“Cover the back of your necks! It’s going for your necks!”
“Use the black hole gun!”
“I’m out of Hero Points!”
“Kill them! Kill them!”
“Argh!”
Yes the house is full of teens playing a review copy of indy game I Love the Corps, a self-consciously SciFi game which hits the notes of 90s Military SF, with a dose of Aliens, plus video games like Call of Duty and Mass Effect (the referee’s book has a handy appendix of inspirations, including music). The lads range from 12 through to 16, with my son Kurtzhau, 14, in the middle and in the thick of it refereeing an ambitious one-shot he’s crafted involving rebel humans and sinister uploading aliens, epic scale space dreadnoughts, and more twists than a sack-full of broken micro USB cables.
Sue Burke’s short fiction has been published in Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s SF, Clarkesworld, and many other fine places. Her first novel Semiosis, released this week by Tor, is the tale of a tiny human colony on an alien world of strange ruins and even stranger plants.
It’s already generated a lot of excited buzz from places like SyFy Wire, The Verge, Kirkus, and the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog. James Patrick Kelly says it’s “A first contact novel like none you’ve ever read… The kind of story for which science fiction was invented,” and Adrian Tchaikovsky calls it “top class SF, intelligent and engaging… I loved every moment of it.”
Semiosis is… an easy read, and a pretty compelling one. The novel opens with a small human colony — fifty-odd people set out, with a store of sperm and ova to avoid the problems of inbreeding — landed and settled, rather precariously, on a planet they have named Pax. They intend to create a utopia, free of the problems that dogged Earth: violence, religious oppression, inequality. But Pax is an older planet than Earth, and its biosphere has had longer to evolve. The colonists discover that some of Pax’s plants are intelligent in their own way. The first generation of colonists become, essentially, the servants of a plant they call the snow vine. Their story is recounted by Octavo, the colony’s botanist, as he investigates the mystery of their new environment and comes to hate and resent their new plant overlords…
Semiosis is a very strong debut, and well worth checking out.
Semiosis was published by Tor Books on February 6, 2018. It is 333 pages, priced at $25.99. The cover was designed by James Stafford-Hill. Read an excerpt here.
Mary Robinette Kowal was born on February 8, 1969. Originally a puppeteer, she began publishing fiction in 2004, with her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, arriving in 2010.
In 2008, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writers and has gone on to win the Hugo Award three times, each in a different category. In 2011, she won the Hugo for Best Short Story for “For Want of a Nail.” She won for Best Related work for season seven of Writing Excuses, a podcast she produces in collaboration with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, and Jordan Sanderson, and in 2014 for her novelette “The Lady Astronaut of Mars.” She has served as both Secretary and Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and continues to volunteer for the organization in various roles.
“Just Right” was Mary Robinette Kowal’s first sale, and it appeared in The First Line in Summer 2004.
On the surface it tells the story of a woman who is dealing with the strange eccentricities of her six year old son. Celia’s husband, Lou, usually handles the morning rituals because Celia leaves each day to teach school. With the start of Summer vacation, however, she has suddenly thrown into the morning domestic routine and learns that her son, Mason, likes to do things in very specific, seemingly childish ways. When Celia stop playing along, Mason throws a very atypical temper tantrum.
While “Just Right” seems like a slice of life tale, it really is a very effective short horror story. Celia doesn’t understand what is happening because she is missing a very basic piece of information.
The effectiveness of the story comes from the banality of Celia situation. Anyone with children has experienced the seemingly random meltdowns when a child doesn’t get its way and learns how to handle the child. In this case, Celia is learning that the typical methods of raising her son aren’t always effective, although she is unaware of the cause.
Once many years ago, Ray Bradbury decided the best way to become a good short story writer was to write a whole bunch of them. So he committed to writing a short story every week for a year. He also decided the only way to get published was to submit short stories, so he submitted a story once a week for a year too.
It’s a simple formula many beginning writers just don’t get — you got to put in the effort, and you have to send your stuff out there. As Bradbury explained in this speech, practice will help you, and it is impossible to write 52 bad stories in a row.
So let me introduce you to Write1Sub1, an online group where we encourage each other to write and submit a short story every week. They don’t have to be the same short story, because you probably want to let a story sit for a while before going back and editing it with a fresh set of eyes.
