A note from Wanton Sun co-publisher Simon Sellars.
We’re thrilled to announce that Wanton Sun has signed two new writers for publication in 2025. Please welcome aboard Brendan C. Byrne and Ramiro Sanchiz.
Brendan C. Byrne
Brendan C. Byrne was born in the District of Columbia but has lived most of his adult life in New York City. He has had published three novellas: The Showing of the Instruments (2011), The Training Commission (2019, with Ingrid Burrington) and Accelerate (2021). His short fiction and criticism appear in a variety of organs.
In 2025, Wanton Sun will publish Another World Isn’t Possible, Brendan’s collected short stories.
I’ve known Brendan for many years. We met online when I was publishing Ballardian.com. 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.
I love Brendan’s 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.
His short stories have astonishing range. They feature a Haitian zombie curse decimating 21C America. Immortals drinking and reminiscing in bars. A demonic girl seducing men via an occult ‘social media’ app. Cyborg truckers welded to their vehicles. Rogue, barely alive media oligarchs let loose on Mars.
Tonally, they veer from apocalyptic introspection to incredulous sarcasm. Superficially, many seem everyday tales of suburbia—then imperceptibly turn into darkness. And then they end—often with no resolution, just a clammy clingfilm of unreality.
Brendan C. Byrne’s stories are a spinning vortex of uncertainty. Truly, another world isn’t possible. You won’t forget them.
Ramiro Sanchiz
Ramiro Sanchiz is a writer and translator born and based in Montevideo, Uruguay. He’s the author of 19 novels, among them Krautrock (2024), Un pianista de provincias (A small town pianist, 2022), La anomalía 17 (The seventeenth anomaly), and Verde (2016). He’s also the author of the theory-fiction books Ejercicios de dactilografía (Typewriting exercises, 2022) and Alfredo Zitarrosa: Guitarra negra (Alfredo Zitarrosa’s Black Guitar, 2019).
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. Make no mistake, Ramiro is a giant in Latin American weird fiction. This status won’t be contained for long.
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. The novel weaves a mesmerising Stahlist mythology where Stahl incarnations guide initiates through parallel universes and simulations. Best of all, it mainly takes place in a post-apocalypse where the northern hemisphere is destroyed and the southern realm reigns supreme. With much of the action taking place in Patagonia, Argentina, where my colleague Andrés Vaccari lived for many years, and Australia, where I’m based (and where Andrés now lives), it’s pretty much the ultimate Wanton Sun novel.
Stahl is a recurring character in Ramiro’s work. Like Moorcock with Jerry Cornelius, Stahl is a Uruguayan eternal champion who can never be defeated, only reworked and remodelled. True to this, the novel has had two prior Spanish-language publications, and each edit was vastly different. Andrés is doing the English translation for us, and Ramiro will work with him to offer yet a third variation on the story. Think of this project not so much as a republication in another language, but a rebirth in another world.Future voyages into the Wanton Sun
A part of what Andrés and I want to do with Wanton Sun is bring Spanish-language weird fiction/SF into English translation—it’s become a passion with us. The Imitations is the rocket-fuelled first step on that journey.
It’s one of many strands we’re working on. 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.
Please sign up to our newsletter for more information on Brendan, Ramiro and our other projects as they develop.
—Simon Sellars, 7 October 2024