Good news, everyone! Life Beyond Us is officially getting published on April 22 (Earth Day).
582 pages. 27 stories. 27 essays. Honestly, I didn’t expect it to be so enormous when I first conceived the project; it just grew under our hands – and it grew into beauty.
Life Beyond Us can already be pre-ordered on Amazon and has its Goodreads page (where the first reviews from those who’d received advance reading copies might appear soon). If you are a reviewer, a booktuber, a science journalist, etc., don’t hesitate to reach out to me for an advance reading copy.
There are going to be book launches, readings and other events – more about them soon. You can already tune in to the first one next week: Draxtor’s Second Life Book Club on January 18, at 9 p.m. Central European Time (noon Pacific Time). You can also watch the stream on YouTube. I’ll be there together with several authors – Lucie Lukačovičová, D.A. Xiaolin Spires and Peter Watts should be present – discussing the anthology with the show’s stellar moderator and mastermind Bernhard “Draxtor” Drax.
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Two years.
I contacted Lucas K. Law from Laksa Media Groups, whom I knew as author from one of his previous anthologies, in late December 2020, encouraged to pursue my idea by the positive reception of Strangest of All, which served as a proof of concept of an anthology combining SF stories and science essays following up on those stories. Lucas liked the plan and immediately began to improve upon it, we exchanged ideas, chiseled it, began contacting authors… Then it was time to prepare the Kickstarter campaign, run it, which was a job in itself, then hold the open submissions period (with a few hundred stories to read), start editing the arriving stories, start sorting out and editing the essays, go through further rounds of editing and proofreading, fulfill some of the rewards for the backers in the meantime, sort out all the administrative and financial stuff, start writing up online materials for educators to accompany the book, start planning events… It’s been crazy two years. I have scarcely written anything of mine, although I did translate two novels from English to Czech in the meantime, published one more paper for my PhD and wrote quite a few nonfiction articles.
Still; two years. And it’s not over; an important part of the work only starts once a book is published. So, if you like the idea, if you are curious about the book, spread the word. It’s greatly appreciated.
It’s one huge, huge book. And, hopefully, it might inspire some huge ideas.
