Sweltering under the Wanton Sun

On indie publishing and the urge to connect

Book trailer for Even Animals Are Machines by Andrés Vaccari, available to buy through Wanton Sun.

Dear friends,

I apologise for the extended hiatus. Thank you for not unsubscribing (although maybe you will after this latest effort).

In my last post (August 2023—wow, really?), I promised updates on my UFO/UAP novel in progress. Much has happened since then to slow that progress.

I had some health issues to deal with, plus I lost my job due to a restructure of the company where I worked, all of which dampens the creative spark. Also, I began to doubt the story I was telling and my motivations for writing it, and I’ll interrogate these fatal tendencies in a follow-up post (I promise). Spoiler: the spark has returned, at the investigative level, at least.

The one positive? Losing the will to write meant I could concentrate on getting my publishing house, Wanton Sun, up and running.

I basically founded Wanton Sun to publish the Argentinian writer, Andrés Vaccari, a novelist and philosopher whose work I’ve long admired. Andrés was born in Buenos Aires and migrated to Australia at the age of 18. He moved back to Argentina a decade ago, living in Argentine Patagonia. He stopped writing in English and published exclusively in Spanish, receiving awards and recognition for his novels, short stories and plays.

This year, Andrés returned to live in Sydney—and also to publishing in English. I saw an opportunity. I’d been hawking my second novel Code Beast around to agents and publishers for a year and had no luck getting a nibble. My thoughts turned to self-publishing, as I didn't want to be one of those embittered writers who waste years hoping to be touched by the hand of God. I wanted to do more than self-publishing, though. I wanted to create an outlet for other writers, such as Andrés, who was transitioning to a different publishing landscape.

Mr Vaccari at rest.

I’ve been involved with indie publishing since the mid-90s. I created several experimental and science-fictional zines in the 90s, and first made contact with Andrés after I wrote to him in 1996 expressing admiration for his visionary SF zine Abaddon.

Later, I launched several successful online publications, including the original Sleepy Brain, an early 2000s expose of Melbourne’s artistic subcultures, and, most famously of all, Ballardian, which ran for 15 years and led to two book deals.

At times, I think of myself more as an editor/publisher/curator than a writer. I generate enormous energy from developing a concept, realising it and using it to promote the work of people I admire. One of the things I’m most proud of with Ballardian is how the work of J.G. Ballard became a springboard for discovering the fabulous careers of countless people inspired by his work: architects, writers, artists, photographers, theorists, musicians, filmmakers and more.

So it is with Wanton Sun. Back in May 2023, our first publication was supposed to be Andrés’s Even Animals Are Machines, the English translation of his novel La pasión de Descartes. However, we were stymied by rights issues and so the first release became Code Beast. Since then, we’ve published Hypercapitalism and Other Tales of Planetary Madness, a marvellous collection of Andrés’s short stories—an uncanny blend of horror, SF and weird fiction that will make you think twice about looking in the mirror.

Another stellar cover by the talented Matthew Revert.

Two weeks ago, we finally published Even Animals Are Machines. I love this book. It’s a showcase of Andrés’s versatility and vision. Forget McCarthy, Turing and Hinton. In Even Animals Are Machines, Vaccari—a Cartesian scholar with over 30 published academic articles and book chapters to his name—weaves a theory-fiction fantasy starring the necromantic, melancholic philosopher René Descartes as the true father of AI.

In Vaccari’s ornate alternate universe, Descartes creates a sentient android replica of his beloved, dead daughter, Francine. On the run from powerful enemies, sick with pneumonia and near the end of his days, he loses the droid, who falls under the spell of a powerful sorcerer. Together, this odd couple hack the dying Descartes’s brain, inhabiting and interrogating his theories, until Francine realises her true potential: the birth of AI in a timestream parallel to our own.

File Even Animals Are Machines under Baroque-punk. It’s such an original, uncanny vision, and it would mean a lot if you’d consider buying a copy. Indie publishing is a tough slog in this day and age. Everyone wants to write, it seems, but does anyone want to read? I hope so.

If you’d like to support the work of Wanton Sun, here are the links to purchase our books:

• Even Animals Are Machines by Andrés Vaccari

• Hypercapitalism and Other Tales of Planetary Madness by Andrés Vaccari

• Code Beast by Simon Sellars

The future of Wanton Sun

Here’s where my curatorial instincts kick in.

I’m thrilled to announce that Wanton Sun has signed two new writers: Brendan C. Byrne, based in New York City, and Ramiro Sanchiz, from Montevideo, Uruguay.

Brendan C. Byrne.

I’ve known Brendan for many years. We met online when I was publishing Ballardian. Brendan liked the project, got in touch and I followed his writing career as it took off. Later, Brendan conducted a surreal interview with me in Second Life for the publication of my theory-fiction novel Applied Ballardianism. The event was clearly cursed, and the interview is highly recommended for Brendan’s gonzo reactions.

In 2025, we’ll publish Another World Isn’t Possible, Brendan’s collected short stories. I love his fiction. I was blown away by his freak-cyborg-Mad Max–Robocop action novella Accelerate. It was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to publish when Wanton Sun started. Now, here we are with Brendan on board.

Ramiro Sanchiz.

As for Ramiro, he’s a writer and translator, and the author of 19 novels of speculative fiction and three theory-fiction books. Make no mistake, Ramiro is a giant in Latin American weird fiction. This status won’t be contained for long.

Ramiro is another Ballard connection. Aside from his fiction, he’s a stunning essayist and critic. This I realised when he reviewed Applied Ballardianism. We stayed in touch, but back then I had no idea of the extent of his fiction career. This is clearly not the fault of Ramiro. It’s down to the insular nature of mainstream science fiction and speculation fiction scenes in the US and UK, which rarely deign to look over the border.

In 2025, Wanton Sun will publish Las imitaciones (The imitations, 2019), the first English publication of Ramiro’s hallucinatory novel. Steeped in Bowiesque Martian mystique, it tells the story of Federico Stahl, a Uruguayan rockstar who died and either was resurrected by a supercomputer in Argentina or escaped into a designer-drug-fuelled multiverse.

With much of the action taking place in Argentine Patagonia, where Andrés lived for many years, and Australia, where I’m based (and where Andrés again dwells), it’s pretty much the ultimate Wanton Sun novel.

…and beyond

Recently, I asked Andrés to become a partner in Wanton Sun, and he agreed. I was struck by what he’d told me about the SF/weird fiction scene in Latin America. There are so many talented writers in this scene, with loyal followings, but they don’t get deals in the English-speaking world.

With Wanton Sun, we want to bring Latin American weird fiction/SF into English translation—it’s become a passion with us. Ramiro’s The Imitations is the first step on that journey.

We want to re-spark SF short fiction, too, as Brendan’s project demonstrates, and also plunge headlong back into the pulpy 60s and 70s. Metal plated PKD eyes in the sky, that sort of thing. We’ll reveal these other strands more fully when they reveal themselves to us.

For now, thanks so much for staying in touch with my newsletter.

In the meantime, I’ll get to work on that UFO/UAP update. There’s a pressing reason to do so.

Let me tell you all about it soon.