The code and open-source tools I used to produce a science fiction anthology

https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/the-code-and-open-source-tools-i-used-to-produce-a-science-fiction-anthology.html

by mojoe • 8 months ago

215 48 8 months ago

compellingsciencefiction.com

Related: Think Weirder: The Year's Best SciFi Ideas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785154 - Nov 2025 (75 comments)

__mharrison__3• 8 months ago

I did this 10 or so years ago when I taught an ebook course to elementary students.

We learned about ebooks, HTML, and they each write a short story, which was included in an ebook (and a physical book).

Pretty amazing the tools we have access to. Of course, now I would use typst instead of latex for the physical book part.

bramadityaw• 8 months ago

typst FTW

TimorousBestie• 8 months ago

Have a preferred typst template for ebooks?

__mharrison__3• 8 months ago

I made my own... Based on my latex stuff.

ashton314• 8 months ago

Typst is so stupidly easy to use. It took me an hour to go from zero Typst knowledge to reproducing my résumé perfectly. The docs are easy to read and there’s a guide for making templates. I feel like if you’ve written CSS and are familiar with associating some kind of selector with some properties, then you’ll be able to pick up Typst and make whatever template you want in no time.

GiovanniP• 8 months ago

I would rather use TeXmacs, it frees you from the write-compile cycle while being equivalent (maybe in some ways better) from the point of view of the control you have on the document and the typographical quality.

There is also a wide choice of output formats.

A_D_E_P_T2• 8 months ago

It's quite an achievement.

I was once interested in publishing a SF anthology. Formatting and editing was nbd -- I was going to use Amazon's KDP software package for most of it, which can take a .docx and output an ebook in 5 minutes. I've done it before for non-anthology books I've published, and it couldn't be easier, though I understand why people might avoid Amazon in this day and age.

The real trouble was getting the rights to all of the different stories! Though everybody I was able to get in touch with was great -- in particular, Peter Watts, Alan Dean Foster, David Moles, and Walter Jon Williams -- many authors were totally impossible to reach! I ended up scrapping the idea after a few stories I was intent on collecting in the anthology were unobtainable. (And this after I had already paid an initial sum to many of the authors.) Finding alternates and embarking on more contract negotiations just seemed like too much work.

Anyway, I bought your anthology, will review when I'm done reading, and sincerely respect the hard work that went into it!

mojoe14• 8 months ago

Thanks, you're completely correct, rights acquisition was the most difficult part!

The absolute hardest story in the anthology to get rights for was "Stars Don't Dream" by Chi Hui. It's a translation of a story that won an award in China, but Chi Hui doesn't speak English, and her contact info was extremely hard to obtain (I had to get help from the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine). We did the entire contract discussion via a combination of Google Translate and my very weak Mandarin I learned in college.

(I'm a huge Peter Watts fan, btw)

ssivark• 8 months ago

Just a thought... would it make sense to maintain a govt/central registry of copyright owners, and have an "official" means of contacting them, on which they have an SLA to respond (say 3 months) which might be part of the ground rules for maintaining rights.

From a macro societal perspective, would this evolve "copyright" into a more balanced (value generating) deal for all of society?

helterskelter• 8 months ago

I have no idea how accurate this comment from last week is, or if it applies beyond games, but the model is interesting:

Japan has a scheme for orphaned games where if you can prove you did due diligence in searching for a rightsholder and couldn't find one, you can go ahead with rereleasing the game and the royalty payments get held in escrow by the government in case the rightsholder comes forward. I wish the US had something similar for cases like these.

Source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45877983#45878084

jll292• 8 months ago

The whole basis of licensing law is everything is forbidden unless you have a written license permitting it from the copyright owner.

This is contrary to most (all?) other parts of the law where everything is allowed that isn't forbidden.

