I got the good word yesterday that The Modern Deity’s Guide to Surviving Humanity officially has a release date! The book is coming out on July 15th, alongside its two sister anthologies, Derelict and When Worlds Collide. Each one features upwards of 14 short stories from a fantastic roster of science fiction and fantasy authors. Which I guess means if you got all three, you’d have enough short stories to last you the rest of the summer, at the least!
The Modern Deity’s Guide is a collection of stories that imagines how ancient gods could have adapted to the modern day. If you’ve ever seen the show American Gods or read the book by Neil Gaiman, this is right in the same ball park. My story, “The Teotl of Gaming,” is about the Aztec god of games Macuilxochitl trying to run an MMORPG company. But day jobs don’t necessarily come easily to deities. Throw in Macuil’s moonlighting as a gambler, and things quickly spiral out of control…which is just how the god of games likes them.
Since this is a little bit of an untraditional release cycle, I wanted to take a minute to give you an update on all the different places and times that the anthology will become available. Zombies Need Brains is a small press that publishes three themed sci-fi/fantasy anthologies annually, funded by a yearly kickstarter. They’ve been doing this sort of thing for upwards of a decade at this point, and their anthologies are beautiful. I’m beyond excited to have my first published piece of fiction be a part of one of their books.
So, where can you get it?
The Modern Deity’s Guide to Surviving Humanity is currently available for preorder in two places. The first is on Amazon, where you can preorder the book for Kindle. The second is directly from Zombies Need Brains’ website, where you can preorder a physical copy as well as ebook. The print version you can preorder now, from ZNB’s site, is a limited edition mass market paperback. This is the ‘first edition,’ so to speak, which is also what everyone who backed the kickstarter will be receiving. The kickstarter edition is a limited printing of only 500 copies. Once they are gone, they are gone. They will hopefully be shipping out before the July 15th release date as well, so not only is this a limited edition, but you’ll be getting it early. If you order the ebook directly from Zombies Need Brains, the link will go out around the same time that the kickstarter editions start shipping. (Again, hopefully. We’re at the mercy of the printer’s schedule, and everything in publishing is running a little bit behind since the pandemic. But as of now, it’s looking likely that the kickstarter editions will be going out ahead of release day.)
Come July 15th, the book will become widely available on other ebook platforms, and it will be getting a general trade paperback release that same day…which means that if you missed the kickstarter edition, you can still get a physical copy of the book. There is no preorder for the trade paperback or the other ebook platforms, so if you prefer to go for one of these formats, all you need to do is go to your retailer of choice on release date and order it.
I’m in the process of laying this info out all nicely with links and such on the Fiction page for future convenience, but wanted to give you the details immediately. [Update: All preorder information, including for Nook and Kobo, is now up on the Fiction page.]
Thank you for taking this journey with me. I can’t wait to share “Teotl” with you, and to see how you react to all the other amazing stories in the anthology as well. I’ve had the chance to read a few of them, and am totally humbled to be among such incredible company.
Adding to the excitement: now that we’re closing in on release day, we can share more about the book. So here’s the full cover artwork, including the back copy!
And there you have it. The Modern Deity’s Guide to Surviving Humanity, out on July 15th! I hope to see you on the mountaintop, where I will be shouting about this regularly for the next few months.
Daniel Roman 