Many of us (including yours truly) are more novelists at heart, so if you don’t think you can face a weekly challenge, you can write and submit once a month. When I did this challenge back in 2014, I tried the weekly challenge. I burned out after four months, but got 16 stories written, more short stories than all previous years combined. Many got published in magazines and anthologies and the rest assembled into a collection I indie published. It really does work!
Check us out on our Facebook page. It costs nothing but your time, commitment, and perhaps your immortal soul. Keep on writing!
Usually I use a Vintage Treasure post to celebrate a book I enjoyed decades ago, or a tough-to-find artifact that I’ve finally tracked down. But not always. Sometimes they’re just surprises.
The 1985 Tor paperback The Exile Waiting is a fine example. It showed up in a small collection of vintage paperbacks I bought on eBay last week for $5.95. Until then, I had no idea it even existed.
This is a surprise because Vonda N. McIntyre was one of my favorite SF writers of the 70s, and I thought I was paying more attention. Her marvelous novelette “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” won the 1973 Nebula Award, and the novel it formed a part of, Dreamsnake (1978), won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. And in 1997 her novel The Moon and the Sun won the Nebula, beating George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. That’s not something you see every day.
“This man is a Samson in physical strength – in fact, the limit of his strength is unknown even to me., as every bone and muscle in him is of the finest steel. The machinery that works his limbs is inside of him, and he can walk, run, jump, and kick forward or backward with wonderful agility. The motive power that moves him is in a powerful electric battery enclosed in yonder box, under the floor of the carriage, and is communicated to him through wires inside the shafts. … By pressing one knob inside the carriage, there, I start the battery under the floor, and the man shows signs of light and life. That globe inside the helmet gives forth a light that equals the noonday sun, and his eyes do the same. At will I can extinguish all the lights, or only one at a time, just as I may elect. Then another knob starts him going, and another will turn him to the right and another to the left – just as a faithful horse obeys the rein and the bit – and all, too, without my being exposed to any danger from without.”
We think of robots being fairly modern marvels, but that’s definitely a description of a robot and it dates to October 10, 1886. The Electric Man in Australia (the fantastically racist cover is from a later London magazine reprint, and yes, those are supposed to be Australian aborigines) was the invention of Frank Reade, Jr., a young inventor who was the prototype for Tom Swift and all his ilk. The adventures of young Frank – there had been a Frank Sr. for four books, with Harry Enton disguised as “Noname” – were written by the amazingly prolific “Noname,” really Luis Senarens, himself a teenager when the first Frank Reade, Jr. book, Frank Reade Jr. and His Steam Wonder, appeared in 1882 in Frank Tousey’s Boys Weekly. A “boys weekly” became a generic term for 8, 16, or 32 page weekly newsprint magazines. For a nickel, later a dime, readers got an exciting illustration on the front page, with the others crammed full of tiny type adventure or mystery novels or stories, sometimes serialized, sometimes filling an entire issue. Dozens of them appeared in the late 19th century only to be superseded by the coming of the pulp magazines.
Karen Joy Fowler was born on February 7, 1950. She began her science fiction career with the stories “Praxis” and “Recalling Cinderella,” both published in March, 1985. Her first novel, Sarah Canary, appeared in 1991. In addition to writing science fiction, Fowler wrote The Jane Austen Book Club, which was turned into a film.
In 1991 Fowler, along with Pat Murphy, founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award to recognize speculative fiction that expands or explores the understanding of gender.
She has won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 2004 for “What I Didn’t See” and in 2008 for “Always.” Fowler won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 1998 for Black Glass and again in 2010 for What I Didn’t See, and Other Stories. She won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for We Are Completely Beside Ourselves, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
“Always” was originally published in the April-May 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, edited by Sheila Williams. It was reprinted the next year in Year’s Best anthologies edited by Rich Horton and David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer. Ellen Datlow included it in Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 and Fowler reprinted it in her collection What We Didn’t See, and Other Stories.
Set in 1938, “Always” is a sympathetic view of a cult colony on the California coast called Always. The cult leader, Brother Porter, has promised his followers eternal life. Fowler never fully addresses whether Brother Porter has really discovered the secret of immortality, or if he’s just a leader who’s found a way to fleece people and get sex. More important to Fowler appears to be an attempt to depict someone who has found faith in her beliefs, a faith which endures beyond the bounds of evidence.
