Tag: short stories

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Mythographers we Love: Fates and Furies by Christine Lucas

Genre legends Gwyneth Jones and Melissa Scott were ecstatic over Fates and Furies.

Visions of the fate of our flesh, set in the far future and in our own bitter times, all informed by ancient Hellas: I think I liked the alien migrants in modern Greece best, but I loved all these stories. A very fine cover too!

Gwyneth Jones

This is an extraordinary collection. Myths old and new sing to readers, drawing them ever deeper into a world deeply informed by the Hellenic world. My only regret is that I would gladly have read more of every one of them.

Melissa Scott

Fates and Furies is available on Amazon and on the Candemark and Gleam website, where a purchase brings along the full digital bundle (PDF, Epub and Mobi, with the PDF containing the usual bells and whistles) . All C&G ebooks are DRM-free. The stunning mosaic that graces the collection’s cover, embedded in the deep sea-blue background created by Alan Caum, perfectly distills the collection’s essence in both appearance and backstory.

Christine Lucas lives in Greece with her husband and a horde of spoiled animals. A retired Air Force officer and mostly self-taught in English, she has had her work appear in many SFF magazines, including Daily Science Fiction, Pseudopod, and Nature: Futures. Her stories appear in highly-claimed anthologies; among them Ellen Datlow’s Tails of Wonder and Imagination (“Dominion”, Night Shade, 2010), and Athena Andreadis’ The Other Half of the Sky (“Ouroboros”, Candlemark & Gleam, 2013). She was a finalist for the 2017 WSFA award; her story “Χίλια Μύρια Κύματα” (“A Thousand Waves from Home”, included for the first time in English in Fates and Furies, translated by Christine herself) won the 2017 Φανταστιcon Award; and she’s working on her first novel. You can visit her at Of (Wo)man and Mau.

Get it on Amazon COM

Get it on Amazon UK

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Get Your Free Short Stories at the Store!

Choose your gift from a selection of short stories. Available at cart totals over 10 and 20 euro, just pile on those books and you’ll see the selection at checkout.

We are constantly adding more stories, but there is plenty to go around.

You can start by getting the Antigravel Omnibus of any of our best-selling titles:

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What is GameLit?

GameLit Stories

Simply put, GameLit is a kind of story that borrows heavily from videogames, or has direct elements of such a game, like levels, boss-fights, character classes etc. The crunchiest form is LitRPG, but these stories will never be that.

Mythography GameLit will always sit in the intersection of a fun story and one that has some select Game Elements. If you are not a gamer, these stories are still for you. Don’t feel daunted by something you’re not familiar with.

We made a page for the Gamelit Stories, it’s just a spot where everything can be found quickly.

Our titles with GameLit elements so far are the following:

And more are added every day. You can find the non-Kindle-Unlimited titles on the shop:

You can watch the Halloween Raid review on the LitRPG Audiobook Podcast below.

Watch the Halloween Raid review on Youtube.

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Awesome Things to Check Out in January

We have lots of things going on, so it was best to put them all in a post. Here it goes:

Spitwrite Boxset

We made a boxset of the first 3 Spitwrite volumes. You can find it on Amazon and on all stores.

Jellyspace in Patty’s Promo

Jellyspace is at 99c for this weekend only. It’s a part of the Ebookaroo promotion, linked below:

Get to the promo page to find ebooks at 99c, from all speculative fiction genres. Most of them are also available in all retailers, Smashwords, Kobo, Nook, iTunes and Google Play Books. Check it out.

A Short Story About a Brave Little Lunar Rover

People liked Selenography, a short story about the Chinese Lunar lander mission:

7 Deadly Roommates is Free for a Limited Time

7 Deadly Roommates is available free on Amazon for a few days only, grab your copy now if you haven’t already.

Audible is Running an Amazing Deal for the New Year

Seriously, 7 audiobooks with your subscription. It’s totally worth it. Grab the deal before it’s gone for good and then pick one of our audiobooks from this page.

Check out Our New Translations

We have a few titles translated in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. Upcoming are German titles.

Check out the Translations page that is updated with all the store links.

If You Want to be the First to Learn About These Things, Join the Mythographers

We don’t usually make these comprehensive posts. Most of the things we’ve got going on are sent out in our newsletter. Join the Mythographers and get them in time.

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Binge-Worthy Reads: Future Fiction, A Collection of the Finest Sci-Fi From Around the World

If you like thought-provoking science fiction hand-picked from all around the world, then this collection of short stories is for you.

Future Fiction is an Italian house that picks out authors and translates their stories in English. We’ve posted about them before and we will do so again, because it seems they’re here to stay and we really like what they’re bringing to the international scene.

Tor called these: 

(…)thirteen incredible tales from all around the globe that will not only introduce you to worlds you may not be familiar with but also expand your horizons and the horizons of the science fiction field itself.

Strange Horizons has a thorough review if you want to read an analysis of the stories. Here are some snippets:

Future Fiction: New Dimensions in International Fiction. Edited by Rosarium’s Bill Campbell and Future Fiction‘s Francesco Verso, this collection brings together speculative fiction that was originally published by Verso’s Italian press. Represented here are India, Greece, Zimbabwe, China, Italy, the US, Canada, the UK, Russia, Mexico, Nigeria, and Cuba. Of these twelve stories, four are translations: “Creative Surgery” by Clelia Farris (translated from the Italian by Jennifer Delare), “The Quantum Mommy” by Michalis Manolios (translated from the Greek by Manolis Vamvounis), “Tongtong’s Summer” by Xia Jia (translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu), and “Grey Noise” by Pepe Rojo (translated from the Spanish by Andrea Bell).

