Brandon is a straight ally who is ethically opposed to any group having lesser rights than the majority. His work has appeared in several places including M-Brane SF, Byzarium, Everyday Weirdness, and Return to Luna. Together with Chris Fletcher of M-Brane, Brandon is editing an anthology, The Aether Age: Helios, which is due out this Summer.

Brandon is a Rissho Kosei-kai Buddhist who lives in the Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas area with his wife and daughters. His favorite movie is The Night of the Iguana, and his favorite book is Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer. In addition to his blog, he maintains a Twitter feed as @Nithska.

***

OA: Aether Age: Helios, the anthology you teamed up with OA member Chris Fletcher to create, is due out this summer. Can you tell us a bit about it? What’s the premise, and how did it develop?

BB: Aether Age started out as a conversation on twitter. From the beginning, I pushed the idea of ‘open sourcing’ the shared world and the stories written in it. That isn’t good terminology (we’re edging toward Liberated Lit.) but the idea is there. Something that recent Aether Age (AeA) observers may not realize is that the world bible was a collaborative effort too. Derek Goodman originally suggested an alternate Earth where space travel happened a long time ago, with a habitable Mars or such. From there I suggested that the Earth floated in a Niven-style gas torus, and the idea of an aether of sorts was born.

The aether was controversial at first and the torus idea was nixed, but the aether remained with the caveat that we’d not give a definitive rationale for the aether, only theories, until one of the theories in the cannon emerged as dominant. Those initial rap sessions included Neil Colquhoun, Rick Novy, T. J. McIntyre, Kaolin Fire, and Clifford Green. I know I’m leaving someone out, but the point is: AeA isn’t ‘writing in someone else’s world as some of the writers initially conceptualized it, but rather it is picking up the starting conditions this collaborative effort defined, and then further defining the world through the process of telling stories within it.

As for ‘What is Aether Age: Helios?’ It is the first in a trilogy that imagines the early introduction of a technology leads to industrial revolutions in the ancient world, roughly around 400BCE. Meanwhile the Earth has passed into a breathable aether into which mankind soon ventures.

The stories exist in this interesting space somewhere between short story and novel chapter, both discrete units and part of a greater whole.

The book will arrive this summer in both print and ebook formats, with unique covers for each format. The book has extensive quotations from the era, story art, and a timeline.

If we are successful, we’ll see Aether Age: Tartaros and Aether Age: Cline in the near future. And since AeA carries the license that it does, this universe is free for anyone to write in and any venue to publish, they just have to give attribution and release under the same license.

I should mention the multi-talented Chameleon Chamber Group remains on board to create music for the anthology and are reading the rough arc now. Voice actress T.C. Parmelee is also reading in preparation for the audio work. Both CCG & TCP should go on to be millionaires in their respective fields: they are amazing talents. I can say the same about the writers and M.S. Corley, our cover (and more) artist.

Working with Chris has been awesome, by the way. I think he’s the Schwarzenegger to my Devito: twins separated at birth. Of course I’m the short dumpy one. lol.

OA: You are one of the OA’s founding members, meaning you were there for the first discussions that led to the group forming. As a straight cisgendered male, why does a group like this seem important to you?

BB: Because hate is the cancer eating away at the heart of humanity. Which sounds grandiose, but I think it boils down to that. I have an unattributed quote taped to my laptop: “Act or Accept”. I like the simplicity and symmetry of this statement. Do I accept the world as it is? Then it is my responsibility to take action to change it.

OA: You say you’re a proponent of culture unfettered by excessive copyright. As a writer and editor, how do you hope to see your projects distributed? What is the ideal balance between free information and paid artists in your opinion?

BB: First, I believe creators should be able to make money on their creations. Bottom line. And I do use the phrase ‘excessive copyright’ because I’m not sure how some of these ideas scale. How would it work for Stephen King? At the least I suggest that if copyright exists past the life of the creator it should only do so to benefit that person’s children and grandchildren, not big media. At that point, creative works rightly belong to all of humanity. And, there is still money to be made on those works as is demonstrated by all those public domain book ‘apps’ on the Pre and iPhone, or on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. The Disneys of the world display their intellectual dishonesty when on one hand they make mounds of cash with their redactions of other people’s public domain creations, but then don’t think they should in turn contribute back to the culture from which they so profited. This is the failure of a very limited pro-mega-corporation take on modern commerce and culture. If only mega-corporations can own creative culture, it ceases by definition to be culture, but is rather a product parading as culture. If instead, future generations can expect to have today’s products freed of their copyrights, then that becomes a part of the cultural heritage that is not owned by anyone… or perhaps that is owned by all.

