Across many worlds and many timelines, these stories depict the moments when people see the fascism in front of them for what it is, accept it as real, and make the choice to fight it. Who are the canaries in the coal mine? When can the long-hidden voice no longer be ignored? Anti-fascist rebellion can take many forms. A transgender woman living on an artificial satellite learns to reject oppression via poetry. A machine ethicist finds a way to dance with her gods in a surveillance state. An unlikely golem hears a new call to action. A jailed musician rediscovers the music of rebellion.

Will you recognize fascism and join the rebellion?

RECOGNIZE FASCISM will be available in ebook and paperback through a Kickstarter campaign running July 28 to August 28, 2020, and will be available through traditional vendors in October 2020. See below for the full table of contents and to learn more about the authors!

 "A Disease of Time and Temporal Distortion" by Jennifer Shelby
"The Scale of Defiance" by Nina Niskanen
"May Your Government Be the Center of a Smelly Dung Sandwich" by Justin Short
"The Company Store" by Kiya Nicoll
"Scholar Miaka’s Brief Summary of Memories Imbued in Memory Object Exhibit 132.NW.1" by Jaymee Goh
"Just an Old Grouch" by Laura Jane Swanson
"A Brilliant Light, An Unreachable Dawn" by Phoebe Barton
"Octobers/October" by Leonardo Espinoza Benavides (translated by Julie Capell)
"That Time I Got Demon Doxxed While Smuggling Contraband to the Red States" by Luna Corbden
"Go Dancing to Your Gods" by Blake Jessop
"Brooklyn" by Jonathan Shipley
"Sacred Chords" by Alexei Collier
"The Three Magi" by Lucie Lukacovicova
"The Body Politic" by Octavia Cade
"In Her Eye's Mind" by Selene dePackh
"What Eyes Can See" by Lauren Ring
"We All Know the Melody" by Brandon O'Brien
"Chicken Time" by Hal Y. Zhang
"Notes on the Supply of Raw Material in the Bodies Market" by Rodrigo Juri
"The Sisterhood of the Eagle Lion" by Sam J. Miller
"The Turnip Golem" by Dianne M. Williams
"Today is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life" by Meridel Newton

Jennifer Shelby hunts for stories in the beetled undergrowth of fairy-infested forests. She fishes for them in the dark space between the stars. This story, and many others, are a part of her ongoing catch-and-release program. If you'd to learn more, you can visit her website at jennifershelby.blog or on twitter @jenniferdshelby 

Nina Niskanen writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She lives in Helsinki, Finland, with her partner, and her dog where she works as a computer programmer. She is passionate about space, language, and creepy crawlies. She’s a graduate of Viable Paradise and Clarion UCSD. More at ninaniskanen.com

Justin Short lives in Kansas. His fiction has previously appeared in places like The NoSleep Podcast, The Arcanist, and Jerry Jazz Musician. Visit him online at www.justin-short.com.

Kiya Nicoll is only an egg, and does not communicate entirely in echolalia (but it is sometimes a near thing). They write stories and mythologies in the stolen moments between being covered in cats and children and very occasionally reptiles.

Jaymee Goh is a writer, reviewer, editor, and essayist of science fiction and fantasy. Her work has been published in Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is an editor for Tachyon Publications. Find more about her at jaymeegoh.com

Laura Jane Swanson holds a degree in biochemistry and has done graduate work in molecular biology and science education.  She lives in Indiana with her family, where she dreams of the coast and knits lots of socks.

Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Analog, On Spec, and Kaleidotrope. She is an Associate Editor at Escape Pod, is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and lives with a robot in the sky above Toronto.

Leonardo Espinoza Benavides is a Chilean physician and science fiction author. He’s best known for creating the anthology COVID-19-CFCh Antología en tiempos de Pandemia and as a current director of the Chilean SF Society. When not at the hospital, he can be found quarantined in his apartment in Santiago with his wife, Daniele, and their dog, Hulky. Website: Leoespinoza.cl Social Media: Facebook & Instagram (@leonardoespinozabenavides)

Luna Corbden (who also writes as Luna Lindsey) lives in Washington State. They are autistic and genderfluid. Their stories have appeared in the Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Zooscapes, and Crossed Genres. They tweet like a bird @corbden. Their novel, Emerald City Dreamer, is about faeries in Seattle and the women who hunt them.

Blake Jessop is a Canadian author of sci-fi, fantasy and horror stories with a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Adelaide. You can read more of his political speculative fiction in the second issue of DreamForge Magazine, or follow him on Twitter @everydayjisei.

Jonathan Shipley writes in the genres of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror with over 100 short story publications, including the last ten volumes of SWORD & SORCERESS. The AFTER DEATH anthology where he contributed won the 2014 Bram Stoker Award. A complete bibliography of his short fiction can be seen at www.shipleyscifi.com/publishedworks.