There’s speculative fiction, and then there’s speculative fiction that’s been kicked up several levels. You’ll find the latter when you read stories like James Patrick Kelly’s “Bernardo’s House,” Farris’s “Creative Surgery,” Tendai Huchu’s “Hostbods,” and Efe Tokunbo’s absolutely brilliant “Proposition 23.”

Some of the stories, including Kelly’s “Bernardo’s House,” Carlos Hernandez’s “The International Studbook of the Giant Panda,” Manolios’s “The Quantum Mommy,” Huchu’s “Hostbods,” Rojo’s “Grey Noise,” and Tokunbo’s “Proposition 23,” focus on the complex and often troubling intersection of humans and machines.

Here’s a shot of a very happy Michalis Manolios only moments after he got the book in his hands for the first time.

The book is available in both paperback and ebook version. Shelf it on Goodreads.

Get Future Fiction on Amazon US

Get Future Fiction on Amazon UK

Get it on Amazon IT

Get it on Kobo

Get it on Barnes and Noble

Get it on Google Play Books

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Do You Miss Old-School Science Fiction? Then Check Out These Little Beauties

There’s a project out there, that is quite interesting. Future Fiction translates sci-fi stories from selected authors around the world and makes them available in English (And Italian, apparently).

Finding the books on Amazon is a mess, to be honest. You can start with a search on Kindle here. Or you can buy directly from the Future Fiction website.

The one I want to point out to you is the one containing two excellent shorts by my mentor, Michalis Manolios. Mentor is a strong word when you’ve had as many beers together as we’ve had, but it’s accurate. I think it was 2010, maybe 2009 when he read my stories, pushed me forward and told me I could do this, and do it well. I was fascinated with fantasy back then, but my true calling has been science fiction apparently. I shifted towards sci-fi and I honed my craft every year. The results seem to be good, as shown by reader reactions and sales numbers.

So, Michalis has two of his best short stories translated into English. They are not my favourite but they are definitely good. The stories in that Greek collection are pretty mindblowing, and these two fit the bill. Aethra and Quantum Mommy.

Read this now


I Wanna Get My Mind Blown

The rest of the volumes are either a single novella or two short stories from authors around the world. It’s a shame that we don’t have access to these stories, and that’s what I like about Future Fiction, they bring these unreachable gems to English, thus making them available to us. Some authors you’ve never heard of, naturally, others are quite well known in their countries.

Everything in the collection has the feel of old-school sci-fi, like the books I have in my bookcase. The covers, the stories, the atmosphere is a way to go back to that time when science fiction showed us what was possible instead of just shoving dystopian warnings at us. Which I’m guilty of, obviously.

Check out some of the volumes:

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I Have a Patreon Now. Patreons Are Cool.

Patronage. Just like the practice of old, we’ve resurrected the model into a digital mold, more fitting to the age.

I’m new to this. Be gentle.

Micropatronage, having a bunch of regular people pitching in small amounts instead of one wealthy patron, is being successful with plenty of examples.

What I had was a PILE of story ideas sitting on my projects folder. Some have merit, some are simply the butt of a joke. Others are pretty damn brilliant, I might say.

I took all that and decided to squeeze out at least one short story per month. That way, I can see the works-in-progress slowly thinning down, I can test them with real people and real readers, and see which one’s a winner and which one’s a dud.

I’ve been doing that already with the Epic Poets, but to be honest, I firmly believe in putting one’s money where one’s mouth is. Feedback from fans is excellent, but feedback from people who have paid a dollar carries much more weight.

Also, I have plenty of ideas that fall into fantasy or urban fantasy. At some point, as I burn through the sci-fi ones, I’ll eventually work on those too. Having patrons will provide a steady and verifiable metric that my output will be worth the time invested. I’m bound to change a lot of this on my Patreon page, I just threw one up quickly.

There’s a short story waiting for you right now, called “Life Coach.”

So, click the orange button to get a steady flow of speculative fiction short stories. I’m your story-dealer. Be patronizing. Or just share the post with your friends.

Become a Patron!

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Watch the book trailer of “How to 3D print a god”

The gods are back in town. Skyscrapers pop out of nowhere all around Athens. Corporations rename themselves as Greek gods. It all started with the Greek crisis of 2009 and it will forever change the world as we know it. Some say that CEO’s have gone mad. Others, that they know damn well what they are doing. That there is something solid amongst the myth. In the day of inter-connectivity and social media admiration, can the ancient myths come back to life?

The gods are back in town and they carry a god complex.
The gods are back in town and they carry a god complex.

When the score of a lifetime falls in their lap, Deimos and his team accepts to sneak in a factory and 3D print the client’s secret design. But will they succeed when a pack of well trained Amazons tries to stop them, when things don’t quite go as planned and when the secret design turns out to be something very different?

See the product page on our shop:

Click Here to Buy the Book How to 3D Print a God

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How to 3D print a god is available on Amazon Kindle now.

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