Jeff VanderMeer’s fantastical city of Ambergris has always been—in my opinion—on a par with places like Gormenghast, Melinboné, Bas-Lag, or Amber. That is, a completely believable fantasy world where I would never, ever, not even in a million years or for a million dollars, want to go. And of all of the aforementioned places, Ambergris is top of that list as the one that’s the most deadly.
From The City of Saints and Madmen through Shriek: An Afterword to VanderMeer’s new novel Finch, Ambergris is a place where you feel just as likely to get a knife slipped into your kidneys as find a place to eat lunch. Not that the other places are a Disney-esque location where only fun happens, but there’s just a little something grittier about Ambergris. If you’ve never read any of VanderMeer’s Ambergris tales, see below* for a quick history of the city.
In Finch we follow the titular character while he works to solve a double homicide of a human and a gray cap (small mushroom-like, underground dwelling denizens). Unlike previous iterations of Ambergrisian tales where the language was either lush and baroque (The City of Saints and Madmen) or academic and literary (Shriek: An Afterword), Finch is gritty and subversive. It’s noir to the nines. You’ve got fisticuffs, gun fights, detective work, spies, and more (and yes, Finch has the requisite sexy lady in his life).
[Jump with me to learn more about Finch; spoilers are present but labeled!]
This is a quickie from World Fantasy in San Jose: the results of The First Annual Last Drink Bird Head Award. The awards are named after the anthology Last Drink Bird Head from Ministry of Whimsy Press (an imprint of Wyrm Publishing). The proceeds from the anthology benefit the ProLiteracy charity. Contributors include Peter Straub, Ellen Kushner, Gene Wolfe, Tanith Lee, and over 80 others.
The awards, both the categories and the finalists, were chosen by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, who edited the anthology. I found these categories interesting, as they focus on aspects of the field that are very different from your typical awards. Given that, the categories are highly specific and range from the slightly sarcastic (i.e., Gentle Advocacy) to the very serious (i.e., Promotion of Reading).
Without further ado (winners in bold):
Gentle Advocacy
In recognition of individuals willing to enter into blunt discourse about controversial issues…
- K. Tempest Bradford
- Nick Mamatas
- John Scalzi
Tireless Energy
In recognition of individuals who selflessly give of themselves for worthy organizations or causes…
- Natania Barron (for the Outer Alliance)
- Leslie Howle (for Clarion West and Hugo House activities)
- Rina Weisman (for SF in SF and the Variety Children’s Charity of Northern California)
Promotion of Reading
In recognition of individuals whose efforts contribute to the promotion of reading or an increase in reading proficiency…
- Colleen Cahill (for her work at the Library of Congress as an advocate for genre fiction and as the library’s representative to the ALA)
- James Gunn (for his work with AboutSF)
- Susan Straub (for her work as the creator and director of the Read to Me program, the goal of which is, in part, to “stimulate the imagination”)
Expanding Our Vocabulary
In recognition of writers whose fiction or nonfiction exposes readers to new words and, often, new ideas…
- John Clute
- Hal Duncan
- Catherynne M. Valente
International Activism
In recognition of those who work to bring writers from other literary traditions and countries to the attention of readers in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia…
- Charles Tan (for Bibliophile Stalker and various ad hoc efforts)
- Lavie Tidhar (for internet advocacy and for editing The Apex Book of World SF)
- James and Kathy Morrow (for editing The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent and continuing advocacy efforts)
Special Achievement Award
The winner of a Special Achievement Award also will be announced at the Last Drink Bird Head party. This award is geared toward recognizing individuals who are proactive behind the scenes but whose efforts often don’t receive public recognition. The winner will receive an elegant Hieronymous Bosch bird-with-letter figurine, a certificate, and chocolate. Starting with year two, the award will be named after the first year’s winner.
Neil Clarke
Congratulations to all the winners!