Alexei Collier grew up in Southern California, but now lives across the street from Chicago with his wife and their cat. His short fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Online and Cicada, among others. You can find out more about Alexei at his oft-neglected website, alexeicollier.com.

Lucie Lukacovicova was born in Prague, and lived for a while in Cuba, Angola, England, Germany and India. She has a Master degree in librarianship and cultural anthropology at Charles University, and has published over 100 short stories and 5 novels in Czech, shorter texts in Chinese, Romanian, German and English. She collects legends and ghost stories. Find more at lucie.lukacovicova.cz/ and www.facebook.com/lucie.lukacovicova.author/

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov's, Shimmer, and a number of other places. A climate fiction novel, The Stone Wētā, was recently released by a NZ publisher. She attended Clarion West 2016, and is the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University.

Selene dePackh is a multiply disabled feral crone with a bad attitude. She spends too much time at www.facebook.com/depackh. She exists in the evil empire here www.amazon.com/-/e/B078W85MFL and her artwork can be seen at www.deviantart.com/asp-in-the-garden.

Lauren Ring is a perpetually tired Jewish lesbian who writes about possible futures, for better or for worse. Her short fiction can also be found in Pseudopod, Helios Quarterly, and the Glitter + Ashes anthology from Neon Hemlock Press. You can see her latest work at laurenmring.com.

Brandon O'Brien is a performance poet, speculative fiction writer, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among other outlets. He is also the Poetry editor of FIYAH.

Hal Y. Zhang writes science, fiction, and science fiction, in no particular order. Her work is at halyzhang.com, and her chapbook Hard Mother, Spider Mother, Soft Mother was published by Radix Media.

Rodrigo Juri is a 48 years old author and retires high school biology teacher from Chile. His works has been published in portals, magazines and anthologies from Chile, Argentina, Spain, France, and in Clarkesworld.

​Sam J. Miller is the Nebula-Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more — and a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine). A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam’s work has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. A community organizer by day, he lives in New York City.

Dianne M. Williams is a speculative fiction writer from Lawrence, KS who enjoys finding the humor and the horror in everyday things. She attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 2019. Visit her website at DianneMWilliams.com or follow her on Twitter at @diannethewriter.

Meridel Newton lives in Washington, DC. Her work has previously appeared in the 1001 Knights anthology and various self-published releases. Her writing reflects her interests in environmental science, social justice, folklore, and human geography. She can be found at www.thepuppetkingdom.com and on Twitter as @ridelee.​

Crystal M. Huff (they/them) is the editor of this book and the ED of Include Better. They have been an invited speaker in Sweden, Finland, China, Iceland, Israel, Canada, the UK, Aruba, Spain, and across the USA. Over 2,000 people worldwide have taken Crystal’s impostor syndrome workshops. Crystal chaired or co-chaired 7 SFF conventions between 2011-2017. Crystal speaks fluent English, rusty American Sign Language, beginner Finnish cussing, small amounts of Chinese, y un poco de español.

Twitter: @CrystalVisits
Website: www.crystalhuff.com

We've only released one new book in 2020 (more coming in the Fall!) but our backlist is going strong. Wendy Nikel's time travel novella series rules the charts this time, followed by a mix of newer and fan-favorite anthologies. Many thanks to everyone who has purchased, reviewed, or recommended any WWP book! 

For the last two years, we've donated a percentage of the royalties from the solarpunk anthologies to Rainforest Alliance, an organization dedicated to fighting climate change and empowering the indigenous peoples who are often at the forefront of environmental battles. This year, we were able to add a donation to the Black Lives Matter Global Movement as well.

Want to see how this list stacks up to last year? See the June 2019 bestseller list here. The December 2019 can be found here. Below, you'll find our top 10 bestsellers for the first half of 2020, as well as a list of our top 10 bestsellers of all time. Is your favorite on these lists? Let us know in the comments!

A few notes on these rankings:

• This list takes into account all vendors (Amazon, iTunes, convention tables, libraries etc.), from all countries, in both ebook and paperback.
• Vendors do not report sales to us for one to three months after the actual sale, so even though I'm calling this list "first half of 2020," it may include sales ranging from October 2019 to May 2020, depending on vendor reports.
• Small presses rely on reviews from readers like you! If you have read any of our books, please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon and/or Goodreads so more readers can discover our books.

​A city is an ecosystem, shared by humans and animals, insects and plants, landforms and machines. What might cities look like in the future if we strive for a more sustainable balance in our urban settings? In these more-than-human stories, 24 authors investigate humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world, placing characters in situations where humans have to look beyond our own needs and interests. A quirky eco-businessman sees broader application in a high school science fair project. A bad date takes an unexpected turn when the couple finds sea turtle hatchlings that are confused by light. A genetically-enhanced supersoldier struggles to find new purpose in a peaceful Tokyo. A community service punishment leads to unexpected friendships with both birds and people. A boy and his mammoth travel across Asia in search of a city of elephants. Set primarily in the Asia-Pacific, these stories don't shy away from the serious issues that affect that region, yet generally offer optimistic visions of future cities. 

