Two Kickstarters For Writers I Like
Kickstarter is one of the best things to come out of the Internet in a while; it’s enabling artists everywhere to crowd-fund projects in a powerful, flexible way. Anything that rewards the die-hard fans with scalable prizes for donating and allows an artist to keep producting new work is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And there are two writers I like personally who have Kickstarter projects that I think you should take a look at.
The first is Tobias Buckell, who I’ve referenced in this blog previously a few times for his politics, but he also has the Crystal Rain universe – a genuinely diverse set of science fiction adventure novels. I forget who said it, but there was an essay somewhere that discussed that for a lot of sci-fi books, the reader had to wonder about the plague that had killed off all the blacks and Chinese and other non-white races, because none of them seemed to exist in space at all. Tobias’s universe has all sorts of interesting people of differing races.
His Kickstarter is for the fourth book in the series, which is a concern, but I know he’s a smart enough writer to make it accessible to newbies. Check out his Kickstarter here.
Then we have my old Clarion teacher Mary Anne Mohanraj, who writes some rather intense erotic fiction, and what she wants to do is to create an interconnected science fiction series where the world is ending and there’s a lot of fucking. To quote her pitch for Demimonde:
On a planet far, far away, tensions are rising. Men against men, men against aliens — the players in this game are complex, and the average citizen doesn’t really understand what’s going on. They just want to go on with their life: go to work, go home, make love to their wife. Or wives. Or husbands. Or indeterminate gender human and/or alien partners.
She’s only got 23 hours to go, and as with all Kickstarter projects if she doesn’t make her target the project fails, so I’d seriously check it out now if you’d like some nice hot squirmy writing.