John Klima is the editor of the Hugo winning zine Electric Velocipede as well as the upcoming fairy tale reprint anthology Happily Ever After.
Hot on the heels of my announcement of Lightspeed, the online science fiction magazine to be edited by John Joseph Adams, comes the news of Daybreak Magazine, edited by Jetse de Vries. The magazine is the online companion to the Shine anthology that de Vries is editing for Solaris Books. The stories featured on Daybreak Magazine will not appear in the print anthology. Both the magazine and the anthology will feature near-future, optimistic science fiction, as de Vries was sick of reading down-beat fiction.
Daybreak Magazine launches today, October 16, 2009, and will post a story every second Friday until the print edition is published. Shine is currently slated to appear in April 2010. De Vries hints that the online fiction may appear beyond that date.
After all those announcement of magazines closing, and the general down feeling of the genre short fiction market, it’s exciting to be able to announce a new magazine. Lightspeed is a new monthly online science fiction magazine from Prime Books that will launch in June 2010.
John Joseph Adams (current assistant editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as well as the editor of many excellent anthologies such as The Living Dead and Federations) will select and edit the magazine’s fiction, and Andrea Kail (a former Late Night With Conan O’Brien producer) will handle the nonfiction. Adams will be leaving his post at F&SF at the end of the year to focus on the magazine as well as his other editorial projects.
I don’t know about you, but I think this is pretty exciting news. Adams has shown himself as a worthy editor and I think Lightspeed will make a great companion to Prime Books’ consistently strong (and appropriately named) online fantasy fiction magazine: Fantasy Magazine. I know the official launch is a ways off, but it’s still good to hear about a new magazine starting, particularly one with as good a pedigree as this one has.
Yes, yes, I realize that October 1 was more than a week ago. But I’ve been thinking about Support Our ’Zines Day (SOZD) a lot since then.
To quote Damien G. Walter (SOZD’s creator):
’zines need support. Professional ’zines rely on subscriptions to pay their staff and the writers who make the stories. Smaller ’zines often rely on donations just to cover their costs. But with the speed of life in the 21st Century it can be difficult to remember to renew subscriptions or make donations to the ’zines whose work we enjoy.
Damien included everyone in this, from Asimov’s and F&SF down to Shimmer and Sybil’s Garage to Kaleidotrope and Brain Harvest. He knows that in a traditional zine sense, many of those publications are not zines in the traditional sense, but he feels that they all need our support.
I agreed with this idea. It sounded great. Go out and support short-fiction venues. Of course I would get behind this. It stayed on my mind as I got renewal notices for three magazines—Fantasy & Science Fiction, Zoetrope, and Realms of Fantasy—and had been considering subscribing to Asimov’s. As I tallied up the subscriptions, it became quite a financial commitment.
Then my assistant editor made a brilliant suggestion: you could offer to volunteer as a means to support.
[read after the break to see why it was a brilliant suggestion]
In addition to all sorts of other cool things to encourage reading, the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress has launched a new project called The Exquisite Corpse Adventure.
For those who don’t know, an exquisite corpse is an old parlor game where sentences or images are collected together from separate collaborators to make a cohesive whole. For example, it could be that one person writes a sentence on a piece of paper and then that paper is passed around the room with each person adding a new sentence until someone finishes the story which is then read aloud.
Jon Scieszka, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, is the impetus behind this particular exquisite corpse. Scieszka has written the first episode and send it on to a series of noted authors and illustrators (including Gregory Maguire, M. T. Anderson, Daniel Handler, Shannon Hale, and many more) who will continue and complete the story. It will be published every two weeks and conclude one year from now.
As Scieszka describes his part: “pieced together out of so many parts that it is not possible to describe them all here, so go ahead and just start reading!”
I agree.
Start reading.
John Klima is the editor of the Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction zine Electric Velocipede.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a lot of people in my age group (heck, even a decade or so before and after my age group) first encountered Ray Bradbury in school. I remember reading and watching The Martian Chronicles in fifth grade. There was something both accessible and complex about the work. My underdeveloped reader brain could dive into the text and enjoy the stories, but it was something I could back to again and again and always find something new.
