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WELL, SINCE YOU ASKED ...
Basically it’s all about puns. Terrible, terrible puns. Possibly not the best basis for a business decision but what the hell, it’s done.
Get it? Paper Road Press? Shortcuts? Track 1?
Aha, ha, ha.
I founded Paper Road Press in 2013 and named it after one of my two favourite cartographic phenomena (the other being those troll contour lines cartographers use to ‘watermark’ their work by adding hills shaped like elephants and suchlike). A ‘paper road’ is a road that exists only on paper, not in real life. Maybe they were meant to be built but somehow the idea died out between crisp papery plans and the muddy reality; maybe they really did exist, once, not that you would know it if you tried to walk down one. In Dunedin, where I grew up, and Wellington, where I live now, there are many roads that surreptitiously fade out or dwindle into cliff-side steps, much to the chagrin of anyone trying to use a map app to drive around. Paper roads – intriguing, occasionally frustrating, uncompromisingly dubiously real – seemed the perfect metaphor for the speculative fiction I planned to publish.
So when I started bandying around the idea of publishing a series of shorter works, calling them ‘shortcuts’ seemed the obvious choice. Shorter than novels, longer than short stories, these shortcuts would be the sort of story you could read on your commute, your lunch-break, or any other odd time when you just want to slip away for a bit. After the usual mind-gnashing submissions and selections process I published six stories ranging between 10,000 and 20,000 words in 2015 as standalone ebooks, which are now collected together for the first time in this volume.
The seven authors whose work is featured in this collection took my rather waffly brief to ‘be inspired by the extra-ordinary possibilities of our land, history and cultures’ and ran with it in a glorious confusion of directions.
In Mika, Lee Murray and Piper Mejia introduce us to a woman on an odyssey to find a cure for the disease that ravages her people. As she ventures into America, cultures clash, but it’s only through connecting with others in this strange land that she will find what it is she seeks.
Grant Stone takes an outside perspective in The Last, as music journalist Rachel flies in to Auckland to interview musician Katherine St John, a fellow English expat who disappeared from the limelight after her last record. She’s brought her music to the other side of the world – but what else did she bring with her?
Bree’s Dinosaur, by AC Buchanan, is a story of displacement – of place, family, and self, and trying to make sense not only of the world’s mysteries, but the solutions it offers.
‘Tech horror’ is a well established trope, but it’s not necessarily the machines you should be worrying about. IK Paterson-Harkness’ Pocket Wife shows us what can happen when long-distance relationships get too close for comfort.
One night. One life. One decision. Tim Jones’ Landfall explores the desperation of climate refugees in a not-too-distant New Zealand.
Lives, families and the atom are broken down in the final story in this collection; Octavia Cade’s The Ghost of Matter, takes a new look at Ernest Rutherford’s life and career.
I couldn’t be happier with these stories. I hope that you enjoy them, too – and that they lead you down new paths, following bibliographies and tables of contents into other new worlds. Try not to get too lost.
As for ‘Track 1’? Suggests a certain continuity, doesn’t it – a whisper, if not a promise, of numbers yet to come.
We’ll see.
Marie Hodgkinson
Publisher
Paper Road Press