A report from your friendly editor in chief, Shaun Lawton
Welcome to the forty-fifth issue of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Begun sixteen summers ago with veteran, award-winning author John Shirley's never-before published serialized novella Sky Pirates, presented in sixteen daily installments, this homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sabatini's Captain Blood in a futuristic setting really helped lift off our mutual worldwide creative writing workshop/webzine and send it in the right direction, hurtling straight forward through time.
As very few people in general are self-aware that the blogger forum—which is to say, blogs themselves--are archived through time in daily, weekly, monthly, and annual installments, so too are we generally predisposed toward keeping our noses to the grindstone throughout most of our lives that we don't stop to consider how they, too, our lives mind you, are catalogued in time—from every second and minute and hour and day since we're born until, frankly, this very moment in time, where we get to strangely meet from our various and disparate positions about the globe, conglomerating more or less together, a little pixelfractal cloud all of us sort of suspended together on a planet in outer space need I remind you, still here after all these years, having survived the pandemic and every other thing, well it just seems somewhat remarkable to me, as I'm sure it is for everyone. Meaning the underlying central theme of our webzine dedicated to speculative fiction and art just so happens to be time, that barely understood phenomenon that has bound us all together as one historic document, still developing against all odds.
Now here we are again, after having just run seven installments for our traditional Fall/October spooky-at-a-distance periodical, paying homage to the strange and uncanny after a variety of different forms. The Freezine got in the habit of putting out an OCTOBER, Halloween-themed issue, almost every year since its inception, it being everyone's favorite month and Holiday, pretty much. We have featured a wide variety of talented writers and artists, throughout the years. This year we have just finished streaming the 0c☨☉b☄☈ | iSsuE # 45 | 2025. The cool thing about this webzine, is that if you weren't actively engaged reading each of the short tales and offerings, well it might even be better that way, since now you can read this one editorial post and binge on all the entries in one sitting.
Click on the entries below to read the stories (then read the concluding afterward at the end of this post, thanking all contributors):
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First I'd like to thank the ghost of M.R. James, a medieval scholar from Eton, England who died eighty-nine years ago, known for his ghost stories and admired by both H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith for being the best ghost story writer England ever produced. His classic ghost story Lost Hearts was included in the collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), and has been updated here into a more contemporary style, for the benefit of our growing legion of younger readers out there. I hope you enjoyed the small liberties I took in redrafting the original text into what I hope will prove to be a slightly more accessible telling for young readers (of all ages) who may find themselves never having even heard of M.R. James, before.
Here lies the key to the idea of bringing out the whole soon to be lost world of stories from the public domain, and dressing them up as needed into a more modern setting or with whatever minor changes necessary to make them more appealing to the broader sensibilities of millions of new, younger readers out there. It's really the same idea that the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, and the like, have had throughout the ages, and if you think about it enough, can picture it going back through Shakespeare and Homer and further back to a time when stories such as these were told orally, and passed on from generation to generation, as information captured in the telling of a tale. With many tellings undergoing revisions and minor changes in characterization and setting, sometimes with different endings, adjusting scenes to accommodate the needs of both publisher and reader, and for whatever reasons may come through the changing of the seasons, the point being, the stories remain to this day, as if granted an extended afterlife breathed into constantly by a continually renewed authorship.
The next story I discovered that I wanted to adapt into my own new version of a "Big Book of Fairy Tales," is an old Ruthenian fairy tale called The Dead Mother. I found the text from an old 1872 book called Russian fairy tales, A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore, by W.R.S. Ralston, M.A. (published by Hurst & Co., New York). The only changes I made were to set the story here in the midwestern United States, in a more contemporary manner; but otherwise, I tried to stay as close to the telling which I was presented with, to preserve the feel and grim tone of the original tale and keep to its skeletal framework as much as possible. So thank you, Mr. Ralston, for helping maintain the course for this creepy ghost story to find new life here in our unfolding year of 2025. And thanks to the fine folk at Project Gutenberg for providing us with your invaluable archive of public domain documents.
