Free online anthology: Thoughtcrime Experiments

I've been meaning for weeks now to link to Thoughtcrime Experiments.

It's a science fiction anthology, edited by Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson, featuring nine stories (including one by Mary Anne) and five pieces of artwork, plus some fascinating making-of info (see below).

You can read all of it for free online, either in HTML or as a downloadable PDF. (And if you're not sure what story to read, you can click their "random story" link and it'll pick one for you.) Or you can order a paper copy as a print-on-demand book from Createspace or Amazon for $5 plus shipping.

And the electronic version isn't only free to read; it's also Creative Commons licensed. They used the by-nc-sa license, which means you can freely redistribute and/or remix anything in the book, as long as you provide attribution, don't use it for commercial purposes, and distribute any changes you make under the same license. Want to turn one of these stories into a podcast, or a short animated film, or an epic poem? Go right ahead! Want to translate it into another language? Feel free! Want to write fanfic in the world of one of the stories? That's fine too. You can even download the source document files to make remixing easier.

But that's not all! Included in the book is a pair of appendices: "How to Do This and Why" and a sample contract. The main goal of the former is to demonstrate that you, too, can become an editor—but it'll probably also be of interest to those of you writers who are interested in editorial process and stats. It includes graphs of submissions, a sample rejection letter, and plenty of comments from the editors about why and how they put together this anthology.

So I'm hoping, as Leonard and Sumana are hoping, that in addition to providing a good read, this anthology will inspire others to embark on new publishing ventures.

Added later: Forgot to link to some blog entries (by the editors) about the anthology: Leonard's thoughtcrime category, and a couple of Sumana's recent entries: Let's Hear It For (Labors Of) Love, More Anthology Notes (the latter of which includes some author-gender and author-ethnicity stats).

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