MULTISPECIES CITIES will be available sometime late 2020 or early 2021. Subscribe to our newsletter or follow World Weaver Press on Twitter for updates.

"Wandjina" by Amin Chehelnabi
"The Mammoth Steps" by Andrew Dana Hudson
"Vladivostok" by Avital Balwit
"A Rabbit Egg for Flora" by Caroline M. Yoachim
"The Exuberant Vitality of Hatchling Habitats" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires
"The Birdsong Fossil" by D.K. Mok
"Crew" by E.-H. Nießler
"Down the River" by Eliza Victoria
"In Two Minds" by Joel R Hunt
"Mariposa Awakening" by Joseph F. Nacino
"It is the year 2115" by Joyce Chng
"Deer, Tiger, and Witch" by Kate V. Bui
"Old Man's Sea" by Meyari McFarland
"By the Light of the Stars" by N. R. M. Roshak
"A Life With Cibi" by Natsumi Tanaka*
"The Streams Are Paved With Fish Traps" by Octavia Cade
"Children of Asphalt" by Phoebe Wagner
"Listen:" by Priya Sarukkai Chabria
"Arfabad" by Rimi B. Chatterjee
"Abso" by Sarah E. Stevens
"The Songs That Humanity Lost Reluctantly to Dolphins" by Shweta Taneja
"My Boy, We're Going To Be Martians" by Taiyo Fujii*
"Untamed" by Timothy Yam
"Iron Fox in the Marble City" by Vlad-Andrei Cucu

(*Translated from the Japanese by ​Toshiya Kamei)

Amin Chehelnabi is an Australian-born gay Iranian with a strong interest in the speculative fiction field. He has been a Collection/Anthology Judge for the Aurealis Awards, and a First Reader for Lightspeed Magazine. He's also an alumnus of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop at UC San Diego (2014), and a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship Award. His publications include a horror story published with Innsmouth Free Press, which received an Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Seven (Edited by Ellen Datlow), and was a panelist for a three-day conference called, Shaping Change: Remembering Octavia E. Butler through Archives, Art, and Worldmaking, which took place in 2016 at the Cross-Cultural Center at UC San Diego. He also has a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts, majoring in sculpture, and loves cats.

Caroline M. Yoachim is a prolific author of short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, among other places. She has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Locus, and multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Yoachim's debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out with Fairwood Press in 2016. To find out more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Strange Horizons, Nature, Terraform, Uncanny, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Grievous Angel, Toasted Cake, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Shoreline of Infinity, LONTAR, Mithila Review, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Deep Signal, Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Broad Knowledge, Future Visions and Battling in All Her Finery. Select stories can be read in German, Spanish, Vietnamese, Estonian and French translation. She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter and on her website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com.

DK Mok is a fantasy and science fiction author whose novels include Squid’s Grief, Hunt for Valamon, and The Other Tree. DK has been shortlisted for six Aurealis Awards, three Ditmars and two WSFA Small Press Awards. DK lives in Sydney, Australia, and her favourite fossil deposit is the Burgess Shale. Connect on Twitter @dk_mok or find out more at dkmok.com.

Eike-Henning Nießler is a freelance translator and writer from Berlin, Germany. Working as a retail-clerk, museum tour-guide and private tutor for the better part of two decades he managed to raise a family and obtain an MA in East-Asian Art-History and Japanese Studies from the Free University of Berlin in 2016. With his self published début novel 'Liminality - At the Edge of Worlds' in 2019 he started to pursue his passion for writing in earnest. Find news about his work on www.atelier-vulpecula.com.

Eliza Victoria is the author of several books including the Philippine National Book Award-winning Dwellers (2014), the novel Wounded Little Gods (2016), the graphic novel After Lambana (2016, a collaboration with Mervin Malonzo), and the science fiction novel-in-stories, Nightfall (2018). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several online and print publications, most recently in LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, The Best Asian Speculative Fiction, The Dark Magazine, and The Apex Book of World SF Volume 5. Her work has won prizes in the Philippines’ top literary awards, including the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Her one-act plays (written in Filipino) have been staged at the Virgin LabFest at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Visit her at elizavictoria.com.

