(1) CANCER SMACKDOWN IN PROGRESS. Pat Cadigan has a great update — “That’s Right, Cancer, I Said You Better Run ‘Cause There Ain’t Nothin’ For You Here”.
Yes, in case you can’t tell, the level of cancer in my body continues to decline. I did a little math and the current level is 3% of what it was when I started chemotherapy in January 2015. I saw one of the doctors on my consultant’s team, a young Asian doctor that I’ve seen before. He was so genuinely happy for me, I kinda choked up.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I had the bad luck to have my cancer recur in the worst possible form but the good luck to have the drugs work better than anyone expected them to. I’d like to tell you attitude is half the battle. I mean, then I could really pat myself on the back (no pun intended, I swear) and say I kicked cancer’s arse. The truth is, I got lucky; the drugs work. My attitude lets me enjoy it.
I would like to be more profound but at the moment, I’m just kinda dazed. Six months ago, I was terminal, at least as far as anyone knew. Today I’m no longer dying of cancer, I’m living with my technicolor Doc Martens boot on its neck.
You know, I don’t think that will ever get old.
(2) OVER TIME. An interview with Lois McMaster Bujold in the New Zealand Herald.
Gentleman Jole And The Red Queen is precisely to do with what happens when a woman refuses to be constrained by the assumptions of the people who think they know her. Cordelia is 76, in a future society where she can expect to live to 120.
“This, of course, has metaphorical import for our own times, with more people living longer. What should we do with ourselves? Is something genuinely new possible, that isn’t just a variant of things we were doing earlier in life?”
It will not spoil the book if I tell you the answer is that it depends on your perspective; which does indeed change with age.
Bujold, 66, remarks she was once part of a book club discussion of her fantasy novel, The Curse Of Chalion, with a group of junior high students, “where it gradually became apparent that the hero was far more alien to them by being an old man of 35 – practically like their parents! – than by being a demon-ridden medieval fantasy nobleman.”
(3) SPECIAL DEFECTS. From LiarTown USA —
(4) SCHOLARSHIP ABOUT SPANISH SF. Science Fiction Studies, published three times per year by DePauw University, is looking for contributions to the monographic issue on Spanish SF, to be guest edited by Sara Martín and Fernando Ángel Moreno. (Via Europa SF.)
By ‘Spanish SF’ we mean SF novels and short fiction written specifically in Spain, excluding other Spanish-language areas.
Science Fiction Studies is particularly interested in articles dealing with writers Gabriel Bermúdez Castillo, Rafael Marín, Rodolfo Martínez or Javier Negrete and with SF women writers (excluding Elia Barceló).
All submissions must be in English and conform to SFS submission policies, which includes a rigorous peer-reviewing process.
Abstracts (150-200 words) are due by March 30, complete papers by 1 September (maximum 7000 words).
Please, email your proposals to Sara Martín : Sara[dot]Martin[at]uab[dot]cat
(5) NEW GAME IN TOWN. The “Storium” play-by-post forum has just gone live. A number of fairly-well-known writers and game companies have kicked in worlds, including File 770 regular Ursula Vernon, Seanan McGuire, Chuck Wendig, etc. Chris Meadows has details in “Storium storytelling game launches for public view” at Teleread.
The Kickstarter game worlds include quite a few intriguing settings, including some by fairly well-known authors or game companies. For example, the default universe for the HERO system “Champions” RPG is one of those worlds—so if you have some favorite old characters from a “Champions” setting, why not bring them back to life? Hugo-winning webcomic artist and author Ursula Vernon has a humorous setting called “Weird Fruit” (pictured above), and multiply-Hugo-nominated author Seanan McGuire has a setting called “Chambers of the Sea” in which merfolk take part in Atlantisian politics. Matt Forbeck has adapted his Monster Academy young-adult series into a Storium setting as well.
