When college student Emery Driscoll is blackmailed into being a courier for a clandestine organisation, she’s cut off from the neural implant community which binds the domed city of New Worth together. Her new employer exploits her rare condition which allows her to carry encoded data in her blood, and train her to transport secrets throughout the troubled city. New Worth is on the brink of Emergence – freedom from the dome – but not everyone wants to leave. Then a data drop goes bad, and Emery is caught between factions: those who want her blood, and those who just want her dead.
I’ve had the privilege of knowing Lauren for several years now and watching her writing go from strength to strength. She has a master’s degree in Mass Communication and worked for several years as a researcher in that field before moving to New Mexico. There, she attended the Taos Toolbox Writer’s Workshop and sold several short stories before earning her first contract with Angry Robot.
We recently sat down to talk about Implanted, her career to date, and her future projects.
Lawrence M. Schoen’s novel Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard was nominated for a Nebula Award, and Nancy Hightower at The Washington Post gave it a concise and enthusiastic review, saying:
Barsk is set 62,000 years into a human-less future, where anthropomorphic animals rule the galaxy. There is no record of human existence, and while the different species get along relatively well, the Fant, an elephant-like hybrid, are completely shunned and exiled to live on a rainy planet called Barsk. While labeled less intelligent and “dirty,” the Fant nonetheless are the only species to produce a drug that allows clairvoyants known as Speakers to commune with the dead. When the planet is threatened with invasion and annihilation by the galaxy Senate, Jorl, a Fant Speaker, must race to save it by communing with ancient beings who hold even darker truths. Suspenseful and emotionally engaging, Barsk brings readers into a fascinating speculative world.
It was widely praised in the genre. Walter Jon Williams called it “a work of singular imaginative power,” and Karl Schroeder proclaimed it “a compulsive page-turner and immensely enjoyable.”
I’ve been looking forward to the sequel, and I’m not the only one. It was selected as one of the the Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of August 2018 by both Unbound Worlds and the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi 7 Fantasy Blog; the latter said, “With a cast of uplifted animals of all stripes and unparalleled worldbuilding, this series is a sorely under-appreciated, highly original delight.” It arrives in hardcover next week from Tor.
She has twice been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and once for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. Her greatest recognition came from the Canadian Casper/Aurora Awards, which she has won ten times. Vonarburg won the French language award in 1987 for her story “La Carte du Tendre” (“Readers of the Lost Art”). That same year, she received a second Aurora for her fannish contributions to Solaris. She won three additional short story Auroras for “Cogito” (1990), “Ici, des tigres” (1991), and “La Course de Kathryn” (2004) and five Auroras for Best book for Histoire de la Princesse et du Dragon (1991), Ailleurs et au Japon (1992), Chroniques de Pays des Mères (1993), Les Voyageurs malgré eux (1996), and Reine de Mémoire 4. La Princesse de Vengeance (2007). She won the Prix Rosny-Ainé and the Prix Boreal in 1982 for her novel Le Silence de la Cité. She also won the Boreal for Chroniques de Pays des Mères (1993), Les Rêves de la mer (1997), Reine de Mémoire 1. La Maisson d’oubli (2006) and Reine de Mémoire 4. La Princesse de Vengeance (2007). Prior to 1990, the Aurora Award was known as the Casper Award and in 2011, the Prix Aurora and Prix Boreal combined.
Vonarburg originally published “Cogito” in French in Imagine #46 in December 1988, and it was translated into English with the same title for Tesseracts 3, edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott in 1990. The next year, it was published in French in Vonarburg’s collection Ailleurs et au Japon. Algis Budrys reprinted the story in English in issue 21 of Tomorrow SF in 1996 and Vonarburg again included the French version in her 2013 collection La Musique du Soleil. The story received the 1990 Aurora Award for Meilleur nouvelle en français (Best Short-Form Work in French).