Joel R Hunt is a writer and ex-English teacher from the British Midlands. He has a passion for science fiction, horror and all things bizarre, with a particular appreciation for talking animals, twists on classic monsters and [insert genre here] with added robots. Joel’s drabbles and other short stories can be found in a range of anthologies by Black Hare Press, Eerie River and Escaped Ink, among others. He also posts daily micro stories on https://twitter.com/JoelRHunt1 and a number of longer stories and poems on https://www.reddit.com/r/JRHEvilInc/

Kate V. Bui is a Vietnamese-American trans lady from the Pacific Northwest. Kate has been world building her whole life in role-playing games and visual art, but this is her first published work of fiction.  You can reach her at https://katevbui.com/

Natsumi Tanaka is a writer living in Kyoto, Japan. Her short stories have appeared in journals such as Anima Solaris, Kotori no kyuden, and Tanpen. She is the author of the short story collection Yumemiru ningyo no okoku (2017). Her short fiction has appeared in various English-language publications, including Daily Science Fiction, Japanese Fantasy Drabbles, and The William & Mary Review, among others. You can find her online at https://note.com/tanakan.

Rimi B. Chatterjee has published three novels and a number of prose and graphic shorts and is currently working on a science fiction pentalogy called Antisense Universe while running to stay ahead of the apocalypse. This story is set in the world of that pentalogy and features Zigsa, the main character. Rimi also occasionally cosplays as a mohawk-sporting academic and teaches English at Jadavpur University in India. All the dogs know her.

Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Their fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS:  Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Their recent space opera novels deal with wolf clans (Starfang: Rise of the Clan) and vineyards (Water into Wine), respectively. They also write speculative poetry with recent ones in Rambutan Literary and Uncanny Magazine. Occasionally, they wrangle article editing at Strange Horizons and Umbel & Panicle, a poetry about and for plants and botany. Alter-ego J. Damask writes about werewolves in Singapore. You can find them at http://awolfstale.wordpress.com and @jolantru on Twitter. (Pronouns: she/her, they/their)

Meyari McFarland has been telling stories since she was a small child. Her stories range from SF and Fantasy adventures to Romances, but they always feature strong characters who do what they think is right no matter what gets in their way. She has been published in multiple anthologies including Love is Like a Box of Chocolates and Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse from Camden Park Press, and the 2019 Holiday Spectacular by WMG Publishing. Her series range from Space Opera Romance in the Drath series, to Epic Fantasy in the Mages of Tindiere world. Other series include Matriarchies of Muirin, the Clockwork Rift Steampunk mysteries, and the Tales of Unification urban fantasy stories, plus many more. You can find all of her work on MDR Publishing's website at www.MDR-Publishing.com.

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer with a PhD in science communication. She's had close to 50 stories published, in markets such as Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and Shimmer, and particularly likes writing stories where science and ecology are explored in positive and sustainable ways. Her own biology background is in seagrass, and she's aiming to put together a research proposal that looks at how communities interact with seagrass populations on their own doorstep. She attended Clarion West 2016, and is the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University/Square Edge.

Taiyo Fujii was born in Amami Oshima Island—that is, between Kyushu and Okinawa. He worked for stage design, desktop publishing, exhibition graphic design, and software development. In 2012, Fujii self-published Gene Mapper serially in a digital format of his own design, and was Amazon.co.jp’s number one Kindle bestseller of the year. The novel was revised and republished in both print and digital as Gene Mapper - full build- by Hayakawa Publishing in 2013, and was nominated for Japan SF Award and Seiun Award on his first work. He won Japan SF Awards and Seiun Award in 2015 with his second novel Orbital Cloud.  After he won these 2 awards, he was appointed for 18th president of SFWJ - Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan. His latest award is a mainstream literature award: Yoshikawa Eiji Literature Awards for New Writers in 2019 with novella collection Hello, World! which is a story about a software engineer awakened to stand by freedom and justice on the Internet.

Vlad-Andrei Cucu, by day an average student, by night an average student that expresses himself through drawing, indie game making, and more recently writing. Trained in the methods of anarchism in Romania’s mountains, and the art of creative writing in Ireland, he is eager to let out some weird, but interesting transhumanist ideas.

Guest Blog by Andrew Dana Hudson

In the grand scheme of things, what we have is a waste disposal problem. Fossil carbon was once nicely tucked away underground, where it had little impact on the atmosphere, the oceans, or the biosphere. Then we dug it up, and I don’t much blame us, for millions of years and immense pressure had packed into those hydrocarbons incredible potential to do work and release heat. But now all that burned fossil floats free through our world in a low energy state, a waste product, garbage in the air, a billion roaming genies, released from their barrels, with all their wishes used up.
 
So we have to stop emitting air-trash, of course, and if we are very fast and lucky we might halt the runaway train, find a stable perch for the Earth at the edge of more dangerous attractor basins. A stable hothouse would be very different than the planet our ancestors knew, but perhaps we could live there and continue to make love and beauty and interesting lives.
 
