Spontaneous ∂erivation

An update to the glorious trainwreck that is William Sanders and Helix SF Magazine.

Over at Rachel Swirsky’s That which deranges the senses, the writers whom Sanders has either called “pantiwadulous”, or denied their requests to remove stories from his archive, have banded together. The result is Transcriptase, a mirror of Helix—without the racist lunatic at the wheel, of course.

And yes, this effort is entirely legal—the Helix contract doesn’t disallow stories being placed in other web archives.

So visit Transcriptase and take a peek at the wonderful stories there—and all packaged in a far better website, too.

Goodbye, Sanders. Thanks for playing.

Is it worth it to submit to some place or other in the mere hopes of publication?

As the worms turned up from Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly’s recent wankery show, sometimes it is decidedly not.

Come with me as we explore a trail of

• racism, bigotry, and rejection letters;
• the acts of nonprofessional spewage from an editor of a Hugo-nominated semi-prozine;
• what happens when your contract with your publisher is not well-examined;
• and how to deal with the blatant wankery.

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