Hello from Glasgow. I arrived here late yesterday afternoon and have done nothing much except socialise since I got here. The hotel is modern, comfortable and spacious. The restaurant is good and the bar is cheap. Programme, what programme?
Actually I did attend one item. The lovely people at Handheld Press are re-publishing Vonda McIntyre’s debut novel, The Exile Waiting. It is set in the same world as her Hugo-winning Dreamsnake. Well worth a look.
Publishers are strange people. We love books so much that sometimes we are drawn to extraordinary lengths to make them. Sometimes mere paper is not enough. And to illustrate the point here is something completely crazy that is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. This is what the publishers, Beehive Books, have to say about it:
Bram Stoker made a radical experimental choice in the writing of his classic novel Dracula. He presented it as a collection of found documents — correspondence, newspaper articles, journal entries — painstakingly transcribed and compiled into the published book by his characters themselves. His experimental approach brings you directly into the story, and refracts it through countless points of view.
DRACULA: The Evidence is an entirely new way to experience Stoker’s masterpiece: through an actual physical research file full of ephemera, correspondence, clues and artifacts. It’s the entire original text of Dracula, presented as a gorgeously designed and curated briefcase full of maps, letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, telegrams, and phonograph records. We’ve teamed up with Dracula expert and Bram’s descendent Dacre Stoker to bring you the most immersive way imaginable to experience this modernist masterpiece of gothic horror.
Of course it is fantastically expensive. A copy of the “book” will set you back $400 ($350 if you get in on the early bird offer). I certainly don’t have that much money to splash, nor do I have anywhere to put the thing if I did. But the toothy Transylvanian has plenty of wealthy admirers and fanatical followers so I’m sure the project won’t have any trouble getting funded.
I am, of course, in awe of the ambition of the people who came up with this idea.
By the way, as I understand it, the putative Kickstarter staff union has asked people not to boycott the site just yet as negotiations are still underway. I do hope that the dispute is resolved amicably because I want to see more projects like this happen.
It is a very busy month for Wizard’s Tower Press. We have Juliet being up for the Robert Holdstock Award with The Green Man’s Heir at FantasyCon. We have Airship Shaped & Bristol Fashion II being launched at BristolCon. And in the meantime I’m busy working on next year’s releases. As part of that I am delighted to announce that we have exchanged contracts with Tate Hallaway (aka Lyda Morehouse) for a new novel.
Unjust Cause is a sequel to Tate’s highly enjoyable urban fantasy novel, Precinct 13. Despite getting great reviews, Tate was unable to interest the original publisher in a sequel, so I get lucky. Tate fans will be aware that an incomplete version of the novel was posted online, but the new version has been almost completely re-written and will be available as a paper edition as well as in ebook format.
Work is progressing on the book. The plan is to have it ready to go for sometime in Spring next year. I’ll let you know when we have a cover, and when pre-orders open. The official press release is here for anyone who is interested.
Pre-orders for ebook editions of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion II are now open in various stores. Here are some links:
I see that Amazon are also accepting pre-orders for the paperback, which is nice.
The book will be launched at BristolCon on October 26th.
Yeah, I have been quiet for a while. The politial situation in the UK doesn’t help. But also I have been busy working on this here book. Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion II is due for launch at BristolCon. I posted about the Table of Contents a while back. I can now show you the cover, which is once again by Andy Bigwood.
The ebook will be available for pre-order in the usual online stores any day now (well, except for Google for arcane reasons best known to them). If any of you would like an eARC to review, do let me know.
Yes folks, the Little Airship that Could is back for a second helping. Airship Shape and Bristol-Fashion is still selling steadily, five years after publication. So it is about time for Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion II : Planes, Trains and Automatons.
Once again the book is being edited by Joanne Hall and Roz Clarke. Today Jo posted the table of contents to her blog. The over reveal will be coming fairly soon, and we are expecting a launch at BristolCon.
The sharp-eyed will notice that I have a story in the book. I put some trains in for Kevin. There’s also something else… Kaiju!
I’m looking forward to you folks being able to read it.
Today on her blog Juliet E. McKenna has announced several public appearances. The first is at The English Bookshop in Uppsala, Sweden on Saturday 14th September. She will be appearing alongside Steven Savile, Stephen Gallagher and R J Barker. It is quite a novelty for me to be asked to send books to Sweden for an author event. So if you happen to be in striking reach of Uppsala, do pop along and buy some. (Not that I’ll be asking Juliet to bring them back. Any leftovers will be going to Swecon, Ã…con and Finncon next year.)
