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Month: November 2016

November 2016 Clarkesworld Now Available

November 2016 Clarkesworld Now Available

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clarkesworld-122-smallI checked Tangent Online this morning to get their thoughts on the current issue of Clarkesworld, but their review isn’t up yet. Phooey. Fortunately, Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews posted an enthusiastic review this week. Here’s his overview:

It’s another packed month at Clarkesworld with six original stories, including a rather charming novelette in translation. And it’s another month that is entirely science fiction, with a splash of science-fantasy thrown in for flavor. These are tales that show visions of the future, conflicts playing out for the soul of humanity and for the fate of planets. Many of the stories take their focus off of Earth to show what humanity is capable of, the way that it can move from place to place, leaving a trail of destruction behind it. There’s hope, though, too, and the stories also show the power that humanity can hold to create and to change and to love….

Yeah, Charles knows how to whet your appetite. I’m especially curious about that “charming novelette in translation,” which turns out to be “Western Heaven” by Chen Hongyu, translated by Andy Dudak. Here’s what he says (in part).

Aww. This is a rather adorable adventure story about a robot artist, Wu Kong, on an Earth still deeply tainted from humanity, who wants to see where humans went, the planet that they fled to in order to escape the destruction they had wrought, leaving the robots behind, abandoned. Wu Kong gathers up a small band of robots to accompany him and together they work to find where humanity went and answer the questions burning within them. What are humans like? What is the meaning of work? Why were robots created? It’s a story that moves along with a rather chipper feel, this great adventure that the robots are going on. It almost feels like an old animated film to me, fun and with robots with distinct styles and voices… An excellent read!

Here he is on “Afrofuturist 419” by Nnedi Okorafor, just because I love his one-line story description:

Well this is a very fun, funny, and creepy story about a Nigerian astronaut left in space for 14 years and finally coming home because of a viral scam letter… It’s another short work but it’s an excellent blend of audio and text, tension and mystery, horror and humor. Go read it!

Read Charles’ complete review of the issue here.

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In 500 Words or Less: An Inheritance of Ashes is Absolutely Friggin’ Awesome

In 500 Words or Less: An Inheritance of Ashes is Absolutely Friggin’ Awesome

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an-inheritance-of-ashes-smallAn Inheritance of Ashes
By Leah Bobet
Clarion Books (400 pages, $9.98 in paperback/$9.99 digital, October 11, 2016)

The more I write, the harder it is for a novel to really get me excited.

Holy gods did Leah Bobet pull that off with An Inheritance of Ashes.

Though it won the Sunburst Award in the Young Adult category (and a bunch of other accolades) Inheritance has the darkness and intensity of an adult novel, much like The Hunger Games except much better written. The story opens with conflict, as young Hallie is forced to say goodbye to her uncle Matthias, who is finally being forced from their family’s farm and his ongoing feud with Hallie’s father. Flashforward eight years and Hallie is in a similar feud with her sister Marthe, as they struggle to survive in the post-apocalyptic world outside ruined Detroit. (Sidebar: it took me a while to realize Inheritance takes place in a world that once had advanced technology, and even longer to realize it’s actually our world — that’s how masterfully subtle Leah’s writing is, and how engaging her characters are.)

The feud between Hallie and Marthe perfectly captures the type of conflict you have when two loved ones are so afraid of disappointing or losing the other that they hold everything in, and then let the wound fester not because they hate each other, but because they love each other more than anything. But there is so much more to this novel than just that core relationship. There’s the cloud of a recent war against Twisted Things from another dimension, which claimed Marthe’s husband and crippled so many others. You have Heron, veteran of that conflict and secretly in possession of the weapon used to kill the Wicked God, which the military would kill to possess. How the world collapsed before the war is a mystery all its own. And every prominent side character captures your heart in different ways as they try to keep their community alive — because Inheritance is really a story about community coming together in the wake of devastation, to push back the darkness and survive despite pain, loss and disagreement.

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Haunted: Always, Sometimes, Never

Haunted: Always, Sometimes, Never

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Haunting — The old fashioned way

Many years ago, in the days of my misspent youth, I toiled for four years at California State University, Long Beach, as a theater major. As such, I of course spent most of my time on and around the department’s two stages. What with the vicissitudes of costume fittings, lighting adjustments, and walking on saying, “What ho!” twenty or thirty times until the director was satisfied, I often found myself in the building quite late at night, which led to a discovery — theaters are damned creepy places. They are, in fact, haunted. (The clunks and thumps and creaks and pops I heard were not from causes as mundane as the huge building setting or from the big glass windows cooling and contracting after the heat of the day — absolutely not.)

On reflection, I have come to think that all places, of any sort, fall somewhere on a supernatural sliding scale — always, sometimes, or never haunted. Indeed, this realization has led to a family game that my children and I often play — naming a place and stating its haunted status and, in case the others disagree, making a persuasive argument for your position. I know it sounds like an odd way to pass the time, but you get tired of Yahtzee after a while.

