Mythic Delirium Books has launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for the latest in its series of Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, “a home for stories that sidestep expectations in beautiful and unsettling ways, that surprise with their settings and startle with the ways they cross genre boundaries, that aren’t afraid to experiment with storytelling techniques.”
Mythic Delirium continues: “We started the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series in 2008. The first three volumes were met with all kinds of critical acclaim and award nominations. But then we lost our funding. In 2012, to bring the series back from the dead, we decided to publish Clockwork Phoenix 4 ourselves. We held our first ever Kickstarter, which was a smash success, raising over $10,000, thanks to the generous support of 270 backers… With the Clockwork Phoenix 5 Kickstarter, our purpose is not to rise once again from the ashes, but to see what we can accomplish when we start from a position of strength.”
The target for the new round is $11,000, with $1972 already raised at the time of writing from 55 backers, and 26 days to go. The Kickstarter page lists the accolades and recognition that the previous volume received: “tales from our book were nominated for the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the WSFA Small Press Award, and selected for the 2013 Locus Recommended Reading List, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2014, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, The Mammoth Book of SF by Women, Heiresses of Russ 2014: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, Imaginarium 3: The Best Canadian Speculative Fiction and Nebula Awards Showcase 2015.”
As this suggests, the new volume is likely to be weighted towards the weird, the speculative, and the fantastic, but there’s no reason to question the expectations of its quality. The cover art already looks fantastic, and the list of special awards and goodies for backers is commensurately lavish. Very likely one to back.
