Those of you who were on social media over the weekend may have seen the launch of a new crowdfunded anthology. It will be called Accessing the Future, and it is being published by The Future Fire, the same fine people who brought you Outlaw Bodies and We See a Different Frontier. It aims to publish, “speculative fiction stories that interrogate issues of disability—along with the intersecting nodes of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class—in both the imagined physical and virtual spaces of the future.” The book will be edited by TFF’s Djibril al-Ayad, and by Kathryn Allan, a Canadian academic who, rather spectacularly, has been inaugural recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.

Djibril should need no introduction, having the fine track record of the previous anthologies behind him. Kathryn has also produced two works. Her PhD thesis was Bleeding Chrome: Technology and the Vulnerable Body in Feminist Post-Cyberpunk SF, and she is also the editor of Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure, which pretty clearly indicates her interest in science fiction about disability issues.

Kathryn’s thesis is particularly dear to me as one of the four books it focuses on is Tricia Sullivan’s Maul, the only book ever to have a quote from Emerald City on the front cover.

More importantly for you folks, one of the higher level rewards (at $75) is an ebook bundle described as follows:

All three Futurefire.net anthologies (Outlaw Bodies, We See a Different Frontier, Accessing the Future), and the five volumes of Lyda Morehouse’s multiple award-winning AngeLINK series from Wizards Tower Press, *plus* a revised version of her short story “The Case of the Missing Devil Child”, set in the same universe (which is not available elsewhere), all in DRM-free e-books, in the format of your choice.

Further up the list at $250 you can find:

Lyda Morehouse (author of the multiple award-winning AngeLINK series) will name a character after you (or a person of your choice) in a forthcoming work set in the AngeLINK universe. You will also receive the Accessing the Future anthology in trade paperback and DRM-free e-book.

So yeah, this is a project that Wizard’s Tower — specifically Lyda and myself — have a vested interest in. It also means that I need to get Resurrection Code and “The Case of the Missing Devil Child” ready for publication. Fortunately that is well in hand.

Also I will be doing a Skype interview with Kathryn on Thursday, which will appear on the Salon Futura feed in due course. So if there are any questions about the anthology that you’d like asked…

Let’s see if we can get this one up to the $7000 stretch goal so that they’ll be able to offer SFWA rates and therefore get top quality professional writers submitting.