What are the factors that influence the likelihood of a place being haunted? If we’re talking about buildings, then function is very important, especially if the structure has any intrinsic relation to death or the supernatural. Thus it is far easier for a funeral home or church or morgue to be haunted than it is for a factory that exists for the purpose of extruding plastic into molds for Star Wars toys. (Now if two or three workers should fall into a vat of molten plastic, well, their co-workers might get a little uneasy walking around the isolated areas of the building alone at night. Just how uneasy would have to be determined by several other factors.)

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Fantasia 2016, Day 18, Part 2: Commitment to Genre (Before I Wake and The Top Secret: Murder in Mind)

Fantasia 2016, Day 18, Part 2: Commitment to Genre (Before I Wake and The Top Secret: Murder in Mind)

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Before I WakeAs the evening of Sunday, July 31, began I was looking forward to two films I planned to see at the Hall Theatre. The directors of both movies had interesting track records. Before I Wake, following the strange events surrounding an orphan boy whose dreams cross over into reality, was a new film from Oculus director Mike Flanagan. After that would come The Top Secret: Murder in Mind (Himitsu the Top Secret), a science-fiction murder mystery from Keishi Otomo, maker of the Rurouni Kenshin historical samurai-steampunk movies. One of these two films would (more or less) live up to my expectations.

First came a short film called “Quenottes” (“Pearlies”), written by Pascal Thiebaux and directed by Thiebaux with Gil Pinheiro, in which a boy (Matthieu Clément-Lescop) losing the last of his baby teeth brings out the supernatural mouse that hoards old lost teeth. A nastier version of the Tooth Fairy, the mouse cannot be cheated of its bounty, and this causes problems for the boy and his father (Lionel Abelanski). An excellent soundtrack helps the story move sharply along to a final disaster. The film’s an effective horror short with the feel of an old unDisneyfied fairy tale.

Before I Wake is a story about a married couple, Jessie and Mark (Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane) who adopt an orphaned eight-year-old boy, Cody (Jacob Tremblay). Cody seems like a perfect child, but he’s had problems with previous foster families. We soon learn the boy has a psychic gift that makes his dreams come to life for so long as he’s asleep. His nightmares have killed already, so Cody’s doing all he can to stay awake as long as he can. But he can’t keep his eyes open forever.

Usually when there’s a question-and-answer session after a film I report it after giving my impressions of the movie. This is one of those cases, though, where the comments of the creators have such a direct relevance to what I thought of the film that I want to present them first. What follows, as always, comes from handwritten notes (possibly inaccurate in specifics though I believe generally representative of the gist of things) recording the the comments of director Mike Flanagan, star Kate Bosworth, and Producer Trevor Macy.

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Sentient Spaceships, Alien Derelicts, and Warring Empires: S.K. Dunstell’s Linesman Trilogy

Sentient Spaceships, Alien Derelicts, and Warring Empires: S.K. Dunstell’s Linesman Trilogy

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I know a few collaborative writing teams who publish under a joint pseudonym (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, for example, who publish the Expanse novels under the name James S. A. Corey), and I even know a few husband and wife writing teams (like Ann & Andres Aguirre, who write urban fantasy under the name A. A. Aguirre, and bestselling fantasy authors Ilona and Andrew Gordon, who write under the name Ilona Andrews). But I’d never heard of a pair of siblings writing under one name — or at least I hadn’t, until I came across Sherylyn and Karen Dunstall, who write together under the name “S.K. Dunstall.”

Their first book was Linesman, published in paperback by Ace in June of last year. My friend Sharon Shinn called it “Full of fast action, interplanetary intrigue, appealing characters, and a fascinating new take on the idea of the sentient spaceship.” My son Tim, who’s currently studying physics in college, read it in virtually one sitting, and loved it — so much so that when I gave him an advance proof of the second volume, Alliance, for Christmas last year, he happily disappeared for hours.

The third volume in what’s now being called the Linesman series, Confluence, arrives in paperback from Ace at the end of this month. Great timing! That’s my Christmas shopping for Tim done.

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Meet Me through the Black Gate, Then Two Blocks down Great Jones Street

Meet Me through the Black Gate, Then Two Blocks down Great Jones Street

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the-war-of-the-wheat-berry-year-sarah-avery-smallTonight Great Jones Street, the new magazine that brought back my old Black Gate story “The War of the Wheat Berry Year,” is hosting an author chat, and you would all be very welcome. We’ll be talking about fantasy stories of all kinds, particularly epic, heroic, and sword and sorcery. I expect we’ll also be talking about issues of revision and representation, because of my essay, “Conscientious Turncoats,” at GJS about how the story needed to change to come back into the world. Feel free to bring your readerly fixations and preoccupations with you, too. I would love to have some familiar Black Gate voices in this new space.

Great Jones Street is a peculiar hybrid creature, a magazine that’s also an app. They started with a love of short stories and a realization that the short story may be the perfect form for reading on phones. I almost said I got unintentionally hooked on their app, but it would be more accurate to say they filled it up with so many great stories by top SFF writers that I forgot I was reading through an app. It feels more like the kind of anthology you might find in Jorge Luis Borges’s interdimensional library, or the best bookshop in Diagon Alley — endlessly growing new stories as you read it. Seeing my name among the other authorial names gathered there is a bit dizzying, and I’m not quite sure how I landed the first spot for their inaugural author chat.