“Cogito” is a strangely chatty story about a young girl, Nathany, who is growing up on Cybland, a planet settled by humans who left Earth in search of a life made better through cybernetic implants. The narrator begins by describing Nathany’s life in her communal school, originally EdBlock 6 until her teachers determined that she was precocious and moved into SpecBlock D. As the story continues, the narrator takes breaks from the action, such as it is, to address the reader directly, providing the background for the world necessary to understand upcoming events.
Through the course of the story, Vonarburg reveals that people on Cybland have all five of their senses removed at a very young age and are implanted by “cybes,” which allow them not only to have heightened senses, but also to present themselves in any way they want while they can also switch around the way their senses interact with the world, creating their own personal synesthesia.
Rather foolishly, I thought Sebastien de Castell’s Greatcoatstrilogy was, er, a trilogy. But that was before the fourth novel, Tyrant’s Throne, showed up in hardcover last year. Jo Fletcher Books reprinted it in trade paperback on May 1 of this year, and this time it seems that de Castell has indeed bought his popular debut series to a close.
In her review of Knight’s Shadow Sarah Avery said,
De Castell is carving himself an enduring place in the fantasy canon…. Knight’s Shadow is so strong, the only way I can see the Greatcoatsseries failing to achieve eventual wide recognition as a classic is if the author meets an untimely demise.
Fortunately that hasn’t happened, and in fact de Castell just launched a brand new four-volume series, Spellslinger(which we discussed here). The second volume arrives this month, and the next two before the end of the year. With productivity like that, Sebastien de Castell may well be the hardest working man in fantasy.
1979 Ace edition, paired with Master of Life and Death. Cover by Frazetta.
Robert Silverberg’s novella “Spawn of the Deadly Sea” appeared in the April 1957 issue of Science Fiction Adventures. He expanded it to novel length in 1965, retitling it Conquerors from the Darkness in the process. It wasn’t one of Silverberg’s more successful novels, at least from a commercial standpoint. Today it’s considered a juvenile, and it was reprinted only a handful of times, including a 1979 Ace paperback in which it was paired with Master of Life and Death and given a typically colorful Frank Frazetta cover (above).
In his introduction to the Ace edition Silverberg talks about Robert E. Howard, and it’s one of Silverberg’s few early SF novels with a clear Howard influence. Perhaps as a result, the book certainly has its fans. Here’s an extract from James Reasoner’s enthusiastic review on his blog.
Conquerors from the Darkness is exactly the sort of vivid, galloping action yarn that made me a science fiction fan in the first place. At first it seems like a heroic fantasy novel, set in some totally different universe than ours. The oceans cover the entire planet except for a few floating cities. The only commerce is between those cities, and keeping the seas safe for the merchant vessels is a Viking-like group known as the Sea-Lords. The hero of the novel, a young man named Dovirr, lives in one of the cities but wants to be a Sea-Lord and take to the oceans. He gets his wish and rapidly rises in the ranks, and along the way the reader learns that this is indeed Earth, a thousand years after alien invaders flooded the planet for reasons known only to them, preserving a little of humanity in those floating cities… the alien Star Beasts return to take over the planet again, and Dovirr and his comrades have to find some way to stop them with swords and sailing ships.
I love a good science fiction series, though I don’t get to indulge that love very often. But I’ve got some vacation time coming up this month, and I plan to put it to good use. I’ve had to ruthlessly pare down my to-be-read pile to an achievable size (man, that was painful), and only one SF series survived the culling: Becky Chambers Wayfarers trilogy.
There’s been a lot of praise heaped on these books — including making numerous Best of the Year lists, and a Hugo nomination for the second volume, A Closed and Common Orbit — but what’s really drawn me to them has been the intriguing reviews. Niall Alexander at Tor.comcalled the opening novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, “A genuine joy,” and Publishers Weekly labeled the second “Superb work from one of the genre’s rising stars.” But I think my favorite review came from James Nicoll, who admitted up front that he read the first one expecting a Travellernovel.
I picked it up because, over on Livejournal, Heron61 said:
It’s basically what you’d get if you took Firefly (minus the unfortunate Civil War metaphors) or an average campaign of the Traveller RPG and focused more on interpersonal dynamics and character’s emotional lives, while substantially reducing the level of violence.
