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Year: 2012

Candas Jane Dorsey and Black Wine

Candas Jane Dorsey and Black Wine

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Black WineSome time ago, at one book fair or another, I took a chance on a book I’d never heard of: Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey. I’m not sure why; I’d already had reasonable luck at the sale, as I recall, so I didn’t feel the need (as one sometimes does) to grab a book for the sake of coming away with something. I don’t normally buy books based on cover art, and in any case this cover was more stylish than striking, a black pattern on black. It may have been the mention on the cover that the book had won an award for Best First Fantasy Novel. Most likely, it was the puff quotes on the back, featuring praise from Elisabeth Vonarburg and Ursula Le Guin (who compared Dorsey to Gene Wolfe). At any rate, buy it I did, for whatever reason; and having finally gotten around to reading it, I’m happy I went for it. Black Wine is an excellent, excellent book.

Published in 1997, it not only won the IAFA/Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel, but also the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and the Aurora Award for Best Long Form Work in English by a Canadian Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer. Dorsey herself (I find from Wikipedia and the ISFD) is a poet and prose writer from Edmonton. She’s published one other novel, A Paradigm of Earth, along with two collections of short fiction, and has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies. She also co-wrote a novel called Hardwired Angel with Nora Abercrombie.

Black Wine is a tricky book to describe. It begins by presenting three different narratives in three consecutive chapters; those narratives then coil back and forth. It’s not too difficult to work out how they interlock, but it does require careful attention and (in my case) considerable flipping around to re-read earlier parts. Further, names are powerful in this book, sometimes seeming to be guarded like treasures; which makes keeping track of characters and their family relations a challenge — particularly as so many of those characters are mother and daughter, a recurring relationship that seems to shape the story: the dominant narrative, we eventually realise, is set off by a daughter’s quest for her mother, a mother gone missing as a result of her relationship with her own mother and (especially) her mother’s mother.

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Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

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of-blood-and-honey-by-stina-leicth-adoiOf Blood and Honey
By Stina Leicht
Night Shade Books ($14.99, trade paperback, 296 pages, January 2011)
Reviewed by Sean T. M. Stiennon

Perhaps I’ll be accused of going below the belt by saying this, but the most damning criticism I can offer of Stina Leicht’s Of Blood and Honey is that it took me several weeks of intermittent reading to finish.  It’s not an awful book by any means, but I never felt as though it generated enough momentum or sympathy to pull me from one reading session to another.

But let me discuss what I did like, which is quite a bit.  Although Leicht is ultimately writing a tale of faeries, demons, and inquisitors, she opts for a clean, modern style that’s well in keeping with the setting in 1970s Ireland.  The sentences flow smoothly from paragraph to paragraph and page to page.  There are some nice snatches of dialogue which, to me at least, rang as distinctly Irish: “It’s married I am, and it’s married I’ll stay.”  Leicht never resorts to spelling out accents, instead relying on vocabulary and syntax to convey dialect, which is a far higher and finer art.

The picture the book paints is rather grim, but ultimately I thought the book came through strongest on atmosphere and milieu.  I know very nearly jack-squat about the Troubles (my ancestors left Ireland much earlier, more around the time of the Potato Famine), but the sense of constant fear and persecution Leicht evokes is powerful.

She tells the story of Liam, a young man who has never known any father besides his step-father Patrick.  His mother tells him that he’s the product of her forbidden union with a Protestant, but Liam has always suspected that there’s something more alien about his origins.

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New Treasures: Kari Sperring’s The Grass King’s Concubine

New Treasures: Kari Sperring’s The Grass King’s Concubine

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the-grass-kings-concubine2I haven’t paid much attention to paperbacks in my New Treasures column. Which is odd, considering paperbacks are actually my preferred format. I think it’s just force of habit — I try to talk about the arrivals that look the most interesting and important, and I think my eye just gravitates towards the hardcovers and trade paperbacks each week.

Several very intriguing paperback originals have arrived in the past few weeks and I’m going to try and rectify that mistake by highlighting them, starting with Kari Sperring’s The Grass King’s Concubine. Sperring made a splash with her first novel Living With Ghosts — a finalist for the Crawford Award, a Tiptree Award Honor Book, Locus Recommended First Novel, and the winner of the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. With her second novel she returns to the same world with a brand new tale set several hundred years later:

It began with Marcallen, a man bringing human knoledge into WorldBelow — where no mortal had been… And though Marcellan never meant to cause harm, his theories undermined the immortal Grass King’s magic, the power that gave life and plenty to all the Domains of WorldBelow. That disaster was compounded by a spell of stone and blood cast in WorldAbove by exiled shapeshifter twins, once favorites of the Grass King…

Generations later, Aude, born to wealth yet driven always by her childhood vision of a strange Shining Place, seeks to understand her family’s past, where their wealth came from, and why they and all who live in the Silver City want for nothing, while the people who live in the industrial Brass City have nothing at all.

