World Weaver Press has acquired the rights to publish an English translation of the science fiction anthology Solarpunk – Histórias Ecológicas e Fantásticas em um Mundo Sustentável, originally published in 2012 by Editora Draco in São Paulo, Brazil. Solarpunk is an anthology of optimistic science fiction stories compiled by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, which envision a world run on renewable energies, featuring nine authors from Brazil and Portugal including Carlos Orsi, Telmo Marçal, Romeu Martins, Antonio Luiz M. Costa, Gabriel Cantareira, Daniel I. Dutra, André S. Silva, Roberta Spindler, and Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro. The anthology will be translated from Portuguese to English by Fábio Fernandes, and publication is expected in the first half of 2018. Portuguese artist José Baetas will create interior illustrations for the anthology. A Kickstarter campaign will run during the summer of 2017 to assist with translation costs.

**Update**: The Kickstarter campaign runs August 14 to September 14, 2017. Find more here.

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro had two novelettes published in Brazilian Asimov’s: hard SF “Mythic Aliens” and “The Ethics of Treason”; the latter was the first alternative history story in Brazilian and Portuguese science fiction. His alternative history novelette “The Vampire of New Holland” won the Nova Award in 1996, while his SF novelette “The Daughter of the Predator” won the Nautilus in 1999. His main short fiction collections are: Other Histories…, The Vampire of New Holland, Other Brazils, Taikodom: Chronicles and The Best of Carla Cristina Pereira. Gerson has published four novels so far: Xochiquetzal: An Aztec Princess Among the Incas, The Guardian of Memory, The Adventures of the Vampire of Palmares and Strsangers in Paradise. He has edited eight short fiction anthologies so far: Phantastica Brasiliana, How Lustful my Alien Girl Was!, Vaporpunk, Dieselpunk, Solarpunk, Fantastic Erotica 1, Super-Heroes, and Dinosaurs.  Beyond the science fiction borders, he published Vita Vinum Est!: History of Wine in the Roman World.

Fábio Fernandes lives in São Paulo, Brazil. He has published two books so far, an essay on William Gibson’s fiction, A Construção do Imaginário Cyber, and a cyberpunk novel, Os Dias da Peste (both in Portuguese). Also a translator, he is responsible for the translation to Brazilian Portuguese of several SF novels, including Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and A Clockwork Orange. His short stories have been published online in Brazil, Portugal, Romania, the UK, New Zealand, and the USA, and also in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded and Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction (2011), The Apex Book of World SF, Vol 2, Stories for Chip. He co-edited (with Djibril al-Ayad) the postcolonial anthology We See a Different Frontier. He is a graduate of Clarion West (class of 2013), and a slush reader for Clarkesworld Magazine.

Solarpunk is an emerging subgenre of optimistic science fiction that imagines the radical possibility that we might not destroy ourselves and our planet (or that if we nearly do, we'll get it together after that). Like Cli-Fi, eco-speculation, and eco-weird, solarpunk engages with issues of climate change, renewable energies, and the politics of sustainability, and explores the implications of those changes through a human lens. While other types of climate fiction usually present a bleak, dystopian, or apocalyptic vision of the future, solarpunk is hopeful, often portraying unique adaptations to ecological challenges.

While there has been much discussion about solarpunk as an aesthetic, there are few defining texts that put these ideas into practice—which is one reason we felt it was so important to bring this Brazilian anthology to an English-speaking readership. Many of the works of Kim Stanley Robinson fit the description, especially Pacific Edge (1990) and New York 2140 (2017). Other anthologies of solarpunk short fiction include Wings of Renewal, edited by Claudie Arseneault and Brenda Pierson (2015), and Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland (forthcoming 2017).

WWP editor-in-chief Sarena Ulibarri blogged about solarpunk last year, so if you're curious, check out her blog post The Brighter Futures of Solarpunk. For more on solarpunk as a movement and an aesthetic, check out Solarpunks.Tumblr.com.