Eventually, however, I’d like to think that we’d talk about taking out some of that trash. It’s possible; we can do most anything, chemically, if we harness enough of the sun’s energy. The amount of carbon we need to dispose of is about the size of Lake Michigan. We could try to put it back where it came from, sucking it out of the air with solar-powered machines, pumping it into vast underground reservoirs. But we could also imagine grand afforestation projects. If we made the arid Sahel in Africa into a jungle as dense and long-lived as the Black Forest of Europe, that would fix into wood and soil much of the 500 gigatons of carbon that’s causing us so much trouble.
 
There are limits to such a plan—nutrient bottlenecks that would need to be finessed, heat waves that would need to be adapted to—but what interests me more is the politics. Imagining that winding the Earth back to pre-industrial temperatures might be just as controversial for some parties as letting us fall into the hothouse today...well, I think that brings some perspective to our present climate dilemma. Solarpunk is uniquely equipped to think about these choices and the long, slow process of taking responsibility for maintaining the subtle machinery of our world.
 
I am drawn again and again to this future history. So while my story “Black Ice City” takes place at the North Pole, it is overshadowed by events at the equator. The Burning Man-style festival culture the story explores depends on iceless arctic summers; I wanted to imagine a kind of beauty that could only exist in a hothouse world we would desperately like to avoid—guiding the freezing of the pole into something beautiful, architectural, and rare. And then I wanted that precious culture to be threatened by a change that we, from our fearful 21st Century vantage, would likely support. Their impending solastalgia is in some ways the mirror of our own.
 
At the end of Kim Stanley Robinson’s melancholy generation ship novel Aurora, the interstellar settlers who retreat back to Earth are given work moving beaches swamped by rising seas. It’s a poignant idea. After all, sandy playas are worn by millennia of wave and tide. If the waters overtake them in a few decades, we’ll be walking into the ocean through mud and concrete and dead grass.
 
The other option is described in this story: moving the seas. We cool the world, pump new glaciers back onto Greenland, Antarctica, and reclaim the sunken land. An almost unimaginable infrastructural effort, but I say solarpunk should imagine it.
 
In the very long run—past the disasters and dislocations and societal breakdowns that climate change has in store for us—we’ll need to decide how much we want to accept and live in the hotter world we’ve made, and how much we want to engineer the planet back on track. Are we going to move the beaches? Or are we going to move the seas?

​Andrew Dana Hudson is an award-winning speculative fiction writer. He studies sustainability at ASU and is a fellow in the Center for Science and the Imagination’s Imaginary College. His solarpunk work includes the story “Sunshine State” and the essay “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk.” He lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Guest Blog by Brian Burt

Solarpunk has always resonated with me. I love optimistic visions of a future where technology meshes with the natural world, transforming enemies into allies. An article about seasteading made me wonder: if people can build environmentally friendly floating cities in the ocean, why not on the vast expanse of the Great Lakes that border my home state of Michigan? A recent family trip to Isle Royale — probably the most remote U.S. national park, a rugged chunk of wilderness in the middle of Lake Superior — provided the final bit of inspiration.

To naturalists, Isle Royale is famous for its Winter Study of moose and wolf populations isolated on a 200-square-mile island far from human civilization. What better place for the Native American characters in my short story "Snow Globe" to launch their archipelago of lakesteads, dynamic floating laboratories where they can experiment with new kinds of society and culture? Lake Superior herself became a character as well: cold and deep and lovely, her calm surface capable of exploding with the fury of winter storms. (My family can assure you, after our stomach-churning ferry ride back from Isle Royale to the Michigan mainland, that you wouldn't like her when she's angry.)

​The seasteading (or lakesteading, in the case of "Snow Globe") movement seeks to chart a new course for human social evolution. People come together to form sovereign, floating city-states with their own unique spin on how to govern themselves. They create sustainable systems that allow them to be self-sufficient, balancing what they create with what they consume, ensuring that they don't degrade the precious resources that empower their freedom. And they can change their minds. If they don't like their neighborhood, they can detach their section and move to another part of the city. If they're really unhappy with the direction their community has taken, they can tow their homes to a different floating city altogether. Their world is like the vast body of water on which it floats: flowing, swirling, shifting, never stagnant.
 
Isle Royale remains the one constant. It has withstood the steady pounding of Lake Superior for millennia, providing a refuge for endangered creatures and ancient legends alike. When my wife and son and I hiked the densely wooded trails along Rock Harbor, saw moose wading into the shallows and heard the haunting cries of loons, we felt blessed, touched by a magic rarely encountered in the modern world. How could any writer not draw inspiration from an experience like that!
 
I loved exploring the fictional world inhabited by the characters of "Snow Globe." I hope you do, too. Just remember: on Isle Royale, or anywhere on Lake Superior, surprises await. Keep your eyes open and your life jackets strapped tight!

