Brain Harvest: super-short, mind-bending sf for the attenuated 21st century attention-span

Eden Robins, one of my talented Clarion West students, writes,


Brain Harvest will feature the best snappy, bad-ass speculative fiction pieces we can find in 750 words or less. These will be available on our website, where readers can also subscribe to have the stories delivered to their mobile device of choice. We figure a lot of reading is happening in non-traditional ways – people have five minutes while they're waiting for their cheeseburgers and might just enjoy the chance to read something interesting on their iPhones. We aim to fill the time between the ordering and the cheeseburger-eating, and we publish the kinds of stories we'd like to read in these interstitial moments.

Right now we're publishing once a week, but we plan to fill the gaps with more content – quick and pithy movie and book reviews, content inspired by ideas expressed in the stories, and in the future, interviews, podcasts, and an interactive community of readers and writers.

We're hoping to raise money to pay our writers pro-rates by donation ($10 or more gets you a free homemade mustache!) and by offering our critiquing services for fiction writers and coming soon, the Feed-A-Writer program, where you can adopt a writer, Sally Struthers-style, and get a photo of the little rascal and a personalized thank you letter in return.

First up on our maiden voyage is highly-decorated author Nick Mamatas.

Brain Harvest

(Thanks, Eden!)