Fusion: Digital SciFi Morphs into Print.

Fusion: this excellent collection of speculative fiction, first published in digital form, is now available in paperback with accompanying illustrations.

A collection of 25 stories of fantasy and science fiction from around the globe, each illustrated by digital artist Alice Taylor. This collection has been compiled from the winners of the Fantastic Books Publishing International Charity Short Story Competition 2012 and features 2 stories from our professional contributors Danuta Reah and Stuart Aken. 10% of the proceeds of this book will be donated to the WCRF (World Cancer Research Fund - Registered Charity Number - 1000739) who do sterling work in the field of global cancer prevention.

The cover has changed for the paperback edition, but the stories remain as fresh and individual as on the day I reviewed the book when it first came out. Click here for the review.

To purchase click the link below:

From Fantastic Books Publishing

From Amazon UK

From Amazon.com

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Coming Closer, the New Book in the Series!

A copy of my publisher's latest enewspaper, with some more news about Partings, and other things of interest. 

Enjoy

Congratulations to our Short SF Competition cash winners, Stuart Aken’s 2nd is here and exciting Kickstarter news!

This week we are celebrating the closing of the Fantastic Books Short Science Fiction Competition 2014. The cash winners have been notified and the editorial process has begun!

After many months, our judges have finally finished battling with the longlist and have awarded the following people the 5 cash prizes;

First prize: Dying Star by Marko Susimetsa
Second Prize: Steampunk Striker by Pierre Le Gue
Third prize: If We Start Killing by Ulla Susimetsa
Fourth Prize: Three Second War by Darren Grey
Fifth Prize: The Moon a Balloon by Rose Thurlbeck

The judging is done completely anonymously and it came as a very nice surprise to see no less than 4 Fantastic Elite Fiction authors in the top 5!

Our heartiest congratulations to everyone who made it to the longlist and we really must stress how impressed we were with the high quality of all the entries. It was a very hard job to decide who was in the anthology and who didn’t make it. Well done to everyone who entered, you are all Fantastic.

We have now opened our next competition. It is a horror story competition asking for stories of EXACTLY 666 words. It is a tough challenge but after seeing the quality of the entries for our competitions over the last two years, we know you can do it. We look forward to you scaring the pants off us!

Now, to other news. Stuart Aken has released the second novel in his ‘A Seared Sky‘ series. Partings continues from where Joinings left off and has a shiny new cover to ensure the final trilogy looks amazing. Our cover designer Heather Murphy has done a wonderful job integrating Stuart’s hand drawn maps into the cover and we couldn’t be more pleased.

Stuart’s books are available from ourFantastic Bookstore and also on Amazon.

And now to our next exciting project. Although lots of our own Kickstarter gifts are still to be sent out (the boxed sets are in production, the special edition boxed sets won’t begin production until October and the audio books will be ready by December at the earliest), there are still lots of folks who would love to see another Fantastic Books Kickstarter based in the universe of Elite: Dangerous.

Thanks to our friend Anthony Olver, who runs the Elite Archives, we are very proud to announce that a brand new Kickstarter will be launching on the 20th September to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original Elite computer game!

The Elite Archives Kickstarter will use your pledges to fund the creation of a beautiful hardback book detailing the 30 year journey this game has taken including interviews, artwork, game tips and tricks, reviews, archive pictures and lots more. Anthony’s passion for the game shines through in everything he does and he has decided that the world needs to know about this amazing game and share his collection that he has painstakingly built up over the years.

This will be the first ever book detailing the history, lore, releases and more of this seminal space trading computer game. As massive fans ourselves, we felt very privileged to be approached by Anthony to publish this book and we are prepared to throw everything we have at making this Kickstarter a success. With us on board as publisher the book will benefit from professional editing, proofing, typesetting and cover design as well as joining the other 5 official Elite titles in our bookstore and on Amazon and other retailers.

The project goes live on the 20th September and will run for only 48 days. With the help of the Elite Community, Science Fiction fans, Gamers and Collectors alike we hope to push this project over the line quickly and have already formulated some great ideas for stretch goals. And for those of you who still remember our own Kickstarter project, Commander Dan has promised to make an appearance on video too!

So when the project goes live in two days time, look out for ‘The Elite Archives Book: A 30 Year History of Elite’ on Kickstarter and make sure you spread the word by liking and sharing all our posts about it. Thanks!

By working together on projects that people are genuinely passionate about we can create anything. Just imagine.

Come join the family, you’re welcome!

Just imagine,

The Fantastic Books Team

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Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Vol 4, Reviewed.

Collections are often a mix of good with poor, but this anthology of prize-winners and near misses is

actually quite consistent in terms of quality. It features the top 3 prize-winning stories along with 17 shortlisted entries to the 2011 contest. As an entertainment, it provides a series of interesting reads.

There are a few too many urban grit stories for my personal tastes, but that doesn’t detract from the overall quality of the offering. Interestingly, many of the stories are written in the present tense, a technique that lends urgency and immediacy to the tales.

Just one of the stories (I won’t name it) was disappointingly peppered with typos and grammatical errors, but one out of twenty is pretty good, I suppose. It does, however, cause the reader to wonder why it made the short list. In general terms, the selection does give some idea of what judges might be looking for when faced with selecting winners for short story competitions. Unfortunately, such hints are notoriously unreliable, since each set of judges seems to have its own ideas of what is or isn’t desirable in short fiction. And even the same judge can change opinion from contest to contest, so very little help to be found by reading the winners.

For the writer who may want guidance about such entries, however, it is clear from the anthology that a degree of literary merit is valued over formulaic or genre specific approaches. Good use of language, well-developed characters and interesting themes seem to win over plot-driven and fast action tales.

In spite of the lean towards urban grit and present tense, I enjoyed this collection and happily recommend it.

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Out of Time, by Word Watchers, Reviewed.

Eleven varied stories by a group of writers initially from a writing class make up this collection. In

common with most anthologies of this type, there is a mixture of style, genre and quality, though none of the stories is poor.

There is dark fiction here, speculative, alongside some of a more literary nature. So, a good mix. I particularly enjoyed Charlotte Betts’ Absolution, which opens the offering: a moral tale with edge. Julian Dobbins’ Fire and Forget is a story of grief and hope with a strong central character. Starnav, by Mel Gerdes puts a different slant on the getting-pregnant-mother-to-the-hospital-in-time theme, and does so with some humour mingled with the tension. Chris McCormack’s Forever Offshore gives an old theme a real twist and delivers it in a style which conveys the author’s unique voice. A Good Innings from the pen of Pamela Pheasant, is a warm tale of a life well-lived, told with grace and humour. John Potter’s Eye For an Eye is an intriguing political crime tale, full of tension. I See it in Your Eyes, by Abbie Todd is a tale of loss that’s full of subtle and raw emotion: have your hankie ready. And, in Katherine Webb’s On Beedon Barrow we have a coming of age story with a difference.

So, an anthology of well-written stories for those of us who enjoy short fiction. Definitely worth a look.