On International Women’s Day, several of the best writers in SF/F today reveal new stories inspired by the phrase “Nevertheless, she persisted”, raising their voice in response to a phrase originally meant to silence.
The stories publish on Tor.com all throughout the day of March 8th. They are collected here.
Welcome back to Rich and Strange, where we’re taking a turn towards print again: this week’s story, “The New Mother” by Eugene Fischer, headlines the current issue of Asimov’s, making it the first Asimov’s story I’ve read before seeing it nominated for an award. It’s good to be reminded that, as much as I discover loads of amazing stuff in online venues, and as much as the gratification of reading and sharing stories online is instant, there’s staggeringly good stuff an extra click or two away.
Full Disclosure: Fischer introduced me to Gunnerkrigg Court and for this I will be forever grateful. He’s a good friend and I’ve had the privilege of seeing early drafts of “The New Mother,” as well as suggesting emendations to it. I’m delighted to see its quality recognized by Asimov’s, giving me the opportunity to crow about its many felicities here.
Hereabouts on Rich and Strange, I like to keep things from getting same-y—odd streak of tiger/beast-lover stories notwithstanding—since part of my project with this column is to broaden my own reading as well as comment on the stuff I like. So I’m delighted to add a no-holds-barred pulp action cuss-fest to the roster with Brooke Bolander’s amazing “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead,” from this month’s issue of Lightspeed.
Full Disclosure: I’m a columnist for Lightspeed; my first column there will appear next week. Brooke Bolander and I follow each other on Twitter and share a passion for cucumbers so intense that it may well lead to some sort of unexamined bias in her favour.
Happy Lunar New Year, readers! This week’s rich, strange story briefly features the event, which is actually a very happy coincidence, as I was reading the most recent issue of Lackington’s for this column anyway.
Full Disclosure: JY Yang was almost completely unknown to me before I met her at LonCon3, shared a panel with her on Writing SF/F in Non-Western Modes, and listened to her say super smart things. Now I follow her on Twitter so as to see her saying more smart things.
I first became aware of “the Singularity” as a thing around the time when everyone seemed to be sick of talking about it, when the subject as a spur to storytelling seemed exhausted. As a consequence I lacked a crowd of enthusiasts telling me to read this or that, or explaining its intricacies to me in depth; my knowledge is cursory at best, and my ability to relate its relevance to this other thing I really want to talk about is limited. But here goes.
I’m utterly fascinated by stories that look at humans as augmented by or enmeshed with computers in our current smartphone / smartwatch / wearable camera context. There’s a keen difference to me between that idea of the Singularity as inevitable sublimation of humanity-as-we-know-it, and taking stock of the ways in which we’re already entwined with our intelligent technologies to the degree that everything’s changed, but everything’s also pretty much the same.
Enter “In Loco Parentis” by Andrea Phillips.
Happy New Year, and welcome back to Rich and Strange, where I look with some depth at short fiction that has astonished and delighted me. This week I want to draw your attention to Sonya Taaffe’s novella “The Boatman’s Cure,” included as the concluding portion of her just-released poetry collection Ghost Signs, from Aqueduct Press.
Full Disclosure: I would be honoured to consider Sonya Taaffe a friend, but for the fact that she keeps my heart in a salt-encrusted bottle on her window-sill, and will insist on giving the bottle a shake whenever she knows I am reading her words.
Welcome back to Rich and Strange, a weekly reading of marvellous short fiction from around the web. Today’s review takes a look at “Nkásht íí” by Darcie Little Badger, published this week in Strange Horizons.
This week in Full Disclosure: nothing to declare! Except that this story is beautiful and hooked me from start to finish.
This week on Rich and Strange we head over to Clarkesworld, a venue that became one of my early favourites for online reading but that I’ve inexplicably been neglecting recently, to read Dominica Phetteplace’s “No Vera There.”
Full Disclosure: I had never read or heard of Dominica Phetteplace before her good friend Christopher Caldwell recommended this story on Twitter. Christopher Caldwell is also my good friend and I have eaten his jambalaya, which is superb.
As it happens, so is this story.
This week I want to review a story published here at Tor.com, because in addition to being elegantly written and intensely engaging it taught me something about the way I read short fiction.
Full Disclosure: I am writing this review of a Tor.com story on Tor.com! Circles are closing! Streams are crossing! But far more perniciously than that, Max Gladstone and I have dirt on each other. We share a Dark and Terrible Secret. It’s entirely possible that if we were to become enemies instead of friendly acquaintances we could mutually assure each other’s destruction.
Thank goodness I loved this story.
