Introduction by Lou Anders, Executive Editor, Bookface.com The anthology you hold in your hands has a unique history. It features some rather amazing stories. This is the introduction where I get to tell its own story. Welcome.
Before being selected for this anthology, each tale was chosen for display on a website called Bookface.com, a place with the auspicious mission of providing whole books for users to read right off their computer monitors. Bookface.com launched June 2, 2000, and we happily claimed thousands of happy readers reading thousands of wonderful titles, bona fide “real books” that you might find in a bookstore, provided to us from our generous publishing partners, large, medium, and small presses alike.
Along the way, however, Bookface.com displayed a small handful of hand-picked short stories, some original to our site and some that had seen prior publication in more traditional avenues. Writers like J. Michael Straczynski and Brian Hodge, John Grant and Graham Joyce, Terry McGarry and Paul Cornell, kindly tried out this new Bookface.com experiment, and their tales have proved to be enormously successful on our site. Short stories are, after all, an excellent introduction to the concept of online reading, a sort of “training wheels” for eBooks, and we are quite proud of them and the success that they have brought us.
Collecting the best of them into an honest-to-God book is as natural a progression as I can imagine.
In this sense, all the stories here are very much “outside the box,” having leapt from out of the computer screen into traditional ink and paper form.
But why settle for one meaning when a good title can afford you two?
Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the World Fantasy Convention in Corpus Christi, Texas, where I was able to spend several days with many of the writers anthologized here. We were still searching for a name for this collection, and I had put the word out among those involved that I was open for suggestions. Several unwieldy and not-quite-appropriate contenders were suggested, but nothing remarkable had so far presented itself. Still, we were all fully confident that the right name would emerge of its own accord in its own good time, as such things so often do.
A visit to the Corpus Christi Aquarium was jokingly seen as a possible source of inspiration, and every strange fish and crustacean was seized upon as fodder for a slew of titles. The most interesting of these would-be titles came from an exhibit detailing the way the male sea horse gives birth; this book very nearly having been named “What’s in Papa’s Pouch?”
Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and the hunt for the proper title continued. Later, as I lunched with two very talented authors, Fiona Avery and Tippi N. Blevins, we fell into trying to describe the common thread that ran through all the short fiction I had selected for Bookface.com. While the tales covered the spectrum, from mystery to fantasy to science fiction to horror, Fiona felt their commonality was that they were all tales that defied easy classification – stories that crossed genres and pushed envelopes and thumbed their noses at easy market categorizations. As she talked, I nodded my head enthusiastically, proclaiming, “Yes! Yes! They’re all stories outside of the box.”
And then we three stopped and looked at each other. The last piece in the puzzle snapped easily into place.
Outside the Box. A title that wonderfully encapsulates both the nature of the stories themselves and the transition they are making from the online reading experience of Bookface.com to this, our first print anthology. Voilà!
And here it is. Clothed in beautiful artwork from John Picacio, and nurtured through its inception by the kind advice of the anthology goddess Lee Martindale, a fine testament to the first year of Bookface.com and the people that made it all possible.
For those of you who have read these tales already, here is an edition that scores over the online version in one respect—you can carry it into the bathroom with you. For those just discovering these tales for the first time, you are in for the same treat that I experienced when I read them originally.
Happy reading.
— Lou Anders, Executive Editor, Bookface.com