Thank you to the team at Editora Draco for this opportunity!

EQUUS, the final installment in Rhonda Parrish's Magical Menageries, a popular anthology series that began with FAE in 2014, will arrive on July 18, 2017. Pre-orders are available now, and we're excited to show off the pretty cover. Many thanks to Jonathan C. Parrish for this cover design! (He was also the genius behind the SIRENS cover last year.)

Pre-order:

Ebook
Amazon
Amazon UK
Amazon Canada
Barnes and Noble
iTunes/Apple iBooks
Kobo

Paperback
Amazon (coming soon!)
World Weaver Press

Rhonda Parrish is driven by the desire to do All The Things. She was the founder and editor-in-chief of Niteblade Magazine, is an Assistant Editor at World Weaver Press, and is the editor of several anthologies including, most recently, Sirens and C is for Chimera. In addition, Rhonda is a writer whose work has been included or is forthcoming in dozens of publications including Tesseracts 17: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast, Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012 & 2015), and Mythic Delirium. Her website, updated weekly, is at rhondaparrish.com.

World Weaver Press is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Wendy Nikel's science fiction novella, THE CONTINUUM, tentatively scheduled for publication in spring 2018. Professional time traveler Elise Morley is an expert on the past, but when a high-stakes assignment lands her a hundred years into the future, for the first time ever, she's the one out-of-date, out of place, and quickly running out of time.

THE CONTINUUM was acquired by World Weaver Press Assistant Editor Rhonda Parrish, who was the primary editor for the recently published urban fantasy DREAM EATER by K. Bird Lincoln, as well as anthologist for the Magical Menageries anthology series including FAE, CORVIDAE, SCARECROW, SIRENS, and EQUUS.

Watch for more news about THE CONTINUUM later this year and early next year! Want to be sure you don't miss it? Join our newsletter or our cover reveal team, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

We're excited to announce that Cheryl Low's debut fantasy novel, VANITY IN DUST, will be available in ebook and paperback August 8, 2017. VANITY IN DUST is the first in the Crowns & Ash series,  set in a decadent dark fantasy world of hedonism, addiction, and political intrigue.

Cheryl Low might be an Evil Queen, sipping tea and peeping on everyone from high up in her posh tower—a job she got only after being fired from her gig as Wicked Witch for eating half the gingerbread house.
 
…Or she might be a relatively mundane human with a love for all things sugary and soap opera slaps.
 
Find out by following her on social media @cherylwlow or check her webpage, cheryllow.com. The answer might surprise you! But it probably won’t.

We'll be revealing the cover for VANITY IN DUST on May 10th. If you have a book-related blog, join our cover reveal team so you can see it before anyone else, and also have the chance to receive an advance review copy.

While you wait for the cover, please add VANITY IN DUST to your Goodreads shelf, and follow Cheryl Low on Twitter.

by K. Bird Lincoln

Recently an author friend wailed online about the often hopeless feeling one can have writing books and casting them into the great, white, beyond.

Is anybody there? Does anybody care?

I’ve been asking myself that for nigh on 18 years. Crazy, but 18 years is how long I’ve been writing speculative fiction.

You see, I can’t seem to do things in a straight-forward, timely manner. I got my first professionally-published pay rate for a short story in Strange Horizons in 2000. (The Valley of Darkness) It took me another 9 years for Strange Horizons to publish another one in 2009. (Sometimes We Arrive Home) Of course I was having children and moving from the West Coast to Japan and back again during that time, but those are only excuses, right?

Then I wrote a novel. And it sucked, big time. No, seriously, it was terrible. Way too many ninjas. So I wrote another novel that only sucked a little. And then I wrote another novel, Tiger Lily, which I thought actually was entertaining and unsucky, but that probably wasn’t the most commercially viable genre (medieval Japanese fantasy with gender-bending characters anyone? Anyone?)

