Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries from across the Known Multiverse

I'm in the second week of an artist's residency at Centrum, in Port Townsend, and so I've been away from my Aqueduct Press desk. My connection to the internet has been limited (particularly since my netbook no longer seems to be able to connect with any of the sources of wifi here. It's so, so different being here near the summer solstice as opposed to the winter solstice, as was the case with my three previous residencies here. The chief difference is the light-- not just the amount of daylight, but its quality. It's bright and white, rather than golden and thin. I suppose because I associate Port Towensend with that thin, golden light, it didn't occur to me to equip myself with sunscreen. So my nose has been sunburned for days (and is now peeling). Another difference is that instead of high-ish low tides, we're getting some minus low tides, and so I'm getting to see parts of the beach I've never seen before-- including rocks with anemones on them-- and have even been able to walk around Point Wilson to the stretch of beach I usually don't get to see. Also, there's a coffee shop (open only during the summer)! I hadn't realized it was there until the weekend. It's a great place for working over chunks of text.

Besides enjoying wonderful beach walks, I'm getting work done on my novel. (Actually, I sometimes get work done while I'm on the beach-- I carry a pad of paper and a pen in my little backpack, so that I can whip them out and do some new writing while sitting on a log that's turned into driftwood. I suffer twinges of guilt about all the Aqueduct Press work I left on my desk, undone, of course, but since for most of the year I don't often concentrate on my own writing, I'm not having too much trouble forgetting Aqueduct exists for several-hour stretches at a time...

 And yet,  I realized on Friday I needed to find a way to post via my iPad (which I'd never before done-- but can now do because of a handy dandy Google app that apparently won't allow me to cut & paste images into this blog). What happened, you may wonder, on Friday? Why it turns out that Annalee Newitz recommended Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries from across the Known Multiverse, an Aqueduct Press book edited by me, which we launched at WisCon, for her Secrets of the Universe 5 Great SF and Fantasy Summer Reads over at NPR. "Editor Duchamp, a longtime publisher of progressive, independent science ficiton, has put together a wicked and witty sendup of how history is written today -- and how some people and stories are systematically edited out of it..." (The other books she recommends are Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls, Will McIntosh's Love Minus Eighty, Karen Jow Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane.)

 Missing Links and Secret Histories elucidates these and other mysteries (some admittedly occasionally obscure). It even includes excerpts from lost or suppressed manuscripts scholars have not even suspected exist, such as “The V Manuscript” written by the Marquis de Sade in 1783 while imprisoned in the Chateau de Vincennes, detailing an interview between the Marquis and a prisoner in the next cell calling himself “de Hurlevent,” but whom the Gimmerton Theory claims was really Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights fame.

Here's a brief description of this anthology: Ever wonder who that frequent addressee of Anglophone Nineteenth-century narrators, “Dear Reader,” really was? About Nancy Drew’s mother? Or the true story on which Edgar Allan Poe based his melodramatic “Fall of the House of Usher”? Perhaps it never occurred to you to wonder whether there might have been a relationship between H.G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau and Joseph Conrad’s Col. Kurtz, or why the popularity of fairy attendance waned in the eighteenth century—but

 Contributors include Alisa Alering, John J. Coyne, L. Timmel Duchamp, Kristin King, Catherine Krahe, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Jenni Moody, Mari Ness, Mark Rich, Nisi Shawl, Jeremy Sim, Lucy Sussex, Anna Tambour, Anne Toole, and Nick Tramdack. It's available on our site in both print and e-book editions. It should be available elsewhere very soon if it isn't already.

I'll eventually add some images to this post. But I've lost half an hour trying to do it, without any success whatsoever.  (The handy dandy app isn't quite the real deal, I guess.)

ETA: I'm home now, and have been able to upload the images in the usual way.