By Victor D. Infante

Well, as pretty much anybody standing in our general vicinity knows, this was our first week publishing fiction at Radius. Did it go well? It’s honestly still too early to tell, but I know I’m pleased with the results, and stoked about the future.

The decision to begin eyeing the connections between poetry and genre fiction was perhaps a counter-intuitive one, but from where I’m standing, it seems a natural line of study: The first poems preserved the stories of gods and heroes, and genre fiction is steeped in metaphors and symbolism that we almost no longer recognize as such. It struck me as interesting terrain to explore.

And trust me, we’re just getting started.

The decision to serialize stories came from thinking about the heroes and stories of the 19th century, how fans would return to a periodical to read the next part of a Doyle or Dickens story. This seems unnecessary on the Internet, where you can have whole libraries at your disposal instantly. But still … I was curious. I wanted to know if anyone would respond to that sort of serialization, if they would develop that sort of reading habit. Frankly, I wanted to know if people missed anticipation for stories. Certainly, there’s anticipation for new seasons of TV shows and sequels to movies, to the next issue of a comic book or the seemingly unreachable next George R.R. Martin novel. We talk about the story, but is the waiting for the story part of the experience?

I don’t know. We’re serializing four stories at the moment, each of which will run for a few weeks. Maybe everybody will just be annoyed, and indicate that they prefer reading everything in one gulp. Or maybe people will enjoy the format, and enjoy the thrill of waiting. Damned if I know. We’ll find out when we get there.

Anyway, here’s an index of the experiment so far. If you’ve not checked some of this out, I wholeheartedly suggest you do. We brought in some top-notch genre writers to launch this thing, and I ‘m terribly grateful for their support and encouragement:

Introduction: Prayers and Stories: Pulling New Heroes From the Oldest Well, By victor D. Infante

Serialized Stories:

Mondays: Union Dues: Freedom with a small f (Part One), by Jeffrey R. DeRego

Tuesdays: Baby Detonate for Me (Part One), By Victor D. Infante

Wednesdays: Pink Aviary (Part One), by B. DeMarco-Barrett

Thursdays: Murder by Remote Control: an Essex Man story (Part One), by Gary Phillips

Related Essay:

On Falling: Action Heroes, Metaphor and Gravity, by Sam Cha: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

And there we are. That’s a heck of a lot of content for one week, isn’t it? We’ll be slowing down a bit, over the next week or so, and only serializing stories. After that, poetry will work its way back into the mix, and the two will co-exist in harmony. Hopefully. I guess we’ll know when we get there.

(P.S.: Check out the nifty redesign by Lea C. Deschenes! We’re still tweaking it, but so far, it looks gorgeous!)