DeKalb, IL – Hugo Award-winning editors and publishers Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas are launching a Kickstarter in July for their Hugo Award-winning professional online science fiction and fantasy magazine Uncanny Magazine, covering the magazine’s Year Four, including the Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction double-sized, guest-edited issue. Each issue of Uncanny contains new and classic speculative fiction, podcasts, poetry, essays, art, and interviews. Uncanny Magazine is raising funds via Kickstarter to cover some of its operational and production costs for its fourth year and the special issue. Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction will be an issue of Uncanny Magazine 100% written and edited by disabled creators– an official continuation of Lightspeed Magazine’s immensely popular and award-winning Destroy series of special issues. The Kickstarter will launch July 24 and run through August 23.

Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction will be in the same vein as the previous Destroy special issues, this time featuring editors, writers (both solicited and unsolicited), and artists with representation from all across the sliding scale of disability. There is already a stellar team of guest editors for the special issue which includes:

Editor-in-Chief/Fiction Editor: Dominik Parisien
Editor-in-Chief/Nonfiction Editor: Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
Reprint Editor: Judith Tarr
Poetry Editor: S. Qiouyi Lu
Personal Essays Editor: Nicolette Barischoff
Cover: Likhain

“We at Uncanny are absolutely thrilled to be taking over the Destroy series of special issues from Lightspeed Magazine. We are so honored that Lightspeed Magazine Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams trusts us enough to pass the torch so we can publish Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction with a phenomenal roster of guest editors who we know will find some amazing contributors. We feel this is an excellent fit for Uncanny’s mission of featuring passionate SF/F fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, and provocative nonfiction, with a deep investment in our diverse SF/F culture. We publish intricate, experimental stories and poems with verve and vision, from writers from every conceivable background. With the hard work of the best staff and contributors in the world, Uncanny Magazine delivered everything as promised with our Years One, Two, and Three Kickstarters, and we are ecstatic that Year Four will feature Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. So far, pieces from Uncanny Magazine have been finalists for 28 different awards including Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Uncanny Magazine has won a Best Semiprozine Hugo Award, a Parsec Award for our podcast, and Hao Jingfang’s Uncanny Magazine story “Folding Beijing” (translated by Ken Liu) won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette. We couldn’t have done all of this without the amazing support of our Kickstarter community, whom we call the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps after our logo mascot. This is also their magazine, which is why we’re running the Uncanny Magazine Year Four/Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter,” Lynne says.

In 2014, Lightspeed Magazine conducted a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund its first special issue, Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which ended up raising more than 1000% of its original goal. In 2015, Lightspeed conducted another successful campaign to fund Queers Destroy Science Fiction! and in 2016 to fund People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!, both performing similarly to WDSF. Likewise, Uncanny Magazine has previously run Kickstarters for its first 3 years, each time fully funding and reaching all of the stretch goals.

Uncanny Magazine issues are published as eBooks (MOBI, PDF, EPUB) bimonthly on the first Tuesday of that month through all of the major online eBook stores. Each issue contains 5-6 new short stories, 1 reprinted story, 4 poems, 4 nonfiction essays, and 2 interviews, at minimum.

Material from half an issue is posted for free on Uncanny Magazine’s website (built by Clockpunk Studios) once per month, appearing on the second Tuesday of every month (uncannymagazine.com). Uncanny also produces a monthly podcast with a story, poem, and original interview. Subscribers and backers receive the entire double issue at the beginning of the issue’s first month before online readers.

For more information, interview requests, or guest blog invitations, please contact Lynne and Michael Thomas at [email protected]

Uncanny Magazine Staff:

Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas guide the magazine as Publishers and Editors-in-Chief. Four-time Hugo Award winner Lynne is the former Editor-in-Chief of Apex Magazine (2011-2013) which was a finalist for three Hugo Awards during her tenure. She co-edited the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords with Tara O’Shea, as well as Whedonistas with Deborah Stanish, and the Hugo Award finalist Chicks Dig Comics with Sigrid Ellis. She co-moderated the two-time Hugo Award-winning SF Squeecast and contributes to the Hugo Award finalist Doctor Who: Verity! Podcast. She is currently a finalist for two Hugo Awards and two Locus Awards for her work on Uncanny Magazine.

