Apologies for the lack of updates here this week -- as you'll have seen if you have checked the fund drive status, things have been ticking along, and we released the next bonus material from our special issue a couple of days ago: A. T. Greenblatt's story, "Dido, Retold." Here's the opening, to tempt you in:
Act I: The Curse, Such As It Stands
Dido walks through her slumbering city like an old memory: tired, but with a determined stride. It’s dawn, the most forgiving time of day, when sleepy shadows still dull the world’s harsh lines and grime. In the soft unassuming light of morning, the gods’ curse always feels a little more bearable.
The street she’s walking down is long, and the bag slung over her shoulder is impossibly heavy. But she moves forward, slipping past closed shops with graffiti-covered grilles, past balconied apartments with untamed gardens, past so many sleeping lovers in their beds. She alone is awake, aware and carefully searching, watching, feeling her city.
Hunting.
Why not read the rest?
We're also getting close to our next tier of content -- in fact at the time of writing we're only just over $100 away from it -- which is an interview of Garth Nix by Aishwarya Subramanian. If you want to see that unlocked, you know what to do!
And in fact, there's an opportunity here for your support to count double, because we are adding a Patreon-specific goal! We currently have 250 patrons; as and when we reach 300, we will publish Lawrence Schimel's translation of "Terpsichore", a story by Argentinian writer Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría. So if you support at Patreon, it will count towards unlocking that and towards unlocking the regular bonus content.
Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría is both a university professor with a doctorate in philosophy and the direct of the Center for Science Fiction and Philosophy in the Research Department of the Human Vocation Foundation. She has published articles and stories in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Axxón, Buenos Aires Próxima, Cuá'sar, Fición Científica, and others. Her novelette Memory is published by Upper Rubber Boot books and was reviewed for us by K. Tait Jarboe in July ("a work that is at once lovely and terrifying in its implications"). You can find her blog here; and just to whet your appetite, here's how "Terpsichore" begins:
From Vasilyevsky Island (above the park located right in front of the Naval Museum and between the two rostral columns that marked the Neva's bifurcation), the Terpsichore's static motors deafened all of St. Petersburg. The city was ready for its beloved daughter to make the first non-motile journey in history: the ship, which would never leave the city, would traverse half the galaxy.
The sound had become a background hum and nobody noticed it any longer. Or perhaps it wasn't a sound but instead a vibration, like the deepest tone of a double bass, felt by the skin more than the ears.
Intrigued? Then right this way to our Patreon... and don't forget, it's only a taste of what we'll be able to publish if we reach the stretch goal for Samovar.