How to Properly Retreat

How to Properly Retreat

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You too could be this productive.
You too could be this productive.

I don’t mean retreat from battle – I WOULD NEVER ADVOCATE FOR THAT! Fight until the end, my warrior friends!

I’m talking about a personal retreat to achieve certain goals, such as mastering a new weapon, learning a new fighting style or, for the cerebral among you, writing a book. Or a good chunk of one, anyway.

As I’m about to undertake a writing retreat myself, and have done quite a few successful ones in the past, I’ll focus on wordsmithing. But you may decide to apply some tricks to other types of retreats, as well.

1. Choose your Location


Can you achieve this at home? Or will there be a thousand interruptions? I’m an awesome procrasti-cleaner and procrasti-cooker, so I find home dangerous. I’m trying it this weekend, but usually I head to a place made for retreats: a convent. (A silent retreat where I don’t have to attend religious activities, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve not spontaneously combusted.) Wherever you go, make sure you have headspace and time. Make sure you’ll have a writing space all your own, and make sure that distractions are at a minimum (convents rarely have TVs or wi-fi. I’m weak-willed and know it.) Find your perfect spot.

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July/August Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

July/August Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

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Fantasy-and-Science-Fiction-July-August-2015-smallNew editor C. C. Finlay seems to be settling in nicely. His first effort as editor, the July-August 2014 issue of F&SF, produced a Nebula Award, for Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i.” It’s too early to see if his second, the May-June issue, will fare as well, but it did includes good stories from David Gerrold, Albert E. Cowdrey, Sarah Pinsker, Amy Sterling Casil, and others, so things look promising.

And so on to the third issue, with stories by Rachel Pollack, Richard Chwedyk, James Patrick Kelly, Naomi Kritzer, an Archonate story featuring Cascor the discriminator by Matthew Hughes, and others. Martha Burns reviews the fiction at Tangent Online, saying “The Deepwater Bride” by Tamsyn Muir “gives us some of what P.G. Wodehouse gave us with Bertie Wooster’s zippy argot… brilliant.”

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

NOVELLAS

  • “Johnny Rev” – Rachel Pollack

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Vintage Treasures: Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, edited by Ray Bradbury

Vintage Treasures: Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, edited by Ray Bradbury

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Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow Bantam 1952

Ray Bradbury is known primarily as a writer, and as one of the most gifted fantasists of the 20th Century. But in his 70+-year career, he also edited a handful of anthologies. The first of these, Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, originally published as a Bantam Giant paperback original in 1952, was also the most popular, with multiple reprintings and editions over the next two decades.

Most SF and fantasy anthologies in the forties and fifties drew heavily from pulp sources. Bradbury’s approach was very different. His fat, 306-page anthology collected classic and contemporary fantasies originally published in The New Yorker, Charm magazine, Harper’s magazine, and other more literary sources, and included such writers as John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka, E. B. White, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.

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The 2015 World Fantasy Awards Ballot

The 2015 World Fantasy Awards Ballot

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The Bone Clocks David Mitchell-smallThe 2015 World Fantasy Awards Ballot, compiled by the voting attendees of the World Fantasy Convention, has just been released. If you’re looking for a short list of the best fantasy published last year as you prepare for a length stay on a desert island, your wait is over (and remember: leave room for sunscreen).

For both of the last two years the coveted Life Achievement Award has been given to two recipients (Ellen Datlow and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro in 2014, and Susan Cooper and Tanith Lee in 2013). This year the judges continue that tradition, honoring both Ramsey Campbell and Sheri S. Tepper for their outstanding service to the fantasy field.

The winners in every other category will be selected by a panel of judges. Here’s the complete list of nominees, with links to the online stories (where available) and our previous coverage:

Life Achievement

  • Ramsey Campbell
  • Sheri S. Tepper

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The 2015 Hugo Shortlist, Short Fiction: A Review

The 2015 Hugo Shortlist, Short Fiction: A Review

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2011 Hugo Award-smallI promised to read all the short fiction Hugo nominees, and report on them, so here you go.

I’ll begin by mentioning that I haven’t come close to reading the novel nominees: I have only read Ancillary Sword, by my almost-neighbor Ann Leckie, and while I quite enjoyed it I thought it not as good as Ancillary Justice. A middle-book thing, in some ways – in other ways, I think this post by lightreads gets at some of the problems I had pretty well.

I’m also about halfway through The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu –- I’m not sure what to think yet. There’s some neat ideas, but some of them seem distinctly pulpy, and the writing is a bit dodgy. We’ll see how it works out in the end.

