Over at Borders' blog Babel Clash, Adams explains exactly how Lightspeed will differ from existing SF magazines. For one thing it'll publish only SF, no fantasy. But unlike other SF-only venues, it'll publish all SF, not just near-future stories. Another difference: Lightspeed will publish a 50-50 mix of reprints and original stories, because Adams figures its target audience is general readers, who haven't already read everything out there. Adds Adams:

[S]ince we're targeting new or casual readers of short fiction or science fiction in general, part of the reason for mixing the reprints and originals is to show them where science fiction comes from, where it is now, and where it's going.

And finally, the magazine's fiction and non-fiction will go together, so if there's a short story about robots, there'll be an article about famous robots from SF, or comparing Optimus Prime to Mechagodzilla.

Meanwhile, Lightspeed will also have its own unique revenue model, including advertising but also a monthly ebook edition that you can subscribe to. The ebook edition will have the following month's content all at once, so there's no waiting for the site to update twice a week. Adds Adams:

Other than that, we'll be experimenting with and exploring the possibilities of various new media like iPhone apps, and podcasts (which may not be a money-making venture, but can help us broaden our reach). Although there will be no print edition of Lightspeed, we will not be ignoring traditional media altogether; once a year we'll be publishing a Lightspeed anthology, which will collect all of the fiction that appeared in the magazine over the course of a calendar year.

With print magazines continuing to struggle and webzines having a hard time breaking out of the pack, here's hoping a more defined focus and some new revenue models will help magazine-publishing in general. Here's hoping.

Tachyon Books

This publisher, specializing in short fiction, has been around for close to 15 years. But it's expanded tremendously in recent years, growing to put out ten books per year. Authors in the Tachyon stable now include the late Thomas Disch, Cory Doctorow, Peter S. Beagle, Terry Bisson and Charles de Lint among many others. Known for single-author short story collections, Tachyon has started making more of a mark recently with anthologies like Steampunk, The Secret History Of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and The New Weird. A lot of the most challenging and thrilling short fiction today is appearing in Tachyon's titles, one way or another. You can read our interview with Tachyon's Jacob Weisman here.

Night Shade Books

Another San Francisco press, Night Shade has been around for a dozen years. The company originally published only about four books a year, but now puts out 30-35 titles every year. And now Night Shade is putting out books from the likes of Iain M. Banks, Jay Lake, Neal Asher, Kage Baker, Paolo Bacigalupi, Walter Jon Williams and Greg Egan. And just like Tachyon, Night Shade has made huge inroads into the anthology market, with anthologies like The Living Dead, By Blood We Live and Wastelands. They've also put out Jonathan Strahan's "best of the year" anthologies and the Eclipse series, which we've been following with much excitement. Not to mention Ellen Datlow's Best Horror Of The Year anthologies. They've recently joined forces with the award-winning small press magazine Electric Velocipede. You can read our interview with Night Shade's Jeremy Lassen here.

ChiZine publishing

ChiZine started out as a webzine called Chiaroscuro, publishing horror, dark fiction and weird-ass shit, a decade ago. They started putting out books in spring 2008, and already they're up to 12 titles a year. And judging from recent offerings, they seem to be upholding their proud tradition of freakgnosis and terror. Recent books include Katya From The Punk Band by Simon Logan, A Book Of Tongues by Gemma Files, Chimerascope by Douglas Smith and The World More Full Of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema.

Edge Science Fiction & Fantasy Publishing (and Tesseract Books)

This indy has been around since 2000, and now includes Tesseract Books. They seem to put out a lot of horror, including the Tesseracts anthology series, but also a fair amount of regular science fiction and fantasy. One of their recent releases is the intriguingly titled Time Machines Repaired While U Wait by K.A. Benford. That seems to be a kid-friendly title, and some of their books, like A Petrified World, are labeled as aimed at children ages eight and up.

Subterranean Press

Specializing in the horror, suspense and dark mystery genres, this publisher puts out tons of books by Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ray Bradbury and Kage Baker. Fans of Alastair Reynolds will need to track down their recent flipbook of two novellas: Thousandth Night (set in the same world as House Of Suns) and Minla's Flowers. Coming soon: The Best Of Peter S. Beagle, which looks amazing. They have a close relationship with Joe Lansdale, allowing them to put out limited editions of many of his books. Their limited editions, generally, are fantastic and often have great illustrations, recently including Dan Simmons' The Terror and John Scalzi's The Last Colony.