Jehan, a soldier serving in the Brass City, also questions the inequities between the wealthy and those who work for them. When the two find each other on the troubled streets, their destinies are linked. Together, they flee the cities in search of the origins of Aude’s family. All they find is a devastated land, and when Aude is snatched away to WorldBelow by the Grass King’s last remaining supporters, the Cadre, Jehan has no choice but to follow, aided and impeded by the twins. While Jehan travels through hostile lands and battles terrifying guardians, Aude must survive as a prisoner of the Cadre, who believe that she is the solution to restoring WorldBelow — even at the cost of her own life…

The Grass King’s Concubine was released by DAW Books on August 7. It is 481 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the print and digital editions.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1952: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1952: A Retro-Review

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galaxy-may-1952I’ve been blogging about my experiences collecting and reading Galaxy magazine (originally titled Galaxy Science Fiction). Within my initial collection I had the May, 1952 issue (Volume 4, Number 2 for those who want to get that detailed). The issue included a novella, two novelets, and three short stories from Boyd Ellanby, Peter Phillips, Charles De Vet, Richard Matheson, Franklin Abel, and Poul Anderson.

“Category Phoenix” by Boyd Ellanby – In a Big Brother society ruled by Leader Marley, Dr. David Wong works in Research, tasked with finding a cure for White Martian Fever. But for the past ten years, Dr. Wong has been researching immortality, something he inadvertently discovered while creating a cure for Blue Martian Fever. Dr. Wong hopes to share his findings with those closest to him without alerting Leader Marley – a challenging task, considering how closely they’re monitored.

“Lost Memory” by Peter Phillips – Palil and his associates examine a new arrival from outer space. It seems like them – inorganic and metallic – yet without normal modes of communication and shaped as a cylinder. When they’re finally able to communicate with it, they cannot understand all of its words, like mann, blud, and deth. Their only hope of saving the poor, blind creature is to perform an operation, but the visitor is so confused that it keeps asking for corrosive oxygen.

“Wheels Within” by Charles De Vet – Mr. Bennett suffers from headaches so severe that not even a neurologist can help. The headaches even escalate into hallucinations of a beautiful woman named Lima. One day, he discovers a show in town called “Lima, Mystic of the Mind,” and he is shocked to find that the woman exactly resembles the one from his hallucinations. For a price, she offers to cure him of his headaches, though the cure will involve pain and anxiety through false experiences, leading him into a cyclical dream sequence that seems unending and hopeless.

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Self Publishing 101

Self Publishing 101

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in-savage-landsWhen I first read about self-publishing, I certainly didn’t think it was for me. I was busy trying to break into the market, working on my skills, celebrating a few acceptances here and there, and collecting a ton of rejections. It was what I had been told to expect, so everything seemed to be moving along just fine. At that time, with my limited understanding of what it meant, self-publishing would have been an admission of defeat, and was being self-published even really being published?

But the idea took hold and germinated in the recesses of my mind. I continued to read up on it, perusing blogs such as J.A. Konrath’s and Dean Wesley Smith’s and lurking on forums like the Kindle Boards Writer’s Café — even as I kept submitting to markets. I didn’t have consistent access to the Internet at that time, so my opportunities to keep informed were limited and infrequent. But over time, one thing became clear: there were people actually making a go of it, getting read, and a few outliers were actually making a living.

Which led me to ask what it was that I wanted to accomplish with my writing in the first place. Make a ton of cash, pay off the mortgage and retire, you bet. But that wasn’t really the reason, because if it was, I wouldn’t be writing. There are far more profitable ways to spend that time. No, I write because I take pleasure in it; I like the idea that something I’ve done might entertain someone for a while; that a stranger might read it and enjoy it. Yes, it’s all ego! I want to be read.

Well, that and make a million dollars.

A quick glance on the old hard drive showed over a hundred stories just sitting there, doing nothing. Some had already been published, but the rights had reverted to me. Others had been accepted by publishers that had, for whatever reason, folded before putting the story in print. Still others had been rejected by their intended markets, but I liked them anyway. And lastly, there were those that sat there because they deserved to. They weren’t all that good. So I selected a tentative table of contents for a collection and started researching the nuts and bolts of publishing in earnest.

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After 34 Years as Editor, Stanley Schmidt Retires from Analog

After 34 Years as Editor, Stanley Schmidt Retires from Analog

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analog-october-2012Much of the early buzz among short fiction fans at Worldcon last weekend centered around the announcement that Stanley Schmidt, longtime editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, had announced his retirement on August 29, the day before the con:

I have now been editor of Analog for 34 years, tying or (depending on how you count) slightly exceeding the previous longest-tenure record of John W. Campbell. I still enjoy it thoroughly, but am leaving to pursue a wide range of other interests. Two of the most important of these are doing more of my own writing, and reading Analog purely for the enjoyment of it, which I expect to remain at a high level under Trevor Quachri’s direction.