A thank you to Whitney R. Holp for submitting your short story Sweeter Than Honey, I'm glad to have you onboard, and thanks for coming along as we sail forward through the Fall with yet another issue developing at this very moment. What began as a very personal issue for me last month in October, considering we hadn't run a proper Hall0ween issue for a couple of years [see: Fractal Blood Issue [# 41] soon the issue become even more personal with the accompaniment of Whitney R. Holp, Steven Craig Hickman, and John Shirley. My short piece "I Have a Mouth, and Must Not Scream," serves as a minor bridge article, from an editorial viewpoint, a habit that may or may not survive itself, depending on how things shape themselves moving forward from here.
The following short story The Telltale Gift, by Shaun Lawton, is my flash fiction offering in honor of our scaredy cat, Ranger, who's five now, and which I wrote this silly little piece for my own amusement, and while its clocking in at 940 words, I'm reminded of one of the freezine's optimal tenets, that of rendering fiction into micro doses, for a world on the run that honestly, we can't even be that certain reads at all.
A big shout out of appreciation for Steven Craig Hickman, your bright little fish of flash fiction I caught swimming upstream from my position anchored in the metaverse comes as a sweet surprise, and I appreciate your willingness to be a contributor to our fully realized archival metaclipper of hand-picked documents, all set sail upon the waves of time. Over the past sixteen years here, we've amassed a motely crew of word-slingers and perfected practitioners of the craft of sleight-of-hand with mirror-neurons, now well known among us as one of the oldest tricks in the ever expanding book of dreams we're all caught up in here together. That was just my weird way of saying welcome to the fold. You are now archived online with the rest of the motley crew of digital dreamers and misfits.
Once again my sincere gratitude goes out to my old word-slinger outlaw partner, John Shirley, for contributing your short story Empty Bottles to this sudden outpouring of a Fall issue. I believe it counts as your 19th tale tacked on to our old crusty pirate board, here. I'm just surprised I was able to get these stories up and into an issue. However, I'm pleased with the results as another short, sharp shock of an issue has emerged for posterity and our own lazy re-examination, should the pace of our respective lives slow down just enough or afford us with the opportunity to do so.
The whole point of a science fiction fanzine being rendered into one major url artery on the world wide web—https://freezineoffantasyandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/ ,
easily accessible on any smart screens, as a public service free of charge, it was started on a lark, and now today after all these years of building its own sublegacy to the expanding frontier of the cyberweird, I'm grateful to all the readers and contributors and artists and rebels who've come along for the ride, committed to our fullest to the cause of unbridled literary imagination, and the freedom to read the striking sort of speculative fiction that grabs our attention and won't let go, at no financial cost, until we politely ask if we can take a breath.
That's the reason this blog masquerading as an official website remains here for us, the fans and readership of all the greatest writers this world has ever known, and those far and few between of us who long ago were sworn to the dream. This cyberzine has been incepted and fully supported by one such individual, and maintained with occasional upgrades over the past sixteen years, and may be subject to continuation or abandonment; it could fall to the escalating or non-negotiable third party hosting image costs syndrome, or it may continue to flourish for years to come, depending on the delicacy of finances and a host of other factors we can't get into here, so barring any other manner of interruption that may present itself in life during these turbulent of times, I'll be here to see you all on the other side for the next issue.
Honestly, I'm as surprised as the next person that the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is still here, and grateful that it means most of us going along with it are still here, too. Thanks to the host of writers and contributors I've come to think of as my friends over the years, those who have allowed me to plunder their cache of stories, or who have graciously submitted their own tales for consideration in the Freezine. I'm still here hoping to put together an even better issue than the ones that came before, so please don't ever let go of the dream, hang on to yourself, and if need be, take charge of your life. Otherwise, congratulations for keeping it together this far. After all, each and every one of us is the Star of our own story. We're all in this one big thing together. So keep your own faith. And don't stop reading.
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