Editor’s Note – January 2011

Welcome to Redstone Science Fiction #8. We’ve got two outstanding stories for you this month, along with a another fine essay by Henry Cribbs, and an interview with this month’s new author, Rhiannon Held.

Bloodtech is the story by Rhiannon Held and it’s one of the first stories that all of our editors got excited about. It has so many of the elements of the kind of quality science fiction that we want for our magazine. The futuristic and the familiar are casually intermingled and there is a nod to the science fiction fan community that is integral to the setting. Most importantly, the protagonist is faced with a dilemma stemming from a radical new technology and she, and eventually her society, must decide how they are going to respond to the change it is causing.

Our second story, Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359? by Ken MacLeod, originally appeared in The New Space Opera, an anthology edited by Gardner Dozios and Jonathan Strahan. This story and that anthology have everything to do with why we started Redstone Science Fiction.

As I began writing speculative short stories in recent years, I started exploring the field to find what was popular and what was well-received critically. I began listening to fiction podcasts and reading the big three magazines and the available websites. Much of what I read and heard was very well written and entertaining, but not exactly the sort of story that I enjoyed, the type of story that came to mind when I thought of science fiction. Something like Haldeman, or Heinlein, or Harlan Ellison.

When I heard ‘Wolf’ on Escape Pod, it was a revelation. This, this, was the sort of story that I liked and I wanted to read more like it. I picked up the anthology and later its sequel, and found JJA’s Federations and read Scalzi and Stross and found what I was looking for.

In making the decision to start Redstone, we knew that we wanted stories ranging from near-future pervasive computing and nanotech, like we find in Bloodtech, to the New Space Opera like Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?. So this issue, in a lot of ways, shows that range of what we’d like to see in future submissions to RSF. We feel like we span the range in topic and in experience. We couldn’t be more excited to bring you a new author, Rhiannon Held, and her quality story, and I can barely contain myself at how pleased I am to have the opportunity to bring you Ken MacLeod’s story that was so pivotal for me, that he so graciously agreed to allow us to reprint in Redstone Science Fiction.

In addition to our fiction and the interview with our new author, we have another excellent essay by Henry Cribbs, Sci-Fi in the ‘Teens: What can the new decade learn from the past three?. He examines the stories Gardner Dozois chose for The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction and draws upon the trends he gathered from the top stories from previous decades to speculate on what we might see in the future of science fiction as we move into a this new decade, the ‘Teens.

As always, we hope you find something here that you enjoy.

Your friend,
Michael Ray
Editor
Redstone Science Fiction