Golden Gryphon

Founded in 1997, this small press survived the death of its founder, Jim Turner, in 1999, and is still putting out books — including The Empire Of Ice Cream and The Fantasy Writer's Assistant by the great Jeffrey Ford. They also put out Nancy Kress' Nano Comes To Clifford Falls And Other Stories and George Alec Effinger's Budayeen Nights, plus books by Mike Resnick and George Zebrowski. Their website looks a bit like it was last redesigned in 1997, but their books are fantastic.

Damnation Books

I had not heard of this publisher until I started working on this feature, and now I'm utterly fascinated. Maybe it's the weird, off-beat nature of their books — like The One-Percenters, in which a society of serial killers goes around murdering those with weak genes, who are only being kept alive because of money and medicine. Or The Zombie Cookbook, a book of "stories, poems
and recipes" about cooking with zombies, or cooking zombies. (Eww?) Mostly, though, it's the way all of their books are rated (on a scale of one to five) for sex and violence, as well as reader response in some cases. Only one book has scored a "5" for both sex and violence: The Body Cartel by Alan Spencer. Other Damnation authors? Time to raise your game.

P.S. Publishing

This British small press has put out tons of award-winning titles, especially in horror and fantasy but also in science fiction. New books are coming up by both Stephen King and his son Joe Hill. They've championed the underrated horror author Ramsey Campbell, and published great authors like Gwyneth Jones, Stephen Baxter, and Graham Joyce. They also put out Postscripts, a quarterly anthology/magazine series edited by founder Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers.

Eraserhead Press

This indy press, started by Carlton Mellick III, keeps chugging along under the steady leadership of Rose O'Keefe and her gang. And they're keeping it weird: We saw a table of Eraserhead titles at World Fantasy Con, and were blown away by the sheer Dada-ness of it all. There's Mellick's The Faggiest Vampire, which is what it sounds like. There's Shatnerquake, in which the real-life William Shatner attends a convention and has to fight all the fictional characters he's ever played. (The cover blurb goes: "William Shatner? William Shatner. William Shatner!") But perhaps the best title actually is, Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere. How do you get any better than that? Like so many of the small presses on this list, they also put out a magazine, The Magazine Of Bizarro Fiction.

Apex Publications:

Like most of the small presses on this list, Apex also puts out a magazine — but the magazine, Apex Magazine, seems to be the biggest part of their publishing empire. They do also put out a number of horror/dark fantasy books, though, including B.J. Burrow's The Changed, which tells of a zombie outbreak from the zombie point of view. (The intriguing blurb goes, "It's not the end of the world. It's just zombies.")

Prime Books

This small press has been around since at least 2001, when they put out Catherynne M. Valente's The Labyrinth. Since then, they've put out books by KJ Bishop, Theodora Goss, Sarah Monette, Holly Phillips, Ekaterina Sedia, Jeff VanderMeer, and many more. And their books have made top ten lists from Amazon, Booklist and Publishers Weekly. Publisher Sean Wallace purchased the Prime Books imprint from Wildside Press, and relaunched it as a Recently, they've put out some great anthologies, like Federations and a forthcoming wizard-themed book (both edited by John Joseph Adams.) And they're putting out a new edition of Rudy Rucker's Ware tetralogy, with an introduction by William Gibson. A lot of the most interesting new books we've seen lately have come out from Prime. They also do their own annual Best Science Fiction & Fantasy anthology, edited by Rich Horton (full disclosure: I have a story in the new volume of this.) And they publish Fantasy magazine, which is now a webzine.

Circlet Press

Cecilia Tan started out putting out chapbooks of erotic science fiction in the early 1990s, with Telepaths Don't Need Safewords, which I still think is the best title ever. This grew into an empire of science-fictional smut, including the gay erotic SF anthology series Wired Hard and many other futuristic collections like Fetish Fantastic and Best Fantastic Erotica. These days, a lot of their titles are available at low cost as PDFs and e-reader volumes. If you've ever wanted to know how aliens and demigods practice safe and consensual BDSM, then these are the books for you.