And that’s only scratching the surface. Well-known gaming or fiction writers such as Tobias Buckell, Robin D. Laws, N.K. Jemisin, J.C. Hutchins, Richard Dansky, Elizabeth Bear, Sam Sykes, Mur Lafferty, Kenneth Hite, Chuck Wendig, Stephen Blackmoore, Jordan Weisman, and Charles Stross have settings either ready or under preparation. Steve Jackson Games and Green Ronin Publications are also readying Storium worlds based on their “In Nomine” and “Mutants & Masterminds” RPG settings, respectively.
(6) YOUR TUMBLR DEEP THOUGHT OF THE DAY. From Weird Deer, this quote by Erin Bow:
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
(7) HAPPY ANNIVERSARY. Max Florschutz launched his blog Unusual Things a year ago this week.
Views
So, where to start? How about with the number of views Unusual Things has landed in its first year of operation? A quick look at the site’s stats board and some simple addition says …
10,207 Views
Hey, you know what? That’s not bad. Not bad at all. Ten thousand views, while nothing to those with heavy advertising budgets and ten thousand fans, is pretty good for a one-year blog on writing, a subject not a lot of people care about.
Actually, let’s dig into that one a bit more. What’s been the post with the highest number of views, the one that’s caught the most attention?
I’m Not a Fan of Science-Fiction and Fantasy? from May 30th, 2015, with 741 views.
You might remember that post. That was the post where I reacted to a number of statements from the Insular crowd during last year’s Hugo insanity, statements that, well, in line with their given moniker of “Insulars,” was all about how certain “casual” fans needed to be kept out of the Hugos, suggesting that they weren’t “real” fans of Sci-Fi and Fantasy because they hadn’t passed some invisible, societal conscientious litmus test that made them a “real fan.”
(8) CHAINS OF LOVE. There’s everything else, so why wouldn’t there be books where “Science Fiction Romance Goes To Space Prison”? Victoria Scott tells you about several of them at Amazing Stories. Ann Aguirre’s Perdition, for example, gets this valedictory:
OK, I have to warn you that “bleak” is an understatement. This series has some of the darkest stuff I’ve ever read, much more to the horror side than I normally will go (I have nightmare issues, ok?) but I found the characters so fascinating, I was compelled to read on. I was rooting so hard for Dred and Jael to make it – as a couple, out of Perdition, on to a Happily Ever After – that I was willing to stay with them through all the travails. The grim world of Perdition is well drawn and comprehensively thought out, and learning the many details of the worldbuilding backstory was another good reason to continue reading.
(9) NOT PLAN 8 OR PLAN 10. Before he can discuss Plan 9 From Outer Space, Jay McDowell needs to explain what a Bad Movie is:
A real, honest to goodness, grade Z modern Bad Movie is a movie where the creator, be it due to A) technical ineptitude (Manos: The Hands of Fate); B) budget limitations (pretty much anything cranked out by Roger Corman and/or AIP [American International Pictures]); or C) the creator’s overinflated sense of self (vanity projects like Battlefield Earth, Star Trek V, and Glitter), failed spectacularly and inadvertently, made a movie that has become endearing to the viewer. Simple, run-of-the-mill bad movies are, usually, movies that are just bad and not in a fun way; they’re sub-par or heavy handed with their message or, perhaps worst of all, purposely trying to be a true Bad Movie.
(10) WILL SHE PREORDER? My daughter has mentioned several times how excited she is that the eighth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Pts. I & II, is on the way. Will I ever get a clue that I’m supposed to buy it for her? 🙂
Directly following the play’s premiere in London, a play script will be released in both print and digital finally, finally, FINALLY giving readers the story of Harry’s life 19 years after he defeated the Dark Lord.
The book will be published by Little Brown Book Company on July 31, 2016, marking Harry’s 36th birthday.
(11) BAEN NEWS. Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf sent readers a message: they’re going to synchronize the release dates of ebooks and paper books.
From the publication month of April 2016 onward, the release dates will be the same (that is, the ebooks will not be available two weeks earlier than the paper books).
We will not be changing the time the Monthly Bundles are initially offered for sale, we will continue to offer eARCs as usual, and all other policies regarding ebook bundles will remain in place. We will not be making the period you can buy Monthly Bundles shorter, but longer.
