Transcendence Express, Re-Redux

Sometimes, the strangest things happen.

Today, Hub editor Lee Harris informed me that my story "Transcendence Express" -- which originally appeared in Hub #2, the last print issue -- will now appear again in Hub #44: the February 5 online issue (it also appeared as an audio version read by Jack Mangan on Escape Pod).

This on top of his choosing the story as the best of Hub of 2007.

(Also, Vincent Chong's illustration for "Transcendence Express" was long-listed for the BSFA Award, but didn't make the shortlist. Oh well, you can't have them all...;-)

His reasoning:

Our print runs were significantly lower than the size of our current readership, so we have decided to cherry-pick some of our favourite stories from those two issues, and reproduce them here, every now and then, in order to allow our swollen membership (stop sniggering at the back) to enjoy some tales that might otherwise be missed.

Hub Magazine currently reaches nearly 6,000 readers every week (and growing)

More readers? I certainly won't complain, rather the contrary. If Escape Pod's statistics are correct, then well over 22,000 people downloaded the audio version. Together with Hub's claim of over 6,000 readers, this piece might have reached close to thirty thousand people...

Free IGMS stories

Apologies for the low blogging amount: be assured that my fiction writing amount is even lower the last couple of months.

Anyway, Edmund Schubert, editor of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, pinged me to say that IGMS is putting up a number of stories for free here.

• Issue one’s free story will be “Trill and The Beanstalk” by Edmund R. Schubert;
• Issue two’s will be “Yazoo Queen” by Orson Scott Card (from his Alvin Maker series);
• Issue three’s “Xoco’s Fire” by Oliver Dale (up February 14);
• Issue four’s “Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” by Eric James Stone (also up February 14);

Each story is fully illustrated by artists who were commissioned to create artwork to accompany that tale -- as is every story published in IGMS.

So there you go: an online prozine with a subscription model (like Baen's Universe) that's trying to be financially self-supporting. Interesting times, and you can check some of their fiction out for free.

Frankly, the battered SF fiction magazine market could use a success story, or two.