Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. Last time around, we discussed Christopher Barzak’s new collection; this week, I’d like to get back to some recent magazines—namely, the July and August issues of Asimov’s, edited by Sheila Williams. The July issue included four novelettes and three short stories; August, however, included a novella, three novelettes, and only a single short story.

Of those, the pieces that stood out to me the most were “The Art of Homecoming” by Carrie Vaughn and “Today’s Friends” by David J. Schwartz from the July issue, as well as “The Ex-Corporal” by Leah Thomas from the August issue. While each issue also contained stories in universes familiar to readers of Asimov’s (a Rick Wilber piece in July and a Kristine Kathryn Rusch in August), the stand-alones were the offerings that caught my attention the most.

[Onward.]

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, published by Doubleday, is the newest nonfiction offering from Annalee Newitz—familiar voice from io9 and editor of previous nonfiction anthologies such as She’s Such a Geek!: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff. This project is a hybrid work, a popular-science style research project that begins with the hard facts of mass extinction events on our planet and concludes, in quite speculative territory, with the technological futures we may work toward to avoid being wiped out in the next extinction.

To quote the flap copy:

As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet’s turbulent past suggests that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or human interference. It’s a frightening prospect, as each of the earth’s past major disasters—from meteor strikes to bombardment by cosmic radiation—resulted in a mass extinction… But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz […] explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of log-term species survival are better than ever.

Going on to call the book a “brilliantly speculative work of popular science,” that brief introduction to the project gives a good idea of what will follow: science, history, and the future—in one bright narrative thread.

[A review.]

At a lovely New York City gala, the winners of the 25^th annual Lambda Literary Award for outstanding LGBTQ literature were announced—including the science fiction, fantasy, and horror category. Past winners have included Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest, Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett’s Point of Dreams, and Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, as well as many, many books from small presses. Additionally, a few other categories this year included books that were a little speculative, or at the very least genre-bending.

The nominees for this years’ SFFH category were: (1) Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, Brit Mandelo, Lethe Press, (2) Chocolatiers of the High Winds: A Gay Steampunk Romance, H.B. Kurtzwilde, Clasp Editions; An Imprint of Circlet Press, (3) Green Thumb, Tom Cardamone, Lethe Press, (4) Heiresses of Russ 2012: the Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, Connie Wilkins and Steve Berman, Lethe Press, (5) In the Now, Kelly Sinclair, Blue Feather Books, (6) Night Shadows: Queer Horror, Greg Herren and J.M. Redmann, eds., Bold Strokes Books, and (7) The Survivors, Sean Eads, Lethe Press.

[And the winner is:]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. Our conversational focus this week will be a few stories from a recent collection by Christopher Barzak, Before and Afterlives. The collection, recently published by Lethe Press, is Barzak’s first full-length book of short fiction, following 2012’s diminutive but vivid Birds and Birthdays (published as part of Aqueduct Press’s Conversation Pieces series, reviewed here). Before and Afterlives collects previously published stories spanning from 1999 to 2011 and also includes one piece original to the book, “A Beginner’s Guide to Survival Before, During, and After the Apocalypse.”

I’ve previously discussed one of the stories included in this collection—“Map of Seventeen”—but this time around, I’d like to shift focus to a couple of the stories that I find most emblematic of Barzak’s work as it comes together in this particular book: “What We Know About the Lost Families of ——- House” and “Plenty.” I’ll also spend a little time on the story original to the collection.

[A discussion.]

After it was given in 2012, Neil Gaiman’s commencement address to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts lit up the artsy, writerly, creative ends of the internet. It was, all at once, an uplifting speech with emotional content, a professional speech with good advice, and a humorous reflection on a life spent making art. So, it’s not much of a surprise that it was picked up to be published in a unique form: a small hardcover book designed—and the word designed is really important here—by Chip Kidd. It’s a book that is, itself, art. The form is the content, with this piece; the choice to make a physical and visual object out of a public speech is a creative one, and this book is more a product of Chip Kidd’s art than not.

The petite, brightly colored book is titled simply Neil Gaiman’s ‘Make Good Art’ speech. (And yes, the period is included.) There is background “floating” text on the front cover beneath the title that reads, “Fantastic Mistakes.” Kidd, the designer who adapted the speech to this visual form, primarily uses four colors—a pale blue, a soft butter-yellow, a bright red, and white—for backgrounds, designs, and text alike.