So it's the right of authors to ignore email requests to discuss a re-publication if they so wish.

graemep• 8 months ago

Its not practical. Lots of things are copyright by default. HN comments are covered by copyright. Every photo you take is covered by copyright, so are letters contracts, kids drawings as well as professional artists,.....

What would work is an orphan works exemption, whereby if a work is not available and its not possible to trace the copyright holders you could use it.

The other problem is the term of copyright is far too long. it is ridiculous that something written during the reign of Queen Victoria could remain in copyright into the 21st century in the UK and EU. US law is slightly saner (in avoiding bringing out of copyright works back into copyright) but not much.

ozim2• 8 months ago

Oh how naive.

We have that in place for open source software. No one is contacting the authors on GitHub they just grab and use it.

Second thing is big bad guys will see if someone copyright is just a person that doesn’t have means to fight for themselves in court - you still have to sue them and still have to get initial cost of lawyers.

Last but not least there is a lot of content that you don’t want to be easily tied to the owner because history is showing us how that can be used to hunt down people having “wrong ideas”.

tenacious_tuna• 8 months ago

Can you name the works you'd collected? That's a killer lineup, I'm a huge fan of Walter Jon Willams and have enjoyed what Watts I've read.

A_D_E_P_T2• 8 months ago

It was intended as a sort of military SF anothology, with the word "military" also encompassing revolution, insurgency, and various other 4GW concepts. The stories spanned the period from roughly 1980-2020, with many published from 2010-2020. The list was:

A Dry, Quiet War by Tony Daniel
ZeroS by Peter Watts
A Soldier of the City by David Moles
The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka
Lady Be Good by Jack Campbell
Mid-Death by Alan Dean Foster
Weaponized Math by Jonathan Brazee
Prayers on the Wind by Walter Jon Williams
Highwaymen by Ken MacLeod
Second Skin by Paul McAuley
The Dread And Fear of Kings by Richard Paul Russo
Herbig-Haro by Harry Turtledove
The Lost Dorsai by Gordon Dickson
Cincinnatus by Joel Rosenberg
The Proud Foot of the Conqueror by Reginald Bretnor

It's the stories lower on the list that were unobtainable. Dickson, Rosenberg, and Bretnor being dead (may they all rest in peace,) did not help matters.

m-hodges• 8 months ago

Very cool! How does licensing work with the included stories? What tools or systems contributed to the success of managing that?

mojoe14• 8 months ago

The reprint rights agreements were all extremely manual, I did everything through email and SignNow. Mostly payments went through PayPal, although there was one author who wanted a physical check mailed.

thangalin• 8 months ago

I developed my Markdown editor, KeenWrite[0], to replace the shell scripts described in the Typesetting Markdown series[1]. KeenWrite takes in YAML document metadata (for variables), (R) Markdown documents, and generates XHTML. The XHTML is passed to ConTeXt[2] for PDF typesetting.

A feature matrix[3] compares various text formats and ecosystems for generating PDF files.

[0] https://keenwrite.com/

[1] https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...

[2] https://wiki.contextgarden.net

[3] https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/

mojoe14• 8 months ago

This looks cool, I'll check it out!

ericrosedev• 8 months ago

I saw this on amazon the other day and picked it up. As an avid reader of short form science fiction, I was really excited to see an anthology that focused on interesting ideas. I'm three stories in and my only gripe so far is Twenty-Four Hours, I just can't find the outstanding idea in it. I think it is a lovely and touching story, it just lacks the punch I'd expect to find in this type of collection. I'd love to hear more about your selection process and what we can expect from future volumes. A+ for the quality of the books printing and presentation, extremely impressive!

edit: just found your article with more info on your process! https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/how-i-curate-an-a...

mojoe14• 8 months ago

Thanks for your support! I believe I understand where you're coming from, some of the stories have more novel concepts than others -- Twenty-Four Hours is hard to discuss without spoilers, but I selected it because the characters and setting felt very real, while at the same time it would completely fall apart without the technological concept.

