Science Fiction

Dirda on Živković

~ Cheryl

Much of the time book reviewing is a very subjective activity. You like books or you don’t. Some books work for some people, but not for others. Proving literary quality is damnably difficult, which is how come the literary establishment manages to get away with looking down its collective nose at anything outside of the narrow purview of dull realist stories about middle-aged white men.

However, the literary house of cards relies heavily on status, and when a Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic happens to review the same sort of stuff you do, and comes to the same conclusion you do, that gives you every right by their rules to say you were right to praise the work in question. Of course it helps that Michael Dirda has always been something of a fan of science fiction. But is also helps that Zoran Živković really is a very good writer. Here, Dirda says so, it must be true.

Oh, and I love the covers of the new editions of Zoran’s books too.

Sheri S. Tepper, RIP

~ Cheryl

The Gate to Women's Country
I should have done this yesterday, but I was rather preoccupied. Sorry.

I met Sheri Tepper once, which just goes to prove that old adage about never meeting your heroes. It was when she was a Guest of Honor at WisCon. She was very grumpy all weekend.

Tepper did not think much of men. Given what I have heard about her life, I can see why.

Some of her later novels weren’t just bad, I found them morally abhorrent. She was a committed environmentalist who appeared to believe that, for the good of the planet, most of the human population should be culled. She flirted with eugenics.

Nevertheless, she was an amazing woman. She published her first novel in 1983 at the age of 54 and went on to have a prolific and successful career. In Grass, The Gate to Women’s Country and Beauty she produced three remarkable novels. Not perfect, because no novel is, but very powerful and thought-provoking.

All of which goes to show that you can admire problematic people, and problematic work. All it requires is an acceptance that nothing is wholly good or wholly bad. Not even Brussels sprouts or dill pickle.

For all of my often annoyance at Tepper, she made me think hard, and for that I am very grateful. I hope that wherever she has gone she has found a place where she can be less angry at the world.

Introducing Caribbean SF

~ Cheryl

Want more Caribbean science fiction and fantasy in your life? Now you can, because Tobias Buckell has created a wonderful portal site to showcase the region’s genre writers. You can go here, and find lots of lovely reading suggestions. And because the Caribbean is not a wholly English-speaking region, some of them are translations (I presume some from French and some from Spanish).

I think I have read 18 of the 25 novels listed on the site, and they are all good. I should read the others. In particular I hope to discover new Caribbean authors (and one day I want to see you on that list, Gabby Bellot).

Book Review – The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

~ Cheryl

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt BoeIt is more than two years since I saw Kij Johnson give the Tolkien Memorial Lecture in Oxford. We’ve both been busy in that time, and one of the things Kij has done is write this lovely little novella. I’m pretty sure that she wrote it after her visit to Oxford, because the central character is a professor at a university in a fantasy world and the descriptions of her home in the first few chapters could easily be descriptions of Pembroke College.

Oxford, of course, is not Ulthar. There is doubtless a large feline population in the city, but the city does not belong the cats in the same way that Ulthar does. Nor do they exert the same influence.

The cute stuff doesn’t last long. As you will have guessed from the title, this story riffs off HP Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Kij’s story visits many of the same places, and features a lot of the same characters, but there the resemblance ends. There is so much interesting, and occasionally brilliant, in what Lovecraft did, but this book makes me wish he had been a better writer.

You can read my review here.

While you are doing that, I’m going to continue to ponder on one of the great questions of the Dreamlands, which Kij alluded to but did not answer: just who is it that is buried in that bridge outside of Ulthar, and why?

Dimension 6 – Issue #9

~ Cheryl

Issue #9 of the Australian SF&F magazine, Dimension 6, is now available for download. The contents list is as follows:

‘The Plastinarium’ by Zoë Harland
Students of necromancy should really take more care…

‘All the Colours of the Tomato’ by Simon Petrie
Out among the stars we need to learn to see with different eyes.

‘The Widow in the Woods’ by Barry Charman
Jakob lost one family member to the widow. He would not lose another.

You can download the magazine for free in either epub or mobi format from their website.

