It is strongly recommended that you study the magazine before submitting. This will obviously greatly improve your chances of acceptance.

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Trent Walters, co-editor of the forthcoming Mundane-SF issue of Interzone, has posted an article addressed to writers planning on submitting: Mundane-SF blogspot.

Tags: INTERZONE • Mundane-SF

Geoff Ryman writes:

A year from now the May-June issue of Interzone will be devoted to Mundane SF. Guest edited by me with Julian Todd and Trent Walters, it will feature approximately 35,000 words of Mundane SF.

What makes a story Mundane? A few simple rules:

• no FTL travel or communications
• no aliens
• no time travel
• no parallel universes
• no immortality or telepathy

We believe that these SF ‘inventions’ are powerful myths whose presence may be drowning out some very important ideas. They may be entertaining to write and read about, but could there be something else we are all missing? The time comes when someone has to throw these babies out of the bathwater and see if there is life besides.

No matter how strong your convictions are regarding the inevitability of one, or all, of the above so-far non-existent phenomena, you can still write Mundane SF if you set your story between now and when the first of these becomes possible within your own personal belief system.

Just because we don’t want to see any of these usual elements doesn’t mean we don’t demand the highest standards of quality and sense of wonder expected from all good SF. We promise, however, that if your story so much as hints at the existence of any one of these banned memes it will not be accepted no matter how good it is. A great Mundane story will most likely focus on the future here on Earth. It can be near or far future. But any story that does not violate established facts or simply throw out experimentally supported theory can be Mundane. To see in more detail about what makes a story Mundane, visit mundane-sf.blogspot.com.

If you are struggling for ideas in the absence of spaceships, alternative realities, brain downloads, etc, try checking out some of the shocking developments that have been happening here on this Earth, according to the best scientists.

Stories are likely to be 2,500 to 5,000 words. You can submit by using the forms here.

Submissions must be in by 31st October 2007.

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Announcing two new windows for emailed story submissions, May and November. Detals in Guidelines.

NB: this applies to Interzone only.

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