Ok, so getting off my soapbox and more to the point: short story writers don’t make much money at all. You know, if F&SF would just buy one of my stories I could finally buy that vacation home in Saint Martin! By applying a CC-BY-SA license, on a certain level it is throwing a conceptual bottle into the stream of cultural history. We’re not letting these works fall prey to time and vague/thorny copyright issues by specifically stating that they are freed of those copyrights. If someone takes my copyleft story, puts it in their book, and sells a 100k copies, you might object: you fool, you missed out on all that money! But in practice, if contributors are getting paid, I probably will too. And even if not, due to the license, this becomes 100k fingers pointed back to me. It’s a win-win for me.

Weather it is a physical book, or an ebook on the iPad or whatnot, people like to be able to go to a reliable source for their reading. Copyleft works do not function any differently when it comes to this transaction. I can make money on each of those. What it does ensure is that the media companies who own/stock the bookshelves (virtual or otherwise) never have exclusive control of the content therein.

OA: You do some local (Dallas/Ft. Worth area) work with a non-profit called SOS at Zac’s Ridge because they are LGBTQ friendly unlike many of the other charitable organizations in your area. What sort of work do that group do, and is it looking for new volunteers? How can interested people get involved?

BB: Let me just say first, in fairness, that I don’t know of any other charitable groups that are LGBTQ ‘unfriendly’. But the reality is this is the American South and many people who care enough to do volunteer work are Christian and there is a prevalent meme in many denominations that could be summed up as ‘Homosexuality is a sin’. This despite that Jesus never uttered a word about the subject.

I want to be clear that my criticism isn’t of Christianity –most of the gay & lesbian friends I have are Christian– but rather of this Old Testament view. If we went by that, we’d have to stone the neighbor when he mows his lawn on Sunday. It is easy for us to rationalize that this is an outdated idea because we can put ourselves in the neighbor’s shoes. I’m merely suggesting those inflicted with this meme make the next conceptual leap.

The Zac’s training is an ‘experience-based’ training, which means it is not a Tony Robbins ego gig or lecture, but really just a series of games that are played over the course of the weekend designed to lead the participant through a series of light-bulb moments. As a pretty self-aware and liberal sort of guy, the idea of ever doing something to me sounds like a workshop for rich WASPy housewives is just… well, crazy talk. But I swallowed my pride and judgments almost a decade ago (the training was born out of another non-profit which is where I originally attended) and discovered that even without a huge train wreck to deal with, I still found it a liberating experience. Because the trainee finds his/her own answers in the processes, there is never a time that someone dictates something like ‘you should be xyz’, hence it works for the one Buddhist in the room. Several LGB(I can’t say T unfortunately)Q people have attended and remain around as volunteers.

What else… Ah, it’s the sort of thing that you’d need to attend the training in order to be a training assistant. Which might sound odd, but I know Ms. Gretna Carrey and Mrs. Veda MacGregor and the others who started this thing: no one is on a payroll and they are just now doing the training at cost (Gretna would give it away for free if she could and did just that for a time, but it can’t continue on those terms). Bottom line, they are doing good work and the training changes lives: anyone who wants to test the waters should check out the website, sosinc.org, and each weekend they have the training there is a free session for anyone to attend for a couple hours on Saturday.

If you do check it out, I’m just going to say: this is DFW and most of the people anywhere here are Christian. So, though the training isn’t religious, most of the people attending it are, and they’ll share their content in that context. I’d say, if that is a challenge for you, that just as surely as I expect people ‘in the room’ to honor me for being Buddhist, or my friend for being gay, we should in turn honor those people for being true to their hearts. Not to erase the differences, but to find value in them.

OA: The first part of your new novel is going to appear in M-Brane SF. What’s that about, and what else is on the horizon for you?

BB: The working title is On the Demise of Captain Fantomas Patton-Guererro and Loss of La Amenoza Elegente. The part to appear in the M-Brane Double follows the titular incident as a crew of ‘Slicks’, men and women who wrangle kelpies and other fauna on the moon Shanama, attempt to survive the huge bulges of ocean that occur in high tide. The settlers in this story are descended from refugees of the tech singularity taking place in the background of my Abraham story from M-Brane SF #5. Incidentally, that is the issue of M-Brane that Tangents Online reviewed, and they really didn’t like my story. My first bad review: woo hoo! It also takes place in the same background as my story in Return to Luna. It’s a fun story, a multicultural space western that is more familial than ‘rag tag crew of misfits’. I hope people like it.

Other than that, I’ll keep writing stories as long as people will read them. Actually, I’ll probably write them anyway.