Another Book of Arabic Fantasy Stories

~ Cheryl

There’s a fascinating post over at the Arabic Literature in English blog. Some of you may remember me posting last year about Tales of the Marvellous, News of the Strange, a new English translation of a book that significantly pre-dates the earliest copy of The 1001 Nights that we know of. That book was announced to the world in 1933, but was only available in German. Well it turns out that there is another book of tales, confusingly called The 101 Nights, which was translated into French in 1911. That book is now being translated into English by Bruce Fudge, Professor of Arabic at the University of Geneva.

The post I allude to above is the first part of an interview with Professor Fudge. In it he speculates that what we are seeing now is the tip of an iceberg of Arabic fantastic literature. There are, he says, plenty of other manuscripts lying unstudied in libraries in the Middle East and Europe:

I know in Paris and Berlin alone there are dozens, if not hundreds, of these types of manuscripts. I think Paris alone has enough for a few scholarly careers. But for much of the 20th century, scholars didn’t taken much interest in these.

There’s a whole world of fantasy history out there waiting to be rediscovered.

New Fiction by Me at Holdfast

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

ontheradio
Yesterday a new story by me went live at Holdfast Magazine. They’d asked for stories inspired by Brexit, and I sent them one that had werewolves and trans medicine, and is primarily set in a radio interview. The locations are all in the Bath and Bristol area. If you’d like to read it, you can find it here.

Better still, read their whole Brexit supplement, which includes poetry, a cartoon, and the story of what happens when King Arthur returns post-Brexit to sort things out.

This is also a good time to remind you that the Holdfast crowdfunding campaign is into its final week. They are 73% of the way to their goal and just need a few hundred pounds more to get there. Please back them if you can.

Africa Gets Speculative

~ Cheryl

While the world’s attention has been on Kansas City, exciting things have been happening in Africa. Yesterday saw the official launch of the African Speculative Fiction Society. They already have their own awards, the Nommos (named after characters from Dogon cosmology). I hope that in due course there will be equivalent of Eurocon bringing science fiction and fantasy goodness to countries all around the continent.

Tade Thompson, who is the UK regional officer for ASFS, is due to be on my radio show later this year when his latest novel is out. I’ll be asking him about the new society then.

May Fringe Podcasts – Martyn Waites & Paul Cornell

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

It is that time of the month again. If you are in Bristol this evening do come along to the Shakespeare Tavern on Prince Street for 7:30pm to hear Scott Lewis and Jo Lindsay Walton. In the meantime, here are the recordings from the May event featuring Martyn Waites and Paul Cornell.

The event was a crime fiction special in honour of Crimefest, our local crime fiction convention which was due up the following weekend. Martyn does have SF credentials, of which more later, but his fiction is straight crime. In addition to his own books he writes as Tania Carver, and it is one of her books that he reads from here.

Paul, of course, read from Who Killed Sherlock Holmes, the latest in his Shadow Police novels.

And then of course we had the Q&A, which was epic. I, of course, wanted to know the story about how Martyn came to write as Tania. As you will hear, the position of women writers in crime fiction is very different from that in SF&F. Martyn gave me an idea for a panel at BristolCon.

Along the way Martyn also revealed his various SF&F credentials, including publishing a Doctor Who fanzine and featuring in a Robin Hood TV series. We also talked about a book called Great Lost Albums in which Martyn and friends invent famous albums that never were. I was particularly taken by the idea of a Kraftwerk Christmas album.

Paul talked more about the Shadow Police series. Naturally there is discussion of Holmes, and Paul’s recent episode of Elementary. There is also mention of his comic series, This Damned Band. There is, inevitably, some discussion of science fiction television series, which leads to some well-deserved praise for The Expanse.

WSFA Small Press Award

~ Cheryl

The Washington Science Fiction Association has released the short list for this year’s Small Press Award. I like this award, partly because it is only for small presses, and partly because all of the judging is done blind. This year has produced a very interesting list.

Of the nine finalists, five are women and four are men. There are three stories from Clarkesworld, including Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please”, which I very much hope will also get a Hugo. Cats are clearly the in thing as two other stories come from Lawrence M. Schoen’s anthology, Cats in Space. One of the finalists is by Tanith Lee. It was published posthumously. I’m also pleased to see a story on the list by Stephanie Burgis who is a BristolCon regular. However, the story I want to win is “The Haunting of Apollo A7LB” by Hannu Rajaniemi, which I fell in love with when I heard Hannu read it at Finconn in 2014.

