[HN Gopher] The code and open-source tools I used to produce a s...
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The code and open-source tools I used to produce a science fiction
anthology
Related: _Think Weirder: The Year 's Best SciFi Ideas_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785154 - Nov 2025 (75
comments)
Author : mojoe
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-11-18 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (compellingsciencefiction.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (compellingsciencefiction.com)
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| 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.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| 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!
| mojoe wrote:
| 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)
| m-hodges wrote:
| Very cool! How does licensing work with the included stories?
| What tools or systems contributed to the success of managing
| that?
| mojoe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| mojoe wrote:
| This looks cool, I'll check it out!
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(page generated 2025-11-18 23:00 UTC)