We’ll do the other two Aether Age books, if there is demand. So if you think we’re doing good work, please buy a bunch of copies when it goes on sale.

And last, we’re in talks now to launch a new magazine called Fantastique Unfettered. All I can tell you for certain is that it won’t be a monthly zine, but if we can manage quarterly, I’ll do it. All content will carry a CC-BY-SA license. I’d love to pay great rates to writers and artists, but again: right now this remains a labor of love and just as you can’t buy love, it usually doesn’t pay you back in cash either. Good with the bad, right? This zine would be the F to M-Brane‘s SF and we hope this will further establish the M-Brane empire as a source for great short genre fiction. Oh, and we can refer to it as ‘FU‘ for short. What’s not to love about that?

***

Thanks, Brandon! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Brandon’s work.

Chris and his longtime partner Jeff moved from St. Louis, Missouri to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 2007, after the restaurant they’d run together failed financially. Chris took that failure as an opportunity to reboot his creative writing side, and in February of 2009, started the magazine, M-Brane SF.

As one of the very first people to join The Outer Alliance, Chris has been an active Outer Alliance blogger and advocate from the start. In addition to M-Brane SF, he also recently edited an anthology of queer speculative fiction called Things We Are Not, which contains several stories by other Outer Alliance members. On the horizon, slated for a June 2010 release is another anthology to be published by Hadley Rille Books called The Aether Age, which Chris is co-editing with Outer Alliance member, Brandon Bell.

Chris keeps a personal blog at mbranesf.livejournal.com and is active on Twitter as mbranesf. He has two cats names Maus and Jack.

***

Would you tell us a bit about Things We Are Not? How many of the contributors are Outer Alliance members, and what kinds of LGBTQI themes are included in the collection?

I am very pleased with this book. It is my first such project, and I am really proud of the great work that the writers did for it. Nearly all of the writers in it ended up joining the Outer Alliance either early on or a bit later, including the straight allies, which I found very gratifying. I was pleased that some straight-identifying writers wanted to contribute to my queer book, and then even more so when they all supported the Alliance (which was founded right around the time that I was finalizing content and starting to promote the book).

The project formed when I decided that I wanted to read and publish some queer science fiction and realized that none of was showing up in the normal M-Brane slush. Though the zine is not queer-focused, I would have been happy to publish more queer material if I ever received any. So one day I decided to see if I could manage to do a stand-alone book. I put out a call for submissions and was amazed at the number of stories that showed up.

I decided from the beginning that I wanted the collection represent a lot of points of views and orientations. In particular, I didn’t want it to be too gay male-oriented or too focused on sexual matters or erotica. As it turned out, however, I didn’t need to think about it too much, nor apply any kind of quotas to my selections. It just happened to work out that the stories that I liked best also represented a lot of diversity. Several items are gay male stories, but just as many are about lesbian characters. Some of the other stories feature variations that are probably only possible in science fiction (a young man’s love affair with a giant sentient machine, for example). Some of them deal with other issues, such as reproduction and marriage, in a quite subversive way. One disappointment that I had with the selection of stories is that I did not end up with anything that I can point to as a “real” trans or intersex story. There are certainly some items in the book that get away from the gender binary, but which might do it in too science fictional a way to really satisfy someone looking for transgender content. It’s just the way it ended up this time, but if I ever do another queer anthology, I may make a more deliberate effort to find more stories that fit under the “T” in LGBT. I was a bit surprised that I didn’t see more of it when submissions were coming in.

You’ve been an active Outer Alliance member since the beginning. What has your experience with that been like? Do you have any goals or wishes for the future of the group?

I think I might have been the first or second person that joined it, literally moments after Natania Barron announced on Twitter that she wanted to start this organization. It just seemed like it was the right time for something like the Outer Alliance. As members recall, it started in part as a mobilization against the homophobic attitudes expressed by John C. Wright in his psychotic screed about the Syfy channel. But even if there had not been something really outrageous like that to stand against, I think it was still time to gather together queer and queer-allied writers and publishers into an association like this. A number of queer sf/fantasy groups exist that one can join—in fact, I belong to a couple of them—but they are mostly focused on visual media fandom and not so much on reading and writing. I don’t mean to knock movies or TV or fandom in general, but it’s really nice to have a group that is focused on the written genres, has a lot of creators in its membership, and which also has a pro-queer stance.