The April 2016 bundle contains the ebooks that will be available in print on April 5th. The final versions of these ebooks would have been scheduled to go live as ebooks on all retail venues on March 16, 2015, and will now be available in their entirety April 5, 2016. At that point, the Monthly Bundle will become unavailable for sale.
We will continue to publish two newsletters per month to help you keep track of our offerings, one highlighting the print books which will come out two weeks in advance of the release date, the other highlighting ebook and website offerings on (or very close to) the release date itself.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born March 3, 1920 – James “Scotty” Doohan
(13) KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY. Rod Roddenberry is executive producing CBS’ new Star Trek series.
Roddenberry Entertainment President Rod Roddenberry and Chief Operating Officer Trevor Roth are serving as executive producers on the new Star Trek television series.
Other executive producers include Alex Kurtzman, Heather Kadin and Bryan Fuller, who was previously announced as showrunner.
(14) AT LSE. Literary Festival 2016 at the London School of Economics featured a number of discussions about sf/f-related topics.
There’s a podcast of “To Boldly Go: what Star Trek tells us about the world”, with participants Michèle Barrett, Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary University, London and author, Duncan Barrett, a best-selling author, Barry Buzan, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the LSE, Steven French, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, and Bryan Roberts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE.
And tweets about several other items have been collected at Storify.
.@MikeSav47032563 begins our #LSELitFest event. Says ideas of utopia are crucial to sociological study of inequality pic.twitter.com/5eipZuIgIG
— LSE Inequalities (@LSEInequalities) February 25, 2016
(15) SCOTT KELLY RETURNS FROM THE ISS.
Astronaut Scott Kelly arrived in Houston early this morning where he was reunited with his family after a whirlwind year-long mission in space.
Waiting for Kelly, 52, in Houston were his two daughters and girlfriend, along with his identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, and his sister-in-law, former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
After living for nearly a year aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is two inches taller than his identical twin brother Mark.
One of the main goals of his groundbreaking mission is to study how well humans can endure — mind, body and spirit — on a long-duration spaceflight.
From his perch 400 kilometers (249 miles) above the earth’s surface, Kelly snapped hundreds of beautifully abstract photographs of our planet’s landforms and waterways. He spotted hurricanes ominously swirling on sapphire-blue oceans. He gazed out at the aurora’s glittering fog. He consistently turned Earth’s lands and waters into an abstract artist’s dream, with shots of beaches, deserts, forests, and everything in between.
(16) GHOSTBUSTERS TRAILER BONUS. Russ discovered this website was apparently hidden in the trailer… http://www.paranormalstudieslab.com/#/
(17) THAT’S BAT-MA’AM, TO YOU. In 1974 Yvonne Craig gave an equal pay pitch to a captive audience…
Will Batgirl save Batman and Robin from the bomb? Or will she stand for her rights and get the same pay as a man? If they say no to equal pay…bombs away! 1974 Public Service Announcement by the U.S. Department of Labor–Wage & Hour Division.
[Thanks to Will R., John King Tarpinian, Steven French, JJ, Robotech_master, and robinareid for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Iphinome.]
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Not related to anything in particular: today’s video find.
(How do you embed videos here?)
Durn it, they’m talking SJWish at us now.
Funny, they didn’t look SJWish.
NickPheas:
Just be happy we don’t speak the robberlanguage. Bobecocausose itot sosoundodsos lolikoke tothohisos!
(7) I’m with Cat: is Florschutz just inattentive, or was he deliberately misrepresenting somebody’s stupid statement as being representative, or was he misrepresenting the statement itself? I see a link for Hugo definitions, but nothing linking to specific comments; he talks about McCarthyism but the lack of evidence in his essay runs in that direction itself.
(15) but how much taller is Scott K tomorrow? The impression in my car roof attests that I’m significantly taller in the morning than in the afternoon, which I’ve read is common due to expansion of the spinal discs when a load (e.g., being upright in gravity) is taken off them.
