With the first wave of our fiction experiment underway, the time has come for us to begin the delicate business of seeking submissions.

So here we are: Radius is now accepting fiction submissions. But because we’re Radius and can’t do anything in a straightforward manner, we’re looking for very, very particular sorts of stories.

We’re looking for a particular breed of pulpy speculative and genre fiction, set in the contemporary world and featuring an easily identifiable protagonist or group of protagonists. In short, we’re looking for a modern day Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Doc Sampson and Batman. We’re looking for iconic new action heroes for the 21st Century that are both fantastic and reflect the world outside our window. No hate for stories set in Narnia, Middle-Earth, Krypton or any other fictional place, and no disrespect meant to historical fiction. All are worthy and legitimate storytelling tools. They’re just not what we’re looking for.

Why are we doing this? We’ve long posited that there is an intrinsic relationship between poetry and this sort of action hero, going all the way back to Beowulf, Gilgamesh and their ilk. (I wrote about it at length in my essay “Is Katniss Everdeen Gilgamesh Dreaming?: Unveiling The Connections Between Poetry and Heroic Fiction.”)

But more than that … well … we think it’s kind of cool, mixing starkly political poetry, hard-core literary theory and pulp storytelling in one place. It better reflects the breadth of our literature, and more to the point, literature which has an active role in the real world. The offbeat polarity we’re experimenting with here might not work. But still, you never know until you try, and we’re excited to see where it goes.

For the moment, please submit using our online submissions manager, specifying “fiction” in the subject line. We’re particularly interested in stories we can serialize, as we’ve been doing, but we’ll work with you on that. We’ll be updating all of our submission guidelines ASAP. Also – and this should really go without saying – a commitment to diversity is one of Radius‘ core values, so we’re particularly interested in seeing stories from writers who might be underrepresented in the mainstream genre fiction market.

So give us your superheroes, your hard-boiled detectives, your sympathetic monsters and spies. We’re looking to create a few new legends.

Victor D. Infante
Editor-In-Chief