My Story for Chip

I'm well chuffed to say that my story "An Idyll in Erehwyna" has been accepted for the STORIES FOR CHIP anthology edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell. Part of a... collection? assembly? mosaic? call it collage novella, "Susurrus on Mars," that should be coming out later in the year (more news as it comes,) "An Idyll in Erehwyna" is simultaneously the hardest SF I've ever written and the most bonkers. Set on a terraformed Mars, it has the Martian godling of the wind, Susurrus, son of Zephyros and Ares, as one PoV, along with sundry plants (exhaustively detailed in terms of Greek myth and Linnaean botany.) This story is largely about painting a room. I'd say it's about the semiotics thereof, but that would gloss over the extrapolated future in which the primitive superstitious notion of the sign has long since been superseded by that of the stance. Semiotics? No, pataphysics, mate! So, yeah. A bit nuts.

Anyhoo, aside from the thrill of being in a tribute anthology to a writer who ultimately might even outrank James Joyce for me in terms of "OMG, that is--how the--lookit how the words--I WANT TO DO THAT WHEN I GROW UP!!!" just check out the Table of Contents below, the company I'll be keeping. Yeah, I can't wait till this comes through the door:

• Christopher Brown – “Festival”
• Chesya Burke – “For Sale: Fantasy Coffin”
• Roz Clarke – “Haunt-type Experience”
• Kathryn Cramer – “Characters in the Margins of a Lost Notebook”
• Vincent Czyz – “Hamlet’s Ghost Sighted in Frontenac, KS”
• Junot Díaz – “Nilda”
• Geetanjali Dighe – “The Last Dying Man”
• Timmel Duchamp – “Real Mothers, a Faggot Uncle, and the Name of the Father: Samuel R. Delany’s Feminist Revisions of the Story of SF”
• Hal Duncan – “An Idyll in Erewhyna”
• Fabio Fernandes – “Eleven Stations”
• Jewelle Gomez – “Be Three”
• Eileen Gunn, Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005
• Nick Harkaway – “Billy Tumult”
• Ernest Hogan – “Guerilla Mural of a Siren’s Song”
• Nalo Hopkinson & Nisi Shawl – “Jamaica Ginger”
• Walidah Imarisha – “Walking Science Fiction: Samuel Delany and Visionary Fiction”
• Alex Jennings – “Heart of Brass”
• Tenea D. Johnson – “Each Star a Sun to Invisible Planets”
• Ellen Kushner – “Delany Story”
• Claude Lalumiere – “Empathy Evolving as a Quantum of Eight-Dimensional Perception”
• Isiah Lavender – “Delany Encounters”
• devorah major – “Voice Prints”
• Haralambi Markov – “Holding Hands with Monsters”
• Anil Menon – “Clarity”
• Carmelo Rafala – “Song for the Asking”
• Kit Reed – “Kickenders”
• Kim Stanley Robinson – “Introduction”
• Benjamin Rosenbaum – “The First Gate of Logic”
• Geoff Ryman – “Capitalism in the 22nd Century”
• Alex Smith – “Clones”
• Michael Swanwick – “On My First Reading of The Einstein Intersection”
• Sheree Renee Thomas – “River Clap Your Hands”
• Kai Ashante Wilson – “Legendaire”