Afterthought: Mumtaz Science Fiction Night

I’m becoming notorious for my length miscalculations. After a slight systematic error when compiling stories for Nova 20 forced us to postpone two stories to the next issue and after I overrun my 30 minute reading at the Festival der Liebe by mere 50 %, I managed to even top this during the Science Fiction Night in the beautiful Mumtaz Taj Mahal in Second Life. A little too eager to read my novelette “The Spirts” completely I almost overstretched the patience of my partner of the evening. ambient musician Jan Pulsford aka Jana Kyomoon. Well, almost. After playing a short intermezzo between the two parts of my reading, she was still in good mood enough to play another set of 40 minutes after I was finally finished. Thanks for that, Jana! In the end, I think, all were satisfied and the event was well-received by about 30 visitors in the course of the night. Above avarage for cultural events in SL! Freya and Voodoo. the builders and owners of the Mumtaz, are interested in further events.

To all those whose patience I’ve stretched in recent events: I pledge to make it better next time. There are ideas to organize a music night in the Mumtaz on Friday, March 22nd. This time Jana will be the main and the starting act and I will wait very, very patiently. Promised! More news here soon.

Below some impressions of the evening as I experienced it.

Notes on the Mumtaz Science Fiction Night

It’s just 18 months ago that my fellow writer Thorsten Küper aka Kuperpunk Korhonen first introduced me to cultural events in the 3d Internet world of Second Life. Since then I not only took part in numerous single and group readings and some live music performances but also extensively explored the potentials of a virtual world and met a lot of interesting people from around the world online. On January 19th I will for the first time organize an event in Second Life myself. The story “The Spirits” that I’m going to read – my second work originally written in English – was partly inspired by the music and websites of Native American artist John Two-Hawks who in Euope became known through his collaboration with the Finnish band Nightwish. John was so kind to send me a nice reply when I let him read the story that is dedicated to him.

The reading of the novelette will start at 1:00 pm Second Life Time resp. 22:00 central European time in the Mumtaz, a wonderful recreation of the Taj Mahal in Second Life. Renowned ambient musician Jan Pulsford aka Jana Kyomoon will join me with a live set. The location is at

http://surl.com/secondlife/Danbi/118/168/28

Story published in Axxón

My story “The Last Days of Eternity” has just been published, in Spanish translation by the versatile and brilliant Claudia de Bella, in issue #238 of the renowned Argentinian sf webzine Axxón.  Thanks to editor Eduardo Carletti for my first publication in Spanish and to Richard Kunzmann who created the English version that the translation is based on. The story has already been published in the Italian magazine Futoro Europa in 2005. It’s also the title story of my first story collection published by Wurdack in March 2012.

Mumtaz Science Fiction Night on January 19th

It’s just two months ago that I first visited the Mumtaz, a wonderful recreation of the Taj Mahal in Second Life, and I’m already close friend with its builders Voodoo Spyker and Freya Beresford and all the other fine people that visit its club and surrounding area regularly. I’m more than happy that my first Second Life event this year will take place there (the first one I organize myself). On Saturday, January 19th, I will read my story “The Spirits” completely – sections of it have been well-received at several SL events in the previous year. To make the evening perfect I invited renowned ambient musician Jan Pulsford aka Jana Kyomoon – who I met on two occasions in Virtual Cologne in 2012 – to join me and take the musical part.

Christian Günther has again created a promotional flyer with all required information. Feel free to use it for announcing the event, as long as you provide a link to my or Christian’s homepage.

New InterNova co-editor: Introducing Fran Ontanaya

With the ten year anniversary issue #20 the German science fiction magazine Nova – edited by Olaf G. Hilscher and ne – made a major step toward a full-professional magazine. For the first time in its history the renowned magazine is circulated by a major magazine distributor and will be published twice a year at fixed dates and with payments for its writers and artists. This has put an additional workload and time pressure on me. To make sure that InterNova, my other magazine project, can be continued and advanced as planed a search was started among the InterNova community for a second responsible editor. The perfect man for the job was soon found. It’s Fran Ontanaya from Spain and he has already started with his work that I’m sure will raise the quality and acceptance of our magazine.

Fran Ontanya has freelanced as proofreader, translator, cover and editorial column copywriter for the genre publisher La Factoría de Ideas. He also freelanced on web design and development. He wrote the first guide in Spanish about the internals of EPUB2 files and tried to convince publishers to replace the ISBN by automated metadata collection and hash ID numbers. Lately he has been contributing transcriptions, translations and proofreading of subtitles for TED talks. He often teams with a Polish friend who is also interested in futurism and transhumanism. Furthermore he created and moderate the euro4euro community at Reddit and operates the IRC channel, so he’s in contact with european sf fellows every day. He also contributes occasionally to unmannedspaceflight.com. His personal blog is at http://www.franontanaya.com/.

With Fran Ontanaya and me as main editors and with the assistance of Sven Klöpping (sf art/French language area) and Nils Müller (web design & programming) and of course our various proofreaders InterNova is facing a major update. From early March onward InterNova will be published as a regular e-zine with six issues a year that will be available in the web and as e-book downloads in PDF and epub formats. Each issue will contain about four stories in English or English translations, one or two essays or classic reprints and several stories in Spanish, French and/or German original, also small portfolios of international sf and phantastic artists. Fran will especially research for new interesting writers in the Spanish and Portugese language area. My main areas of interest are Western and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and the English-speaking world in general. More news about the update will follow soon.

New Uploads at InterNova

I’ve just uploaded the following stories in the fiction section of InterNova, the international science fiction e-zine that I now edit in collaboration with Fran Ontanaya from Spain:

Charkrienorrathip (Thailand): “Cataclym”

Thorsten Küper (Germany): “Haptic”

Cyril Simsa (England): “Poorly Formulated Questions”

After Achmed Khammas’ “Light”, Thorsten Küper’s story is my second attempt at translating fiction from German to English. Thanks for Tom Baxter for giving the translation a final polish.