Chicks Dig Comics is the newest in the line of “Chicks Dig” books published by Mad Norwegian Press, following the Hugo-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords. This volume is edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Sigrid Ellis; it collects over thirty pieces of short work about women’s relationships with comics, from interviews to critical essays to personal statements. There’s even an essay on adapting superhero fashions for daily wear from a geek fashionista.

The strength of the book comes from its variety — comics professionals, fans, fiction writers, critics, feminist theorists, and sometimes all of the above at once are contributors — and the range of topics and styles of writing in the book make for a quick, entertaining read, though one that is occasionally uneven. There’s sometimes a bit of a jangle in the brain between one piece and the next, when they don’t connect in tone or style.

[A review]

Kickstarter has become ubiquitous around the SF community, funding things like “An Evening with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer,” the digital archiving of Charles Brown/Locus Magazine’s extraordinary collection of SF-related documents, and a thousand other things. But, there’s a new Kickstarter in town, and it’s one that I very much want to draw attention to.

[More on this neat new project]

Set in the same ragged, war-torn, post-peak oil future as 2010’s Printz Award-winning Shipbreaker, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Drowned Cities takes place in and around the titular region of the used-to-be United States—the old capitol, in particular. On the surface the novel is a survival story, following Mahlia, a young woman, as she sets out with Tool, the half-man familiar to readers of Shipbreaker, to rescue her only constant companion, Mouse. However, where Shipbreaker was predominantly concerned with extrapolation on climate change and ecology, The Drowned Cities is a novel deeply engaged in social commentary on child soldiers, politics, race, and the awful ouroboros effects of war.

The word everyone is bandying about in discussing this novel, “brutal,” does fit the necessary framework. However, so do “honest,” and “complex,” and (if I may cheat and use several words) “lit through with moments of compassion and humanity.” The Drowned Cities is a complicated book, and perhaps my favorite of all of Bacigalupi’s to date, because it engages thoroughly with layers of kindness, harshness, empathy, and, yes, brutality. And, because this bears mentioning before getting any further, it’s also a book entirely driven by a powerful, self-directed, multi-faceted young woman of color—a woman who forges alliances, makes war-plans, does the rescuing, and survives at all costs, while also coming to terms with her history, her desire for revenge, and the world that she lives in.

[A review.]

To round out poetry month, there’s one more magazine I’d like to talk about: Mythic Delirium, edited by Mike Allen. This magazine has been running steadily since 1998, and across the years has featured poets such as Neil Gaiman, Greer Gilman, Suzette Haden Elgin, Jane Yolen, and Ursula K. Le Guin — among a host of other voices. The newest issue, recently released, is the twenty-sixth installment; the table of contents features familiar names, from Rose Lemberg to Sonya Taaffe, Amal El-Mohtar to C. S. E. Cooney, and fresh ones, like Sandi Leibowitz and Jason Sturner.

The twenty-two poems within range from science-fictional to mythic and cover a wealth of ground in between. For a beginning reader of speculative poetry or a seasoned veteran, there’s a lot on offer in Mythic Delirium 26. The issue is also illustrated with art from Paula Friedlander, Don Eaves and Terrence Mollendor, Daniel Trout, and Anita Allen. The cover is by Tim Mullins.

[A review]

After the short collection of essays on sexuality and feminism, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts (1985), comes Russ’s final collection of short fiction, The Hidden Side of the Moon. Containing nearly twenty-five stories—more than, if the two-parter stories’ halves are considered separately—this collection spans from Russ’s first published SF tale, “Nor Custom Stale” (1959), up through stories published in the mid-80’s. The Hidden Side of the Moon was originally published by St. Martin’s Press and was reprinted by The Women’s Press in 1989; both editions are currently out of print.