[A review.]

The third and final installment of Chris Moriarty’s Spin Trilogy, Ghost Spin, releases at the end of May—nearly seven years after the initial release of Spin Control, itself the brilliant follow-up to her debut novel, Spin State. In much the same way that the second book differed significantly from the first in tone, focus, and structure, Ghost Spin is an ambitious attempt to once again provide a fresh angle on this universe and its problems—this time with space pirates, fractured AIs, and a desperate two-pronged search for answers to questions that are at first personal, but are ultimately the force that will shift the direction of the future.

The story revolves primarily around Catherine Li and Cohen, with the addition of other narrators, including ex-Navy captain, now-pirate William Llewellyn. In the opening chapter, Cohen is trapped on a backwater planet recently taken over by the UN—and, as a security team closes in on him, he commits suicide. His component parts are auctioned off almost instantly, as is the usual procedure for decoherent AIs; however, he’s left a trail of clues for Li, and the only hope for what he was trying to do, to save, is that she’ll find and pursue them. Li herself, without Cohen’s protection, is also in plenty of danger—from Nguyen, from the Syndicates demanding her extradition, and elsewhere. The question of what Cohen was up to, as well as how she can finish the job and put him back together, drives Li to make a series of dangerous and significant decisions that might alter the course of humanity’s future.

[A review.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. While catching up on a bit of magazine reading, I noticed that one author in particular had a strong showing in April: Karin Tidbeck, who had two separate stories out last month, one of them here at Tor.com (“Sing”). We see this a lot from some delightfully productive folks, of course, but it’s still notable to me whenever I encounter two stories in a month, in different publications, from a writer whose work I genuinely enjoy. There was also a stand-out story in the newest issue of Apex by Emily Jiang that I wanted to talk about.

[Onward.]

The second in the Spin trilogy, Spin Control (2006) was a finalist for the Lambda Award and winner of the 2007 Philip K. Dick award. As the follow-up to an already strong debut, Spin Control builds on the complexity and intensity of Spin State—and, to my delight, it also drastically expands the world of the novels, giving insight into both the Syndicates and the splinters of humanity still surviving on Earth.

Spin Control follows Arkady, a Rostov Syndicate scientist, and Cohen, the Emergent AI, across a political landscape rife with strain and danger: the recently revived Israel-Palestine conflict on Earth. Arkady had participated in a terraforming mission that went terribly wrong on the planet Novalis; something he discovered there, with his lover and pairmate Arkasha, is being offered to Israel as a trade as he defects to that country from the Syndicates. Of course, the whole thing is being driven by a Syndicate spymaster—but only so far. Cohen and Li have arrived to bid on the “weapon,” or whatever it might be that Arkady has been told to offer, for ALEF. Other players on the world stage are also participating, including the Americans and the Palestinians. The “weapon” itself, however, and who’s playing for what team: none of these things are clear, and every acquaintance is a potential traitor.

[A review.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. Though the majority of the magazines whose stories I’ve discussed here so far are semiprozines, I also read a variety of smaller publications—usually digital—that consistently offer unique and provocative stories. One of these little magazines I enjoy is Expanded Horizons; their tagline is “Speculative Fiction for the Rest of Us.”

Driven by an editorial philosophy expressly devoted to diversity of all types and honest, productive representations of that diversity, Expanded Horizons tends to publish works that I find intriguing on a variety of levels. Their new issue (April 2013) has recently been released, and so that seems like a good place to focus this week’s installment of the Short Fiction Spotlight. The issue contains three stories and a poem. As for the fictional pieces, they are: “From the Book of Names My Mother Did Not Give Me” by Christine V. Lao, “Waiting for Agua de Mayo” by Mia Tijam, and “Calling Oshun” by Shannon Barber. The first two are reprints from the Philippine Speculative Fiction series, while the last is original to this issue.

[Onward.]

The first installment of Chris Moriarty’s recently-completed Spin Trilogy, Spin State (2003) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick, John Campbell, Spectrum and Prometheus Awards—a strong debut, fast-paced, that Nicola Griffith described as “vivid, sexy, and sharply written […] a nonstop, white-knuckle tour of quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and the human heart.” And it’s also—more of a rarity—a hard science fiction novel with a queer woman protagonist.

