Stelliform and Amazon

At this time, we are selling our books on Amazon. Amazon has many negative impacts on our society, but it also provides some good: quick delivery of essential items for people with disabilities, or cheaper items for those who can’t afford to shop elsewhere. Amazon also provides some semblance of legitimacy for new authors. These authors need to be accessible to their readers at a central web location, not relegated only to the small-press-corners of the Internet. While we hope you will choose to support us and our authors by purchasing books from our website, it is important for our books — and our ideas — to be available to a wider public, which is access that Amazon provides. Indie publishers are beginning to make dents in this monolith. This is work to which we will contribute as we grow.

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When the World is Changed in an Instant

In September, Stelliform will publish its first book, Depart, Depart! by Sim Kern, a cli-fi ghost story which considers Jewish and trans experiences intertwined with the changes wrought by climate destabilization. Climate change as a whole is slow, but some of its effects can change the world on a scale of minutes or hours. Not unlike the experience of a global pandemic.

In this post, Sim Kern writes about the links they see between experiences of climate change and experiences of the pandemic.

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Earth Day 2020

Every year, Earth Day affords an opportunity for us to collectively take stock of our relationship with the environment. The first Earth Day fifty years ago is the result of one such stock-taking. Environmentalists were inspired by the “Blue Marble” photo ⁠— an image which still reverberates through Western culture with nearly the same potency as when it was first viewed.

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Quiet Times

We are learning, if we did not know before, that there are different ways to be quiet: the quiet concentration of holding one’s breath; a silent prayer; deep breathing in the moments between acts of care-giving, or going through the now-displaced motions of our former lives. We’re not quite sure when this quiet will end.

I’ve been reading and listening to podcasts, but it’s difficult to think. Hard to reconcile big, transformative ideas into the strange quietness of this moment. But over the next few weeks, I will share some of the things I’m reading here, in case they are as helpful or inspiring or merely interesting to others as they have been to me.

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The World is Changing. The World Can Change.

While many of us are at home ⁠— with others or alone ⁠— the world outside is changing. Under the pressure of a global pandemic, many are seeing the possibility of further change⁠ — of the ways that it becomes more possible every day to resist falling back into “normal” once quarantines and self-isolation protocols are lifted.

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Review: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy

This creepy bit of sylvan horror is the kind of thing we’d like to see in our slush pile: a story about the inhabitants of an anarchist commune in Freedom, Iowa, who summon Uliksi, a blood-red three-antlered deer god, in order to deal with their hierarchy problems. Uliksi “turns predator into prey” when he “hunts those who wield power over others”.

Though Uliksi is originally summoned to deal with a violent sociopath who has seized control of the commune, the summoners soon realize that the act of summoning an “endless spirit” to dispatch Freedom’s unwanted leader results in the deer god’s gaze falling, inevitably, upon them.

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