The full list off finalists is as follows:

  • “The Art of Deception,” by Stephanie Burgis in Insert Title Here, ed. by Tehani Wessely, published by Fablecroft Publishing, (April 2015);
  • “Burn Her,” by Tanith Lee in Dancing Through The Fire, ed. by Ian Randal Strock, published by Fantastic Books (September 2015);
  • “Cat Pictures Please,” by Naomi Kritzer, published in Clarkesworld Magazine, ed. by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, (January 2015);
  • “The Empress in Her Glory,” by Robert Reed, published in Clarkesworld Magazine, ed. by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, (April 2015);
  • “The Haunting of Apollo A7LB,” by Hannu Rajaniemi in Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction published by Tachyon Publications, (May 2015);
  • “Headspace,” by Beth Cato in Cats In Space, ed. by Lawrence M. Schoen, published by Paper Golem LLC, (December 2015);
  • “Leashing the Muse,” by Larry Hodges, published in Space and Time Magazine, ed. by Hildy Silverman, (May 2015);
  • “Leftovers,” by Leona Wisoker in Cats In Space, ed. by Lawrence M. Schoen, published by Paper Golem LLC, (December 2015);
  • “Today I Am Paul,” by Martin L. Shoemaker, published in Clarkesworld Magazine, ed. by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, (August 2015).

It’s Snapshot Week Down Under

~ Cheryl

The lovely people of the Australian speculative fiction community have this great little tradition of The Snapshot. Every few years they post a series of short interviews with the movers and shakers of the community, so the rest of the world can see what they are up to. The 2016 Snapshot is being published this week, and lots of interviews have appeared on their website.

Possibly the best way to browse the material is via their Twitter feed. The website has a sorted index, but the Twitter feed contains photos of most of the interviewees and is currently more up to date.

I note that not all of the interviewees are wholly Australian. This year, for example, they added Julia Rios on the strength of her work on Kaleidoscope for Twelfth Planet Press. It is vaguely possible that they will also include a mouthy Pom who happened to live in Melbourne for a couple of years.

Diversity: It’s Complicated

~ Cheryl

Lots of people talk about diversity these days but, as this famous Media Diversified essay notes, far fewer are willing to do anything about it. What’s more, the word “diversity” contains multitudes of issues. In the LGBT community we know that “diversity” often means “gay white men”. Similar hierarchies occur wherever you look.

Even so, I was shocked to see this article from Fireside Fiction that did the equivalent of a VIDA count for SF&F by black people. By “black” they don’t mean “people of color”, because that term includes a smorgasbord of ethnic identities. I’m not entirely sure what they do mean, but I have taken in to mean people of black African descent. The numbers are stark. Out of 2,039 stories published in magazines in 2015, only 38 were by black people. All of that talk about Afrofuturism, and we still only manage 2% of our fiction from a group that makes up 13.2% of the US population.

Of course the first thing I did was to take a look at Clarkesworld to see how we (I still think of the magazine as “we”) were doing. The detailed stats from the Fireside survey can be found here. In 2015 Clarkesworld apparently only published one story by a black writer. I’m assuming they mean this one. That’s out of a total of 56 stories.

I then did my own count. I did the last 12 months because that was quicker. I counted named authors rather than stories. And I counted non-black people of color too. The results I got were 58 white, 2 black and 21 other PoC.

This shows you one of the reasons why diversity is hard. On the one hand Clarkesworld has almost 40% PoC writers. Thanks to the deal with China it has at least one Chinese writer in every issue, plus some Asian-American writers. It has also had writers from Singapore, Malaysia, the Lebanon and Thailand. And yet it still does poorly where African and Afro-American writers are concerned.

The reasons for this, and the poor showing by just about every other magazine in the field, are complex. We don’t know what submission rates look like. A lot of the stories that Clarkesworld publishes are reprints and older stories may be more skewed white. It certainly isn’t that Neil doesn’t care. He wouldn’t have so many international writers (and artists) if diversity wasn’t important to him. But you do keep having to watch what you are doing, and ask if there is anything you are missing.

With that in mind, I note that I can still count on the fingers of one hand the SF&F authors I know of who have connections to the native peoples of places outside Africa whose populations Europeans have decimated. By this I mean native peoples from all over the Americas, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and Polynesia, the Sami and so on.

