… and now for something completely different.
Not a novel, not a series of short stories, but a little bit of both.
I had the germ of the idea for this years ago when I read Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. I love many things about Maupin’s writing, but one of the things that really caught my attention about the Tales was that they originally appeared as regular instalments in the San Francisco Chronicle.
That struck me as a really different way of writing. When I write a novel, I plan it out, write it, redraft it, change the beginning, change the end, redraft again… I’ve often wondered what it would be like writing a story as a serial, not having the luxury of going back and changing what I’d done. What would that mean? Would the characters evolve in a different way? The idea has fascinated me for years, however there’s always been one drawback. Nobody really publishes serial fiction any more.
I discussed this with Chris Beckett at Eastercon last year, and it turned out he was fascinated by the idea of serial fiction, too. So, it turns out were Keith Brooke, Eric Brown, Juliet E McKenna, Philip Palmer, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Ian Whates. We all wanted to write serial fiction, but there was no outlet for it…
So I decided to do something about that. My wife is an experienced editor, I have the IT skills and so…
Athernet Magazine will be launching on March 30th. Aethernet Magazine is the magazine of serial fiction. In it you’ll find serial fiction by the above authors, and by me. Cosmopolitan Predators! is just a little but like Tales of the City in that it follows the lives of a series of characters, however it scores over Maupin in that it has more robots in it.
The concept behind Aethernet Magazine isn’t a new one, but perhaps its a concept whose time has come again. See what you think…