Spin State introduces Major Catherine Li, a UN Peacekeeper sent to investigate an “accidental” death on her home planet, a mining world that produces the Bose-Einstein condensate that makes quantum entanglement and its benefits—travel, commerce, communication—possible. As one might expect, however, the situation is anything but straightforward; Li is being played against (and by) a variety of actors in the larger political sphere. The answers she finds on Compson’s World could shift the balance of power between the UN and the Syndicates with regard to the control of inhabited space. Li’s own secrets are at risk of discovery, and her relationships to her handlers, associates, and friends—particularly an Emergent AI called Cohen—will determine the outcome.

[A relatively spoiler-free review.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. Having spent several weeks talking about recent fiction, it seems appropriate to take a step backwards and revisit stories of a more classical vintage that, perhaps, have been missed or overlooked by readers. And, when I thought on the confluence of “stories that speculative fiction fans should read but possibly haven’t” and “older fiction that’s still stunning,” I (naturally) settled on Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. Ficciones is a collection of Borges’s short fiction, including the majority of his fantastical or magic-realist works.

For the reader who enjoys tracing out a beautiful labyrinth in the form of a story, Borges will be a pleasure. His tales are hardly ever straightforward, even when the narratives may appear so, and the pleasure of the mental gymnastics that they occasionally provoke is unique. Borges also writes about writing frequently, with the sort of precise, handsome prose that lends itself well to convincing and engaging metafiction. Ficciones offers these pleasures and more—but, there are too many stories to discuss all at once, here. Instead, I’d like to focus on a couple of those that I’ve found most memorable, or most indicative of certain elements of Borges’s style or themes: “The Secret Miracle” and “The Library of Babel.”

[Onward.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. In the last installment, I focused briefly on one of the longest-running print magazines, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; this time, I’d like to return to the world of online publications to note a couple of recent stories that caught my eye. The first, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “The Prayer of Ninety Cats,” appears Subterranean Magazine, a quarterly publication with a strong track record of publishing quality work by well-known authors. The second is another piece from Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse Online: “In Metal, In Bone” by An Owomoyela.

I’ve discussed works by both of these writers in the past and I do always look forward to seeing new stories by them—but it’s not only confirmation bias at work in my choice of these two pieces out of the others available in recent publications. These are intense stories, stories that do interesting things with prose and structure; their shared ability to creep under the skin is something that I appreciate.

[Onward.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. As I’ve paid attention mostly, so far, to magazines that publish electronically, in this installment I’d like to take a look at some stories from the past two issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (January/February and March/April). Three stories in particular stood out above the rest: Ken Liu’s “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel,” Michael Reaves’s “Code 666,” and “What the Red Oaks Knew” by Elizabeth and Mark Bourne.

These are very different pieces, in terms of tone, arc, and focus. Ken Liu touches on issues of human rights and memory, Michael Reaves give us a scary story with EMTs, and the Bournes offer a tale of vital, elemental forces at work in a world one step away from our own. (There is a pleasant variety available in the stories of F&SF, though more would be better, particularly in terms of authors: while having regulars is certainly fine, and most publications end up with them, it can become a touch repetitive if the same folks appear again and again over a few issues in a row.)

[Onward.]

Neil Gaiman returns to familiar territory with his much-anticipated novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, forthcoming from William Morrow on June 18. The story explores the dark spaces of myth, memory, and identity through the experiences of a young boy, recalled by his adult self upon a visit to the place where he grew up—the place where he brushed something larger, more grand and impossible, than himself. As the flap copy says, “When he was seven years old, he found himself in unimaginable danger—from inside his family, and from without. His only hope is the girl who lives at the end of the lane. She says her duck pond is an ocean. She may be telling the truth. After all, her grandmother remembers the Big Bang.”

The flap copy perhaps misrepresents the tone of this novel; it sounds all together more playful than this sharp, poignant, and occasionally somber tale actually is. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Gaiman’s first novel directed toward adults since 2005’s Anansi Boys, but within it, he creates a curious tonal hybrid: the narrative is framed by an adult voice, and the content of the story is frequently outside of what would be seen in a children’s book—yet, the majority of the tale is told as by a child, with a child’s eyes and sense of storytelling. It is as if this novel settles on a middle-ground between Gaiman’s various potential audiences.