There’s no trick to this, you just have to be Ray Bradbury. You have to be a genius. You have to be willing to take years to write a story so that every paragraph, every sentence, every WORD was exactly what it should be. And even then, there is a uniquely stellar level of talent in Bradbury that makes his writing just that much better.
Later this year, Subterranean Press and PS Publishing are combining efforts to bring you The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition. It includes the classic text of The Martian Chronicles as well as 22 previously uncollected (and many unpublished) stories that didn’t make the cut for the final book. And those are fantastic, too!
Writers John Scalzi, Joe Hill, Marc Scott Zicree, and Richard Matheson introduce the different sections of the book. The book includes screenplays from 1964 and 1997 that have never been published before. There are five color plates by Edward Miller to illustrate the sections. To top it off, the book is signed by everyone. The ARC is already a beautiful book; I can only imagine what the final product will look like.
The signed, numbered (500 total) hardcover will set you back $300. The lettered edition (26 copies of course) goes for $900. This isn’t for the casual collector. I already have a gift-sized hardcover of The Martian Chronicles on my shelf. Heck, we all already probably have some edition of The Martian Chronicles or other. Those editions are not like this edition.
But for the Bradbury collector, this is a volume that you can’t pass up.
John Klima is the editor of the Hugo Award-winning magazine Electric Velocipede.
Prolific editor John Joseph Adams has two new reprint anthologies, one out now and one on the horizon. Out now is By Blood We Live, an anthology of vampire stories featuring work by writers like Kelley Armstrong, Anne Rice, Tad Williams, L.A. Banks, Garth Nix, and more, including an original story from Night Watch author Sergei Lukyanenko. As he’s done in the past, Adams has posted a bunch of free fiction from the anthology.
Coming in September is Adams’ Sherlock Holmes anthology The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. You can look forward to stories from Stephen King, Naomi Novik, Stephen Baxter, Neil Gaiman, Anthony Burgess, and more. Again, Adams has put together a selection of free fiction from the anthology.
Both sites also include the introductions and other non-fiction from the anthologies, as well as interviews with many of the authors in which they discuss the stories behind their stories.
Adams hasn’t been editing anthologies for very long (his first came out in 2008, but he will have nine anthologies under his belt by 2011), but their quality is consistently excellent. I expect these anthologies to live up to his previous efforts.
John Klima is the editor of the Hugo-winning speculative fiction zine Electric Velocipede.
The nominees for the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novelette are:
* “The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
* “Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)
* “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008)
* “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
* “Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s Jan 2008)
My first impression on the nominees for Best Novelette is how uniformly strong they are. There is no story that stands out above and beyond the others (unlike Short Story and Novella). However, it seems to me that this is not unusual for this category. It’s a nice length for the author to stretch a bit and give the storyline some nice development, but not so much length so that the author can hang themselves with their own creation. Like Short Story, I saw a common theme among the nominees: a single person struggling with their beliefs and in the end making some tough decisions.
Jim Baen’s Universe, the online subscription magazine edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint, is closing. The magazine is finishing its fourth year of publication, which means the publication schedule that started in June 2009 will run through April 2010.
People who buy a new membership will have access to the entirety of the magazine's run. It’s too bad that the magazine is closing. The list of contributors is impressive, including names like Cory Doctorow, Pat Cadigan, David Brin, Elizabeth Bear, Gregory Benford, Catherine Asaro, Ben Bova, Esther Friesner, and many, many more.
I was literally getting ready to finally get a subscription; something I felt I had set aside doing for too long. I will likely still do that, and take a gander at what I've been missing for four years now.
This has been a particularly hard 12 months for short fiction venues. Jim Baen’s Universe is one more in a long line of closings. I wonder if there were a lot of people like me, thinking about subscribing, and then not doing it. I wish there had been a way, or I had known of the way, to sample the magazine before subscribing.
