Distant Worlds

Library of Science Fiction & Fantasy Press is pleased to announce Distant Worlds, an anthology of novella length Science Fiction.

The novella is often neglected in modern genre fiction. Too short to print as a novel and too long for most short story markets, a novella has room for a lot of richness and growth, for fully realized characters, settings, and societies, and for concepts and ideas that just won’t fit into a short story but may not be big enough or complex enough for a novel. The Novella has the potential to deliver incredible stories.

We believe very strongly in that potential and invite you to help us find it.

The details:

While definitions may vary depending on where you look, for the purpose of this anthology, a novella will have a length of somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 words.

Your submission must be in standard manuscript format and attached to your e-mail as an rtf file. For a good reference on what standard manuscript format entails, please see William Shunn’s web page<http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html>on the subject.

Payment for inclusion in this anthology will be $100, two contributor’s copies of the book, and the everlasting knowledge of being involved in something special.

Submissions are now open and will close on 15 Jan 2010. This is a fairly large window, but we recognize the size and scope of a novella can require a great deal more time than a short story. If you don’t have one ready to go, we’d like to give you a chance to write one from scratch.

Submissions and Queries should be sent to distanteditor@gmail.com with ‘Submission – Distant Worlds’ or ‘Query – Distant Worlds’ in the subject line, as applicable.

Caveats:

There are a lot of themes that have been overdone in SF. Strange Horizons provides a wonderfully detailed (yet certainly incomplete) list of overused themes and plots<http://strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml>. We’re not saying don’t do it, but if you’ve picked something from this list as your main focus, try to stand it on its head.

Because there is only room for 4 or 5 stories in Distant Worlds, submissions will be taken in two stages, building a shortlist of possible inclusions. Rejections will happen, but final decisions on acceptances won’t be made until ALL submissions have been read.

The speculative elements you choose, whatever they are, must be integral to the story. If you can write the same story without them, then it’s not a genre story. That said, we subscribe to the Damon Knight theory of Science Fiction: Science Fiction is what we point to when we say it. Every story will be read. If you believe in yours, please send it.