Christian B: Fascinating! Do the additional videos show any more of the mechanism? I’m especially curious about what sounds the violin-style bass (was that intended as a McCartney tribute, or just for compactness); do the balls hammer-down, or is there something that synchronizes fretting and plucking? (I see the creator going hands-on there, but I’m pretty sure I hear the bass even when he’s not elbow-deep in the machine.)
Kip W: with you on keeping real mechanisms running; one of the big disappointments of House on the Rock is all the fabulously complex-looking music machines (a ~20-piece wind orchestra?!?) that don’t actually work. (Given that one of the organs is admitted to be faked, I wonder how many of the other machines ever did work.) It would definitely be interesting to see steampunkers take on some of this preservation, but I don’t know how many of them are in it for working mechanisms rather than the tech-costume fantasies I see at SF conventions.
Some of the comments bring to mind the time a fan submitted a FAPAzine entirely in Swedish. Art Widner’s reaction: “You did what? with a chicken? and the chicken said you weren’t even any good at it?”
(2) Interesting kicker at the bottom of the article; I had no idea Bujold was not available in dead-tree form in the UK. Fascinating how national tastes (or business perceptions thereof) vary….
Chip Hitchcock
Yes, I don’t think the majority of steampunk aficionados are into the mechanical end of it, but there must be some overlap between them and makers who like to tinker with nonliving guts of things, and the music is a delicious acquired taste. I think if the audience for the finished product increases, there will also be people who are into how it all works—and somebody has to be interested enough to punch the band organ roll of “Bohemian Rhapsody”!
Sadly, I’ve seen the boom box on top of the nonworking mechanism. Hampton’s old Buckroe Beach carousel was saved when they tore down the park (recently enough that I remember seeing a rocket from the rocket ride sitting out in the scrub by the waterside), and it has its own building now, but they were having trouble keeping the band organ working. Now I’m near Seabreeze Park in Irondequoit, NY, which is lucky to have nearby people who know how to keep the instrument in top condition (Matthew Caulfield of the MME lives a suburb or two over, and there are other club members in hailing distance).
It’s free to subscribe to the MME, and gives a good picture of what’s going on in the field. I joined because I noticed the name of a player piano company on a smokestack in East Rochester. Ampico, that’s the one!
@Chip Hitchcock:
Yes, the progress videos do show how various bits of the machine work.
Regarding the bass guitar, if you have a look specifically from 0:56 onwards, you’ll see the marbles falling onto and bouncing off the strings to “pluck” them – while the performer/composer/constructor (Martin Molin) just touches the strings to make the marble-plucking produce different notes.
Steampunk is, largely, about fashion – most Steampunk-ish things look cool but don’t necessarily work …
// Christian
Also on the subject of Sweden, the language, and translation issues … 🙂
Probably somewhere in the 50 to 100 k range.
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2016/02/this-is-why-we.html
Regarding steampunk as a fashion.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA
I guess I just don’t personally see the appeal in PBP/more freeformish types of roleplaying that uses a premade “world”. I was a member of such a forum about ten years ago, and while it technically had a “world”, it was just “it’s a pseudomedieval fantasy world, here’s some faction/place/species names, go nuts” rather than, like, “here are some exquisitely crafted words that architect a wondrous strange world, each detail an irresistibly evocative gem of imagination”.
@Zil: The system permits people with sufficient imagination to make their own worlds from scratch, too, but a lot of people like having fascinating new settings made up for them to play in. Some people like writing original things while others prefer writing fanfic. It takes all kinds.
(A little surprised that RedWombat hasn’t chimed in about her own contribution to Storium…)
There is a long story in today’s Wall St. Journal (3/4/16) about the economics of Cons, growth of Cons, and some famous con participants like Shatner and Elvira.
CANCER SMACKDOWN IN PROGRESS –
Yeah, Cadigan is a lady after my own heart. One of the dirtiest tricks you can play on a cancer patient is to tell them, “It’s important to keep a positive mental attitude.” That is an Admiral Ackbar straight line to beat them all.