Small Beer Press

Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link have been putting out quirky, wonderful and bizarre books, alongside their zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, for a decade now. I remember when the only places I used to see them were in the used bookstore on Newberry Street in Boston. Now Small Beer titles are among the most highly respected, and anticipated, out there. And they are constantly doing great good works: Like when Laurie J. Marks' elemental logic trilogy got canceled by its original publisher before the final volume came out, fans clamored to be able to read the conclusion — and Small Beer stepped in to save the day. Small Beer has also put out the great Interfictions anthologies of genre-defying stories, and books by Benjamin Rosenbaum, Elizabeth Hand, Joan Aiken, Greer Gilman and Poppy Z. Brite. And not to be shallow or anything, but their books are usually among the most beautifully designed out there, with arrestingly lovely covers.

Note: Before anybody pipes up in comments, we thought about including Pyr Books on this list — but they were launched as an imprint of Prometheus Books, a publisher that's been around since 1969. So through a painstaking process involving snake entrails, we deemed they weren't quite as much of an indy as the others on this list. If you disagree, blame the snake — but also, feel free to pipe up in comments. I also wound up leaving out Cemetery Dance, just becuase they've been around for 20+ years. Let us know if we missed your favorite indy press!

Top image: cover of Monstrous Affections by David Nickle, from Chizine Publications.

Adams' latest anthology project is called Brave New Worlds, and it'll be published by Night Shade Books, which put out several previous Adams projects. According to Publisher's Marketplace, it'll consist of reprints covering "the best of dystopian fiction from best-selling authors."

But can Adams' new magazine publishing project, Lightspeed Magazine, help stave off the rise of dystopia in the world of short fiction? We can only hope. Published by Prime Books, which already puts out Fantasy Magazine online, Lightspeed will focus more on science fiction, posting four original stories per week. Says the press release:

Lightspeed will be edited by John Joseph Adams, the bestselling editor of anthologies such as Wastelands and The Living Dead, and Andrea Kail, a writer, critic, and television producer who worked for thirteen years on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Adams will select and edit the fiction, while Kail will handle the non-fiction.

Lightspeed will focus exclusively on science fiction. It will feature all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and writers will be encouraged to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope. New content will be posted twice a week, including one piece of fiction, and one piece of non-fiction. The fiction selections each month will consist of two original stories and two reprints, except for the debut issue, which will feature four original pieces of fiction. All of the non-fiction will be original.

Lightspeed will open to fiction submissions and non-fiction queries on January 1, 2010. Guidelines for fiction and non-fiction will be available on Lightspeed's website, www.lightspeedmagazine.com, by December 1, 2009.

Edgar Allan Poe is usually credited for creating the detective fiction genre but it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that really nailed it with his timeless creation, Sherlock Holmes. The world's first and greatest consulting detective is the model for countless later fictional investigators as disparate as The Batman and television's Dr. Gregory House. And he no doubt inspired as many real-life careers.

There is something that's always been very compelling about an individual of modest birth, who succeeds against every obstacle using naught but pure intellect and a thirst for ever more knowledge. To be sure, Holmes had some major character flaws: he was an utter jerk even to those closest to him, a misanthropic humanist, a recovering drug addict (his cocaine habit was, in later tales, "not dead, but merely sleeping"), and an overly enthusiastic violinist to boot. Still, he uses his immense gifts in aid of a society that he could never quite feel comfortable with. Sherlock Holmes is a Geek God on par with his distant descendant, Mr. Spock.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. " – Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four

A fitting statement indeed for this supreme rationalist. Holmes would only believe what he could observe and prove. This led to some odd quirks in his otherwise encyclopedic knowledge. In the very first Holmes story, the 1887 "A Study in Scarlet", his new acquaintance and faithful chronicler Dr. John H. Watson discovers that Holmes is unaware that the Earth revolves around the Sun. It plays no part in his criminal investigations and so he had never considered it. Despite this he used the most current scientific knowledge to solve cases that plumbed the depths of the human psyche and affected the affairs of mighty nations. It is to Sir Arthur's credit as a writer that he created such an amazing character so at odds with the author's own beliefs. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was hopelessly infatuated with the fads of spiritualism and the supernatural. This was the guy totally bamboozled by two young girls and their hoax of the Cottingley Fairies. Yet he made Holmes, that paragon of logic and analysis feel so real.

