Second Chances

John Joseph Adams and I have edited at least six books together. Is it more? I can’t remember. There was the Apocalypse Triptych from 2014. And the Dystopia Triptych from 2020. Both trilogies gathered dozens of our favorite authors and humans to tell three stories about the before, during, and after of some calamity.

The Apocalypse Triptych was a huge success. My favorite thing about publishing that series was that these traditionally published authors with great careers made more from the short stories in those books than they usually made from places that paid by the word or in a lump sum. We earned back what we put into the series and paid out royalties! We are still paying royalties on that trilogy. Nothing makes me happier than artists getting paid.

The Dystopia Triptych didn’t go so well, and it was entirely our fault (but maybe a little of Amazon’s as well). We set up a pre-order this time, and in order to do that you had to include an interior file, which is a bit weird in the self-pubbing world where you probably don’t have a thing ready to go until close to the date of publication (we don’t sit on finished drafts for a year to wait on marketing and sales teams, or arbitrary publishing calendars). So we put a placeholder file in there, and when the book went live, a bunch of customers got the placeholder file instead of our final file, which we uploaded the night before it went life and we didn’t know it needed to be five days prior or whatever.

Anyway, once you spook the Amazon algorithm, you almost never recover. John Joseph Adams is a bit of a perfectionist, which makes him one of the all-time great editors and publishers of any kind of fiction, and the bad launch probably haunts him to this day. Because the stories in this trilogy are awesome and deserve more love and attention than they got. Also, they have the greatest set of three covers to grace any trilogy of anthologies in history. I mean, look at this:

The stories I wrote for the triptych are some of my favorite ever. I was reminded of this recently when I was going through my hard drive gathering up every short story not gathered in my previous collection, MACHINE LEARNING, in order to prepare my next collection. I thought about including the three INHERITORS stories from the dystopia triptych, but together the stories are about a hundred pages, so they would’ve dominated a collection where most stories run ten to twenty pages. But they deserved an audience. So I published them in their own little collection.

INHERITORS, just published a week or so ago, tells the story of a medical breakthrough that levels the playing field, and the lengths powerful people will go to prevent this. It’s even more relevant today than it was when I wrote it. And as one reader posted yesterday on social media, boy would it make for an excellent TV show. Not that it’ll get made. Just saying.

If you’re looking for something to read after having watched all of SILO and BLACK MIRROR, and you’ve already read everything Blake Crouch has ever written, this is a cheap quick read that I hope will change how you look at the world around you. The paperback will undoubtedly get a better cover at some point (this was me playing around in Photoshop), so grab an ugly copy now if you’re a collector. The paperback is only $5.99, which is what I remember paperbacks being when I was a kid, and yeah I make a whopping 70 cents on each copy sold, so this ain’t about getting rich. This is about putting you on the edge of your seat and keeping you up past your bedtime and making you miss your train stop.

We all deserve second chances. That’s a theme of these stories, but it’s true of the books as well. Enjoy. Love you all.

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