The State of the Loon • 23 March 2021

First up, congratulations to Scott Huggins for winning the 2021 Jim Baen Memorial Award Grand Prize for his story, “Salvage Judgment.” While Scott is a Stupefying Stories contributor and I’d like to be able to claim some small credit for helping him win this award, I can’t, as I still have my marked-up copy of his manuscript sitting in my to-do stack with a note on it saying, “Finish writing this up and send it back to Scott.” The best I can claim, then, is that I didn’t sabotage his chances of winning.

That aside: CONGRATULATIONS, SCOTT!

And watch for his twisted tale of Lovecraftian horror, “On the Menu Stains of Madness,” coming soon to Stupefying Stories!

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Next up, I have received a few polite queries as to what happened to “Dark and Gritty Week” and last Friday’s installment of “Ask Dr. Cyberpunk.” The two got sort of tangled up together. I was writing a column for the latter—I mean, cyberpunk as an idiom pretty much wallows in dark and gritty, and a case can be made that the 1980s cyberpunk boom was basically the dark and gritty reboot of the whole damned science fiction genre—when my wife looked up from reading one of last week’s columns and said, “You know, you guys really have it all backwards.” 

Then she proceeded to explain why from a female perspective we were completely missing some major points about the appeal of “dark” fiction. This turned into a long, interesting, and at times eye-opening conversation, which I was hoping we could capture and turn into a column, but that didn’t work out. She’d just finished her latest round of radiation treatments the week before last and begun her new round of chemotherapy last week, so while the mind was still sharp and the spirit still willing, the flesh decided it needed a nap.

All the same: she raised some interesting points that deserve further development and exposure, so I suspect we’ll be continuing to explore the dark and gritty side for some time to come. In the meantime, as an example of the difference in perspective, she suggested that you read “Dark Will Come For Me,” by Tara Saunders, which you will find over on the old SHOWCASE web site. 

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Third on the agenda—actually first, but third as far as topics for this column go—is that I’m continuing to work on content for SS#24 and SS#25 at the same time as I’m continuing to dig down through the sizable pile of correspondence that’s accumulated. It’s become apparent that things went off the rails much earlier than I thought during our 2019 open reading period. I’m finding stories for which acceptances were sent but never followed up with contracts; stories marked as accepted in our manuscript tracking system but for which acceptance letters were never sent; and more than a few submissions that never received any response at all. I’m also working through our contract files, trying to figure out which stories under contract are still available for our use and which authors assumed we went out of business (understandably so; we very nearly did) and sold their stories elsewhere.

Be patient, please. It took a while to create this mess. It will take a while to sort it out. In the meantime, if you get an email from me about a submission of yours and it doesn’t seem as if I have a clue as to where we stand: in all likelihood, I don’t.

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Finally: Pete Wood has proposed that our theme this week be “Music in Science Fiction,” because he had a column he was just dying to write about the subject. I agreed, because it’s a subject that is near and dear to my heart. Looking back, I was surprised by just how many music-themed SF stories I’ve written and had published—for just one example, “Jimi Plays Dead,” which is not merely a rock ‘n’ roll story, but also hard sci-fi that was right on the edge of cyberpunk. 

(The B-side story, “Buck Turner and The Spud from Space,” is of course all true, except for the parts that aren’t.)

Looking into it further, though, I realized that we here at RLP have published a lot of really good music-related SF stories over the years, and that most of those stories are out of print now. So as I worked on developing Pete’s theme, I found that we have far more than a week’s worth of content on the subject of Music in Science Fiction in the pipeline already, and the pieces began to fall into place as if preordained. We could very easily put together a reprint anthology of music-related SF stories and have it ready to release in a matter of weeks. There are only two things holding us back.

1.) We don’t have the cover art yet.

2.) And we don’t have a good idea for a title for such a collection. 

Any suggestions? I suppose we could make this a proper contest and give some suitable prize to whoever suggests the title we end up using, but I have no idea yet what that prize might be. Let me think about it.

Thanks,
—brb