Let’s hope the rest of Worldcon weekend goes by with better news and fun convention reports.
John Klima is the editor of the Hugo and World Fantasy nominated magazine Electric Velocipede. He works full time as a librarian at a small college in the Midwest.
I am sad to announce that the online zine Farrago’s Wainscott is closing. The reason for doing so is from an all-too-common theme:
There are many reasons behind this closure. Among them, of course, is cost. While our operating budget is comparatively small, the realities of offering free online literature while yet compensating our contributors have made the project unsustainable.
Farrago’s Wainscott was the place for online experimental speculative fiction. The work they published was more cutting-edge than anyone else in the field. Endorsed by people like Warren Ellis, Farrago’s was a place where you could always find something interesting. The editors didn’t seem concerned that people wouldn’t like everything they did; they wanted to published stuff to make you think.
For me, that is exactly what experimental fiction is about. I like it a lot in theory, I like practicing it, and often I like reading it. But it can be very obtuse and difficult. Like avant garde jazz, sometimes you suspect it’s more fun to be on stage than in the audience. I will miss Farrago’s Wainscott, but at least there’s one more issue before they’re gone.
John Klima is the editor of the Hugo and World Fantasy nominated magazine Electric Velocipede. He works full time as a librarian at a small college in the Midwest.
The nominees for the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story are:
* “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
* “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Jul 2008)
* “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two)
* “Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick (Baen’s Universe Oct 2008)
* “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled” by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
For me, the short story is the place to experiment. The author can try something new and doesn’t need to feel obligated to keep it working for more than a few thousand words. At the same time, you should actually tell a story. There’s no point just transcribing a scene (even an exciting, action-packed scene) if there’s no story behind it. And while that sounds simple, it’s not as easy as it looks. It’s no surprise that the five candidates this year for 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story all tell a story.
With only one exception (the Ted Chiang story), the 2009 Hugo short story nominees deal with how humans interact with another race/species. All the stories talk, without exception, about what it means to exist. While these are fairly universal story devices, I found it unusual to see such broad similarity among the nominees.
Be forewarned, if you have not read these stories, it’s likely I will spoil something for you. Proceed with caution.
The nominees for the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novella are:
* “The Political Prisoner” by Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF Aug 2008)
* “The Erdmann Nexus” by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
* “The Tear” by Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
* “Truth” by Robert Reed (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
* “True Names” by Benjamin Rosenbaum & Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2)
I always have trouble reading novellas. The length is just enough for many a writer to get trapped in their setting without an adequate resolution. Sometimes, the format of the story isn’t strong enough to sustain itself for novella length. Or, the story becomes more and more complicated and you can tell by the slim number of pages left that it just won’t resolve satisfactorily.
But a well-written novella, well, that leaves you wanting some more time with it. You get to the end and you hope it isn’t really over.
Be forewarned, if you have not read these stories, it’s likely I will spoil something for you. Proceed with caution.
As has been noted elsewhere online, the deadlines for Hugo voting and World Fantasy Award nomination are near!
The World Fantasy Award nominations are due/must be postmarked June 30, 2009. You are eligible to submit nominations if you attended either the Saratoga Springs or Calgary World Fantasy conventions, or if you are a registered member of this year’s convention. You can find information about the ballot here. The ballot itself is available as a PDF that can be mailed or e-mailed.
To vote for the Hugo Awards, the ballot must be received by end of day Eastern Daylight Time on July 3, 2009. At this point electronic voting is your only option to get your vote counted. You must be a supporting or attending member of this year’s Worldcon (Anticipation in Montreal) in order to be eligible to vote. You can still register, and it will set you back $50 US for a supporting membership or $210 for an attending membership.
I personally think being able to take part in the voting process is one of the most important things about being a science fiction and fantasy fan. Hugo voting numbers have declined some in recent years, and I’d love to see people take more interest in the process. (And that’s not, in interest of full disclosure, just because I’m on the Hugo ballot this year.)