Hugo Award-winner Michael was the former Managing Editor of Apex Magazine (2012-2013). He also co-edited the Hugo Award finalist Queers Dig Time Lords with Sigrid Ellis and Glitter & Mayhem with John Klima and Lynne M. Thomas. He is the moderator for Down & Safe: A Blake’s 7 Podcast. He is currently a finalist for two Hugo Awards and two Locus Awards for his work on Uncanny Magazine.

Michi Trota is Uncanny’s Managing Editor. She is a writer, editor, speaker, communications manager, and community organizer in Chicago, IL. Michi writes about geek culture and fandom, focusing primarily on issues of diversity and representation, on her blog, Geek Melange. She was a featured essayist in Invisible: An Anthology of Representation in SF/F (edited by Jim C. Hines) and is a professional editor with fifteen years of experience in publishing and communications.

Uncanny’s Parsec Award-winning podcast is edited and produced by Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky. Erika is a founding member and producer of the Doctor Who: Verity! podcast. She also co-hosts The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 and is a frequent panelist on The Incomparable. Steven is one of the three hosts of the popular Doctor Who podcast Radio Free Skaro, as well as a co-host of another Doctor Who podcast called The Memory Cheats. They co-host together the Lazy Doctor Who podcast.

Uncanny Magazine’s Reprint/Poetry Editor/Interviewer Julia Rios is a writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in several places, including Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, and Goblin Fruit. She was a fiction editor for Strange Horizons from 2012 to 2015, and is co-editor with Alisa Krasnostein of Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, and the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction series. She is also a co-host of the Hugo Award finalist podcast, The Skiffy and Fanty Show, and has narrated stories for Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders, and poems for the Strange Horizons podcast. To find out more, visit www.juliarios.com.

Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction Guest Editors:

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a partially deafblind speculative fiction writer and disability activist. Her short fiction is included in Upside Down, Inverted Tropes in Storytelling, Fireside Magazine, and Ghost in the Cogs. She also writes for tabletop roleplaying games, and was part of the ENNIe award winning staff for Dracula Dossier. Her nonfiction has been included in The Boston Globe, Uncanny Magazine, Terrible Minds, and many other venues. She teaches disability representation at Writing the Other, and recently spoke at the New York Public Library on this topic. She is the assistant editor at Fireside Magazine. She has a Masters in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College, and uses it to critique media representation of disability from all mediums.

Dominik Parisien is the co-editor, with Navah Wolfe, of The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, which is a finalist for the Shirley Jackson and Locus Awards, and the forthcoming Robots vs Fairies. He also edited the Aurora Award-nominated Clockwork Canada: Steampunk Fiction. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, ELQ/Exile: The Literary Quarterly, Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories, as well as other magazines and anthologies. His fiction has twice been nominated for the Sunburst Award. He is a disabled, French Canadian living in Toronto.

Judith Tarr… hates writing bios of herself. She would rather write historical fantasy or historical novels or epic fantasy or the (rather) odd alternate history, or short stories on just about any subject that catches her fancy. She has been a World Fantasy Award nominee for her Alexander the Great novel, Lord of the Two Lands, and won the Crawford Award for her Hound and the Falcon trilogy. She also writes as Caitlin Brennan (The Mountain’s Call and sequels) and Kathleen Bryan (The Serpent and the Rose and sequels). Caitlin published House of the Star, a magical-horse novel from Tor, in Fall 2010. The paperback appeared in November of 2011. She is dancinghorse on LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter.

Nicolette Barischoff was born with spastic cerebral palsy, which has only made her more awesome. Her fiction has appeared in Long Hidden, Accessing the Future, The Journal of Unlikely Academia, Podcastle, and Angels of the Meanwhile. She regularly writes about disability, feminism, sex- and body-positivity, and how all these fit together. Her personal essays on these topics get read way more than her fiction does, which is only a little annoying. She regularly collaborates with visual and performance artists to promote normalization of visibly disabled bodies. She’s been on the front page of CBS New York, where they called her activism public pornography and suggested her face was a Public Order Crime.

S. Qiouyi Lu is a writer, editor, narrator, and translator; their fiction and poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons and Uncanny, among other venues, and they currently edit the quarterly speculative flash fiction/poetry magazine Arsenika. They are a dread member of the Queer Asian SFFH Illuminati and enjoy destroying speculative fiction in their spare time. They live in Los Angeles, California with a tiny black cat named Thin Mint. Find out more at s.qiouyi.lu or follow them on Twitter at @sqiouyilu.