I was just reading an article about how NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 and thinking that it was forever from now. Only, it’s like twelve years, which, as government agencies go is practically tomorrow.

It’s just that after eight years I’m still not used to living in the twenty-first century. There’s no jetpack, but all the science-fiction dates are just around the corner. I mean, how many stories have you read where something is set in 2024 or 2041. They sound really far away and all furturistic, except they really aren’t.

At last year’s Readercon I wound up on a panel talking about near-term SF and one of the things I said was that I counted stories as near-term right up through 2070 because there’s a fair chance that I will still be alive then. My grandmother is nearly 103 and still lives alone, so I figure 2070 ought not to be a problem for me.

Although we talk about how much has changed in the last hundred years, look at how much hasn’t. Sure there’s tech that a teenager in 1920 would not believe possible, but the structure of society hasn’t shifted out of recognizable forms. Shifted, yes, but most people still live in the same family structure as one hundred years ago. Women worked then, but not as often as their husbands.

It’s making me understand the whole mundane SF movement a little more. It’s not that I have less fascination with deep space colonies, it’s just realizing that it’s much, much farther away than I’d like to think it is.

So, I’m re-examining my SF now, taking trends from the past and trying to project them from today forward instead of just thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if?” I mean, what was the last SF story you saw that had any form of social networking? Darn few of them, aren’t there. They exist, but that part of our present doesn’t show up as often in the future as FTL.

Can you imagine a murder-mystery where the serial killer Twitters?

I gave my nephew the first book in the Strongbow Saga and the moment he finished it, he made his dad go to the bookstore to get book two. He’s been whining, wondering when book three would come out.

Here’s the answer.

The editor at IGMS asked me to pass this along to you. I think highly of him, and he’s offering free fiction. How could I say no?

When you have something great, you want everyone to know. So you tell people about it. You share it. You pass it along to friends everywhere. Well, that’s what we’re doing with InterGalactic Medicine Show. We want to make sure everyone has had a chance to check out what we’re doing, so we’re offering up a sampling of our stories – for free.

During the month of February we are going to make one story from each of our first four issues available at no charge. Two stories will be set free on February 1st, and two more on February 15th. Just visit www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com and explore the table of contents; the free stories will be clearly marked.

Issue one’s free story will be “Trill and The Beanstalk” by Edmund R. Schubert, issue two’s will be “Yazoo Queen” by Orson Scott Card (from his Alvin Maker series), issue three’s “Xoco’s Fire” by Oliver Dale, and issue four’s “Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” by Eric James Stone. Each story is fully illustrated by artists who were commissioned to create artwork to accompany that tale — as is every story published in IGMS.

“Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” will also be featured in the upcoming InterGalactic Medicine Show anthology from Tor, which will be out this August (we wanted you to get a sneak peek of the anthology, too). However, the other three stories aren’t available anywhere except the online version of IGMS.

It’s really quite simple. Great stories. Custom illustrations. Free. We’re pleased with and proud of the magazine we’re publishing; now we’re passing it along to our friends and telling them about it. We hope you’ll enjoy it and do the same.

Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com

And for those of you who read Shades of Milk and Honey, most of the characters in the book got their names from friends. Edmund gave his first name to Mr. Dunkirk.