Novellas

So, to the novellas. The final list of nominees is:

Big Boys Don’t Cry, Tom Kratman
“Flow,” Arlan Andrews, Sr.
One Bright Star to Guide Them, John C. Wright
“Pale Realms of Shade,” John C. Wright
“The Plural of Helen of Troy,” John C. Wright

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Future Treasures: Shower of Stones by Zachary Jernigan

Future Treasures: Shower of Stones by Zachary Jernigan

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Shower of Stones-smallZachary Jernigan’s first novel of Jeroun, No Return, was released in 2013, and widely praised. Staffer’s Book Review called it “The most daring debut novel of 2013,” and Elizabeth Hand said, “It has the sweep of Frank Herbert’s Dune and the intoxicatingly strange grandeur of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun… One of the most impressive debuts of recent years.”

The long-awaited concluding novel in the two-book series, Shower of Stones, will be published by Night Shade this month, and it returns to the harsh world of Jeroun, which pits men against gods and swords against civilization-destroying magic.

At the moment of his greatest victory, before a crowd of thousands, the warrior Vedas Tezul renounced his faith, calling for revolt against the god Adrash, imploring mankind to unite in this struggle.

Good intentions count for nothing. In the three months since his sacrilegious pronouncement, the world has not changed for the better. In fact, it is now on the verge of dying. The Needle hangs broken in orbit above Jeroun, each of its massive iron spheres poised to fall and blanket the planet’s surface in dust. Long-held truces between Adrashi and Anadrashi break apart as panic spreads.

With no allegiance to either side, the disgraced soldier Churls walks into the divided city of Danoor with a simple plan: murder the monster named Fesuy Amendja, and retrieve from captivity the only two individuals that still matter to her — Vedas Tezul, and the constructed man Berun. The simple plan goes awry, as simple plans do, and in the process Churls and her companions are introduced to one of the world’s deepest secrets: A madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, offering the most tempting lie of all… Hope.

Shower of Stones will be published by Night Shade Books on July 14, 2015. It is 238 pages, priced at $26.99 in both hardcover and digital formats. The cover is by Alvin Epps. Read more here.

Street Fighters of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Necropolis

Street Fighters of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Necropolis

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Necropolis_oldNecropolis
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 3 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (301 pages, $6.95, December 2000)
Cover by Martin Hanford

Necropolis marks a turning point in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series for a few reasons. It’s the first book written entirely as an original novel rather than an expansion of previously published short work. It also broadens the scope of the first couple books in covering an entire Imperial Guard campaign from the first rain of shells to the final confrontation with a Chaos warlord, as the Ghosts join in the defense of a hive city besieged by a horde of millions.

Hive cities are one of the key features of life in the 41st millennium, and they’re exactly what the name implies: Enormous cities where millions, if not billions, of Imperial citizens live elbow-to-elbow in habitation towers most easily measured in kilometers. They’re usually built around some kind of industry, whether raw resource mining, mass agriculture, or manufacturing, and exist almost as worlds unto themselves. Hives have their own aristocracy, their own independent militaries, their own networks of corporations and guilds, their underclasses and underworlds.

Vervunhive, on the Sabbat Worlds planet Verghast, actually seems like a reasonably nice place to live, by 41st millennium standards. That is until warning claxons fill every corner of the hive, and a merciless barrage of shells starts falling from guns placed over the horizon.

Panic spreads through all levels of the hive as we skip viewpoints from Agun Soric, a manufacturing plant supervisor, to Gol Kolea, a deep-shaft miner, and from Tona Criid, a gangster from the hives depths, to Salvador Sondar, the half-mad ruler of the hive. An unstoppable tide of armor follows on the heels of the shelling, smashing the attempted counterattack by the Vervunhive defense regiments, and only the hive’s defensive energy shield keeps it from being overrun. Their neighbor, Zoica, has been corrupted by the dark powers of Chaos, and now the entire population and industrial might of that rival hive have mobilized to claim the rest of the planet.

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Ancient Worlds: Arachne and Hubris

Ancient Worlds: Arachne and Hubris

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minervaIn the entryway of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, there was an inscription that read Gnothi Seauton, Know Thyself. This aphorism has been popular with various segments of Western society, particularly in the last century. When we use it, we typically mean it in the context of self-understanding or enlightenment, of introspection or even psychoanalysis. We mean self-knowledge as a deep delving into our own personality, our tastes, our desires, and our goals.

