After publishing short fiction on the themes of Subversive Fairy Tales, First Contact, and Cinderella Noir, Book Smugglers Publishing has announced its theme for 2016: Superheroes! Starting in spring 2016, the publishing arm of The Book Smugglers will release short fiction and their first novel acquisition, focusing on superpowered beings fighting evil in the near and far futures.
Book Smugglers Publishing announced two acquisitions: Hurricane Heels, a series of five interconnected and serialized short stories by Isabel Yap; and the fourth installment of Susan Jane Bigelow’s Extrahumans series.
Yap (whose short story “A Cup of Salt Tears” was published on Tor.com) originally submitted Hurricane Heels as a short story for the First Contact collection. However, the Book Smugglers decided that it was a better fit for Superheroes and talked to Yap about turning it into a series. Here’s the synopsis:
Growing up isn’t easy, even with goddess grace and supernatural ass-kicking powers. The Hurricane Heels series looks at the lives of five magical girls—Alex, Ria, Natalie, Aiko, and Selena—through the years, as they balance slaying the forces of evil with school, secrets, falling in love, and staying friends.
Each story will be told from a different character’s perspective, starting with a disastrous bachelorette party. Hurricane Heels will be published “in quickfire succession” starting fall 2016.
Book Smugglers Publishing’s first novel acquisition is Susan Jane Bigelow’s Working Gifts, the fourth installment of her Extrahumans series. In addition, the publisher will repackage and relaunch the first three books of the series: Broken, Fly Into Fire, and The Spark.
The series takes place in a post-war dystopian future, where certain people possess supernatural abilities including flight, super-speed, precognition, etc. The action centers on the Extrahuman League, established to collect all of these superpowered people. Here’s more about Waking Gifts:
Be careful what you ask for…
Jill feels like a nobody. Her extrahuman powers are weak and pathetic, and yet they still got her run out of her job and her home. She’s a second-rate thief with few friends and even fewer prospects. Jill just wants to be somebody, just once.
Then, during a break-in gone wrong, she finds a mysterious alien orb–and everything changes. She gets all that she ever wanted, and then some.
Now Jill is thrown into a quest for answers that will take her from the high mountains of Valen to the depths of interstellar space to a bizarre prison planet where old friends and enemies both are held captive. By the time it’s over the fate of her friends, her world, a vanished alien species, and the entire Confederation will rest on her shoulders.
And through it all the orb whispers in her mind… awaken and take flight, for the dream has ended.
Waking Gifts will be released in spring 2016.
Book Smugglers Publishing will formally put out a call for submissions around this theme very soon, so watch their Twitter!