Brian Burt is an award-winning writer of speculative fiction with environmental themes. His debut novel, "Aquarius Rising 1: In the Tears of God," won EPIC’s 2014 eBook Award for Science Fiction; the sequel, "Aquarius Rising 2: Blood Tide," won the Readers’ Favorite Gold Medal for Science Fiction in 2016. His story "Snow Globe" is in Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters.

Guest Blog by Shel Graves

​When World Weaver Press announced the table of contents for Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters, I wrote about some of my inspirations for "Set the Ice Free" on my blog.  These included:

1. ·      puppy mill rescue imagery
2. ·      the two songs I listened to on repeat while writing the story
3. ·      the two big mistakes I made in my Solarpunk Summers story that I fixed in Solarpunk Winters

Read more about those here.

However, there were also scientific inspirations powering my optimistic science fiction story. I read about:

·      Bioluminescence — I asked, "What if we could capture the energy in the light inside living things?" and learned that we've started to do that: "Nanotechnology Used to Harness Power of Fireflies," Science Daily, June 15, 2012 via Syracuse University.
·      Kinetic energy and piezoelectricity -- I asked, "What if we could capture the energy of falling raindrops." and learned we're starting to do that: "Harvesting Raindrop Energy Experimental Study," Smart Materials and Structures, Vol. 17 via IopScience. My Solarpunk Summers story "Watch Out, Red Crusher!" has piezoelectric walkways, too.
·      Perovskite solar cells— In this case, my motivation was artsy. My color palette for this story was black, red, and gold and I wanted a matching energy source. My friend who works in solar pointed me to perovskite solar cells, an innovation gaining popularity due to their efficiency. More via energy.gov.
From these explorations, I imagined more. My favorite ideas in "Set the Ice Free":
·      Clothing powered by kinetic energy. Imagine wearing thin clothing that heats as you move. As a person who works outdoors at a farm sanctuary, I loved the idea of thin, flexible gloves that warm your hands when you clap. I hope someone is working on making these!
·      A culture of making energy. In my story, it's a cultural norm and societal expectation that everyone will create energy where possible (not just conserve it).  It's rude not to carry an umbrella to capture the power of raindrops because even if you don't need the energy created someone else might.
·      A free flowing power-generating waterfall (no dams!). The waterfall in "Set the Ice Free" generates additional energy by churning bioluminescent algae and falling on strategically placed drums. It's beauty and power. I live in Washington State, which is the nation's top producer of hydroelectric power. But the four dams on the lower Snake River are decimating salmon runs and contributing to the starvation of our resident orca (who feed primarily on Chinook Salmon). So I imagined a powerful waterfall without dams and, again, a cultural component of a ritual of power-gathering that brings the community together.

I love that World Weaver Press highlighted this quote from Set the Ice Free, "In her mind where she was free to imagine as her heart desired, space was filled with golden sails, balmy as the drowned islands of Nana's old Earth."

This is me saying that fiction is just that and solarpunk (emphasis on the punk here) writers and readers don't want science and realism to create walls, borders, and barriers as to what's possible in our fiction — just as we don't want the current reality to determine our future.
​
We're learning more about our world and its possibilities all the time and can be in a state of exploration and innovation. We can be inspired by what we are learning and, in turn, our imaginations can inspire exploration and change.

Our energy for discovery is renewable. That's solarpunk!

​Shel Graves is a reader, writer, and utopian by the Salish Sea. She works at Pasado's Safe Haven on a mission to end animal cruelty. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College. She's at shelgraves.blogspot.com, @Utopianista on Twitter, and @Sheltopia on Instagram.

​CLOCKWORK, CURSES, AND COAL: Steampunk and Gaslamp Fairy Tales
Anthologist: Rhonda Parrish
Open for Submissions: February 1 - March 31, 2020
Expected Publication: early 2021
Story Length: up to 7,500 words
Payment: $0.01 per word + contributor copy

Steampunk’s core is a re-imagined 1800s using steam-powered technology so it is all about gears, goggles and gaslamps. And corsets and courtship and exploration (often in the form of colonialism). I want the bustles, parasols, high tea and airships, of course, but I also welcome stories which confront the darker, problematic side of Victorian sensibilities and attitudes. Plus fairy tales.
 
For example: What if a shoemaker was visited at night by tiny automatons? What if the little mermaid didn’t have to escape the ocean to be with her prince, but instead her social class? What if a woman’s upper class family was embarrassed by her scientific endeavors so they locked her in a tower… or tried to, anyway? Or a mechanized cat discovers a pair of fantastic boots? Or an explorer climbed a giant beanstalk and found a whole new, forgotten world?
 
Original fairy tales are welcome, as are retellings. If you choose to retell a familiar favourite, make sure your story offers something new and interesting. I’d rather see stories that reflect the long history of fairy tales as social commentary than those which simply tell the same story with a different setting.
 