I love Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. I love it with a geeky, earnest passion for its bleeding trees, its book-vomiting serpents, its undefeatable shield-maiden and her rescue of a woman named Love.
That said, I always read it with double vision—one eye always redacting, reading Duessa and the Saracen Knights against their ergot-laden grain. Of course the first really interesting female character we meet is a duplicitous evil-doer; of course being friends with the Queen of Night and getting her to spirit your boyfriend away before some (quite literal) kill-joy murders him means you’re a villain instead of a resourceful badass. It was strange, reading a book and loving it enough to spontaneously compose explanatory fanfic for its ugly parts, but that was most of my undergraduate English degree.
When I saw the title of Saladin Ahmed’s “Without Faith, Without Law, Without Joy,” I straightened up out of a slouch. I felt my eyes brighten with hope. He’s going to do it, I thought. He’s going to write my fanfic.
A new issue of Lackington’s magazine, edited by Ranylt Richildis, went up this week, book-ended by two searingly beautiful meditations on the relationship between aesthetics and utility. This week on Rich and Strange, I want to talk about Rose Lemberg’s “Stalemate” and Kate Heartfield’s “Bonsaiships of Venus,” both far-future science fiction stories told in awe-inducing language. They’re also two stories that fit together in a way that delighted me into much-needed catharsis after a hard week of reading very upsetting fiction.
This week in Full Disclosure: Ranylt Richildis and Rose Lemberg are good friends and have both published me in their respective zines in the past (Lemberg edits Stone Telling), and I’m friendlily acquainted with Kate Heartfield.
Welcome to Rich and Strange, a weekly spotlight on short fiction I’ve thoroughly enjoyed! This week I want to look Maria Dahvana Headley’s “If You Were a Tiger, I’d Have to Wear White,” appearing in the inaugural issue of Uncanny Magazine.
It’s occurred to me that, given the permeable nature of professional relationships in our genre, I might change the name of this column to Full Disclosure, since I’m often hard put to find stories I love written by people or appearing in venues to which I have absolutely no connection. It’s a natural state of affairs in genre that we read a thing we love, meet the person who wrote it at a convention, strike up an acquaintanceship that becomes a friendship, and then find that we’re reading the excellent work of people we now chat with on a regular basis. So it goes – but I’ll always state those connections up front when they occur.
So for instance, this week in Full Disclosure, I reveal that I read “If You Were a Tiger, I’d Have to Wear White” for Uncanny’s podcast (and was paid to do so); that I supported Uncanny’s Kickstarter; and that Headley once bought me a salad at Readercon. Personally what I think you should take away from this is that I loved “If You Were a Tiger, I’d Have to Wear White” enough to tediously itemize the above because as we all know it’s actually about ethics in short fiction journalism.
Earlier this autumn I was infuriated enough by a bigoted and incompetent review of a talented writer’s work that I decided to review it myself. The result was Rich and Strange, a commitment to review short fiction on a weekly basis, focusing on work in magazines that I’ve especially loved. I reviewed three stories—Sam J. Miller’s “We Are the Cloud,” Alyssa Wong’s “Santos de Sampaguitas,” and Kate Hall’s “The Scrimshaw and the Scream”—before taking Tor.com up on the invitation of running the column here.
Partly in honour of Liz Bourke’s Sleeps With Monsters column but mostly just because it’s dazzling, the first story I want to single out for praise in this venue is C. S. E. Cooney’s “Witch, Beast, Saint: an Erotic Fairy Tale.”
Welcome back to Doc-tails, a two-part post in anticipation of Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary! In part one of this boozestravaganza, we introduced you to the concepts and recipes for 11 cocktails—one for each incarnation of the Doctor so far. In this post, a veritable Companionship—Interrogation? Paradox?—of fans prepare the beverages in question, getting their geek on with photos and tasting notes.
Once upon a time on Twitter, I asked people to come up with easy to make Doctor Who themed drinks for the launch party of Queers Dig Time Lords. I was staggered by the enthusiasm and ingenuity with which people responded—but Al Kennedy of comics podcast House to Astonish took things a step further, coming up with drink components for all eleven incarnations of the Doctor, themed around one of their representative episodes (or books).
Very keen to see these bits and bobs come together as actual, buildable drinks, I asked alcohol architect Stephane Cote for his expertise—and what he came up with absolutely blew me away.
Armed with recipes, good company, and very little in the way of instinctual self-preservation, I journeyed forth into the wilds of Glasgow to find a cocktail bar that would enable us to drink our way through eleven Doctors. Blue Dog and its excellent staff were game, and thus did our adventure begin.