There isn’t a lot of time left, but you could still squeak in if you hurry!
[Image from Flickr user John-Morgan; CC licensed for commercial use.]
This week I give new work from two genius writers who live on opposite coasts of the United States. Catherynne M. Valente on the East Coast, and Tim Pratt on the West Coast. Despite living in such disparate locales, they have quite a few things in common.
Valente’s most recent novel Palimpsest, was published by Bantam Spectra. Pratt’s most recent work is the Marla Mason books (such as Spell Games), also published by Bantam Spectra. They are also currently using these most recent books/series to write new work that is being published online for their fans.
Valente is writing The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which was intended to only be something that was referenced in Palimpsest, but never written. However, due to fan interest and some unforeseen circumstances, Valente has decided to write the book after all. You can read all the details here.
Pratt is writing a new Marla Mason story (a novella actually) that is a prequel to the book series. Pratt is publishing this online partly because of some unforeseen circumstances, but also because this is a story he wants to tell. You can read about Pratt’s reasons for writing the novella here.
Astute minds will note that both authors are actively asking for donations on their sites for people who enjoy the stories. But, both authors are being very clear that the stories are free for whomever come to the site. No one will be required to pay to gain access to any part of the story. And while both authors are people I care about, I am not sending you solely in the hopes of wringing hard-earned money out of your family’s savings. I want you to find some fiction that you enjoy reading.
Both Pratt and Valente are talented writers. And I find it exciting that they are offering new work for free for their fans. I’m curious to talk to them and see how the experience went for them. Reader-funded work is not new; Shadow Unit (featuring Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, and Amanda Downrum) is reader-funded online fiction, and I remember Lawrence Watt-Evans doing something similar (and he still is).
So with the Shadow Unit and Lawrence Watt-Evans added in, that's quite a bonanza of reading material.
[image from Flickr user euzesio; CC licensed for commercial use]
It seems the only time I surface here is to mention markets that are closing. This week gave us the news that Talebones and Lone Star Stories were closing up shop. And to be completely clear, Talebones has a few new issues that are yet to be published, and then the magazine will be changing to an annual anthology. So, that’s not technically a market closing, but a market changing. Lone Star Stories, however, is closing for the forseeable future.
Of course, the announcement of a market closing gives way to the typical reactionary blog posts of how the market is dying and that there’s nowhere to send stories to anymore, etc. etc. etc. Prime Books publisher Sean Wallace has a nice round up of the discussion that’s going on.
In some ways, I was just going to ignore it all and continue on with my work. And then I saw that people were saying that my magazine, Electric Velocipede, was closed. Not closed to submissions (which it is until August 1) but closed. As in: ceased publishing.
This is not a new problem. People read and see what they want to read and see. A market mentions it’s going on hiatus, and everyone rings its death knell. I know that there is historical precedence on this, but do a little research before you start measuring the coffin, ok? Sometimes places need to close to submissions or go on a short hiatus while they catch up with projects or as they’re getting ready to launch a new project.
[Click after the “READ MORE” link to see where I make it about more than just me, sort of.]
China Miéville should need no introduction here. For those who don’t know his name, he has published a number of critically acclaimed and bestselling books, such as Un Lun Dun and Perdido Street Station. Miéville always imbues his books with dazzling originality and his new novel, The City & The City, is no exception.
The City & The City takes place in the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. What makes them interesting is that the two cities occupy the same geographic space. And occasionally, in spaces known as cross hatches, they occupy the same physical space. Citizens of the two cities must ‘unsee’ each other, as you can only legally see and interact with things from your own city. To go to the other city, you must obtain a passport and special permission. Cars drive down a street one direction in Besźel, cross over into the other city, and drive back down the street but in Ul Qoma.