I think the Baen decision is about maximising revenue. The old Dutch auction approach of phased releases with most expensive HC, then TPB, and lastly cheapest MMPB has to contend with current day Internet & ebook immediacy.
Fantastic news about Pat Cadigan.
@Chris Meadows: It’s not really the same thing as fanfic, though, I don’t think. I’ve written fanfic. I read fanfic. I’ve even seen fannish PBP. It’s generally a response to a story-in-its-own-right, not to a set of lovingly wrought premises.
Then again, browsing round, it looks like they leaned fairly heavily on the game-system/game-mechanic aspects as well, so perhaps a better comparison is Fallen London RP — the in-its-own-right parts correspond more closely to the thing-itself of a game of that sort.
There is a Steampunk-Maker overlap – I believe glue and gears should never meet, and the coolest thing in the Computer History Machine after they got rid of the Room Of “Oooh, my *mom* worked on one of those!” was the Difference Engine.
(1) CANCER SMACKDOWN IN PROGRESS
That’s great news! I don’t know Cadigan, but from the video I saw of her speaking at Sasquan, she seems like a great person. It’s not too often I hear good news regarding cancer, so this really made my day.
(6) YOUR TUMBLR DEEP THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Pithy! Writing-angle aside, breweries get a house flavor for a similar reason (the yeast they use, if they don’t just buy the same yeast from a lab, evolves to fit the brewery’s environment). Cantillon, arguably the best brewer of sour and wild beers in the world, is infamous for never sweeping the cobwebs off their ceilings. That’d be horrifying in a regular brewery (you don’t want too much house flavor), but they want to encourage the naturally-occurring wild yeast to propagate. I recall that was causing some trouble because of Belgium’s entry into the European Union, as there are strict cleanliness laws. They must have managed to get an exception, as I haven’t heard anything about that in a year or two.
@Chip – I think the Insulars comment and his reasoning behind the name has to do with GRRM’s post(s?) earlyish in the SP3 controversy about the Hugos belonging to Worldcon members, not SFF fandom at large.
@Vasha – when I went to the the US Amazon to buy The Walls Around Us it was $1.21. Win!
That’s *wonderful* news about Pat! And awesome mental imagery. F*** cancer!
@Kip W:
Seabreeze!! The treat of my childhood, trips there. The best thing about riding the carousel was watching the organ at work; it had a small snare drum and a banjo among other instruments. But I thought both carousel and organ had been destroyed in a fire 20 years ago?
There was also an old wooden funhouse that required you to do things like walk through a rotating barrel (scary) and across a floor that was suspended by chains so it shifted and wobbled under your feet.
Yay Pat Cadigan!
In addition to liking her and her work, and being glad for her specifically, it is very good to hear about a case where the cancer treatment is working better than expected.
@Rev. Bob: Uncouth and/or irrelevant. Editing fiction and writing press releases are two different things, and it’s entirely possible that someone other than Toni Weisskopf wrote that release. It’s debatable (endlessly, as we’ve seen) to what extent “best editor long form” is about working with/on the manuscripts, and to what extent it’s about acquiring good books to publish, but it’s not “best publicist.”
There is a thread about the marble musical machine on one of the more prominent steampunk forums: http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,47537.0/topicseen.html
Re (7)
I’m not familiar with him. Is he always this clueless? Is the crashing lack of self-awareness where people are terrible for hurting his feels, whilst he implicitly or explicitly goes along with a movement that described scads of writers as affirmative action babies representative?
Vasha
We’ve been here 7–8 years now, but it’s my impression that the carousel at Seabreeze has been there a while. There’s also another carousel not far away, in a municipal park by the water, that I haven’t seen. It’s in a wooden building, and I never went by when it was unshuttered.
I’ve been lucky enough to find CDs of a lot of the band organs I’ve seen. The one that comes to the Big E (our last base was West Springfield, MA), the one in Holyoke that used to be in the now-razed Mountain Park, and now the one at Seabreeze.
