I have never believed that Fantasy is a more nerd-laden genre than Science Fiction. It has the unfortunate label of being populated by a fair amount of "zit-ridden little brothers" hiding in our parents' basements. The perponderance of D&D being played by droves of Fantasy nerds has led to the belief that such level of nerdiness leads to a lesser form of genre fiction.

Fantasy, though, is a mature and noble genre.

In the Bible, The Apocalypse - or the End of Days - refers to a time when the Judgement of God will come, and we will all either be brought to Heaven or thrown in Hell for eternity. It's an event of monumental impact on the whole of humanity. However, when people tend to think of The Apocalypse (and the fiction derived from the topic), this is not entirely what we think of.

Define: High Fantasy

This will be one in a series of shorts about the various sub-genres of Speculative Fiction. "Why," you ask, "do I need another definition?" My simple answer: perhaps it will help you better prepare a story for submission to Sheer Speculation Press. Also, I think everyone has their vision of what such sub-genres are, and I think it helps to have various definitions to both refute and support.

A Google search turns up one entry for both High Fantasy and Epic Fantasy, and it's the introduction to the Wikipedia entry on the topic.

I believe that Speculative Fiction has - for the most part - been relatively singular in its path over the course of the last 50 years.

In order to provide more options for writers submitting pieces to Sheer Speculation Press, I've set up market listings and an editorial account at www.EcoStamps.org. This is a nice service that allows authors to submit work and have it fully critiqued. There is a nominal fee (some of which comes to Sheer Spec) for this service, but we hope that you will find the price worth the reward. It is a small way to support Sheer Spec and it's imprints.

From Bart Yavorosky, Creator of EcoStamps:

Issue #3 is ready to hit the presses. We have the .pdf here on the Sheer Speculation website for those of you who are interested. Thanks to everyone for their patience. So who's in this issue?

Table of Contents:

IN THESE SHOES by Lindsey Duncan
DEVOLUTION OF LIFE by Tamara Wilhite
H+ by K.E. Spires
THE KITE by James Bloomer
THE LEFTOVER by James Hartley
BALESAT’S SILENCE by Betsy Dornbusch
B IS FOR BOY by David Loel

We're sending contracts out this week for Issue #3. However, we're desperately in search of the author A. L. Frederickson, as we realized that the contact information we have is either incorrect or out of date. If you are the author, please email me at editor@jbdrydenco.com immediately, so we can sort this out.

We're working through the night, as it were, to get Issue #3 ready. So far, we have five stories picked, and we'll be sorting out a few more today and tomorrow.

Our priority is to get the .pdf online, so people can view it and download it. We will be working diligently to get it to the printer in a timely manner to have print issues available if we can. We'll mostly be sticking with online editions, but we'll try and do print as we get more money.

We're now listed on LitMags.Org, a new database site for Literary Magazines around the world.

Our specific listing is here: http://www.litmags.org/displaymag.php?id=487

Let us know what you think of the listing (and the magazine).

Hello all.

2009 will be a good year for Sheer Speculation Press in a way that directly opposes the very bad year that 2008 was.

We've hired on an assistant to help with Staffs & Starships, and we've found a new designer for the magazine. We're poring as quickly as possible through the heap of stories, and we'll be getting issues 3 and 4 out before the end of May.