to make sure my mailing list is up-to-date (and I didn't forget someone in the transition to a new program). So please send me a quick email if you don't get your copy (or copies) by the end of the week.

Email: editor@jbdrydenco.com

Alright, I have my gloves on, my mouth guard in, and my protective eye-wear. I'm all set for the rumble that's sure to happen.

Paul Raven, who currently runs Futurismic, posted a response to Gary Gibson's response to Richard Morgan's essay about the bickering within the genre community.

Ok maybe not. John over at SF Signal has a great post in regards to this post from Matthew Sanborn Smith.

Hello everyone.

Things seem to be working out well. I've got a few new people helping me out (who will be listed below), and I will be able to accept submissions starting on the first of June. We'll be switching to LuLu for our printing needs, though some tweaking needs to be done for the subscription part of things. We'll get it figured out, though. Download purchases (the .pdf) will still be available on the website with a bit more ease. It's being worked on now.

Here is some other news.

This should have come a long while ago. Over the past few weeks, I've looked over stories again and again, and I've picked a number that I enjoy, and I truly wish to promote; however, I've also looked at the sales of the magazine, the cost of printing, and the payments of the authors, and it's just too much. Also, it's a lot of work for one guy with a full-time job and six freelance gigs at the moment. So for now, Sheer Spec will be closing down. Here's the run-down:

Volume 1, Issue 2 is available for download on the site. For those of you who have a paid digital subscription, you can simply click on the link in the right-hand navigation bar (after you've logged into the site), and it'll automatically begin the download. For those with a print subscription, please email me, and I'll send the pdf over to you. I'm working on compiling the files to send to the printer, so as soon as things are worked out there, everyone who is owed a print copy will get one.

I was trained in college with 'The Classics' - those being the canon of books deemed worthy of study in 'Literature' courses for university by some all-knowing body back in the 60s. They're good books for the most part, but they're not all stellar like my professors tried to convince me. They're also missing a lot of books on their list that aren't on there because of their 'genre' classification. Some slim few slip through the cracks, though, because of their subtlety or good marketing.