Edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi

(The anthology is now closed to submissions)

We’re sorting through the manuscripts we’ve received and will start reading them in the last week of April. If you’ve submitted a manuscript to us, you can expect a response in mid- to late May. We hope to announce the table of contents before Memorial Day weekend (May 27-29).

THE PROBLEM

Epics have lost their charm. It takes ten or twenty years for a writer to finish a series, writing the same book over and over again, piling up the foreshadowing, wearing out characters’ boots to no good purpose. By the time you’re done—whether you’re the reader or the writer—you can’t remember why you started.

That’s where Twenty Epics comes in. Like the neurological anomaly that sparks déjà vu, like the false memories implanted in Blade Runner’s replicants, Twenty Epics shortcuts the repetition and the tedium of reality and goes straight to what we really care about: the subjective emotional and aesthetic experience.

There was a time when you finished an epic. When finishing an epic left you feeling not discontent and exhausted but joyous, melancholy, rejuvenated, satisfied—left you feeling, even (at least for a little while), that you were a better and wiser person for the experience.

If we do our jobs right, each of the pieces in Twenty Epics will bring back that feeling.

In ten thousand words or less.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

We're looking for pieces that can satisfy our adult impatience with cliche, with repetition, with caricature, with easy moral absolutes, with uninspiring language (and with ten-volume series that take twenty years to finish)—and still reach that place in our hearts that once was stirred by tales of heroism and discovery, creation and destruction, sin and redemption and catastrophe, love and high adventure.

What we’re not looking for:

• A synopsis of the brick-thick fantasy novel1 you failed to sell to Tor.

• A synopsis of the brick-thick fantasy novel2 that’s been sitting for six months, in manuscript form, on a desk at Tor.

• A synopsis of the brick-thick fantasy novel3 you haven’t written yet, that you hope to sell to Tor once you do.

• Excerpts from any of the above.

• Screenplays for any of the above.

• Treatments of screenplays for any of the above.

• Thinly-disguised role-playing scenarios.

• Cleverly-disguised role-playing scenarios.

• Parody, satire, or pastiche.4

• Premillennial dispensationalism.5

• Other stuff we wouldn’t like. (This list is not meant to be exhaustive.)

We’re looking for immersive worldbuilding and larger-than-life themes. We’re looking for invention, experimentation, imagination, erudition, entertainment value, and world-class writing.

And we’re looking for epic. It’s got to be epic.

No, we’re not sure what that word means, either.

Redefine it for us.

ADVICE YOU SHOULD TAKE

David Lomax, “How To Write An Epic Fantasy Novel”, Rabid Transit #3: Petting Zoo

ADVICE YOU SHOULDN’T TAKE

Ian McFadyen, “ How To Write A Best Selling Fantasy Novel”.

WHAT WE’RE PAYING

For First Print and Electronic World Anthology Rights:

• For pieces over ten thousand words: Twenty dollars.

• For pieces between five thousand and ten thousand words: Fifty dollars.

• For pieces five thousand words and under: One hundred dollars.

(Yes, you did read that correctly. Anyone can write a long epic.6)

Authors will also receive two copies of the anthology on publication.

HOW TO SEND IT TO US

The anthology is now closed to submissions. We’re sorting through the manuscripts we’ve received and will start reading them in the last week of April. If you’ve submitted a manuscript to us, you can expect a response in mid- to late May. We hope to announce the table of contents before Memorial Day weekend (May 27).

Appendix 1:
Some Epics At Least One Of Us Likes8

Books

• Isaac Asimov, the Foundation trilogy9

• Frank Herbert, Dune10

• Ursula le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea11

• Ursula le Guin, The Farthest Shore

• Marilyn French, The Women’s Room

• Guy Gavriel Kay, The Sarantine Mosaic (Sailing to Sarantium / Lord of Emperors)

• Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove12

• Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

• Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

• Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast/Titus Groan13

• Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers

• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

• T.H. White, The Once and Future King

• Andrew Dickson White, History of the Warfare Between Science and Religion in Christendom

• Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Films

• Francis Ford Coppola, “Apocalypse Now Redux”14

• Leon Gast, “When We Were Kings”

• Peter Jackson, “Forgotten Silver”15

• Aki Kaurismäki, “Leningrad Cowboys Go America”

• David Lean, “Lawrence of Arabia”

• Lance Mungia, “Six String Samurai”

Paintings, sculptures, buildings and monuments

• Thomas Cole, “The Course of Empire”

• Maya Ling Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial

• Julia Morgan, Hearst Castle

Albums

• Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool/Kind of Blue

Musical compositions

• Eleni Karaindrou, Trojan Women

• Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du printemps aka The Rite of Spring

Sports events

• The 2004 American League Championship Series16

Appendix 2:
Some Epics That Have
Been Recommended To Us

but that we have to admit we haven’t actually read/heard/seen, at least not all the way through

Poems & story cycles

• Gilgamesh

• The Tale of the Heike

• Herodotus, The Histories

• Homer, The Odyssey

• Firdausi, Shah-namah

• Elias Lönnrot, The Kalevala

• John Milton, Paradise Lost

Books

• Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative

• Shi Naian, The Water Margin

• Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Albums

• Duke Ellington, Black, Brown, and Beige

• Brian Eno, Music for Airports

Plays

• Shakespeare, Richard II/Henry IV, Part 1/Henry IV, Part 2/Henry V