Which is slightly funny, because that is not at all what the Greeks had in mind when they carved it on the wall.

If we were to translate the intention of the inscription rather than the words themselves, it would read something like, “Remember your place.” Not nearly so satisfying, I’m afraid, but to the Greeks this was an immensely important concept. And from it, we get one of the most critical notions of characterization that we see in modern literature: that of hubris.

Hubris is the idea that there are screw-ups, and then there are cosmic screw-ups. Saying you’re prettier than the girl next door is obnoxious. Saying you’re prettier than the goddess Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis, is a grave offense on a cosmic level, and terrible things are going to happen to you. This isn’t (just) because the gods have delicate egos and are easily offended by mean humans. It’s because they are fiercely protective of their status as gods. Were one to read a less religious and more temporal lesson in this, it is also a warning to the majority of mankind to always be cautiously respectful of those who have more power than you and to those in power over others that the gods are above all.

Ovid plays with this traditional idea in his retelling of the myth of Arachne. Arachne is classically portrayed as having broken this most important rule: she has forgotten that she is merely a mortal and that she owes respect to the gods. Arachne is a weaver, one of the greatest who has ever lived. But she refuses to give worship and thanks to the goddess Minerva (the Romanized Athena) as the goddess of weaving, and denies that she has been in any way blessed.

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Drew Hayden Taylor’s Tales of Otter Lake: The Night Wanderer and Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

Drew Hayden Taylor’s Tales of Otter Lake: The Night Wanderer and Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

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The Night WandererIn 2007 Annick Press published a Young Adult tale called The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel by Drew Hayden Taylor, a veteran playwright, journalist, and essayist (as well as stand-up comic, TV writer, and documentary film-maker). The book follows a mysterious stranger who returns from Europe to the fictional Anishinabe (or Ojibway) Otter Lake Reserve in what is now Ontario, and a teenage girl whose life he ends up affecting. Taylor mentions in an afterword that the story began existence as a play which never quite satisfied him, until fifteen years later, while working with Annick Press on another project, he rewrote it as a prose novel. It’s since been adapted by Alison Kooistra into a graphic novel with art by Mike Wyatt.

In 2010 Taylor returned to Otter Lake with another novel, Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, published by Knopf Canada. In this story, an ancient trickster spirit comes to Otter Lake and becomes involved with the woman who’s currently the chief of the community. It’s longer and more complex than The Night Wanderer, and perhaps more fully exploits the freedoms of the novel form. Point-of-view is varied, and sub-plots more complex.

Both are charming books. Taylor’s prose is light, quick, and direct. His stories marry an earthy sense of reality with superhuman and supernatural figures who upend that reality by their basic nature. And his characters are well-drawn, sometimes broad but always interesting. Even when they’re confused about what they want, at least they want something at any given moment. As you’d expect from a playwright, the scenes move.

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New Treasures: Depth by Lev AC Rosen

New Treasures: Depth by Lev AC Rosen

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Depth Lev Rosen-smallLev AC Rosen is the author of All Men of Genius and the just-released Woundabout. But it’s his second novel, Depth, the tale of a private investigator whose routine surveillance case leads her to an impossible treasure in post-apocalyptic flooded New York City, that really grabbed my attention this year. Here’s what Lev said on his blog about the genesis of the novel:

I have a longstanding love of noir (I’ve even taught classes on it), and this book is near and dear to my heart. It’s a classic hardboiled noir… that happens to take place in NYC after global warming has melted the ice caps. New York is now a city of building tops, boats and bridges. It’s very far away from the conservative US mainland, and it operates differently.

Living in New York now, especially living in the financial district, I have a few things around me all the time; one is the constant… I don’t know what the word is. The financial district used to be this fantastic historical area – my building is over 100 years old. But there are so many new highrises going up, shiny, sleek looking condos. The moody vibe of 1930s and 40s NYC used to be, I think, most accessible in my neighborhood (when I moved in almost a decade ago). Now it feels fake, too modern, too rich. The grit is gone. I knew if I were going to write a noir, I’d have to bring that grit back somehow.

The other thing down here, of course, is the water. Even before Sandy, there were these great nights where I would be out walking and this heavy fog would come off the water and it would smell like the ocean and the dark would be silvery. And then, of course, Sandy hit – the day after my wedding – and my apartment got a moat. I got to see the first inklings of a New York with rivers instead of streets.

Both those things are what helped shape this. I wanted a noir that felt like the old Bogart and Bacall movies, but without being historical. So I went to the future – possibly not even that far – and I’m really proud of what I came up with.

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