a report from your friendly
editor in chief, Shaun Lawton
Welcome to the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. A non-monetized, ad-free blog in Google's domain that exists as a placid oasis amidst a slick of rainbow colored oil spills that help define the cyberscape bending away from the eye in a dizzying array of hidden directories blossoming both above and below the waterline of the rising tide of information being processed on the world wide web today.
We'd like to consider ourselves a venue like a roadside club hosting a rock and roll show formed as a community bound online and disguised as a creative writing workshop, what started out over fourteen years ago as an effort to create a twenty-first century science fiction digital fanzine has taken electromagnetic root and flourished into its proper form as a metamorphosing serial digest of fantastic fiction for all to feel free to contribute to and enjoy...or not...as the case may be, but make no mistake about it: there's no 'maybe' in our lives here, we move forward with the flow, leaping the wave crests one at a time, each in our own worlds that blend with intersection, so feel fine and free to email me or reach out and contact us at
freezinefantasysciencefiction@gmail.com
Even while currently across the nation major industries suffer from a lack of staffing while thousands of job offers remain unfulfilled, meanwhile very few if any applicants step forward to claim these positions, and we at the Freezine here don't know what to do about it, if anything really. This may be likened to a sort of post-pandemic pulling back of the tide, I suppose, revealing thousands of scattered sea shells glimmering in the sunlight for the taking, but who am I to allude to the spawn of the technological singularity and its amassed mirror neurons of cellular automata crowding for our attention?
After a few moments suspended like the measure of a heartbeat, the tide accelerates back inward, sweeping all the sea shells up into the turbulence. Such it is in the minds and measures of men, and such it has always been, or at least it seems to me when I take the time to reflect upon it. We move with the tides and the rhythms of the sea. Who among us really has the time these days to see it all through and understand? I wonder.
Regardless of where we may end up out here, alongside the shimmering coastline overlooking the undulating waves, or on a mountain range stranded high and dry among the nebulous condensation, the blood in our veins pumps in time to the developing cloudscape and parallel to the breakers rolling in from the wide open sea to the shore. Every heart appears to be an oasis sent from the deepest ocean, destined to become yet another remote observer stalking the desert of the mind, blossoming into consciousness in clusters amid the hanging gardens of the universe, a left over fruiting body for us to yet discover and marvel over.
Which brings us to this, our 44th issue of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. As a core handful of followers and devotees already know, this blog masquerades as an online digital fanzine paying homage to the fantastical stories and artwork erupting in the wake of the golden age of science fiction and heralded by a host of new wave and post-slipstream poets and writers beholden to the uncanny spell we've been placed under by former magicians of the trade. From Edgar Allan Poe through Lovecraft, William Blake and Yeats and the legion of writers of the weird spanning the letters of Algernon Blackwood to Thomas Ligotti and beyond, this cybernetic sub literary endeavor would never have come into its strange fruition if it weren't for those lone rogue souls out there who contributed to it, daring iconoclasts such as John Shirley, fearless dreamers like Keith Graham, Johnny Strike, David Agranoff, Blag Dahlia, Vincent Daemon, Gil Bavel, Sean Manseau, John Claude Smith, Icy Sedgwick, A. A. Attanasio, Bruce Boston, Misha Nogha, Lewis Shiner, Brian "Flesheater" Stoneking, Jeffrey Thomas, and many more with their short stories archived as well as even more contributors to come, I'm sure of it, as the long and winding road ahead rises to meet us.
With our patron saints Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick, the Freezine echoes the mantra "the writer must get paid," and in the spirit of stapled and mimeographed fanzines of old from the 60s and 70s, this webzine for the 21st century stands both monumental and solid as a pillar as well as active and fluid along the relentless course of time, just waiting while the rest of the world flows on by and every so often, we snag an attentive soul or two while we continue publishing serialized novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, drabbles, poetry and the best graphic artwork we can manage to conjure up from this well of souls that has been dubbed the Earth.
If you're reading this now and would like to contribute your drabble or flash fiction piece or longer work of fiction or poetry, don't hesitate to shoot me a PM on Messenger or whatnot, by any means you have at your disposal to submit your writing or art. Any method of reaching me remains welcome since I've become adept at "all the above" and I'm doing this for the love of the craft in order to get more aspiring writers as well as professionals to boost their signal however slightly it may be, in the hopes that by doing so, our respective trajectories into the unknown future of publishing may be enhanced to the point it helps us along toward achieving our mutual goal of becoming published and successful writers and artists. I'm not Warner Bros. I'm just Shaun...and my dream is to help pave the way toward realizing our fullest potential as human beings trapped as we are here in time along with the sprawling vista of stars twinkling their age old music of the spheres before our very eyes and ears.
If you listen with extreme enough care while outdoors past midnight in the forest on a mountainside and stare at the slowly passing constellations overhead as our singular planet spins along its orbit around our local star, you can actually hear the faintest echoes of the stellar song still playing in the wind, and you will notice that every star seen twinkling overhead appears with its own infinitesimally faint color. While we're here trapped among eternity suspended in our endless freedom while yet alive, I invite you to participate in this unfolding legacy of writers and artists, because honestly, it's a fun sort of creative writing online workshop / cyberzine that is only picking up steam with every revolution we successfully complete around the Sun.
Without further ado, I will kick off this 44th iSsuE of our august zine with a ten paragraph flash-faction piece I call The Pathogen Nursery. It's a summation of a longer work germinating on one of the back shelves of my mind, and to be honest I feel its time to at least give our dear readers a "sneak peek" into it, since the idea behind it appears to me, at least, important enough for more of us to begin considering. After all, many of us were brought up to not only enjoy the satirical writings of Voltaire and Swift, but it seems to me the greater majority of us have been swept along since then upon darker tides of dystopian lore, thanks to some fantastic writers (not to mention some popular movies responsible for instilling certain memes into public consciousness) to the point I'm afraid it may have imprinted us with a negative viewpoint when considering not only the future, but our priceless present itself.
So please, stay tuned to this same Bat-channel while I put the finishing touches on my flash faction piece, which should be posted here within the next few hours or days. And thanks once again for following, contributing, participating, and reading this blog, the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I'll be lurking by my inbox waiting for fresh submissions from people I know that have yet to step out onto this fragile and enduring stage. After all, we're all here together now, at the exact center of our creation. And you know what they say. There's no time like the present.
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