Edging towards publication...


I note that EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, the gang that does Tesseracts these days, has put up a pretty comprehensive web page for Tesseracts Eleven - the Cory Doctorow/Holly Phillips edition of the Canadian spec-fic anthology series. It's here, and proves to any of you doubters out there that I wasn't just fooling around when I claimed here and here that I'd sold my story "Swamp Witch and the Tea-Drinking Man" to them. Or when I claimed that Madeline Ashby's story beat snot out of Swamp Witch - the table of content shows her story, "In Which Joe and Laurie Save Rock and Roll," in the all-important lead-off spot. The witch is in the appropriately snot-beat spot of number two.

For those of you coming here from Aukland and Oslo and Malaysia (and looking at my Google Analytics, I know there are a few of you), you should know: the Tesseracts anthologies are a big deal in home-grown Canadian speculative fiction. The late golden age sf author/editor Judith Merril edited the first one in the mid-1980s, in so doing attending to the birth of the late 20th-century boom in Canadian speculative fiction (DON'T call it science fiction - we Canadians hate that).

The series has published the work of many fine authors over the years - Margaret Atwood, Candas-Jane Dorsey, Charles de Lint, Robert Charles Wilson, Andrew Weiner and James Alan Gardner; and fine-authors-and-pals-of-mine Karl Schroeder, Michael Skeet, Sara Simmons, Peter Watts, Hugh A.D. Spencer and Sandra Kasturi. And also a few by me - including the first appearance of "The Toy Mill," Karl's and my Christmas fable that mutated into The Claus Effect, about which I've bent your ear enough.

Tesseracts Eleven is available late 2007, I'm told. But don't fuss about dates - I'll let you know here, when it's okay to buy a copy.