Take another gander at the above quote. If the Detective ever encountered a case truly unworldly and improbable that he couldn't Scooby-Doo it apart like the Sussex Vampire or the Baskerville Hounds, his trusty Occam's Razor would allow him to deal with it in the same cool dry reason that he used against pickpockets or philandering spouses. This is the basis behind The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.. The original stories of Sherlock Holmes may not be science fiction, they surely belong on the borderlands and have influenced many a speculative genre writer.

Editor John Joseph Adams oversaw this anthology of twenty-eight tales of the Great Detective, involving hard science, the undead, aliens, allohistory, dinosaurs, pirates, Canadians and other weirdness. Click here for a look at the complete Table of Contents.

Nearly all of them are reprints, but it's pretty cool to have them all in one volume, and there are some you might have missed. Shamefully, I must admit I never read Neil Gaiman's oft-reprinted and deservedly popular "A Study in Emerald" before. It really is a must-read for Lovecraft fans. Squamous and rugose notes of the Mythos can also be felt in Tim Lebbon's "The Horror of Many Faces" and Barbara Hamby's "The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece".

Another story steeped in the supernatural that caught my bibliophilic eye was Barbara Roden's "The Things that Shall Come Upon Them" wherein Holmes teams up with fellow investigator Flaxman Low. Low was a fictional psychic investigator, perhaps the first, the literary creation of Doyle's friend Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Pritchard. The 1957 film Night of the Demon was based on one of his stories. In Ms. Roden's story, the two detectives solve a case using wildly differing methods but arriving at the same conclusion. I got a kick out of Holmes' initial dismissal of Low as a cheap imitator and charlatan. Low, of course, is a total Holmes fanboy.

There are significant appearances by the rest of the Holmesian dramatis personae besides the trusty Watson, who solves a case before his friend in a story by Stephen King. Long-suffering landlady Mrs. Hudson gets her moment in the sun at long last in a piece from Laurie R. King's Mary Russell canon. Rat-faced whipping boy Inspector Lestrade is here of course, as is The Woman — sublime Irene Adler, and the formidable older brother Mycroft Holmes. And what Sherlock Holmes collection would be complete without that Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty and his sinister right-hand man Col. Sebastian Moran. We even get a crossover with another Arthur Conan Doyle character, the quintessential early science fiction boffin, Professor Challenger.

Even more of a treat are the stories where Holmes crosses paths with historical figures. A Young H.G. Wells assists in Stephen Baxter's "The Adventure of the Internal Adjustor" Aan elderly Rev. CharlesDodgson helps investigate the cold case of the untimely demise of a student named Doyle many years ago in Tony Pi's "Dynamics of a Hanging". Arthur Conan Doyle himself appears as a client who summons Holmes and Watson to investigate crop circles and strange lights in the night sky over his estate. "The Adventure of the Field Theorems" by Vonda N. McIntyre is a sharp and very funny look at the differences between Sherlock Holmes and his creator.

In the fifty-six stories and four novels penned by Sir Arthur, he alludes to other cases that Dr. Watson was sworn to never reveal. In The Improbable Adventures, we can finally read the truth(s) behind the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, the criminal Merridew of abominable memory", and others.

Sadly, Mr. Adams did not see fit to include any tales concerning the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Perhaps he felt the world is not yet ready for that tale. For those of you stout of heart, I was always fond of this interpretation of that ghastly case. Okay, it's pretty silly, but I like it. The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen is probably more worthwhile. I also recommend this tragically overlooked film by the great Billy Wilder, it includes midgets, steampunky tech, Christopher Lee as Mycroft, and a certain famous loch.

I should also mention contributions from legends Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgess or those stories that explore the Fermi Paradox and Everett's many-worlds interpretation. Suffice it to say, this is a great collection of stories that really only samples a wee bit of the shelves and shelves of works that writers and fans of the Great Detective have written. The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a good place to start or rediscover your love for one of the world's greatest literary creations, Sherlock Holmes.

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes will be out soon. You may purchase it from these bozos
or your local independent bookseller.

Grey_Area is known to the Baker Street Irregulars as Chris Hsiang. He awaits Guy Ritchie's film with cautious optimism.