Yes, this book reminds me of Traveller… I was more strongly reminded of James Tiptree, Jr.’s short story “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side”… that is, if James Tiptree, Jr. instead of being relentlessly, inexorably depressing, had been a cheerful optimist. The book isn’t quite what I was expecting, but it was a refreshing change of pace.
The third volume, Record of a Spaceborn Few, arrived last week. I’ve been looking for something fun and different — and new — and this series very definitely fits the bill.
Beth Bernobich is the author of the River of Souls trilogy (Passion Play, Queen’s Hunt, and Allegiance) and Fox and Phoenix (which Rich Horton reviewed for us here.) In his July wrap-up at Kirkus Reviews John DeNardo tipped me off to her latest, A Study in Honor, her first science fiction/mystery, and her first title released under the pen name Claire O’Dell:
Claire O’Dell’s futuristic mystery A Study in Honor is not set in space but is no less thrilling. It’s a gender-flipped re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective Sherlock Holmes. In near future Washington, D.C., Dr. Janet Watson, recently and honorably discharged from the Civil War, teams up with covert agent Sara Holmes to find a murderer targeting veterans.
Early notices for the book have been excellent. Liz Bourke at Tor.comcalled it “a tense, gripping story, excellently paced, and Janet is an amazingly compelling narrator. This novel is really hard to put down, and I’m looking forward to the sequel with great anticipation.” And Publisher’s Weeklysaid,
This riveting mystery (fantasist Beth Bernobich’s first work under the O’Dell pseudonym), set in near-future Washington D.C., spotlights delightfully fresh adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous characters. After Dr. Janet Watson loses her arm in an attack by the New Confederacy, she is discharged from the Army and returns home. She meets the fascinating, if infuriating, Sara Holmes, and they become roommates in Georgetown, Va., where, as two black women, they are not entirely welcome. Watson observes troubling patterns in her new job at the VA, and these, along with prompts from Holmes’s top secret connections, send the women on a high-stakes search for answers… This is a real treat for fans of Conan Doyle and SF mysteries.
A Study in Honor was published by Harper Voyager on July 31, 2018. It is 304 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Chris McGrath. Read an excerpt at Unbound Worlds.
Robert Holdstock was born on August 2, 1948 and died on November 29, 2009.
He won a British Science Fiction Award (BSFA) for the original novelette “Mythago Wood” in 1981, and the novel version earned him the 1984 BSFA and the 1985 World Fantasy Award. The second book in the series, Lavondyss, won the BSFA in 1988. Holdstock’s novella “The Ragthorn” won the World Fantasy Award in 1992 and the BSFA Award the following year. He won a third BSFA in 1989 for Best Artist for the anthology Other Edens III, shared with Christopher Evans. He won a special Prix Imaginaire in 2003 for La forêt des mythagos, tome 1 and tome 2, two volumes that contained five Mythago Wood novels. The following year, he won the Prix Imaginaire for his novel Celtika. He was awarded the Karl Edward Wagner Award posthumously in 2010.
“Magic Man” was originally published in Mary Danby’s anthology Frighteners 2 in 1976 and reprinted in Danby’s 65 Great Tales of the Supernatural three years later. Holdstock included it in his collection The Bone Forest and it showed up in the reprint anthology Great Vampires and Other Horrors. The story was translated into German for an appearance in Heyne Science Fiction Magazin #5 in November 1982 and into French in 2004 for a collection of Holdstock’s works, Dans la vallée des statues et autres récits.
On the face of it, “Magic Man” seems to be a face-off between One Eye, the old man in a group of prehistoric hunters who paints images of the hunt on the walls of the shrine-cave, and He Who Carries a Red Spear, the leader of the bands hunting bands. There is clearly no love lost between the men and the situation is made worse because Red Spear’s son enjoys hanging around with One Eye and wants to learn to draw.