The next event in her diary is BristolCon Fringe on Monday September 16th, where she will be reading alongside Rosie Oliver. I will be on hand with books. So listen up:
If you want a hardcover copy of The Green Man’s Foe (or indeed The Green Man’s Heir) then please let me know, because I’m only planning to bring paperbacks.
After that Juliet and I will be at FantasyCon and BristolCon. I will have a dealer table at both events and will therefore have a bigger selection of books.
Also at BristolCon I expect to have something else, but that’s a subject for a whole new post…
I was back in the Ujima studio today, and my first guest was friend and colleague, Dr. Jamie Lawson of the University of Bristol. Jamie has written a children’s book on LGBT+ history called Rainbow Revolutions. It is published tomorrow, and I’m very impressed with it. We had a great conversation about the use of the word “queer”, Section 28 and why people are worried it might come back, Ball Culture and the success of Pose, and so on.
Next up I dragged in Harriet Aston who roomed with me at Worldcon. It was her first big convention and understandably she was a bit overwhelmed, which makes her an ideal person to represent that first Worldcon experience. I was impressed that Harriet felt that she was swimming rather than drowning by day 4.
The rest of the show was devoted to women’s cricket and the triumph of Western Storm in the final year of the Kia Super League. I played my interview with Raf Nicholson, and passed on the latest news about the women’s part in the stupid new “The Hundred” series. It is possible that a new Western Storm might rise from the ashes of the KSL after all.
You can catch up on the show via the Listen Again service here.
The playlist for today’s show was as follows:
My next show will be on October 2nd and will feature an interview with Ellen Datlow that I recorded while we were in Ireland.
For the past year or so I have been party to a small publishing secret. Juliet McKenna has a secret identity as JM Alvey, a mild mannered writer of crime novels set in ancient Greece.
It’s not a very serious secret. Anyone who has turned up to an Alvey signing will have spotted who is writing the books, and if you checked out where Alvey’s website is hosted you might put two and two together. But in the wild and whacky world of publishing such subtefuge is often necessary to persuade bookstores to stock volumes by an author whose recent sales have been less that stellar.
Anyway, for a variety of reasons that Juliet doesn’t want to dwell upon, Mx Alvey’s career seems to have come to a premature end. Consequently she’s free to write about it, and if today’s social media is anything to go by that’s lead to an immediate increase in interest in the books. I know that Juliet has many fans out there, including some who would pay good money for a shopping list if she’d written it. I’m happy to add to getting the world out now that I can.
I spent much of today behind Francesco Verso’s dealer table. I’m pleased to see we are selling books. They are not moving in huge quantities, despite us being the only new book dealer at the convention. That’s partly because we have a really awful location, but mainly I think because a lot of the people at TitanCon were also in Dublin and have no room left in their luggage. Certainly that’s what several people told me today.
I did an interview with Ellen Datlow, which will appear on the radio show and Salon Futura in due course.
I also did my one panel for the day. This was on Writing Vulnerable Men. I was moderating, so I didn’t have a huge amount of input, but I hope we managed to establish the idea that, while men are often written as vulnerable in various ways, this is usually done along gender-stereotyped lines; they are not generally portrayed as vulnerable in the same way that women are portrayed as vulnerable.
Things got a little tetchy between the two panelists at one point and I elected not to take sides despite having firm opinions on the issue. At the time it was better to acknowledge a difference of opinion and move on. What I will say here is that it is never “unrealistic” to write about certain types of people if people of that type exist in the real world. It doesn’t matter if they are a small minority, they are still real.
This evening I attended a launch event for Distaff, an anthology of science fiction by women authors, including BristolCon’s Rosie Oliver. I’m always happy to support women’s writing, particularly in a field where the prejudices of the publishing industry can make it hard for them to thrive.
In theory TitanCon is a 4-day convention. It started today and contines through to Sunday evening. However, the programming on Sunday consists entirely of a coach trip to Game of Thrones filming locations followed by a mediaeval banquet. Practically speaking, therefore, at least from my point of view, it is a 3-day convention followed by going out to dinner with a large group of friends.
Today was all about getting settled in. I did have one panel on small presses, but there was also getting registered and getting set up in the Dealers’ Room. My own books might be sold out, but I have a small number of Twelfth Planet books that I offered to take from Dublin to Belfast, and that I need to sell so that I don’t have to take them home and then to Glasgow for FantasyCon. Franceso Verso is once again giving me space on his table, and here we have more time to chat.
A lot of people have come from Dublin to Belfast, including a significant number of Americans. Goodness only knows what Ben Yalow will make of the ESFS Business Meeting. I’m kind of sad that he won’t get to experience Dave Lally chairing it.
Because I talk a lot about translations on panels, people occasionally give me books. Today I was given a copy of East of a Known Galaxy, an anthology of Romanian science fiction translated into English. My thanks are due to Darius Hupov who is the host of The Galactic Imaginarium, a science fiction podcast based in Romania.