Since the group is still very new, it’s hard to know how it will grow or what it will be like in the future. We’ve already demonstrated that we can put together a respectable group action, such as the Pride Day on 9/1, and also our very measured and reasonable handling of the Flash Fiction Online controversy. The latter was really quite remarkable since no one was formally “in charge” of the situation and it could so easily have spiraled into a loud, ugly “fail” thing. So we’re already pretty good at things like that when they come up, and I expect we’ll have more chances to face bad situations or put together positive events as a group. Also, I see the Alliance potentially being a terrific networking resource for its members. I’ve already made contact with so many cool people that I did not know before, and I’ve enjoyed that a lot.

M-Brane SF has been going for several months now, and you’ve just put an anthology out. How hard was it to start these things? Do you have any advice for other individuals who might like to venture into the world of indie publishing?

It’s certainly been a lot of work in that it consumes a great deal of the time that I am not at my day job. But it gets easier with time, too. The monthly issues of the zine get easier each month because I learn new things about how to work better and more efficiently with each issue. If it were still as hard now to complete my tenth issue as it was to do the first one, then I probably would not have taken on the anthology. But I’ve found ways to work smarter and I now feel that I have the ability to do other projects like that anthology and still manage everything else. I can see it coming to a point where I will need help if I want to grow as a little indie publisher, but we’ll see how it goes. Right now, it doesn’t generate real income, and so it remains more-or-less a one-man show until I find a way to make some money from it.

I don’t know that my advice to anyone else that wants to venture into something like this would be any good. I am no expert. I just do what seems right and what seems to work, and then keep trying to learn from my mistakes and build on my successes. Most people who want to publish zines are basically out of their minds. It’s like some kind of chronic illness that can only be treated by publishing stuff. Fortunately, effective treatments are now within the easy reach of people who have computers and internet access. It’s become quite easy and inexpensive to launch a blog or a webzine or a publication like M-Brane SF where I am able to do electronic and print editions with no real up-front cost other than buying fiction. Even publishing a book using the new tools is not that difficult or costly. The biggest challenge seems to be getting the word out about what you are doing and convincing other people that it is good and worthwhile and that they ought to care about it. So you have to have a lot of patience and perseverance because people will probably not respond in great numbers right away. I am only just now starting to feel the beginnings of some progress toward the next level, so I am glad that I didn’t quit after a couple months.

You took a break from writing for several years in order to pursue a culinary career. Do you ever think about going back into the restaurant business? What are some of your favorite foods?

During the good years of my culinary career, I always did a little bit of writing but never in a way that yielded any finished manuscripts. I also toyed around with an early version of M-Brane that never got launched. During the last couple of years, where my day jobs are much less demanding, I’ve had the time and motivation to get more serious about it. Though I am in no way making any money off of writing or publishing yet, I have committed myself to the idea that I am publisher and a writer, and that’s what I do now as my real profession whether it pays the bills yet or not. I have no interest in returning to high-end restaurant work. I love cooking and still do it everyday at home, but I feel that I accomplished professionally everything that I could accomplish in that business and it no longer holds the appeal. My partner is also a fine cook (and gardener), and we enjoy doing that together at home nowadays. It’s hard for me to specify favorite foods because I am very curious about all cuisines and I move with great enthusiasm from one to the other. When I’ve had chances to travel abroad, I am the guy eating one of everything from the street vendors and the shabbiest dives so that I can learn something new. I’m sometimes mistaken for a food snob because I reject chain restaurants for various reasons, not all of them food-related. I’m not a snob at all, but I tend to be impatient with people who claim that they don’t like stuff that they have either never tried or not tried when properly prepared. Our everyday casual food around the house is currently pretty heavy on Mexican dishes, Asian-style items, curries, stews and pastas. These all have the virtue of being very economical yet delicious.

What’s next? Can we look forward to reading more anthologies in the future, or seeing you at any cons?

In addition to continuing the zine, I have a number of other book projects in the works. I recently announced The Aether Age, which will be an anthology of short fiction set in an alternate historical universe. Alliance member and writer Brandon Bell originally suggested the idea, and we are pretty excited about it. The shared universe will be a Creative Commons-licensed project that we hope will inspire some other projects as well. Hadley Rille Books has partnered with me as the publisher, and this should be a big benefit as far as getting the book distributed. We are aiming for June 2010 for this. I am also planning a couple of single-author short fiction collections. I can’t reveal details on these right now, though by the time this appears, I may have made an announcement or two. And there may be a second queer anthology, but a decision on that is at least several months away.

I definitely hope to make it to a con or two next year. I couldn’t fit any travel into the budget this year, but hopefully that will change, and hopefully I’ll be able to meet some Outer Alliance members in person!

***

Thanks, Chris! Join us next week for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out M-Brane SF and Things We Are Not, or consider submitting to The Aether Age.