Drone Express

 Send me your tattered, your torn manuscripts of those special stories or novels of yours that either have proven difficult to sell or place, or perhaps may be in search of an extra-special crow's nest amidships on the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, our ragtag proto-literary cybernetic vessel traversing the world wide terrain of speculative fictional letters on the web since the summer of 2009, when our flagship novella Sky Pirates by John Shirley launched for its epic serialization in sixteen daily installments.


   Most of this evolving tesseract has been hyperbookmark'd here at this masthead site which attempts to keep up with the task of compiling the latest issues of the Freezine (even now there are only 23 issues thus far released; the nanoswarm just recently updated the site.) As much of the artwork used for the Freezine that has been possible to save has been archived here at the official sister-site:  the FREE ZINE ZONE.

   Whereas the FoFaSF principally concerns itself with the open, free and willing showcasing of short stories and novellas, adorned with corresponding artwork, representing facets of some of the cutting edges of current speculative fiction, the FREE ZINE ZONE remains for the most part a wordless site (w/the exception of artist's bylines—hyperlinked to their own respective websites) with its main showcase being the collection of original illustrations that each hyperlink back to the story or chapter in the freezine where they first appeared.

   Consider this a form of post-paradigm digital fly-fishing, if you will, while keeping Harlan Ellison's creed in the forefront of our thought at all times: Pay the Writer.  Believe it or not, this philosophy beats at the heart of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, despite outward appearance. The freezine is not Warner Bros. It is just a blog. Besides aspiring to be a preliminary stepping stone for creative writers everywhere, it's also a forum which doubles as an easygoing platform upon which anyone's short stories or novellas may be posted (or serialized daily, as the case may be) to reside among other examples of the craft already archived and visible in the drop down margins for posterity. One question to ask ourselves as we continue to browse and read...is the browser reading us, as well? Not only a reasonable question, but one which I think we should all stop for a moment to consider more deeply. Never mind that for the moment. On to the freezine.

   The Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction remains a full-immersion online reading experience. Designed eminently for the countless smartphones and internet browsing devices slowly taking over the world out there, this platform distinguishes itself by remaining entirely free of any form of paid advertisements. The real reasons for this may be found in a bottomless well as deep as a quasar at the center of the galaxy, along a conduit which connects the entire living universe since its inception buried so long ago in time that our genetic memory of it may no longer be trusted. It's a platform that intends to continue allowing as much of a writer's original voice as can be humanly preserved, so long as that voice embodied by the written word expresses the age old art of storytelling in clear and challenging ways.

   It's my blog, and I'm a spec-flex geek surviving a living holocaust of information along with the rest of you. We're poised on the threshold of the year 2019 together—the year the movie Bladerunner was set in a rainy, neon-lit Los Angeles, which many of us remember all too well.
I like to sit back and consider that those futuristic images director Ridley Scott presented us in glorious, cinematic color all of those thirty-six years ago are really so drenched with nostalgia by now they qualify as pure duende. This is the Year of the Replicant. I am gathering stories for consideration in our next issue, #24. The freezine remains open to submissions until the end of June, more or less. We're hoping for a summer issue and you'll have to shut your eyes and tune into this branewavelength we're currently riding the edge of this solar storm out with in order to get a sense of what the so-called "theme" is supposed to be.  Get it? It's no secret science fiction has always been about the present moment—projected into a bright, futuristic vision. Put that together with the observation that the truth of our own real experiences always outdoes the most feverishly imagined fantasies, then divide by Stephen King's caveat about fiction being "the truth held within the lie," and you don't need me to provide any guideline whatsoever for your story to have merit and be considered for inclusion among our growing TOC.    

   So get at it. Send us anything the written word can make a little sense out of what is happening to our world right now at this very moment in time. You may think of it as a sixth extinction event underway during the Holocene epoch. However, try not to fixate inordinately on space, the way we have a tendency to do, as moderately sentient terrestrials. You'll get the picture if you shut your eyes tightly enough and dream harder. Remember that while the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox may be fun tools to provoke our imaginations about the nature of our cosmos and the possibility of there being extraterrestrial races out there, don't ever forget that we each represent the living end of a long blood line extending backward into the past and buried in a shroud of time.  If you can perform the small exercise of merely swapping what you normally think of as "space" and replace that with "time," you should be able to see back through countless geological periods of successive extinction events to the point they reveal for us countless respective worlds in time that came before us and are now lost forever.

   Now that the great fishing-reel of our own time-line has greatly wound itself up (or spooled itself out, however one comes to think of it) and we're all still here to enjoy the remaining pockets of breathable air in both our lungs and the atmosphere, I'd like to take this time to wish you all the very best adventure life has to offer—the one which best suits your particular character. We're all characters here, aren't we? Individuals caught up in a grand meta-play called Life. We ask ourselves "where did we come from?" meaning "from whence did we originate as a species?" seldom considering the answer may reveal things too startling, terrifying or wondrous for us to handle. The idea we're part of something that has always been here may only occur in flashes of insight, now and again, but certainly we wouldn't want to live every breathing moment in full realization of this, would we? Why not, I ask.

   At the very least, please be sure to take some time from your routine and write a letter to a family member or a friend. Put the words down on paper, nice and neat. Keep it short, fold up the page, slip it an envelope, peel off a stamp, stick it on the front, jot down your return address in the upper left corner, and print your recipient's address in the middle. Or just write them an email. But if you take the time to hand write them an old fashioned letter, don't forget to affix a stamp and then drop it in a mail box some where nearby. If there isn't a mail-box, look for a mail-slot in a local hotel. Or better yet, tie your letter to a drone, send it GPS express.

   Or feel free to write a stellar story and submit it to the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

   All queries, letters, or submissions in the form of poems, short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels to be considered for publication and serialization in a future issue of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction should be sent to:


freezinefantasysciencefiction@gmail.com 


and I will reply as soon as I can.  2019 stands ahead of us as another cross-loop in the neverending portals of time being stitched in this ongoing experiment called life.  Together we can all hop to it and get through it in record-breaking style.  Please share this post and tell all your friends about it. Or you may just subscribe by email and stay updated every time a new story or chapter from a novella gets serialized in daily installments during a future issue. Thank you for paying attention.  ~the ed.

 (a digital fanzine for the 21st century, currently undergoing an extensive 

ground-zero reset mirroring the universe's blossoming brane)