Eurocon is very much a multi-cultural experience. Also today I got to chat with a French fan about translations from French to English, and to a couple of Estonian fans about my visit to their country this summer. I shared a dealer table with an Italian, and was on a panel with a publisher from Portugal. That sort of thing ought to happen at Worldcon, but it doesn’t. Eurocon is where that sort of inter-cultural mixing is commonplace.
This morning, after a bit of fruitless chasing of phone companies, I took myself off to The Point to meet Scott Edelman who was on a panel there. This is how I discovered that Dublin has a rule that the Green Room is only open to programme participants during the hour before their panels. I guess they are very short of space. Being me, I blagged my way in.
Once Scott’s panel was done we headed off to his restaurant of choice, Mr. Fox, and recorded a podcast for Eating the Fantastic. Scott will post details of what we ate along with the podcast, but he has released the above photo with me and the restaurant’s signature walnut whip confectionary. Scott’s ability to find superb restaurants is legendary in the SF&F community, and rightly so.
It was a very long lunch, but not alcoholic as I had to get back to The Point to give my talk on the Prehistory of Robotics. It seemed to go down well. I was also pleased to meet a long time friend, Paul Mason, whom I haven’t seen in decades as he’s been living in Japan.
The rest of the day was spent chatting to people back at the convention centre. I was very pleased to meet two talented young women who are starting to make a name for themselves in the business. The first was Molly Powell, who is the new editor at Jo Fletcher Books. She’s the person responsible for bringing This is How You Lose the Time War and Gods of Jade and Shadow to the UK. The other was Tamsyn Muir, author of Gideon the Ninth, which is by far the most talked about debut novel that I can remember. They are both lovely, and I look forward to watching their careers blossom.
I didn’t have enough energy left to go to the masquerade, so I came back to the apartment and crashed.
Tomorrow, I have nothing to do except the Hugos. Quite a lot of panels have had to turn people away, and I have taken a policy decision to give up my seat to newbies. I may go whiskey shopping.
Hello Dublin, thank you for having us!
I am safely arrived at my apartment for the week. It is a lovely little Air BnB near the Castle. The travel all went more or less according to plan, despite the best attempts of the West Country weather to have everyone phoning Mr. Noah to ask if he still has that big boat. I haven’t got to the convention centre yet, but I know how to get there and have bought a ticket for the Luas (the city tram network).
Dublin is teeming with fannish persons. When I arrived a flight from Helsinki had just disgored a legion of Finns. I knew three of my fellow passengers on my flight, and several others were clearly fans from their dress and hair color. I ran into John Picacio while I was out shopping for supplies.
The other thing I have been doing today is making sure that The Green Man’s Foe is available online tomorrow. Amazon and Kobo should go live at midnight. B&N and Google may take a little longer. And of course the ebooks will bbe available through the Wizard’s Tower shop.
The folks at Jo Fletcher Books are doing some great work at the moment, picking up the UK rights for US books that everyone is talking about but that the larger UK publishers don’t want. Am I susprised that an imprint run by a woman is picking up hot books by WoC writers that aren’t selling elsewhere? I don’t think I am.
Anyway, enough of the publishing industry gossip, you want to know about the book. Mayan gods in 1920s Mexico. From a Mexican writer. Need I say more? Of course not. Gods of Jade and Shadow is the latest from Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It is well worth a look. My review is here.
The last couple of weeks have seen me in Bristol to do events with local author, Heather Child. I hosted a launch event for her new novel, The Undoing of Arlo Knott, and then interviewed her on my radio show. Obviously I needed to read the book, so I have done a review. I’m really impressed with the path that Heather is crafting for herself in the field. It is light years away from the sort of space opera that Gareth Powell is writing these days, but it is nevertheless very thoughtful science fiction. Also Orbit have outdone themselves on the promotional materials. You can find the review here.
I have a Hugo finalist up for review today. I, of course, voted for Space Opera, because I think Cat Valente is a genius. However, I expect Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars to win. If you want to know why, and why it didn’t quite work for me, you can find my review here.
Reviews for The Green Man’s Foe are starting to come in. There is a rather spoilery, but very enthusiastic, one up on The Monday Review. Michele is less spoilery, but no less enthusiastic, on Goodreads, where you can also find comments from KJ Charles and Jacey Bedford.
Meanwhile Juliet informs me that The Green Man’s Heir now has 125 reviews on Amazon UK, with an average rating of 4.5 stars.
I am so very happy for her.
Today I was in the studio at Ujima with lots of studio guests.