[A spoiler-free review]

Elizabeth Bear’s second Eternal Sky novel, Shattered Pillars, follows directly on the heels of the first, Range of Ghosts (2012). These books are set in a secondary world based loosely on the 12-13^th century Asian Steppes and surrounding empires; as noted previously regarding Range of Ghosts, they are epic in scale but personal in detail, focus, and theme, following a small band of characters as they literally shift the skies of their world through war, intrigue, and determination.

At the opening of Shattered Pillars, Re Temur and the Wizard Samarkar are continuing on their journey to rescue Edene—as well as to begin Temur’s war for his kingdom—with their companions, the monk Hsuing and the tiger-woman Hrahima. However, as is revealed at the end of the first novel, Edene has taken a different path into a caustic and ancient power, determined to save herself, her unborn child, and Temur. The wizards of Tsarepheth, too, have their own struggles and devastations to overcome as the reach of the Nameless cult spreads poisonously from empire to empire.

[A review.]

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells is an anthology of gaslamp fantasy—stories set in or around the world of nineteenth-century Victorian England—edited by the ever-dynamic Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. The contributor’s list is full of familiar names: Delia Sherman, Elizabeth Bear, Theodora Goss, Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer, Catherynne M. Valente, Jane Yolen, and so on. Many of these authors have previously written fantasies of manners or neo-Victorian stories; others visit the topic with fresh eyes.

The stories themselves touch a variety of genres and themes, from a contemporary academic fantasy to metafictional riffs on classic Victorian novels (and, of course, a light smattering of stories that might otherwise be considered “steampunk”). Several, also, offer critical portraits of the people within Britain who weren’t (and aren’t) often allowed their own words or stories: servants, wage laborers, and the people upon whose backs the glossy Victorian façade was built.

[A review.]

The 25^th Annual Lambda Awards nominees have been announced, including the LGBT Science Fiction /Fantasy/Horror category. The Lambda Awards, as the press release says, “celebrate achievement in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) writing for books published in 2012.” The winners will be announced at a ceremony on Monday June 3, 2013.

This year is a bit of a red-letter year for yours-truly, because one of the nominees is Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction. I’ve written a few times about the process of editing this collection, and what I had hoped it would do—and I’m thrilled that it seems to have connected with a wide audience, in and outside of the speculative fiction field.

The full nominee list is as follows:

[Continue.]

It’s been some time since we’ve had a discussion-oriented post at Queering SFF—sure, there have been book reviews and awards coverage and the like, but hardly enough chatting about the field generally, or about topics related under the headings of “queer” or “speculative” (or both). Blame your friendly correspondent, here; between the Exploring Carl Sagan’s Cosmos wrapping up and the Short Fiction Spotlight beginning, I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting my favorite space for talking about queer topics in the genre.

So, what’s been happening? For one thing, I’ve been reading some fascinating queer nonfiction, which I believe falls under our “related topics” heading. (That’s what I’d like to talk about this time—theory, practice, and cultural connections inside and outside of SF.) For another, I’ve been acting as senior editor at Strange Horizons—a magazine devoted in part to diverse fiction—which has made me think quite a lot about short queer SF from the slush pile to publication and beyond; we’ll get to that in the next post.

[Onward.]

While the weather ping-pongs from sixty degrees and sunny to freezing rain and negative wind-chill over the course of a single day, or while blizzards bury cars, sometimes staying in is preferable to going out. And, if you’re going to stay in, fending off cabin fever is a necessity—winter, to me, is the time for games. One recent acquisition that’s captured my interest is a card game designed by Keith Baker and published by Atlas Games: Gloom, the game where you “make your characters suffer the greatest tragedies possible before helping them pass on to the well-deserved respite of death.” In 2005, it was given an Origins Award for Best Traditional Card Game of the Year—but I hadn’t heard of it until a few months ago.

The game is designed for two to four players, and revolves around creating the most crushing, bizarre, appalling series of grotesqueries and accidents possible for your characters—while your opponents try to play cards like “Was Delighted by Ducklings” to remove some of your negative points. (Which are actually good, in this context.)

[If you like card games, story-telling, and puns…]