Oh, and there will be vague, mostly nondescript spoilers here.

Federations aims to be an anthology of short stories about interstellar civilizations — think Star Trek, Star Wars, or Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. But really, most of the stories in this collection are just classic space opera, with only a little discussion of the challenges and joys of multi-planetary collaboration. There's quite a lot of space war, a fair bit of first contact, and a dash of deep-space exploration. And that turns out to be a more thrilling experience, in many ways, than a more tightly thematic collection of stories about deep-space alliances might have been.

For one thing, along with that wider range of stories, the anthology spans a wider variety of time periods, from our present day to a distant future. Some stories contain the merest glimmer of hope that humans will form alliances at some point in the future with other worlds.

For example, one of the best of the book's many space-war stories is Lois McMaster Bujold's lovely, melancholy "Aftermaths," in which a woman and her assistant collect the dead bodies from a deep-space war with the Barrayarans. And the woman, MedTech Boni, insists on collecting the enemy dead bodies as well as the friendly dead, treating them both with the same compassion and respect, even though we discover she's lost something closer to home in this particular war.

But still, my favorite stories in the collection are the ones which engage directly with the theme of federations. The ones which show different planets (and in most cases different intelligent species) colliding, either in war or in diplomacy, and trying to understand each other. The ones which take apart the idea of a confederacy of greatly different interstellar cultures, and what kind of shape it would take. Those are the stories which are most likely to stick in your mind after you're done reading the whole thing.

For example, there's Genevieve Valentine's "Carthago Delenda Est," about a ship full of humans, in a rendezvous point with a bunch of alien ships, all waiting hundreds of years for a super-advanced ambassador from a distant planet called Carthage to arrive – and while the gathering of different species sits in one place and waits, they create a kind of incidental peace, punctuated with bickering, cooperation and even a bit of interspecies nookie, and you sense they're creating the first tentative links in what could become a real alliance.

There are also a few delightfully snarky stories which deconstruct, and in some cases satirize outright, the idea of a civilization made up of civilizations, and these are among the book's standout stories. Jeremiah Tolbert's "The Culture Archivist" mashes up Star Trek's Federation and Borg into a single civilization that's cybernetically enhanced via nanotech and goes around trying to assimilate other cultures into its rapacious capitalist sameness. K. Tempest Bradford's "Different Day" imagines the Earth being contacted by not just one, but three different alien races within the same interstellar group, each with its own agenda. And James Alan Gardner's "The One With The Interstellar Group Consciousness" recasts all of the romantic-comedy cliches into a story of a vast interstellar society trying to find another interstellar society or federation to "mate" (i.e., join) with.

The most upbeat story, and one of the most amusing, is probably Alan Dean Foster's "Pardon Our Conquest," in which a petty alien dictator finds out what happens when you tangle with the vastly more advanced galactic Commonwealth — the Commonwealth is incredibly nice to you and showers you with kindness, until you have no choice but to give in.

And then there are the stories that look at interstellar commuincation from a more idiosyncratic, and hence more fascinating, vantage point — like S.L. Gilbow's "Terra-Exulta," which talks about the linguistic challenges involved in terraforming alien planets — and shows, in a very Orwellian way, how you can justify genocide against countless alien species if you just create the right terminology for it. (Like "Ecoviscerate." Or "retoration," which means "the removal of all life from a planet in order to repopulate it with other life forms to create a more balanced ecology.") And then Catherynne M. Valente's "Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War Elegy" reflects a whole swath of interstellar history through the lens of a wine glass, by walking us through the different vintages that an illicit winery on an alien planet created.

Federations is definitely one of those anthologies that offers something for everyone, including some more traditional space-war stories, and a few rollicking space adventure tales, like "Warship" by George R.R. Martin and George Guthridge, and Harry Turtledove's mildly amusing "Someone Is Stealing The Great Throne Rooms Of The Galaxy." If (like me) you harbor nostalgia for Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, then you'll be happy to revisit Helva in "The Ship Who Returned."