Near Seabreeze Park, there’s the Parkside Diner and Parkside Golf, the latter of which is the oldest mini-golf course in the US. No idea what the oldest one outside the US is, but this one is comfortably well-worn. The concrete pads and paths have taken on distinct dips and rises and other idiosyncracies that make the omnipresent “Par 2” designation seem a bit silly at times. The last hole is a long drive, and if you sink it in one, your next game is free. Sarah did just that on her last shot last time we were there, and then we didn’t go at all the following year. (I mention the Diner because you get a coupon for a discount at the diner when you play golf, and a coupon for a discount on golf when you eat at the diner.)
I’ve been looking at the Campbell-eligible anthology, with a rather scattershot approach of trying stuff that sounded interesting. I’d +1 Vasha’s recommendation* for Charlotte Ashley, who has two good stories in there. I’d also suggest taking a look at Rachael K Jones – for me her strongest story was probably “Who Binds and Looses the World with Her Hands” which was powerful although not enjoyable (subject includes some physical abuse), while “Charlotte Incorporated” was competent quite interesting. “Makeisha in Time” probably let its passion overpower its story, but was still impressive.
I noticed the name of Brian Neimeier (a SP4 boost-ee) in there, so I decided to give him a fair shake. He has a short which is basically “Groundhog Day in 10 minutes.” It built up quite a good sense of urgency in the middle with the inevitable “tries to perfect a solution over many iterations” scene, but basically it wasn’t great, and really lacked any polish. There’s also a novel sample, which I found almost the opposite – the prose was competent if trying far too hard but the story wasn’t grabbing me in any way, and after a couple of “tell, don’t show” moments I gave up on it. Competent but not award-worthy.
Almost at very end is a tale from Jon F. Zeigler (who posts here on occasion) called “Galen and the Golden-Coat Hare” which is worth a read. While a single short doesn’t really get someone in to Campbell territory for me, it’s a well-told half-twist on a classic fairy-tale, and I enjoyed it.
Iona Sharma was already on my list, but the anthology doesn’t include either of her stories I’ve read, which are Nine Thousand Hours and Quarter Days.
Similarly I already had Kelly Robson scribbled down, and in the anthology you can get “Two-Year Man” from Asimovs which I think is her best story, along with two others.
*Umm, I think it was Vasha. Someone’s rec, anyway.
Kip W. That’s really taking me back. I played at Parkside Golf too, though my most vivid memory is getting hit in the face by a flying ball (someone must have been playing in a manner that is strongly discouraged, I guess). I still live not too far away, but haven’t wanted to revisit these sites of childhood memories. Sounds like Parkside hasn’t changed though! (I know Seabreeze has.)
Kip W: thanks for the pointers.
1) I’m really happy to hear that Pat Cadigan is doing better.
8) I second the recommendation for Ann Aguirre’s Dred Chronicles trilogy. It’s a great series and Perdition was on my Hugo nomination list in 2014 (well, we all know how that turned out). I have no idea why Ann Aguirre isn’t better known in SFF circles.
I haven’t read any of the other novels discussed, though a few sound interesting. However, only a few days ago I also noticed that I read a bunch of SF novels with prison settings lately and that a lot of them were written by women. Come to think of it, most of them had at least romantic elements, if not fully blown romance plots.
I’m allergic to self-promotion, but if you insist! It’s a world where everybody is a rodent, and the jungle is full of ambulatory vegetables. So basically I provided a couple locations, world settings, a few characters and the quest seeds–earthquakes possibly caused by the Dragonfruit in the volcano, the mystery of the half-animal, half-vegetable Armadilloupes, missing researchers, taming the venomous Cobrachini, finding the elusive cricket-herding Frog Tribe…you get the idea, but it’s basically a very absurd, whimsical setting, with the easy Storium mechanics. They wanted me along so they had a kid-friendly world, I expect, and also for the furry demographic.