Stanley Schmidt became editor of Analog in December 1978, succeeding Ben Bova. For most of the 34 years he edited it, Analog remained the top-selling magazine in the field, no small feat.

As momentous as the change is, it’s not wholly unexpected. Declining circulation of the SF titles owned by Dell Magazines (Asimov’s and Analog) over the last two decades have led to successive budget cuts, and there’s some conjecture that those cuts led to the retirement of Gardner Dozois as editor of Asimov’s, after winning a record 15 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor during his 16 years as editor (1988 — 2004).

I have mixed emotions at the end of the Schmidt era. I found Analog, the favorite SF magazine of my youth, largely unreadable under Schmidt. However, Schmidt did discover and promote exciting new talent during his 3+ decades as editor, including Timothy Zahn, Harry Turtledove, Michael F. Flynn, Jerry Oltion, Linda Nagata, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Geoffrey A. Landis, Rajnar Vajra, and many others.

Schmidt made his name in Analog first as a writer. His first publication was the short story “A Flash of Darkness” (Analog, September 1968); his novel The Sins of the Fathers was serialized from November 1973 to January 1974. Ten stories in his “Lifeboat Earth” series appeared between 1976 and 1978. As editor, he was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Editor every year from 1980 through 2006 through 2011. He has never won.

Analog‘s new editor is Trevor Quachri, who has served as Managing Editor at Analog (and editorial assistant of both Asimov’s and Analog) for many years. Analog‘s website, which I created over 15 years ago when I ran the SF Site, is here.

ChiZine Publications Launches ChiTeen Young Adult Imprint

ChiZine Publications Launches ChiTeen Young Adult Imprint

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chizineOur homies in Toronto, the almost-too-cool-for-planet-Earth ChiZine Publications, have announced a brand new imprint aimed at the YA market, ChiTeen.

“As a business, you can’t ignore the young adult market,” says co-publisher Brett Alexander Savory. “Over the last decade, writers like Rowling, Gaiman and Collins were consistently on bestseller lists. We’ve been wanting to get into the YA market for a couple of years, and now the timing is right.”

“The timing is right” is sometimes code for “We just couldn’t pass on this great book, so we launched a YA imprint to publish it.” That’s what it looks like to me anyway, as the new imprint already has its first title scheduled for release in spring 2014: The Unlikely But Totally True Adventures of Floating Boy and Anxiety Girl by Paul Tremblay (Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, The Little Sleep) and Stephen Graham Jones (Growing Up Dead in Texas, The Ones That Got Away).

If Savory is co-publisher, our tenuous grasp of the English language leads us to believe there must be at least one more publisher. Turns out there is: Sandra Kasturi, so we tracked her down for a quote too. Caught during delicate international rights negotiations, Kasturi nevertheless gave up the following: “Our editorial style lends itself to young adult fiction. CZP embraces the dark, the bizarre, the unusual. So many teens feel isolated or different and are looking for that outlet. ChiTeen will offer the same dark and weird stories with strong writing that CZP is known for, just with subject matter more suited for a younger audience.”

When not issuing dueling quotes, Kasturi and Savory will serve as ChiTeen’s co-publishers, along with most of the CZP team. They tell us they are currently approaching authors to fill out their 2014 roster. Before you get all excited and dust off that YA masterpiece in your trunk, they are not currently open to un-agented submissions for the new imprint.

We last looked at ChiZine in October (ChiZine Publications’ eBooks Now Available on iTunes Store) and in December 2010 (A Salute to ChiZine Publications). Read more at the ChiZine website.

Librarians to the Rescue: Worldsoul by Liz Williams

Librarians to the Rescue: Worldsoul by Liz Williams

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1540901072Worldsoul
Liz Williams
Prime (311 pp, $14.95 in paperback, August 2012)

Reviewed by David Soyka

The stereotypical image of your local librarian is that of a dowdy, matronly spinster who is constantly telling you to “shush” while your adolescent self is trying to do something vastly more interesting (usually involving a person with whom you are sexually attracted) than figure out the Dewey Decimal system. And, these days with whatever we need to find out only a Google away, who needs librarians anyway?

Well, it would seem the preservation of the underlying fabric of the universe does.

While it’s unlikely that Liz Williams will make librarians cool the way that William Gibson made noirish anti-heroes out of computer nerds, in Worldsoul, librarians brandish magical swords that speak. Not to hush people, but to help defend ancient texts against rogue storylines amongst book stacks that date to the fabled Library of Alexandria before it burned to the ground (at least on Earth).