This unique characteristic of the paired cities becomes a decided problem for Inspector Tyador Borlú, who is investigating a murder. Shortly into the investigation, it becomes clear that the person was killed in Ul Qoma, but the body was dumped in Besźel. Borlú must now navigate the both cities without breaking international laws.
It is a testament to Miéville’s skill that I had a quick thought to research these cities online to learn more about them. This is hardly unusual for Miéville, as each of his novels features a setting, often a city, that is made wholly from the cloth of Miéville’s brain, and yet is so fully realized that the setting becomes another character in the novel.
Much like Jack O’Connell's work, Miéville’s benefits from having a setting with so much depth to it. As much as character to character interaction drives the plot in The City & The City, Besźel and Ul Qoma control everyone’s decisions. Borlú and his co-investigators are continually stymied by things being in Ul Qoma instead of their native Besźel. And it’s not just the fact that the settings share a strange topography; each city is complete: there are political organizations, fashions, car styles, dialects, television stations, and more and more.
And yet, despite all this, as it is every time I get further into a Miéville novel, I begin to wonder if all this build-up will pan out in the end. I’ve had a series of disappointments reading his novels where everything starts out great and builds and builds to a point where it felt like Miéville had written himself into a corner. I worried that this would happen again.
It didn’t happen this time. The novel bucked and twisted, but Miéville brought it under reign with his strongest finish to date. The City & The City is not like any other Miéville novel you’ve read. It owes as much stylistically to Hammett and Palahniuk as his earlier work owed to Moorcock and Peake.
Prepare to be surprised. Prepare to read your ass off.
Please note: this is a Firefox extension; if you use a different browser you won’t be able to see this.
Tumbarumba is an interesting idea for an online magazine from artist Ethan Ham and author Benjamin Rosenbaum. The idea is to take stories and insert a fragment of the story into the text of an article you're already reading online. To quote:
Our intention is for the reader to not only have the pleasure of finding and reading the stories, but also the momentary disorientation of stumbling upon a nonsensical sentence as well as a heightened awareness of textual absurdities (of which only a fraction will be the result of Tumbarumba).
I’m not familar with Ethan Ham’s work, but I do know Rosenbaum’s. His collection, The Ant King and Other Stories, from Small Beer Press was one of my favorite story collections from last year. It’s available as a Creative-Commons download in several formats, so that's a bonus Weekend Getaway this week! Seeing Rosenbaum’s name on the project assures me that the fiction will be top-notch.
Zoetrope: All-Story is a fiction magazine founded in 1997 by film director Francis Ford Coppola. According to its website, the magazine is “devoted to the best new short fiction and one-act plays” as well as exploring “the intersection of story and art, fiction and film.”
Zoetrope has featured fiction from writers like Wes Anderson, Woody Allen, Sherman Alexie, Margaret Atwood, Robert Olen Butler, Ethan Coen, Dave Eggers, Mary Gaitskill, Gabriel García Márquez, Steven Millhauser, Rick Moody, Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Powers, Gus Van Sant, and Kurt Vonnegut among others. That’s certainly a contributor list that many editors would kill for.
The fiction is consistently good, although not necessarily amazing. But, in my opinion, to find that I’m enjoying more than half of each issue’s content means that I’m enjoying the magazine overall. There’s a classic reprint in each issue, and even though some of the ‘classics’ are less than a decade old, some of them, like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” last issue, are truly classic. The reprints tend to have a movie connection.
This weekend I give you the new issue of Heliotrope, an online magazine edited by Jay Tomio, who is also one of the minds behind Book Spot Central.
The new issue is a celebration of Michael Moorcock, with new Moorcock-inspired fiction by Neil Gaiman and Rhys Hughes, as well as nonfiction tributes of Moorcock from writers like Chris Roberson, Hal Duncan, and Catherynne M. Valente.
You can read the issue online or download it as a PDF. Either way, it’s free! Heliotrope has always had a great line-up in each issue, but they’ve outdone themselves with this issue.