I actually would love to play in that world, but of course I would. *grin*
@Mark: Thanks for the tip on Jones and Zeigler. Others you recommend were already on my list (it’s indeed me who’s been enthusing about Ashley).
One to check out might be Arkady Martine — she has an emotional science fiction story, “When the Fall Is All That’s Left”, in which two women, old friends, support each other in acts of great courage (although the science in that one is questionable), a story in the vividly colorful romantic mode, “City of Salt”, (although the salt-dust-dead city is incongruously covered in magical green vines given the even more incongruous name of “kudzu”), and a strange take on the immortal-soldier story, featuring two revived members of the First Crusade, “Adjuva” (the author is a Byzantine historian thus on safe ground factually, but I found the story rather incomprehensible). I think my favorite of her stories is one not in the anthology, the lighthearted myth “How the God Auzh-Aravik Brought Order to the World Outside the World”.
Andrea Phillips has a good science fiction story about growing up with technological aids to decision-making, “In Loco Parentis”. (Review by Amal El-Mohtar). Her novel looks interesting too.
Thomas Waldroon’s “Sinseerly a Friend & Yr. Obed’t” is mostly a straight American historical story, but with a lake monster in the background; the added element works well thematically. Malka Older’s “Tear Tracks” is a good “encounter with aliens reverses perspective on human customs” story. “Ffydd (Faith)” by S. Lynn is a romance of a sort, where a man comes back from war transfigured and his wife figures out that the best of him has not changed. These are all authors who’ve only published one story though.
And for readers who don’t mind visceral horror, L. S. Johnson (“Little Men with Knives”, a careful portrait of a poverty-stricken town, a trapped middle-aged woman, and her rebellion) and Isabel Yap (“Good Girls”, a manananggal at a girls’ reformatory) are notable.
I intend to try out some other author’s I’ve only heard of: JY Yang, Joseph Tomaras, Nin Harris, David Jón Fuller.
RedWombat
I can say with absolutely no fear of contradiction that if anyone could enroll me in the furry demographic, it would be you. Of course it’s not going to happen, so it won’t, but if it did it would be you 🙂
Edited to correct spelling of RedWombat’s name.
The award-winning BBC radio adaptation of Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA will be re-broadcast on BBC Radio 3, March 6th 2016 at 21:00 GMT (that’s 16:00 EST for US listeners). It will be available on the website for listening “shortly after broadcast”.
A propos of the discussion a while back, both of Seanan McGuire’s Indexing books are available for $1.99 on Amazon US right now.
@Mark
Aha, I didn’t realize they had gotten the Campbell collection out already. They didn’t mess around!
Yeah, I don’t realistically expect to even come within shouting distance of the ballot. I do have quite a bit of other related work out, but that one story is the only professional sale of genre fiction I have in my vitae so far. I was kind of surprised to find I was even eligible. Still, if a few more people get to see the story, that’s a win. Glad you enjoyed it!
Mark: I’ve been looking at the Campbell-eligible anthology, with a rather scattershot approach of trying stuff that sounded interesting.
It’s unfortunately so large and of such variable quality that I am not going to read the whole thing before March 31, so I appreciate the recommendations and will try to check them out.
I’d also like to point out that there are a lot of Campbell-eligible authors which are not in the sampler; right now, my nomination shortlist consists of:
Becky Chambers
Andy Weir
Scott Hawkins
C.A. Higgins
Natasha Pulley
Carrie Patel
S.L. Huang
and only the last two are in the sampler. So be sure to check the list of eligible authors at Writertopia when filling out your ballot.
Vasha: Andrea Phillips has a good science fiction story about growing up with technological aids to decision-making, “In Loco Parentis”. (Review by Amal El-Mohtar). Her novel looks interesting too.
Thanks for the rec. I will make a point of reading that story. I read her novel Revision, which was really well done in a lot of ways, but which featured a main character who was so incredibly so selfish and self-absorbed that I spent the entire book wanting to smack her (possibly a consequence of trying to write a character that is relatable to the teenage market) — and who, in the end, did not really grow up much or achieve much enlightenment.
