What We Want

Things Most Likely To Blow Our Skirts Up

1. Like most people, we’re paying peanuts but we don’t want monkeys.¹ Need we say ‘good writing’?
2. Characters We Can Get Our Teeth Into. A story might be driven by character, action, world-building or A Big Idea (and we’ll be looking for a mix of these in the anthology) but it must be populated by people, not cardboard cut-outs.
3. Worlds We Can Step Into. As above, except swap ‘characters’ for ‘worlds’ and shuffle the words a bit so it makes sense. Don’t info-dump, but make us feel that the world is much larger than the segment we are seeing.
4. Things That Make Us Go Hmmm... We like ideas, characters, worlds and denouements that make us pause for a moment after we’ve finished reading - ideally, to think ‘wow’, but, failing that, just a quiet pause for reflection before being able to read the next story.
5. Unconventional Relationships. Queer is good. When we say unconventional, please heed the note below about Gratuitousness, and note that it’s first on our no-no list. For example: necrophilia, paedophilia and gumboot-clad farmers chasing sheep will be very hard to sell to us.² Interspecies relationships between sapient races, on the other hand, may interest us.³
6. Subversion. Of stereotypes and conventions. Humour, irony and satire are good if done well.

Things Least Likely To Blow Our Skirts Up

1. Gratuitousness. Of anything - humour, gore, violence, sex, preaching, cuteness, whatever. It has to drive the story forward.⁴
2. Political Rants. Get as political as you like, but don’t rant.⁵
3. Silly Names for Familiar Things. If it looks like a dwarf, smells like a dwarf and drinks like a dwarf, call it a dwarf, not a fels’nr’grugh.⁶
4. Through The Looking Glass Stories. Where the spunky/ nerdy/ misunderstood kid (or librarian, homeless guy, leper, whatever) from this reality falls through a wormhole/ rabbit hole/ magic mirror/ back of a wardrobe into a fantasy world and is proclaimed the Chosen One.⁷
5. Beasties That Have Been Invented Since (Or By) Tolkien and Lovecraft. So no orcs (or orks), no hobbits,⁸ no Great Old Ones. Nothing that was invented in an RPG bestiary (and we’ve read most of ‘em, between us). Your own inventions are welcome.
6. Absolutes of Good and Evil. Full colour is much more interesting than black and white, and fictional people shouldn’t be able to hide behind ideals as justification for their actions, any more than real people.
7. Arthurian Tales. Not even subversive ones.
8. Fan fiction.
9. Anything Else We Wouldn’t Like.

Some Things That Have Blown Our Skirts Up In The Past⁹ (In No Particular Order And That May Or May Not Be Helpful Now)

• China Meiville’s Bas-Lag - the world.
• Wormwood by Terry Dowling - for an amazingly realised future Earth, audacious non-humans and lyrical writing.
• Wolf in Shadow by David Gemmel - a conventionally apocalyptic future, but enough zing to make it a good story (note that we'd rather not see quite so many adjectives and cliches).
• Ash by Mary Gentle (and the related stories in her Cartomancy collection, as noted below) - an example of how close a created world can seem to documented history and still be distinctive and fascinating.
• West of Eden by Harry Harrison - because it’s a cool idea for a highly divergent alternate Earth.
• Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn - a Japanese feudal elsewhere, and as an example of clean, accessible writing.
• Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldiss - for the idea
• The Black Company (and at least the first couple of sequels) by Glen Cook - as an example of making it up and the Hell if it makes sense as long as it’s a good story, and also for not letting his characters hide behind absolutes.
• The Cup of the World by John Dickinson - another good example of how to give all your heroes and villains full-colour motives, and for not cheating with his narrative POV.
• Robin Hobb’s dragons - either kind, the Farseer and Liveship Traders trilogies, as examples of taking fantasy conventions and making something new.
• The Goblin Mirror by C.J. Cherryh - for the goblin, who is the elegant, predatory antithesis of anything that ever crawled out of Mordor.
• Cartomancy by Mary Gentle - a collection packed with examples of how to deliver remarkable characters and worlds with few words.¹⁰
• Changing Planes by Ursula LeGuin - for building worlds that live and breathe with a few poetic words.
• Visible Light by C.J. Cherryh - for a couple of stories in this collection that make you go hmm... or even wipe a tear from your eye.¹¹
• A Song of Ice and Fire (series) by George R.R. Martin – for an example of characters with depth propelling a rip-roaring story.
• Dan Simmons – see Hyperion for the use of Western literary tradition (in the form of the Canterbury tales) in a soft-SF setting; and Fall of Hyperion for a same-but-different approach (ooo, the Keats cybrid!).
• Malazan Book of the Fallen (series) by Steven Erikson – for the world-building and immersion in the setting, rather than for the quasi-RPG elements.
• Prayers to Broken Stones by Dan Simmons – for a mix of great ideas and interesting characters in tightly written stories.