Diversity is hard. So we need to try harder.

Hugo Voting Time

~ Cheryl

There’s an awful lot bad going on in the world at the moment, and much of it we can’t do anything about. However, those of you who have a membership in this year’s Worldcon can do one positive thing: you can give everyone’s least favorite disease another kick in the teeth. Yep, it is Puppy Clobbering time again.

Many of you will have already downloaded the Voter Packet, though I don’t blame you if you haven’t read it all. If you need a quick guide to which items on it got there because of the Puppies, Mike Glyer has a comprehensive guide.

Having said that, not everything on the Puppy slates is awful. Last year VD and his drones claimed “victory” because one of their picks took out the Dramatic Presentation: Long Form category. That was for a film about a multi-racial crew of misfits who saved the galaxy from a racist, religious fundamentalist bigot on behalf of a government with a female head of state. It says a lot about the fragility of VD’s ego that he has to claim such things as victories.

Of course you should come up with your own philosophy as to how to vote. Mine is that I only place things below No Award if I think that they genuinely do not deserve to be on the ballot. I have done that occasionally in years past, long before the Puppy Plague, and I’ll continue to do it now. Most years very little of what was on my nominating ballot makes it to the Finalist stage, so I’m very used to voting for things put on the ballot by other people. And as far as I am concerned, works by the likes of Al Reynolds and Neil Gaiman deserve to be on the ballot whether or not the Puppies put them on a slate.

This year most categories appear to have at least one Finalist that deserves a rocket, though Related Work looks to be a disaster zone which is sad because Letters to Tiptree surely deserved a Hugo.

You have until the end of the month to vote. Get in early, just in case the final rush causes the MidAmeriCon II servers to melt down under the last minute rush. You can always update your votes later if you want to.

There is also the Business Meeting to come, and the question of what we do with the Hugo rules. That deserves a post all of its own.

Two Magazine Crowdfunding Campaigns

~ Cheryl

Two magazines that I am very fond of are currently doing fund raising campaigns.

First up there is Holdfast Magazine. I have a personal interest in this because some of the money raised will go towards paying me for my story, “Experimental Subjects”. Of course there are lots of other fine people who will benefit as well. You can donate to Holdfast here.

Also there is Uncanny, which has been remarkably successful in its short life. Given how well they have done in just a few days I suspect that most of you space unicorns out there have already signed on for year three, but just in case you haven’t you can do so here.

Awards at Finncon

~ Cheryl

Being a national convention, Finncon has a number of award ceremonies as part of the program. Usually I manage to report on this at the time, but this year I managed to be way too busy. Thankfully the ever-reliable Tero Ykspetäjä has done the job for me and all I need to do is to point you to his fine (English language) blog.

First up Atorox Award for Finnish short fiction went to Magdalena Hai. If you don’t remember her name you may remember her fabulous blue hair from her photo in issue #3 of The Finnish Weird. The story that won the Atorox (“Beautiful Ululian”) is different from the one in The Finnish Weird (“Corpsemarsh”) so she’s clearly building up a good portfolio.

By the way, Toni Jerrman tells me that the ebook editions of the first two Finnish Weird magazines have been substantially re-worked, so if you have those and have issues with the formatting please download the new ones.

Next on the awards list we have the Tähtifantasia Award which is for fantasy novels translated from a language other than Finnish. This went to Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan. That’s quite an achievement for a graphic novel to win such an award. It beat out books by Haruki Murakami and Patrick Rothfuss among others. Well done Shaun!

Finally we come to the Kosmoskynä Award which is an occasional award given to people or organizations who have significantly advanced the cause of Finnish science fiction. This year it was given to my dear friend, Irma Hirsjärvi. This is so thoroughly deserved that I can only ask why it didn’t happen earlier. Then again, the Kosmoskynä is a really hard award to get. It has only been bestowed 13 times since 1985. Congratulations, Ipa!

New Fafnir

~ Cheryl

A new issue if Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, has been posted. You can find it here.

In this issue there are two papers by academics from India. That’s impressively international of my Nordic friends. And on the basis of those I really need to read the anthology, Breaking the Bow, which is spectulative fiction stories based on the Ramayana.

So much to learn…