The novel’s title is the name of an otherworldly realm quartered into distinct cultural, climatic and political realms (and probably having something to do with maintaining the “soul” of the mundane world as we in ordinary life understand it): a hot desert land of ancient Cairo; a cold Nordica where Loki the trickster is an imprisoned nutcase, albeit not totally powerless; the Court inhabited by beings called the “disir” who take human form but aren’t; and the Citadel, the land of the library. This city of Worldsoul somehow or another connects Earth with something called the Liminality, a multi-dimensional storehouse of storylines, the integrity of which no doubt has something to do with the preservation of life as we know it here in realityland.

Our librarian heroine, Mercy Fane, is struggling to counteract strange beings that have escaped from primeval manuscripts and the boundaries of their original storylines. And which take on a female personality that seems to have an agenda to fix some longstanding wrong:

[Mercy] thought of the thing she had seen; the thing that, mentally, she had started calling “the female.” Part of a story from so long ago that any humanity had surely been leached from her, if indeed she had ever possessed any. Something forgotten, that raged, like so many forgotten things. Something that wanted to be known.

And something that, now, would be.

p. 35

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Lawyer Bob Kohn submits Legal Brief in Comic Format in E-Book Case

Lawyer Bob Kohn submits Legal Brief in Comic Format in E-Book Case

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appleamicusbrief-smallThere’s been a lot of passionate discussion and conjecture recently surrounding the U.S. Department of Justice’s case against Apple and several of the world’s largest publishers over alleged price-fixing for e-books. It’s a complicated case, with a lot at stake.

So complicated, in fact, that the judge demanded that attorney Bob Kohn re-submit his 25-page legal brief against the DoJ’s settlement with three publishers in just five pages. Frustrated by the tight page limit, Kohn made legal history by submitting his brief in the form of a comic strip.

His argument — that the settlement harms the public, and Amazon’s aggressive price-setting on e-books is presumed illegal — remains the same in the new brief. But as Publisher’s Weekly observed earlier this week:

His rendering is brilliant — not only is it a not so subtle jab at the court for limiting such a complicated case to five page briefs, as a comic strip, the brief will be widely digestible for the general public who may not have the gumption to plow through a typical legal brief.

Brilliant it may have been, but it didn’t have the impact Kohn was hoping for, as yesterday the judge approved the DOJ’s proposed settlement.

It still makes compelling reading, however. You can read Kohn’s inspired comic brief here.

New Treasures: Black Bottle by Anthony Huso

New Treasures: Black Bottle by Anthony Huso

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black-bottle2I’ve been looking forward to Black Bottle ever since I read Matthew David Surridge’s review of the first volume in the two-book series, The Last Page (Tor, 2010) in Black Gate 12. Here’s what he said, in part:

The Last Page is a high fantasy steampunk novel, and a love story. We follow the sexually charged relationship between the improbably named Caliph Howl, heir to the throne of the northern country of Stonehold, and a witch named Sena. The two of them meet at university, go their own ways, and then come together again after Caliph has become king and Sena has acquired a vastly powerful magical tome. Unfortunately, Caliph is facing a civil war against a national hero, and Sena’s book has a lock which can only be opened at a fearsome emotional cost…

The first volume in a two-book series, it manages the trick of both providing a satisfactory conclusion and keeping the story going; in fact, the conclusion suggests the story has taken a turn, and perhaps is going to head in wild new directions. But what really makes the first book work is its language. The prose is strong, quick and dense in the best ways. The diction, the word choice, is inventive; the imagery is both original and concise. At its best, Huso’s language recalls Wolfe or Vance…

From the plot summary for Black Bottle, that twist Matthew mentions seems dark indeed:

Tabloids sold in the Duchy of Stonehold claim that the High King, Caliph Howl, has been raised from the dead. His consort, Sena Iilool, both blamed and celebrated for this act, finds that a macabre cult has sprung up around her. As this news spreads, Stonehold — long considered unimportant — comes to the attention of the emperors in the southern countries. They have learned that the seed of Sena’s immense power lies in an occult book, and they are eager to claim it for their own.

Desperate to protect his people from the southern threat, Caliph is drawn into a summit of the world’s leaders despite the knowledge that it is a trap. As Sena’s bizarre actions threaten to unravel the summit, Caliph watches her slip through his fingers into madness. But is it really madness? Sena is playing a dangerous game of strategy and deceit as she attempts to outwit a force that has spent millennia preparing for this day. Caliph is the only connection left to her former life, but it’s his blood that Sena needs to see her plans through to their explosive finish.

Sounds intriguing, right? But it was when I saw yesterday’s Facebook post from the distinguished Dave Truesdale, Black Gate‘s Managing Editor for our very first issue, that my interest in the book was truly piqued.

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