Letter from the Editor, March 2
Definitely not written by an AI
We are having trouble understanding how it can possibly be March already — both because we’ve been working hard on all the great new stories we’ll be bringing you in the coming months, as well as because the weather in many parts of the US at least seems to have decided to turn back to winter. We hope you are warm and well, wherever you are.
The Sunday Morning Transport gets rolling for March this coming Sunday with Karen Lord’s “A Timely Horizon,” which asks what would you do if you could hear the echoes of all the choices you made in other lives? On March 12, James Patrick Kelly’s “The In-Between,” connects art, memory and experience in entirely new and unexpected ways. Laura Anne Gilman takes us back to the world of The Huntsmen, following three brave (so very brave), young Huntsmen in “Answering The Call” on March 19. And on March 26th, the aliens arrive in Andrea Phillips’ “Requiem for the Stars,” … or do they?
If you’re a subscriber, the video for our first 2023 Irregulars chat with Sarah Rees Brennan is posted! Meantime, we are scheduling more Irregular chats, and planning a book club event with more details soon. If you want to take part in all the extra fun with Sunday Morning Transport authors please consider becoming a paid subscriber today.
In other news, we are so happy to see Locus Magazine’s 2022 roundup from Paula Guran that says of the The Sunday Morning Transport, “Seldom, if ever, has any online (and maybe print) periodical debuted with such consistently high-quality writing. … TSMT is well worth the subscription price as it equals at least two anthologies worth of great fiction a year. (Not to mention you should now go catch up on the 50 tales from 2022).” Thank you so much, Paula! And thank you everyone — we couldn’t do this without you, our supporters and subscribers, our wonderful authors and our incredible staff.
February, in the space between winter and spring, is always an interesting month for reading. On top of baby books and Sunday Morning Transport submissions, Julian’s been spending time re-reading old Spider-Man comics. Some particular standouts: Tom Taylor’s run on “Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” and Chip Zdarsky’s “Spider-Man: Life Story.” Fran’s reading beyond the Transport took her to a March Atlantic article titled “We’ve Lost the Plot.” She found it eerily apt in terms of the blurred lines between entertainment and life that popularity algorithms, ring doorbells, and sharing culture have brought us.
William Gibson famously said that “The future is already here,” and that was TWENTY years ago.* With the advent of AI, it seems more clear than ever that we live in a world of science fiction. We look to our (human) writers to help us understand what AI may mean for our future. It seems clear that the genie is out of the bottle, we’ll see what changes it brings.
We hope you enjoy our March stories — and we look forward to hearing from you in the comments!
Julian & Fran
*An earlier version of this post identified the quote as being from four years ago.