guidelines

From William Gibson's groundbreaking Sprawl trilogy to the Wachowski brothers' highly entertaining, if also highly derivative, Matrix trilogy, the literary subgenre known as cyberpunk has seen crossover success in just about every entertainment medium. Ditto for steampunk, which has even made its way into everyday forums such as home décor and fashion. Biopunk, on the other hand, has not yet seen nearly the amount of exposure as its literary kinfolk. One of the main reasons for this is undoubtedly the limited amount of work that this subgenre has produced thus far. For those who don't know, biopunk fiction, in short, looks toward a future (or at an alternate present) in which the biotechnology revolution affects everyday life. Look at it like this if it helps: cybernetics and cyberspace are to cyberpunk as biology and biotechnology are to biopunk. The "punk" comes from the subgenre's frequent use of dystopian settings and the political (or perhaps more accurately, apolitical) implications of the open-source philosophy to which many real-life biopunks (aka biohackers) subscribe. Some seminal works of biopunk fiction are the films Gattaca and Splice; the comic book serial Fluorescent Black by writer MF Wilson and artist Nathan Fox; and perhaps most importantly, the book Ribofunk by Paul Di Filippo, who has actually cited H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau as a precursor to the subgenre.

Morpheus Tales is looking for short works of biopunk fiction for an upcoming special. As always, try to think outside of the box. You don't have to steer entirely clear of the genre's main tropes (after all, not too many have been established), but we're not going to publish a handful of stories about clone armies alongside another handful about "Dr. Mephesto's four-assed turtle" and other such genetic oddities. Also, biopunk stories have for the most part taken on a dystopian tone so far, but there's nothing saying that this has to be the case. Try utopian, try ecotopian, try whatever you like so long as it's original and readable.

Deadline for submissions will be July 31, 2012.

Please put Biopunk Special Issue Submission in the subject of your email and send to: morpheustales@blueyonder.co.uk

Other than that, all regular Morpheus Tales submission guidelines apply: no simultaneous submissions, standard manuscript format, only high quality character- or plot-driven stories of no more than 3,000 words.

The Biopunk Special Issue will be available as an ebook and via print-on-demand services. Contributor copies will be in ebook format.

We are currently looking for writers and artists to submit their work. We are a non-paying market, but all successful submissions will receive a complimentary copy of the magazine. For some Special Issues this is in the form of a pdf ebook.

Please be aware we are looking for 1st British serial rights, 1st online rights. We no longer accept previously published work. Your work may also be published online.

Artists please contact us regarding our current needs. We are always looking for regular illustrators.

By submitting your work you are agreeing to these terms.

Please send submissions as word documents. All material should be in standard manuscript format:

12 point Times Roman, left justified, 1" margins all around, double spaced, paragraph indents, no space between paragraphs, with a header on each page giving your name, the title or a short form of it, and the page number.

Please send all submissions to:

morpheustales@blueyonder.co.uk.

Single Submissions Only.

One submission maximum at a time, please.

We DO NOT accept simultaneous submissions.

To give you some idea of what an editor has to go through, we've read through over a hundred stories in the past few weeks, and about eight to ten stories will appear in the next issue.

It's not that the other stories weren't any good, obviously some of them weren't, but some of them very good, they just weren't right for us.

Unfortunately it's difficult to say. We're not looking for one particular thing, otherwise it would be a lot easier. But there are a few simple rules that can help.

READ the writers guidelines. Sending in a submission that's well over the maximum word limit will not endear you to an editor. Sending in a type of story that the magazine doesn't publish is not much good either. Do your homework and, if you can, buy a copy of the magazine before submitting your work.

The easiest way to get rejected is to make mistakes. If an editor has to work hard to read your story then it's much more likely to be rejected. Make sure you check your submission for spelling errors and grammar, typos happen, but good proof-reading should remove most of them. If you need the services of a professional proof-reader we can recommend The Writer’s Services http://www.myspace.com/writersservices

Try to stick closely to the Standard Manuscript Format when submitting work, for more details:

Make your story stand out. You've got limited words, so make every one count. Make sure your story has something that makes it different, the plot, characters, style, anything that raises it above the level of the other stories the editor is likely to read that week. We sometimes read five or six stories a day, so you need to make your work memorable.

The best type of story is one that makes the reader feel something, whether it's amazement, fear, horror, joy…. Think about the stories you remember and why you remember them, then set out to create something like that.