001: A New Age Dawns
The age of X is over. The time of the newsletter has come.
Not really. We’re still around on all your favourite (and least favourite) social media sites, but the slightly weird though not unexpected alliance of Silicon Valley libertarians and techno fascists seems intent on destroying the internet for all of us. The cyberpunk future that Gibson predicted might at least have been an interesting hellscape to live in, but I have to agree with the person who said that Philip K. Dick was the most prescient science fiction writer because everything in his futures was annoying, disruptive, and inconvenient. I think about that every time I’m trying to read a Warhammer 40K Wiki entry and have to close down an advert for face cream every seven seconds.
Given that the internet in general is a depressing pit of shit these days, I’m going to start off our first newsletter with something positive we managed to use it for. Throughout April this year we ran a fundraiser for Medical Aid for Palestinians, an organisation that does what it says on the tin. It started as myself and Karlo just seeing the devastation and genocide unfolding in Gaza and wanting to do whatever tiny thing we could to help ease the suffering in whatever capacity we could. So we decided to donate all our April subscription money to MAP. It quickly snowballed, with some of our authors asking for their story payments to be donated, other magazines like Crepuscular and Reckoning Mag also donating their own April subscription money, as well as a whole bunch of individuals seeing the call and donating their own money. In the end we raised over £2600 GBP (over $3300 USD), which honestly blew me away. Ever since launch Seize The Press as an organisation has had anti-imperialist values at its core, and while nothing we can do just here can bring about an end to such a horrifying structural problem as the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the oppression of the Palestinian people, we’ll continue to do what we can and try and make the world a slightly less shit place.
That genocide is still going on, so if you can I’d encourage you to donate some money to MAP, who are still doing incredible work in Palestine. You can donate easily on the MAP website.
Issue #10 is out now and available in full for subscribers!
This issue whips ass, if I do say so myself. A few of the stories are free online already, including:
“Manywhere, Manyone, Manything” by NM Whitley, a crazed oddball science fiction story about a spacefaring lizard queen who navigates her ship via drug-induced visions, gets shipwrecked on a foreign planet and is tortured by nefarious akephaloi.
“Unbirthday Means You Wish Yourself Unborn” by Avra Margariti, a horror tale “of revenge and unmaking…about the vivisected shape of the world once it refuses to accommodate you.”
“Brick City, Stick, City, Straw City” by Nika Murphy. Our first hopeful story! A gritty, grimy kind of hope that earns its ending with its unflinching prose and genuinely thoughtful storytelling. And in Nika’s words, “a story about a guy so horny he’d topple an authoritarian government just at the chance to have a woman he met one time maybe sit on his face.”
Also out are two new fantastic reviews from our resident critic Zachary Gillan, of Liliana Colanzi’s cyberpunk collection You Glow in the Dark and Seán Padraic Birnie’s collection of destabilising ontological horror I Would Haunt You if I Could; in non-fiction we also have a wonderful essay from Neal Auch that pokes at the flesh of meat horror by way of Burroughs, Goya, and Agustina Bazterrica; and a bloody brilliant and fascinating interview with Carson Winter, author of Soft Targets and The Psychographist, as well as the short story “Canonical Victims” that appeared in Issue #7 of Seize The Press.
Also in Issue #10 but not available publicly yet are a really unsettling and fucked up vampire tale from debut short story writer Curtis Hayden Hill; cosmic horror from the indomitable Victor Forna; an anonymous essay about murder kink; and a new review of Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool from Josh Pearce. If you want to read the rest of the issue now, as well as get the upcoming August issue (and indeed every new issue) in full as soon as it’s released, you can subscribe on our Patreon.
That’s about all from me, so here’s Karlo with a short story recommendation for you. If you’ve ever been in a Discord server with Karlo, you know he has a notorious reputation for posting links to the most god awful stories (“Not today Satan” is a common refrain whenever he posts a link), but take my word for it this time that it’s not a literary rickroll, this story is fantastic.
“The Dust Eater” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #403) by Adam Breckenridge is why I read fantasy — for precisely this feeling of awful wonder. I've often compared fiction to an attempt to capture the sense of experiencing a particularly vivid dream in words, and “The Dust Eater” evokes this very feeling. Partly this is because it's a story about what is erased, unsaid, forbidden. Our narrator — unnamed, or perhaps more accurately, overwritten by the reincarnated soul of unpersoned poet, Offas — has been condemned to a singular execution: death by dust.
Ever since she became the vessel for part of Offas's soul, she has been suspect. Her mother insists on taking her to the great engines that extract people's sins in order to power their great city. This suspicion of wickedness increases when she takes Setarcos as her lover. Poor Setarcos, doomed to be no one, to be a ghost yet living flesh, and all because his father castrated him in a fit of zealotry.
The lovers meet in the shadows of two temples, and despite Setarcos being only able to love her with his mouth, with his tongue, she becomes pregnant. They both agree to reveal their transgression and are arrested and condemned to death.
Setarcos is condemned to death by starvation. Our narrator — after delivering her daughter, a creature of mist, of words, of absences, immortal — is sentenced to eat dust until dead. In a city that prides itself on the sophistication of their executions, she has been afforded a great honor and a great disgrace. With the eyes of the whole city upon her, anticipating her death, she feels Offas stir within her and realizes how she can defy her doom.
I love how this story is strange, how the city feels alien. Uncanny. But in its stark amorality, in its ugliness, recognizable. Which makes our narrator's and Setarcos's defiance all the more precious and needed. Doomed though it may be, it is possible to take a stand, even in the face of imminent death.
— read “The Dust Eater” by Adam Breckenridge here.
That’s all from the first Seize The Press newsletter, stay tuned for more goings on, look after yourselves, and be good to each other.
Jonny & Karlo