I still haven’t figured out whether that was a deliberate choice on the part of the author, or if the author is so young that she doesn’t actually realize that the protagonist is not appreciably more mature at the end than she is at the beginning.
Nevertheless, the novel was well enough done that I am going to keep an eye out for future works by the author.
(8) CHAINS OF LOVE – I love The Dred Chronicles, along with pretty much everything Ann Aguirre writes. I’m not sure why she isn’t better known.
I finished Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant today and might be a little stunned. If a novel could be an onomatopoeia, this would be the one.
Also, yay for Pat Cadigan and her Docs.
Personally, I suspect it’s because Ann Aguirre is a woman and her books feature icky stuff like emotions, romance and – gasp – sex along with space battles, intergalactic politics, intrigue and the like. Plus, Ann Aguirre’s books contain such filthy SJW tokenisms as characters of colour, LGBT characters, interracial and even interspecies relationships.
Anyway, read the Sirantha Jax series, read the Dred Chronicles (which are a spin-off of sorts of the Sirantha Jax series, since one of the main protagonists in the latter is a minor villain in the former), read the Corinne Solomon series, read her YA, read the paranormal romances she wrote as Ava Gray, read the post-apocalytic series she wrote together with Carrie Lofty under the name Ellen Connor. It’s good stuff, all of it.
I should really read that one, especially since it’s now out in paperback.
(1) Huzzah! Outstanding news.
(3) Too true.
(5) scratches head So… it’s like a MUSH? I might do a free one.
(7) Bwuh? More Puppyspeak, inventing words no one’s ever used before?
(11) Clear as mud. thanks to the fine Baen writing/editing! eARCs still come out sooner, aren’t those ebooks?
(15) Interesting stuff for us here on Earth too.
@NIckPheas: No bubble machine, so they may be safe.
It’s a ball bearing machine, but “marble machine” sounds better. Whatever it’s called, it’s impressive and he needs to do more different tunes.
@Cora Buhlert
read the post-apocalytic series she wrote together with Carrie Lofty under the name Ellen Connor.
What is that? I’ve never heard of it.
(Oops, sorry, Mike, this is redheadedfemme. I just decided to put my name out there, at least for this site.)
@Christian Brunschen Thanks for posting the link here! This is the current thing that I’ve been emailing to people with the note “OMG this is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen recently.”
Apparently this guy is his brother and also mindblowingly talented. (If the link doesn’t work, just search for “Anders Flanderz” and you’ll get his stuff.)
@Cora Buhlert – … read the paranormal romances she wrote as Ava Gray, read the post-apocalytic series she wrote together with Carrie Lofty under the name Ellen Connor.
I didn’t know about those and now I have new Ann Aguirre books to look forward to. Thank you! My first exposure to her writing was the Sirantha Jax series, which blew me away, but I think the Dred Chronicles are even better.
I also wonder if part of her relative obscurity is due not only to the marginalized characters she writes about, but also to living outside of the US. I wonder the same thing about Tanya Huff and Kelley Armstrong.
Finished Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. Was supposed to be a heist-book, but didn’t really have that feel for me. Too much improvisation, too little planning? Also had a problem with the protagonists being so young.
It was an ok fantasy book, but compared to Locke Lamora, I found it lacking. Will not nominate.
@Christian Brunschen: WOW!!! Very cool!
@James Davis Nicoll: Hahaha, great video, and I like the song, too – not my usual, but it’s very groovy. One to buy, methinks. Thanks! 🙂
I found what I read of Aguirre and Huff to be…. eh. The Huff, I could perhaps chalk up to (sub)genre conventions that rub me the wrong way. The Aguirre just had subpar writing — poor prose, questionable scene-structuring, and plain out ignorance about how Spanish dialects work. I’m not even sure “I shall devour you while I fuck you, accursed meat-girl!” was *supposed* to be hilarious. That is a line that will never be erased from my memory banks.
Kendall, you might like this.
Although I did feel sorry for the wife.
–ticky–