Introduction
by Sumana Harihareswara
Welcome to the Thoughtcrime Experiments anthology.
Our aim was to find mind-breakingly good science fiction/fantasy stories that other editors had rejected, and release them into the commons for readers to enjoy. My co-editor Leonard writes extensively on our methodology and aims in Appendix A, but the short version is: we did it. Here it is.
There isn’t a theme, really, just “what we like.” It turns out that we like political satire and family drama and detective thrillers and fables and fable deconstructions and the mysteries of debugging. It’s all good stuff and we hope you like it.
We received many awesome submissions. You’re just seeing a fraction of them because we couldn’t publish them all. Appendix A is a step-by-step guide showing you how you can do it too, with a few thousand dollars and some sweat.
This is now your anthology. Everything’s licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike. You can remix the art, the fiction, and even this introduction. If you do cool things with Thoughtcrime Experiments, please let us know so we can rejoice.
Or just let us know if the anthology rocks and you loved reading it. That’s what we’re going for.
Acknowledgments
Rachel Chalmers liked this project so much that when we announced it she offered to pay $200 so we could publish an additional story. And she did, and that’s what happened.
Brendan Adkins helped with story selection, and then with proofreading, and then with layout.
Susie, John, and Maggie Chadwick made the cover photo possible.
Special thanks to Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Jed Hartman, and John Joseph Adams, for inspiration, encouragement, and precedent.
Thanks also to Zed Lopez, the Creative Commons community, Mako Hill & Mika Matsuzaki, Mel Chua, Joe Wahrhaftig, Alexei Othenin-Girard, Rohit Khare & Smruti Jayant Vidwans, Kevin Maples & Beril Guvendik, Susan McCarthy & Daniel Gunther, Julia Bernd & Michael Ellsworth, Kaolin Fire, Chris East, our families, and the Gmail developers.
Thanks finally to all our great authors and artists, and to everyone who submitted a story or announced the anthology.