The Hidden Side of the Moon isn’t just the last collection of short stories; it’s also the last fiction book in Russ’s whole oeuvre. As such, it’s a kind of retrospective: stories from across nearly thirty years of her fiction-writing life gathered in one place, the majority of which have never been collected elsewhere (with a few exceptions). The pieces range from humorous short-shorts to emotionally complex feminist metafictions, covering all of the now-familiar ground in between, but the overall tone of the collection is one of playfulness.

[Possibly, this is because there are a lot of humorous stories here that presumably hadn’t fit in Russ’s other collections.]

April is National Poetry Month — Tor.com has already been celebrating! — and that’s a perfect reason to turn Queering SFF toward a genre that I too-frequently forget to include: speculative poetry. Plus, the timing couldn’t be more serendipitous, because Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan’s speculative poetry magazine Stone Telling has recently released its seventh issue, a queer-themed installment titled “Bridging.”

For those unfamiliar with Stone Telling, it is a spec-poetry magazine with a lean toward “work that is multi-cultural and boundary-crossing, work that deals with othering and Others, work that considers race, gender, sexuality, identity, and disability issues in nontrivial and evocative ways.” They are a consistent haunt of mine when I’m looking for great speculative poetry, and while queer poems are a regular feature of the magazine, this is the first issue entirely devoted to queerness — not only in terms of sexuality but also gender.

Suffice to say, I loved it, and here’s why.

[A discussion]

Leah Bobet’s first novel, Above, is a young adult urban fantasy—in the sense that “urban fantasy” means “fantasy set in a city”—published this week by Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. The novel is told by Matthew, the first child born to a subterranean community called Safe—a place for Freaks, Beasts, and the Sick. His role in the community is as Teller: he remembers and recites the stories of the people. When the only member to ever be exiled comes back with an army of hungry shadows, driving him from his home and onto the unfriendly streets of Above, he and the few escapees must find a way to save their community; however, things are not as they seem, and the situation is not as clear-cut as Matthew once believed.

[A review. Spoilers.]

Black Heart, the third and final novel in Holly Black’s “The Curse Workers” series, picks up with Cassel Sharpe where the second book (Red Glove) left off: he’s playing several long games, trying to stay one step ahead of the teeth nipping at his heels, and in intense conflict with himself as he tries to define his sense of ethics in a crooked, complex world where no one is particularly a “good guy.” Lila Zacharov, his closest friend and the woman he loves, is still furious with him; he’s working with the Feds, alongside his brother Barron; his mother has been caught attempting to con a major politician and is on the run; the national politics about the treatment of hyperbathygammic people have begun to turn toxic.

[A review. Spoilers follow.]

Elizabeth Bear’s newest novel, Range of Ghosts, begins the Eternal Sky trilogy, set in a world inspired by 12-13^th century Central Asia (also featured in her 2010 novella Bone and Jewel Creatures). The book follows a set of exiles and outcasts from different kingdoms who come together as war and strife throw their previously settled societies into chaos. As civil war flames across the steppes, political intrigues unsettle royal dynasties elsewhere, and at the center of it all a murder-cult, an offshoot of the Uthman religion of the Scholar-God disavowed by its own society, sows discontent and infighting along the Celadon Highway with the intent to snap up all of the weakened kingdoms at the culmination of a great war.

Temur, a grandson of the Great Khagan, and Samarkar, once-princess of the Rasa dynasty and now a wizard, are the focal characters of the novel, which revolves around the developing political situation as much as it does their personal growth, relationships, and journeys. This is a complex fantasy, a tapestry woven of characters, intrigues, action, and epic—in the real sense of the word—conflicts that are only just beginning in Range of Ghosts. Those epic conflicts of religion and empire are reflected in the skies themselves; overhead, the heavenly bodies reflect the primacy of a ruler and a given faith. In the steppes, under the Qersnyk sky, there are moons for every one of the Great Khagan’s sons and grandsons. The skies of Rasan are different from the skies of the Rahazeen; what floats overhead—and what doesn’t—is immensely significant, and foregrounds the grand scale of the battles being waged.

[A review.]