One Eye teaches Red Spear’s son to paint in the cave, but, while he teaches technique and discusses proper topics, he fails at the most basic level to explain to the boy the importance of painting in the shrine-cave. While some poo-poo the cave’s effectiveness, it is clear that what is painted there influences the day’s hunt, down to the number of bison the hunters capture. When the clash between Red Spear and One Eye escalates, One Eye instructs the boy to paint a scene which clearly shows that One Eye plans to murder Red Spear, which would put the entire tribe at risk.
Over at Kirkus Reviews, John Denardo has a regular monthly book column. For July he mixes things up a bit by recommending a book for every single day of the month.
I am constantly in awe at the vast number of books that are published every month. July alone sees the publication of several hundred speculative fiction titles vying for your reading time. It can thus be a daunting task for readers to find their way to the best of them. That’s where I come in. Every month, I sift through the vast number of speculative titles and pick out the ones that deserve your attention…
In Emily Skrutskie’s intriguing Hullmetal Girls, the path to a better life (or at least the money to buy one) may be volunteering to become a mechanically-enhanced soldier called a Scela. That’s what Aisha Un-Haad decides to do to raise the money she needs for her brother’s medical treatment. In the Fleet is where Aisha meets Key Tanaka, a Scela with only fuzzy memories of her former, well-to-do, pre-Scela life. Both women from disparate backgrounds must work together if they are to challenge the pending rebellion… There’s also Micah Yongo’s Lost Gods, a dark fantasy in which a young assassin named Neythan finds himself hunted by his assassin brothers and sisters when he is framed for the murder of his closest friend. Neythan’s journey will lead to him learning the true nature of his revered assassin brotherhood… I said it before and I’ll say it again: Shortfictionrocks. July is stuffed so full of short fiction, you won’t know where to start. I do… check out From the Depths: and Other Strange Tales of the Sea edited by Mike Ashley.
Hullmetal Girls is available in hardcover from Delacorte Press (320 pages, $17.99, July 17). Lost Souls is from our friends at Angry Robot (448 pages, $12.99 in trade paperback, July 3, 2018). From the Depths is part of the Tales of the Weird library from British Library Publishing (320 pages, £8.99/$12.50 US, July 19, 2018). Check out John DeNardo’s complete list of July recs here.
Vintage Treasures: Fata Morgana by William Kotzwinkle
William Kotzwinkle isn’t much talked about today. Now that I think about it, he didn’t get as much attention as he deserved 30 years ago, either.
That’s likely because of the fact that, while he wrote a fair degree of fantasy, he was chiefly published by mainstream publishers. His World Fantasy Award-winning novel Doctor Rat (1976) was published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, and The Bear Went Over the Mountain (1996), about a bear who finds a manuscript buried in the woods and uses it to become a New York literary sensation, was published by Doubleday. It was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His most famous book, the novelization of E.T., was published in paperback by Berkley in 1982.
Bantam Books released a pair of Kotzwinkle’s popular early fantasies in matching paperback editions: Doctor Rat and Fata Morgana (1977), his fifth novel. Fata Morgana, a genre-blending hard-boiled detective/fantasy, follows Inspector Picard as he investigates a conjurer whose fortune-telling machine is causing a sensation in 1861 Paris. David DeValera at Goodreads has a fine synopsis:
Fata Morgana is a solid mystery with fantasy elements that elevate it from sleuth versus villain into an enigmatic and elusive tale tinged with Gypsy mystery, parlor games and extortionist magic. Inspector Picard, (career descending and body weight ascending), is on the trail of Ric Lazare who is bilking high-society members out of considerable cash. Ric Lazare possesses a machine that foretells the future, but this alone does not explain his hold on those in his circle of influence. Picard investigates with the intention of exposing the salon scam of a medium and his costly advice; instead, he encounters the unknown — Black Magic, Grand Bewitching, the creations of a German toy maker, and a nagging foreshadowing of events, particularly his own demise…
Fata Morgana has been out of print since 1996, but is well worth tracking down. A digital version was published by E-reads in 2012. The Bantam edition above was published in September 1980; it is 195 pages, priced at $2.95. The cover is by Sandy Kossin.
Lauren C. Teffeau’s debut novel Implanted was published yesterday!