The chat will run from 8pm to 11pm EST. Instructions on how to join the conversation are here.

New Treasures: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams

New Treasures: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams

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the-best-american-science-fiction-and-fantasy-2016-smaller the-best-american-science-fiction-and-fantasy-2016-small

Last year Mariner Books added an inaugural SF and fantasy volume, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, to their highly regarded annual anthology series, which includes Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and others. John Joseph Adams is the series editor; the 2015 edition was edited by Joe Hill and was one of the stronger Best of the Year anthologies from last year. (Check out the compete TOC for that first volume here.)

This year’s volume is edited by Karen Joy Fowler. It includes fantasy tales by Sofia Samatar, Rachel Swirsky, Salman Rushdie, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sam J. Miller, and others, and science fiction by Kelly Link, Catherynne M. Valente, Dale Bailey, Charlie Jane Anders, Ted Chiang, and many others.

It was published in trade paperback in October, and includes a foreword by John Joseph Adams, and an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler. It’s the eleventh and last of the major Best of the Year anthologies to appear this year, and it brings to a close the publishing season that began with Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 back in May.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016.

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Asimov’s SF and Analog Magazine Switch to Bi-Monthly Publication

Asimov’s SF and Analog Magazine Switch to Bi-Monthly Publication

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asimovs-science-fiction-april-1993-smallWay back in January 2009, F&SF edition Gordon Van Gelder announced that his magazine would be switching to bimonthly publication. Instead of 11 issues a year, including a special double-sized issue every October, F&SF would publish six double issues a year, in an attempt to reduce mailing costs and other overhead. At the time there were ominous rumblings and dire prophecies, but it seems to have worked out nicely for the magazine, which has been been publishing regularly every since.

Since then I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop — meaning, when would the two remaining print SF magazines, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction, follow suit? And on Wednesday Locus Online broke the news that both magazines would be switching to bimonthly publication starting in January 2017.

Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams explains in a forthcoming editorial that the magazines will now publish “six 208-page double issues” per year, a 16-page increase over current double issues. She expects the change will allow her to publish more novellas and a higher percentage of original cover art. Despite the change in publication schedule, she says readers “will receive the same number of pages of fiction as in the past,” and subscribers will “receive the same number of issue months” they purchased. Publishing bimonthly will allow them “to hold the current subscription prices a bit longer.” Both periodicals are published by Dell Magazines.

Speaking as someone who enjoys the big double issues, I view this as a positive development — and anything that helps the magazines save costs is a good thing. The current double-issue size is 192 pages, so the increase to 208 pages is another welcome change. However, it is a rather historic milestone for the genre. As Jonathan Strahan puts it:

Moving to a point where we have no monthly print fiction magazines left seems like some sort of turning point, though I don’t know towards what.

Visit the Asimov’s website here, and Analog here. See our November Fantasy Magazine Rack here, and all of our recent Magazine coverage here.

Medieval Treasures on Display in Madrid

Medieval Treasures on Display in Madrid

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Mirror case, France, 1370-1400. Ivory. It depicts a love scene in a
garden where the happy couple hold a heart as cupids hover
overhead holding a shield and a hooded figure looks on.

One of Madrid’s leading private galleries is hosting a major exhibition on medieval art. The Pillars of Europe: Middle Ages in the British Museum brings together more than a hundred objects ranging from 400 to 1500 at CaixaForum’s Madrid branch.

The exhibition aims to show through objects and images how Europe transformed from the fragmentation after the fall of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages and into the emerging nation states at the beginning of the Renaissance. An excellent map shows how borders shifted over the century, and a slideshow gives period depictions of Europe’s cities as they grew and became more prominent. The objects are grouped into four themes: Royal Power, Heavenly Treasures, Courtly Life, and Urban Life.

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Seeking Solace

Seeking Solace

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howard-zebras-smallWhen assembling the first round of Black Gate bloggers one of the few rules I laid down was that we keep our personal politics and religion out of our posts. John and I both wanted to create a safe and welcoming space where people of all stripes could come together to discuss the genres we love.

Over the last week I’ve never found that admonition more of a challenge. You see, I’ve been grieving. Not for any one person’s loss, or even because the side I backed lost, but because it feels to me that an ideal has vanished. That ideal may not have been flawless, but I shudder at the manner in which the leading proponent of a replacement movement conducts himself. And for the first time in my life I’m not just disheartened by an election result contrary to my own wishes, I’m a little frightened.

I believe I’m in the letter of my own law still because I’m not here to proselytize. The preceding paragraph is solely for context so you’ll understand what it is that’s upset me. If, like me, the depth of your own grief and your anger and fear surprise you, you’ve probably been wondering how to cope. I wish I could give you a good answer. I can tell you that one of the things I’ve done is distract myself with the genres I love. The other was to create some art. That is one (and not the only) way I mean to act.

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