After a disastrous February for genre short fiction that we’d all rather forget I thankfully get to redact, well, not redact, but I do get to announce that Realms of Fantasy magazine is not closing. SF Scope reports that Warren Lapine’s press, Tir Na Nog, has purchased the magazine from Sovereign Media. To quote from the SF Scope post:
Lapine is not anticipating any changes that will be visible to the public. Realms [of Fantasy] will continue paying authors the same rates, on acceptance, and leave the editors in place. He hopes to have his first issue out in May. “Our plan is to miss only one issue. The next on the schedule would have been 15 March, and for obvious reasons, that’s not going to happen.”
This does mean that Lapine’s announced magazine Fantastic Stories of the Imagination will not be launched at this time. Also, subscribers to Lapine’s DNA Publications magazines will have their subscriptions transferred over to Realms of Fantasy. I’m very glad to see that the editorial staff is staying in place. Hopefully they will have a smooth transition to a new publisher and we’ll see new issues of Realms of Fantasy soon.
In other news, HarperCollins has announced a new science fiction imprint: Angry Robot Books. The imprint will start will four titles this year from Chris Roberson, Kaaron Warren, Lauren Beukes, and Tim Waggoner. Their mission is to “publish the best in brand new genre fiction – SF, F and WTF?!” There is more detail as to what this means here.
Given that Games Workshop is shopping Solaris around, it’s good to see an announcement for a new imprint in this day and age. Although, I wish that Angry Robot Books was publishing more robot books (two fantasy, one science fiction, and one horror), but it’s early days and I’ll keep an eye on them, too. Maybe if we’re nice they’ll promise to do one angry robot book a year. Hey! Maybe I can edit an annual series of anthologies of original stories about angry robots for them?