esr announces his first science fiction sale:
One of the minor frustrations of my life, up to now, is that though I can sell as much nonfiction as I care to write, fiction sales had eluded me. What made this particularly irksome is that I don’t have only the usual ego reasons for wanting to succeed. I love the science fiction genre and owe it much; I want to pay that forward by contributing back to it.
It therefore gives me great satisfaction to announce that I have made my first SF sale, a short (3.5kword) piece of military SF titled “Sucker Punch” set on a U.S. aircraft carrier during the Taiwan Straits Action of 2037…. the head guy at Castalia House (the infamous Vox Day, wearing another hat) informed me of an upcoming project: an anthology called Riding The Red Horse intended to reprise the format of Jerry Pournelle’s old There Will Be War compendia. That is, a mix of military SF and military futurology, written by a mix of SF authors and serving military personnel, with few technical experts added for flavor.
“Want to write a fiction piece for us?” said Mr. Castalia House. “I can’t write fiction for shit, or at least all my attempts to sell it have failed,” I replied.
“Well, what about non-fiction?” I couldn’t think of a premise; then, suddenly, I could. Which is how I wound up researching and writing a
fact piece called “Battlefield Lasers and the Death of Airpower”.
Congratulations to Mr. Raymond; a link to his blog, Armed and Dangerous, has been duly added on the right sidebar. He is one of a number of excellent expert contributors to RIDING THE RED HORSE, which as he notes is intended to be the spiritual successor to the old THERE WILL BE WAR anthology series edited by Jerry Pournelle.
If – and only if – you are a published author of mil-SF, you may be interested to note we have two more fiction slots open. To inquire concerning a submission, send me an email with RED HORSE in the subject. Please note that we are not looking for any more first-time writers for this first volume; we are already set on that score. We’re also looking for one more non-fiction piece, particularly something related to Russia and the European theater. My original intention was to revive THERE WILL BE WAR and re-release the old anthologies as ebooks, since they are not available in that format. Although Mr. Pournelle was somewhat interested, we were unfortunately unable to make any progress in that direction and so we elected to create a new anthology series with a certain LTC of some notoriety at the helm.