First up I welcomed Graham from My Burrito, a fabulous Mexican eatery in Bristol. We had a great chat about the glories of Mexican food. I was hungry by the end of it, as were Ben, my engineer, and Keziah, the studio manager. You probably will be too.
Next in the hot seat was Tom Denbigh, Bristol’s first LGBT+ Poet Laureate. I met Tom at an event that was part of Bristol Pride and loved the poem he read so I knew I had to get him on the radio. Sadly Ofcom rules about swearing on air rather limited what he could read. It’s about time the regulations caught up with everyday speech.
Guest three was Heather Child, who was no problem to interview as I had already done it last week at her book launch. We talked again about The Undoing of Arlo Knott and the various places where you can find out more about the book.
Finally I was joined by Jon Turney from Zero West to talk about local renewable energy projects.
Much of the music I played was inspired by my time doing the live coverage of Bristol Pride. The full playlist was:
You can listen to the whole show for the next few weeks via the Ujima Listen Again service.
As you might have guessed, that is the title of an academic conference. It is a bit of a mouthful, but basically it was a feminist conference about trans issues. It look place at the University of Roehampton in London last week, and I was one of the speakers.
You can find the full schedule for the day here. Sadly UIrika Dahl was unable to attend due to illness, but the rest of the conference went ahead as planned.
Because the conference was advertised online it came to the attention of the transphobe mob on Mumsnet, who unsurprisingly lost their collective shit about it. If you want to see the nonsense that they come up with, just Google the conference title. This had two main consequences. Firstly the trans student group that was going to be involved had to withdraw because they were concerned about their safety. (One of the haters’ favorite games is to take unflattering photos of trans people and post them online accompanied by a sea of insults and, if they can get it, doxing data.) The other was that for the first time in my life I attended an academic conference that had a security guard on duty at all times. Thanks Pavel, you were great.
Interestingly, of the 8 speakers, 6 were cisgender women. The claim that the haters speak for all women is really utter nonsense.
I won’t go through all of the talks because much of it is fairly niche stuff, but Erzsébet Barát’s description of life in Hungary under the government of Viktor Orbán was chilling, and could prove a forecast of what the UK will be like should Boris Johnson still be Prime Minister at the end of the year. Sadly there are always women who are prepared to go along with far-right regimes and preach a form of “feminism” that puts women’s lives firmly in the control of men.
The really bizarre thing about right-wing Hungarian “feminists” is that they describe their views as being in opposition to that awful neo-liberal capitalist form of feminism known as “intersectional feminism”. The capacity of the far right to re-define words to mean what they want never ceases to amaze me.
The other country I learned a lot about at the conference was India. My thanks are due to Sarah Newport (I’ve found your thesis, Sarah, and look forward to reading it), and also to Antonia Navarro Tejero who introduced me to a work of Indian feminist science fiction.
Manjula Padmanabhan is an Indian SF writer who is working on a trilogy of novels about a young person called Meiji. The first book, Escape, is set in a country in which all women have been exterminated. As the title suggests, Meiji, who was assigned female at birth, manages to escape, and book 2 is set on The Island of Lost Girls. This, of course, is the place where women survivors have fled to. But, as all Suzy McKee Charnas fans will know, that doesn’t mean it is a utopia.
Listening to Antonia talk about the books, it is clear that Padmanabhan is in conversation with Joanna Russ and Charnas. My guess is that she has read both The Female Man and The Holdfast Chronicles. What is interesting and different about her books is that there are a whole lot of trans people in them.
Book 3 isn’t out yet, but I have bought the first two books to see what they are like. That wasn’t easy. Amazon appears to be deliberately hiding them. If you search for “The Island of Lost Girls” you won’t find Padmanabhan’s book even though that’s a full and almost-unique title. I had to search for “The Island of Lost Girls Manjula” to find it. And the two books aren’t linked either.
Anyway, I will read the books and report back. In the meantime, does anyone know anything about Manjula Padmanabhan? Mimi, Tasha, Aisha, Samit?
With Worldcon season fast approaching, a reviewer’s mind tends to turn to chrome rockets. We know who is in the running this year, but what of the crop of hopefulls who will be wending their way to Wellington in 2020 (assuming they are able to make the trip)? Max Glastone, I suspect, will have at least two reasons to go. This is How You Lose the Time War (co-written with Amal E-l-Mohtar) will probably be in the Novella category, and Empress of Forever has a good shot at Novel.
There are many people who are capable of writing light-hearted, entertaining novels. There are also many people capable of writing very serious and thoughtful novels. Few people can do both in the same book. Terry Pratchett was a master at it. Cat Valente cracked it with Space Opera. And now Max has done the same with Empress of Forever. To find out more, check out my review.