Accelerating to Maximum Velocity

A little over a year ago, I posted about Tales of the Talisman magazine going on hiatus. At the end of the post, I made a cryptic reference to discussions with Hugo-nominated editor Jennifer Brozek at LepreCon 41 in Phoenix about about a possible book project. Also at LepreCon was New York Times Bestselling Star Trek author Dayton Ward. As it turns out, the three of us have something in common. We all edited anthologies in the Full-Throttle Space Tales Series published by Flying Pen Press.

This series included six volumes called Space Pirates, Space Sirens, Space Grunts, Space Horrors, Space Tramps, and Space Battles. Unfortunately, Flying Pen Press decided it no longer wanted to devote its energies to fiction and released the rights to the anthologies back to the editors. The plan we hatched at LepreCon was to assemble a “Best of” anthology that included the best stories from each of the books. The thought was we would run a Kickstarter and my company, Hadrosaur Productions, would publish the book. The beautiful artwork illustrating this post is based on a poster idea for the fundraiser by our original cover artist, Laura Givens.

Because each book in the series had a different editor, our plan was to pass the book we edited to the next person in line and they would vote on their favorite stories. This way, everything in the “best of” antho would be vetted by two professional editors. Our only rule was that if we wrote a story in an anthology we were reading, we couldn’t vote for ourselves.

Fast forward to October, when I was at MileHiCon in Denver, Colorado. I ran the idea by Carol Hightshoe, who edited Space Sirens and she was all for it. The surprise at that convention was when David Boop and Peter J. Wacks approached me with an idea. David was instrumental in getting the original series off the ground and had stories in several of the books. Peter was working with Kevin J. Anderson at WordFire Press. Their idea: the editors of the Full-Throttle Space Tales Books should assemble a “Best of” anthology and submit it to WordFire!

Cutting to the chase, we did assemble the anthology and submitted it. WordFire has graciously accepted it. All of the authors selected have been notified and are on board. The editors are now in the process of fine-tuning the anthology and I hope to get the final product to WordFire soon.

The anthology will be called Maximum Velocity: The Best of the Full-Throttle Space Tales. In it, you will find eighteen stories by such folks as C.J. Henderson, Irene Radford, Alan L. Lickiss, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Jean Johnson, Mike Resnick and Brad R. Torgersen. The collection is edited by Carol Hightshoe, Dayton Ward, Jennifer Brozek, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, and yours truly. I’ll keep everyone posted about the book as we get closer to release time. I hope you’re as excited as I am to go full-throttle again and accelerate to maximum velocity!