Yesterday marked the announcement of the finalists for the 24th annual Lambda Literary Awards. As the press release says, “The awards, now in their twenty-fourth year, celebrate achievement in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) writing for books published in 2011. Winners will be announced at a Monday evening, June 4th ceremony in New York at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue) with an after-party at Slate (54 West 21st Street).”

The Lambda Awards cover a large spectrum of queer fiction and nonfiction, including a category for science fiction, fantasy, and horror publications; this year there are a grand total of 119 finalists across categories, selected from “a record number of nominations.”

[The Sf/F/H finalists are…]

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council has just announced the winner, honor list, and long list of recommended reading for the 2011 Tiptree Award. As the announcement says, the Tiptree Award “is presented annually to a work of science fiction or fantasy that explores and expands gender roles. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. It is intended to reward those writers who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.”

This year’s winner was Redwood and Wildfire, a novel by Andrea Hairston, published by Aqueduct Press. Of the novel, the Tiptree Award says: “Intersections of race, class, and gender encompass these characters’ entire lives. They struggle with external and internal forces around questions of gender roles, love, identity, and sexuality. This challenge drives how they move through the world and how it sees them. The characters in Redwood and Wildfire deftly negotiate freedom and integrity in a society where it’s difficult to hold true to these things.”

[The Honor List and long-list recommendations]

The sixth volume of Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, published by Nightshade Books, has just been released. It’s the first of the “year’s best” installments collecting work published in 2011 to come out, and the one I’ve been looking forward to the most. This year’s collection includes work by Kij Johnson, Cory Doctorow, Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, Caitlin Kiernan, and many fabulous others; several of the stories included here are now Nebula Award nominees.

Strahan’s Best of the Year books tend to be my favorite of the annual bunch (last year’s volume reviewed here), and this year’s installment was as high quality as I’ve come to expect. The book is big, nearly six hundred text-crammed pages long, and contains a comfortable mix of various different sorts of speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy, a little science-fantasy, some stories with a touch of horror, and even a bit of urban fantasy.

That variety, in stories and authors alike, is part of what makes Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 6 stand strong as a retrospective of 2011, as well as part of what makes it so very readable — but now, I’m just repeating what I loved about the previous volumes. Suffice to say that it’s still true and still wonderfully satisfying.

[So, let’s get to the review]

Caitlin R. Kiernan’s newest novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, is a story written by India Morgan Phelps — Imp — about her encounters and involvement with Eva Canning, a siren or a wolf or “something far, far stranger,” as the flap copy says. It is her ghost story, her attempt to record her haunting and put it to rights when her own unreliable memory has wound circles and tributaries of fiction around the (factual) truth. The text is constructed as Imp’s recording of the events of 2008 from a point two years and some months in the future, initially, and slides between the past and present in her life as the story accretes and unwinds for the reader of the manuscript — a manuscript at first intended to be unread, to be ultimately private, but in front of us-the-reader all the same.

A helpful hint: here there be layers — layers upon layers, of fiction and fact, of fact and truth, of story and memoir, of tense and pronoun and audience, of real and unreal. The Drowning Girl: A Memoir is not an easy novel, but it rewards tenfold the effort and engagement of the reader who is willing to put in the work.

[Bewilderment and wonder]

Cat Hellisen’s debut novel, When the Sea is Rising Red, is a (delightfully queer!) young adult second-world fantasy set in the highly gender-and class-stratified city of Pelimburg — a city that has seen better years, its economy now half-dismantled and its ruling Houses falling on hard times. The protagonist, Pelim Felicita, is the only daughter of House Pelim: useful as a trading chip for marriage, lacking autonomous citizenship or personal freedom, and bounded on every side by a rigidly defined set of acceptable social roles. The story kicks off when Ilven, Felicita’s romantic friend and only refuge from an abusive brother and smothering mother, commits suicide after having been bartered into a marriage she does not want. Trapped in a similar situation herself, Felicita decides to escape in the only way that seems viable: she fakes her own suicide and disappears into the city.