Even as Fowler’s protagonist accepts the idea of eternal life, her depictions of the other inhabitants of Always shows the shortcomings of living forever. Winnifred is always complaining about her ailments, John is constantly nostalgic for his old life, Harry is always happy, and the protagonist, who entered Always as a young woman, is supplanted by Kitty, younger and prettier than she is.
I was never quite sure what to make of OMNI magazine.
OMNI first appeared in 1978. It was published by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and, while it didn’t publish pornography, it never quite became a real science fiction magazine, either. True, it published some of my favorite SF of the 80s, including the brilliant SF/horror tale “Sandkings” by George R.R. Martin, “Unaccompanied Sonata” by Orson Scott Card, and stories by Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Alfred Bester, Harlan Ellison, Bruce Serling, Gene Wolfe, and many others.
On the other hand, it’s also the only SF magazine I’ve ever thrown away. When I moved to Belgium for a year in 1992 and had to put my books in storage, I chucked my complete collection of OMNI magazine in the trash because it wasn’t worth the back-breaking effort of moving all those heavy boxes. There just wasn’t enough fiction, and way too many UFO articles and other pseudo-science for my taste.
I’m not quite sure what to make of OMNI‘s return to print late last year, either. Mostly because — unlike the original magazine launch, which had a $3 million advertising budget — it was done completely under the radar. I never saw a print copy, and only heard the magazine was back via a few stray comments on Facebook. Amazon has no copies in stock. It took a while to find the website, and the Subscribe Now! button doesn’t work (probably because I have a pop-up blocker on, but still).
Nonetheless, some diligent digging convinced me that the magazine has, in fact, actually returned to print, and this isn’t all just a vague internet rumor. For one issue, at least. And that issue contains some original fiction by top names — Nancy Kress, Maureen F. McHugh, and Rich Larson — and other interesting content.
It also has the luscious interior art and easy-on-the-eyes design that I remember from the old mag. Have a look.
The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (1977) was the eighth installment in Del Rey’sClassic Science Fiction Series. Kornbluth’s long time friend and collaborator Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) served as editor; he also provided an introduction and brief intros to each story. Dean Ellis (1920-2009), who did the cover art for the first four volumes, returns to the series to do the cover art for this one —a scene from “Marching Morons.” Unlike previous volumes, there is no afterword.
Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923–1958) was an original voice in American science fiction. His middle initial “M” apparently stood for a non-existent name, and was meant to include his wife Mary, whom he hoped would eventually collaborate with him, but this evidently never materialized. Though he died at a very young age, his fiction corpus was long, varied, and lasting. He is probably most remembered today for his very influential novel The Space Merchants (1953), co-authored with Pohl. It’s strange to me that Korbluth and Pohl collaborated together since their writing styles seem almost polar opposites. But they were lifelong friends, which perhaps explains Pohl’s presence as editor here.
I’ve listened to most of the audible book His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth. Though that collection is clearly larger, I think Pohl did an excellent job choosing tales for The Best of C. M. Kornbluth. The stories here are truly representative of Kornbluth’s best.
Just a little to report from this past month’s excursion into the realm of short heroic fantasy. First, there’s the best issue in some time of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Second, issue #14 of Grimdark Magazine. While the latter is loaded with good non-fiction articles, there’s only a single, albeit 15,000-word-long, story.
Swords and Sorcery Magazine rarely falls below good, but less often rises to great. I suspect it’s the nature of a magazine that only is able to pay $10 a story. Nonetheless, I found myself not only enjoying issue #72 but, despite not being surprised by anything in them, absolutely loving this month’s stories.
With the first, “Godsteel,” by Michael Meyerhofer, it came down completely to his characters’ voices and relationships. Three archers in the army of the Godprince, stationed in the siege lines surrounding the city of Haltan, are being ground down day after day. The ongoing possibility of a pointless death during an endless blockade brings the trio to a fateful decision that will affect the outcome of the battle and their futures.
During the soldiers’ introductions in the first paragraphs I became wary. While the senior one is named Mennaus, the others were called Tongue, because he lacks one, and Brain, because he hasn’t much of one. I’m immediately leery of any story where everyone has a cutesy nickname based on some trait, a trait which is also usually his singular characteristic. I was relieved to see that wasn’t the case in Meyerhofer’s story.