Although steampunk tends to be focused in the American ‘wild west’ or Victorian England, this anthology needn’t be. I am open to stories set all over the world, and would love to see ‘Own Voices’ stories. As with the first book in the Punked Up Fairy Tales series, Grimm, Grit and Gasoline, I would love to see a diverse collection when it comes to which fairy tales are represented but also the races, genders and sexualities of the characters within them.

Simultaneous submissions = okay. Multiple submissions = no.

How to submit: Between February 1 and March 31 only, upload your story here: ​https://niteblade.submittable.com/submit/159218/clockwork-curses-and-coal-steampunk-and-gaslamp-fairy-tales

Rhonda Parrish is the editor of more than a dozen anthologies including, most recently, Fire: Demons, Dragons and Djinns and Tesseracts: Nevertheless. In addition, Rhonda’s written work has been in publications such as Tesseracts 17: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012 & 2015). Her YA Thriller, Hollow, is forthcoming (March 2020) and her website, updated regularly, is at http://www.rhondaparrish.com

Guest Blog by Thomas Badlan

I’ve been obsessed with the end of the world for a long time. I can remember reading Stephen King’s The Stand when I was a teenager and being enthralled watching a society fall apart. In recent years I joined a local ‘Post-Apocalyptic Book Club’ in my home city of Manchester. We’ve read a lot of stories about the apocalypse, featuring a surprising variety of genres, tones and subject matter. Stories of people surviving and struggling against zombies, asteroids and pandemics, even carnivorous jam. Almost all of them were weighty stories, featuring wide-spread destruction and death. I’m even currently writing a novel about the end of the world, about the loss of all electrical energy to the world and the ramifications of such an event. I know plenty about the end times.

So when I discovered a call for submissions about ‘positive’ post-apocalyptic fiction, I was surprised. It was a breath of fresh air. After cannibalism and nuclear war, it was nice to discover a sub-genre as optimistic as solarpunk even existed. It was new to me, though I was aware of its more famous cousins: cyber- and steam-. Its themes, of equality, adaptability and harmony were something that felt invigorating, even liberating, because it freed me from the usual tropes of armed conflict and horrible violence. Conflict is the fuel writers use to propel their characters forward, but in my story Orchidaceae I didn’t need all that much of it, just a disagreement about direction. I had always wanted to write something about the Svalbard Seed Vault, I’d come across it when researching other works. When I started writing, I had mused about having my characters doing battle against armed invaders trying to take the seed vault away from them. I quickly realised though: I didn’t need any of that. That was the obvious way to create drama. It was cheap and unnecessary. Instead the conflict would come about because two adults had a disagreement about policy. They would have a conversation and discover that, in truth, they were both on the same side.

I recently visited the Eden Project in Cornwall, a beautiful county in the South of the UK. If you’re ever in that little corner of the world I highly recommend a visit. It hadn’t really entered my mind when I conjured the Svalbard Recovery Project’s domes and greenhouses, but the Eden Project is very much cut from the same cloth. There are two enormous domes; the Rainforest and Mediterranean Biomes. Both are home to thousands of species of plants, protected from the sometimes freezing elements and carefully tended by a diligent staff. The Eden Project does serious conservation work but it’s also a tourist attraction. When I visited one wet autumn afternoon I found it full of families enjoying its humid, vibrant pathways.

I feel that sometimes plants are often overlooked in this age of climate emergency. We fret more about the loss of animal species than we do about plants but the truth is that the flora of the Earth is the bedrock on which all life survives. It’s important to protect these environments from the ever-encroaching reach of mankind. Just before Christmas, my partner and I are going tree planting. I believe it’s important to remain connected to the natural world and every single effort of conservation or restoration is important. We are the only species on this planet that has the power to destroy or save the world. Immersing oneself in the apocalypse is fun for a while, but in truth, no-one wants to see such stories made reality. 

​Thomas Badlan has been an aspiring writer for as long as he can remember. He studied Creative Writing at the University of Derby. He is a long standing member of Manchester’s Monday Night Writers Group and currently works a literacy teaching assistant. “Orchidaceae” in Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters is his first published story. 

Guest Blog by R. Jean Mathieu

"Mon pays, ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver" kicks off the anthem of the Quiet Revolution. My country, it is not a country, it's winter.

"Je me souviens" is the national motto of the "nation within the Canadian confederation." I remember.

And before it was a technical term in the social sciences, "la survivance" was our collective hunkering down to stay French and stay Catholic until le bon roi came back for us, to free us from the English. Any day now.

​I found out I was French when I was eight years old, on the first day of second grade, when Mrs. Gallagher told us we would be signing our given and family names. "But," I wailed, "I can't spell my last name!"