As I wrote in that blog you linked, I tried to interleave the stories so that you get alternating vibes as you go through the book. I know not every story will be for everyone, but I hope you find most of them interesting!

I plan on pursuing as close to the same process as I can next year, I want to put out the most consistently concept-focused Year's Best out there.

jll292• 8 months ago

Thanks for sharing some of the methodology and code for how you put your book together.

Are you comfortable speaking about the financial side? What does an editor get per copy sold, what does an author get? (In the science world, for instance, editors tend to get money often, but authors never get paid for articles or book chapters.)

Hopefully, now that you have experience in the process and all your code ready, you can repeat the exercise with higher efficiency and profitability.

noufalibrahim• 8 months ago

This is a lovely example of the value of being a programmer.

The leverage the simple (perhaps messy) scripts and code that these tools gave the author is simply incredible. So satisfying to read and a a really great achievement. Congratulations and thanks for the write up.

jacquesm5• 8 months ago

If I could give you one tip it would be this one: make sure that your current production contains enough contact information and appeal to other authors to help you bootstrap the next iteration. That first one is the hardest, and any aspiring writers that have good stories sitting unpublished (of which there are very many) is always on the lookout for new places to get their stories published. This is how almost every successful anthology in the past was published. Typically they had a contest model where if you got published you were awarded some prize money and otherwise you'd be out a couple of stamps.

mojoe14• 8 months ago

First I just want to say that it's an honor that you took a look, I've read and enjoyed many of your articles in the past.

This anthology is actually a "Year's Best" -- they're reprints selected from a pool of 391 stories printed in the big science fiction magazines last year. So I'm not opening for submissions, or anything like that (I have done that before, back when I published a magazine). For this anthology I reached out to the authors about the best concept-driven stories I read last year, and fortunately they all agreed to let me publish their stories.

jacquesm5• 8 months ago

Do you plan on making it a cycle?

I have been reading old ones (very old, in some cases), they can be quite hard to find and I am absolutely blown away by the quality and the depth of vision in some of those older collections. Stories whose writers never had a second piece in print anywhere.

Short story SF is a very interesting genre to me and I'm super happy to see you make this effort.

wodenokoto• 8 months ago

I’d love to see a few pictures of the resulting layout.

I’m surprised handling meta data in several yaml files is easier than one excel workbook, but each to their own I guess.

mojoe14• 8 months ago

A picture of the first page of the TOC is the only one I have immediately available: https://compellingsciencefiction.com/images/toc.jpg

I'm sure an excel pro would find excel much easier, I just like writing Python more than excel macros!

ajkjk3• 8 months ago

aside, but the link to ralan.com on https://compellingsciencefiction.com/guidelines.html doesn't work since the site doesn't exist anymore.

mojoe14• 8 months ago

Thanks for pointing that out, I need to remove that submissions page altogether, the magazine has been shut down for five years and you found your way to a vestigial part of the site that almost nobody visits anymore.

I wrote a post about the ralan closure in 2023: https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/ralan.com-closes-...

If you're looking for places to submit, https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ is now the place I recommend to check.

ajkjk3• 8 months ago

I don't know how I ended up there! seconds later: oh, I clicked "original short stories" on the top of the page. and I have been thinking about trying to write some short stories myself and was immediately thinking "I wonder how I would go about submitting one somewhere" and then I saw that link...

darthcloud• 8 months ago

Bought the paperback, I really like curated anthology, it's best way to discover new talent. I would have bought Compelling Science Fiction too but look like its out of print.

mojoe14• 8 months ago

I was using my garage as a warehouse for the books, and it burned down, so I lost all the remaining copies of that first printing, unfortunately!

HardwareLust• 8 months ago

"All stories and art are by humans, for humans. We will not publish AI-generated work.

Think Weirder Vol. 02 will arrive in October 2026"

Good job answering my top 2 questions!

The code and open-source tools I used to produce a science fiction anthology

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