Whether they're taking us to deep-space battles, showing us uneasy collaboration between vastly different races, or satirizing the very idea of a benign interplanetary alliance, the stories in Federations mostly keep a very human perspective on the hugeness and strangeness of a galaxy teeming with life. And that's reason enough to sign on to its galactic charter. [Amazon]

Publisher's Weekly has a great article about the zombie craze, talking to editors at Tor Books and Quirk Books, among others, about the rising trend. Apparently Max Brooks has a third zombie book coming out, on the heels of Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z — Brooks' forthcoming Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks is a graphic novel of historical zombie attacks dating back to 60,000 B.C.

Meanwhile, other recent zombie successes include David Wellington's Monster Island, Stephen King's Cell, S.G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie Lament, and John Joseph Adams' anthology The Living Dead. Zombies are moving into young-adult and children's fiction, but the real cutting edge, says Tor's Liz Gorinsky, is books that combine zombies with other stuff — there's George Mann's Affinity Bridge, a steampunk novel with reanimated corpses, Cherie Priest's period-gothic-with-zombies Boneshaker, and even a Star Wars undead novel, Death Troopers.

Some publishing execs warn the zombie craze is almost over, since there's only so much you can do with zombies — as opposed to vampires, who can be romantic as well as scary. (Supposedly, anyway.) So what caused the zombie excitement in the first place? Publisher's Weekly fingers the all-purpose zeitgeist explanation, the September 11 terrorist attacks:

Then came the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the national fear of a faceless horde of enemies slavishly obedient to their objective of dishing out extreme violence. Suddenly, the zombie became a monster for our time. "I think it's interesting that the spike in zombie interest occurred right around the time of 9/11 and the Iraq War," says [Quirk's Jason] Rekulak. "It's been building ever since."

World War Z art by Daniel LuVisi. [Publisher's Weekly]

It's Alive! 2008 Zombie Fest

Originally published in the 2009 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market, the roundtable includes some hilarious stuff about the kinds of stories the short-story editors see too often. Apparently there is a whole flood of stories where a plague transforms the human race, except for one person who's immune. I Am Legend FTW! Also, ever since people started circulating the advice that you have to "grab" the editor in your story's first paragraph, there's been a rash of stories where a spaceship blows up in the first couple of sentences.

They also have some advice on what you should be reading to prepare yourself to write short fiction. (Anthology editor Van Gelder, not surprisingly, thinks you should read some anthologies.) And Groppi, somewhat depressingly, says the younger crop of short fiction writers are resigned to the fact that you can't make a living writing short fiction. [John Joseph Adams]

Here's an excerpt from her weird tale, which is as much about prison social networking websites as it is about zombies. Link's main character, an ex-con named Soap, is infatuated with zombies, and here he explains why:

Zombies weren’t complicated. It wasn’t like werewolves or ghosts or vampires. Vampires, for example, were the middle/upper-middle management of the supernatural world. Some people thought of vampires as rock stars, but really they were more like Martha Stewart. Vampires were prissy. They had to follow rules. They had to look good. Zombies weren’t like that. You couldn’t exorcise zombies. You didn’t need luxury items like silver bullets or crucifixes or holy water. You just shot zombies in the head, or set fire to them, or hit them over the head really hard . . .

Zombies didn’t discriminate. Everyone tasted equally good as far as zombies were concerned. And anyone could be a zombie. You didn’t have to be special, or good at sports, or good-looking. You didn’t have to smell good, or wear the right kind of clothes, or listen to the right kind of music. You just had to be slow.

Read the rest today at lunch.

Some Zombie Contingency Plans [via Living Dead]

According to Publisher's Weekly, the anthology features:

Near-future paradigm shifts in everything from race relations (in Ted Kosmatka's vivid and moving “N-Words,” where cloned Neanderthals encounter violent hatred from Homo sapiens) to the morality of uploaded consciousness (in Blake Charlton's clumsy but charming “Endosymbiont”), with varying success. The hero of Jay Lake's “The Future by Degrees” invents an energy-saving thermal superconductor only to be pursued by corporations protecting their business, with predictable results. Pepper, the mercenary hero of Tobias S. Buckell's Crystal Rain, refuses to assassinate a dictator in the morally contrived “Resistance.” Considerably more powerful is Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's “Spider the Artist,” which combines African folk tales and advanced robotics in a chilling story about a rising social conscience in the Nigerian oil fields.

I can't wait to dig into it!

Seeds of Change [via Amazon]