Ever since, I've been living in a bilingual world, with a mother tongue and a langue paternelle. It got a shot in the arm when I went to college to learn the tongue my father forgot, and again when I first heard neo-trad, and again when I married a Francophile with a better Parisian accent than mine.
And it was that bilingual world I wanted to share. Because I remember, and I wanted to remind everyone else.

In "Glacehouse," Mackenzie grew up in monolingual English in an Alberta finally shorn of effete Eastern frogs, while Marie-Pier grew up black… but at least she speaks French eh mon 'sti? And with a surname about as Quebecois as, say, Hickock is American. Their rainy, muggy Montreal is still bilingual, still thanks to the Anglophone East End Jews and Chinese. Their conversation starts with "Bonjour-hi!" and ebbs and flows back and forth between the two tongues. And they can ebb back and forth… in private, and outside the glacehouse.

Because Dr. Corriveau, that pure lain, has a very specific Quebec in mind. It's the old Quebec of the Grand Noirceur (the Great Darkness), where pure and happy habitants tilled their thin soil and went to mass and did not much question their English-speaking betters. The Quebec before electricity came along in the 1940s. The Quebec that was still a bastard child of two peoples, the French and the (real) Canadians, rather than a people unto themselves, the Quebecois.

He would not dream of English adulterating his pure speech any more than he would dream of American mustard greens springing up beneath his hibernating sugar maples. In both cases, he would love to release his hiver out into the pays. That pays is rightfully hiver, after all. They had a third referendum to prove it. They have political independence, so why, with their weakened economy and reduced standing in a changing world, is their precious French and French way of life being driven back by  the all-consuming economic force of English North America?

Never mind, just keep the old, pure Quebec under glass to remember with.
​
Right now, us cousins south of the 49th parallel are having a bit of a cultural renaissance. David Vermette's A Distinct Alien Race is the first great history of Franco-America. Résonance is our literary journal. Jesse Martineau's French-Canadian History Podcast showcases the Americans grappling with the realization that we are French. The only way to preserve le pays d'hiver is to release it out into the wild, to achieve equilibrium with the ecology that surrounds us. The only way for our families to remember our French, to remember how to spell our own names, is to become bilingual.

A franco-californien armed with a wok and a word processor, R. Jean Mathieu has hauled sail, served tea, hung beef, sold cell phones, and even used his own coat as a zip-line sixteen stories above the streets of Hong Kong. He writes every flavor of fiction under a variety of noms de plume. He and his wife, Melissa, keep a good table when not writing side-by-side or chasing trains to the next adventure. You can find Mathieu’s work in Ecopunk!, Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters, and Amazon.com.

Guest Blog by Steve Toase

Sometimes events just slot together perfectly. Back at the start of 2019 I pitched for a writing project looking at different ways of addressing climate change. As part of my application I put forward several ideas, one of which was inspired by penguins.

Penguins have really efficient methods of managing their ambient temperature. The structure and arrangement of their plumage, with large feathers and soft down beneath, allows the bird to trap air creating a pocket of insulation. If the temperature rises then the feathers can be opened further to allow the air to circulate and carry away excess heat.

When it comes to Adélie in "The Fugue of Winter," the need for silence means the feathers are lowered, removing the air pockets, and in effect removing the city's insulation.

In Adélie, the feathers themselves are created from grown keratin. In reality keratin (the protein in feathers and hair) is a vast untapped resource, particularly as a result of human grooming. Every time we clean our hairbrush strands of keratin are thrown in the rubbish. Maybe they could be used to create these feather superstructures to help regulate building temperature?

In Adélie a second method is used, where synthetic cells mimicking kerantinizing carcinomas (hair producing tumours) are used as organic 3D printers to manufacture the fibres needed to create the feathers. This echoes the structures seen in the work of artists such as Jennifer Willet, with her project BIOTEKNICA.

While the feathers are the main focus of the story, there is a second method of temperature regulation. The walls of Adélie are constructed of an inner and outer flexible skin. Between these membranes, cleaned fat from the city's sewerage system is pumped in to act as subcutaneous layer of insulation, which again mimics penguin anatomy (okay, not the pumps, but the layer of blubber). The advantage of this for the Adélie is twofold. Firstly, it keeps Adélie warm and insulated from the ravages of the hostile conditions outside. Secondly, it keeps the sewerage system free of fatbergs, allowing other waste to be disposed of more efficiently.
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In Adélie the community has found ways to live with its waste, and use it to help the community survive. Maybe that is something we will all need to consider in the future, as well as being inspired by penguins.

Steve Toase lives in Munich, Germany. He writes regularly for Fortean Times and Folklore Thursday. His work appeared in The Best Horror Of The Year 6, and two of his stories have just been selected for Best Horror of the Year 11. He also likes old motorbikes and vintage cocktails.