And then I found myself in Portland, Oregon. And there were other budding, neo-pro authors nearby who liked to get together at downtown patisserie/hippy bars and hang out and encourage each other.  And there was artisanal chocolate to eat. I decided to write another novel, this time Urban Fantasy because I had discovered Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews, Kelley Armstrong, and Jim Butcher and loved this genre with my whole heart.  I wanted to marry this genre.

But again, not a straight-forward, chocolate-less, boring old regular Urban Fantasy--it couldn’t have vampires, nor were-wolves or ye olde incredibly beautiful Orlando Bloom-as-Legolas fae.  My daughters were experiencing life as biracial Japanese-Americans, so it was natural to turn to baku, kappa, Snow Women, and kitsune legends for my fae.

Cue dramatic music: I was then diagnosed with breast cancer. And while it was only stage 2, I had to do the whole slash, burn, and poison treatment. (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy) For the first time in my life I couldn’t write. There was nothing at the heart of me, it was all burned up. I existed in a fog of swiss-cheese brained day to day life. Even chocolate held no allure.

About a year after the last radiation treatment, that spark, that restless desire to write, ignited again. It was a slow, painful process. There’s nothing worse than sitting down in front of a notebook or computer with that story-restlessness wiggling around inside your skin and no words to release them. Out of desperation, I returned to Tiger Lily and started writing a sequel (The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight), bashing out the words as best I could.

And then WWP editor Rhonda Parrish contacted me about that Portland Urban Fantasy novel, and said she was interested in publishing it. (And there was great rejoicing.)

And that felt like a lovely affirmation. Weirdly enough, when Dream Eater hits the stands on April 4th I will be with my family on our annual trip to present my daughters to their Tokyo grandparents. I’ll be in Japan which is almost like coming full circle since my writing history is so tied to that country. And Koi Pierce, the heroine of Dream Eater is biracial Japanese-Caucasian much like my own daughters.

But it’s not full circle. I’m still on my long, winding road as an author. I’m writing a sequel to Dream Eater wherein my main characters head over to Japan to visit the tomb of Jesus (that’s like an actual real thing, Google it, I dare you) in Aomori. And there are other projects simmering away in my brain. 

So I’m excited to see where my path might take me (besides Japan, I mean, there’s really no escaping it for me).

So the moral of the story is, it kind of doesn’t matter if anyone is out there. What matters is that you don’t give up on your creative spark, whatever it is. It might take you a long time. It might go on the back burner if you have children or illness or a social life, but wherever that restless urge to create takes you, go there. I promise, it will be fun. And there might be chocolate.

K. Bird Lincoln is an ESL professional and writer living on the windswept Minnesota Prairie with family and a huge addiction to frou-frou coffee. Also dark chocolate-- without which, the world is a howling void. Originally from Cleveland, she has spent more years living on the edges of the Pacific Ocean than in the Midwest. Her speculative short stories are published in various online & paper publications such as Strange Horizons. Her first novel, Tiger Lily, a medieval Japanese fantasy, is available from Amazon. She also writes tasty speculative and YA fiction reviews under the name K. Bird at Goodreads.com.

Love urban fantasy, but ready for something more than vampires and werewolves? How about Japanese baku and kitsune, Native American thunder gods, and Middle Eastern dragons? That's what you'll find in K. Bird Lincoln's DREAM EATER, available today in ebook and paperback. Koi Pierce is a half-Japanese college student in Portland, Oregon who discovers her mythological parentage.

K. Bird Lincoln is an ESL professional and writer living on the windswept Minnesota Prairie with family and a huge addiction to frou-frou coffee. Also dark chocolate — without which, the world is a howling void. Originally from Cleveland, she has spent more years living on the edges of the Pacific Ocean than in the Midwest. Her speculative short stories are published in various online & paper publications such as Strange Horizons. Her first novel, Tiger Lily, a medieval Japanese fantasy, is available from Amazon. She also writes tasty speculative and YA fiction reviews under the name K. Bird at Goodreads.com.