[A review; spoilers follow]

Following Joanna Russ’s short fiction collection Extra(ordinary) People (1984) comes a much smaller collection of feminist essays, most of which deal with sexuality and the erotic: Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts. The book was published by The Crossing Press and has never been reprinted; it collects essays originally published in The Coming Out Stories, 13^th Moon, and Sinister Wisdom.

Interestingly enough, in her own introduction Russ says: “Life and theory are both notoriously slippery and, since the author doesn’t live her life according to feminist theory, but draws her feminist theory from her life (among other things), there’s much about the following essays I’d now like to change” (9). However, I find it no less sharp, witty, and brilliant than Russ’s other works — and it is much more revelatory, personal, and explicit; I found the act of reading Magic Mommas… to be almost too intense at times, as if I was intruding on something private.

[And yet, the vital importance of sharing personal histories is undeniable]

I initially learned of the existence of Dave McKean’s erotic graphic novel project, Celluloid, because Neil Gaiman tweeted about it for nearly a week straight some while back, and I figured what the hell—that sounds really interesting. McKean is a fabulous, fantastical, thought-provoking artist, whether he’s doing the covers for Sandman or children’s books; seeing what he had to say visually/narratively about sex and sexual art seemed intriguing.

So I did what most of us do when curious about something we’ve seen mentioned on Twitter: I whisked into the Google-mines to find out what people were saying about the book before I decided whether or not to pick it up. The first thing I came across—and the thing that decided me on the purchase—was an interview in which McKean discussed what it was, exactly, that he was doing with a project that was both a “dirty comic book” and a surrealist art-journey. Which also gives me, looking back on it now, an inroad past my initial roadblock in reviewing Celluloid: what the hell do I talk about when reviewing an erotic comic?

[Onward. And, just to be sure, probably a bit NSFW.]

The Best American Comics series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has been going strong since 2006, each year with a different guest editor who chooses the works to be included — last year, it was Neil Gaiman and you can read his take on it here — and managed by the series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. This year’s edition was high on my radar for its guest editor, Alison Bechdel, author of the fabulous long-running series Dykes to Watch Out For and the critically acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.

I was not disappointed.

[An appreciation]

I’ve encountered ArcAttack before – possibly the most science fictional band in the history of ever, as they play their music using Tesla coils – because their awesome performance of the Doctor Who theme was not to be missed. This next video is potentially even cooler than the Doctor Who theme performance: ArcAttack do sections of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” on their Singing Tesla Coils.

Their band statement just verifies my suspicion that ArcAttack are the most SFnal band going right now: “ArcAttack is all about putting on a show that is not just a concert, but an otherworldly experience. In doing so with the technology that we’ve created, we hope to inspire minds, the young and the old, to take up an interest in science, the arts, and their applications, to examine where they intersect, where they are going, and to re-examine the works of past researchers and performers such as Nikola Tesla and Delia Derbyshire in light of the ever evolving face of this amazing world.”

Further videos available on their website, including an excerpt from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue and an interview done at the ’08 Maker Faire.

For the first time, I recently watched the film I Walked With a Zombie, an oft-discussed 1943 “B-movie” directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton for RKO Pictures. (If those names sound at all familiar, it’s because the cult-classic horror film Cat People came from the same creative team.) The movie stars Frances Dee, Tom Conway, and James Ellison; these three play, respectively, nurse Betsy Connell, sugar-cane plantation owner Paul Holland, and Holland’s half-brother, Wesley Rand.

Possibly what makes the film so odd is that it’s a reinterpretation of Jane Eyre, mixed with Haitian folklore and commentaries on slavery, teetering precariously between exoticism and realism. For a 1943 film, it’s less wildly offensive than I had expected it would be, though it’s hardly free of racist implications; it is trying to comment seriously on exploitation, slavery, and race, though it falls down on the job regularly and severely.

[A set of thoughts.]