So, I haven’t exactly been slack lately, but I have been trying to spread out my news a little, instead of dropping everything on everyone at the same time, like happened to me.

Today, a reminder that Issue 004 of Boundary Shock Quarterly is now available at all major vendors.

This issue is entitled Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Oh My.

The theme I challenged the Syndicate to explore was a fun one: “We can make her better than she was. Or build a better one to replace him. What does it mean to be Sentient? Human? Or even alive?”

What I got was the biggest issue yet, over 94,000 words of fiction and essays ranging across everything, from slapstick to sadness, from almost every one of my authors.

Because our future is electronic, unless we manage to gack ourselves back to the stone ages in the next few decades, we wanted to explore where we were going.

Michael W. Lucas gave me a fantastic story about what cyberware might mean to the future of business. Duncan Ellis went there, but did so in a way that makes you think about what a truly “fully-functional-android” means and how we need to handle it. Joel Ewy, mostly on a dare, wrote me a computer program that he swears will compile, and claims to be the Try/Fail/Else loops necessary for the first sentient machine to bring a human to orgasmic bliss.

There are also two essays in this issue, from Robert Jeschonek and Joel Ewy, looking forward and backwards at the pinnacle of technology we may have reached, and where we need to go.

As I write this, I am nearly done with reading all the stories for Issue 005: Boneyard of Lost Dreams, so I highly recommend that you sign up for the Boundary Shock Newsletter so you never miss an issue. Also, if you have missed one of the first four, go open another tab and order them while you’re thinking about it. I’ll wait.

Back? Signed up so you never miss an issue? Good.

Enjoy the fun. My story, Dancer, is the beginning of a whole new cyberpunk universe, and I have six other short stories already written, just waiting for the time to write the first Kumiko novel. As I have talked to the others, they are doing the same, exploring characters and new worlds and deciding they need to write more in those places as well.

I hope you have enjoyed, are enjoying, and will continue to enjoy all the fun that is Boundary Shock Quarterly.

We now return you to your regular programming.