Martin Livings

I've been hanging out for this... thanks to girliejones for the link!

http://www.asif.dreamhosters.com/doku.php?id=new_ceres_nights

Alex makes me happy by saying:

Criminality is again a major issue, along with high tech, for Martin Livings’ “Blessed are the Dead that the Rain Falls Upon”. Once again taking us into the underbelly of New Ceres society, and this time connecting it viscerally with the aristocrats, this tale of the snake disguised as a flower is a delightful take on the detective noir genre; I could imagine (a younger) Harrison Ford playing the detective’s (sorry, constable’s) role. While some of the stories treat technology in quite straightforward terms (can’t have/want to have), it’s problematised in this tale by not being a passive object. It’s another of my favourites.

*poing poing poing*

And, of the collection itself, she says:

Overall, this is a superb anthology, and one that I highly recommend. Coming out of a shared online world, it is to be hoped that there will be more authors who are inspired to take up the stories, ideas, and characters suggested by these thirteen authors – and there is so much that is hinted at and swept over! – so that New Ceres’ history, and its future, become as fully fleshed out as they deserve to be.

Nice work, girliejones and editormum!!!!

I really should get around to reading it myself, shouldn't I???

Yes, I've been slack about putting my money where my mouth is lately. Sometimes I feel like a bloated leech on the neck of small presses; I tend to take money from them (by selling them stories) but never give any back (by actually buying anything). I tend to survive off contributors copies alone. But when something genuinely different comes along, you should get behind it, just a little, to keep it going long enough to see if it'll work. Small presses, like small businesses, tend to either fail very quickly or stick around for a long time. It's up to us to push them from the former to the latter, to give them a chance to find their feet. Or, more accurately in this case, find their audience.

So please, subscribe to New Ceres now. It's only five bucks an issue, with stories from folks like catsparx, jaylake, stephen_dedman and the (as far as I know) LJ-less Lucy Sussex. I've laid down my pink plastic note. If I like it, I'll keep laying them down. But if we don't do this early on, we'll never get the chance to see where this experiment goes. And that would be a serious shame.

As a mildly-inappropriate incentive, anyone who can email me their receipt for subscribing (with any sensitive information edited out, of course!) will be emailed a PDF copy of the prologue to Bitches, the sequel-in-progress to Carnies.

Email me at newcerespimp [at] martinlivings [dot] com.