The code and open-source tools I used to produce a science fiction anthology
compellingsciencefiction.comRelated: Think Weirder: The Year's Best SciFi Ideas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785154 - Nov 2025 (75 comments)
Related: Think Weirder: The Year's Best SciFi Ideas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785154 - Nov 2025 (75 comments)
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!
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)
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?
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.
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
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.
It is, but I think what the comment you're replying to is saying is that the world might be better if things didn't work that way.
Given experience with OSS contributors burnouts we can see how world would not be better.
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...
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.
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.
Happy to talk about it, the TL;DR is that this is a hobby where I as the editor don't expect to make back the money I spent creating the book, but the authors get paid a fixed amount up-front. Here's a more detailed answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785154#45879003
The only addendum to that answer is that after being featured on HN last week I'm now over halfway toward break-even.
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/
This looks cool, I'll check it out!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have a preferred typst template for ebooks?
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.
I made my own... Based on my latex stuff.
typst FTW
Very cool! How does licensing work with the included stories? What tools or systems contributed to the success of managing that?
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.