There’s nothing new on Salon Futura this week. However, I have just posted a podcast to the SF in SF website. It is a reading featuring Marie Brennan and M. Thomas Gammarino. Here’s the audio:
Huge thanks to Soma FM who are doing a great job recording those readings.
I have received notification of a new speculative fiction magazine that will be launching soon. Titled Persistent Visions, it will be edited by Heather Shaw who has an excellent track record in both short fiction and editing. They plan to pay 7c a word, and their submission guidelines suggest that they are committed to diversity and to supporting new writers. That sounds promising. I might even send them something myself.
Some excellent news for fellow fans of the Serbian writer, Zoran Živković. A company called Cadmus Press will be publishing his entire back catalog in English. Zoran has an announcement here.
Naturally I Googled Cadmus to see who they were. I found this:
Cadmus Press was founded to answer a growing need for enjoyable, high-quality, and easily available English translations of outstanding literature from Eastern and and Southeastern Europe.
The region known as Eastern Europe is familiar as the vague geographical area between Western Europe and Russia, mostly parts of the former Soviet Union. Southeastern Europe is less familiar, but generally includes (according to Wikipedia) “Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Moldova, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and partially Turkey, Italy and Slovenia.†This part of the world has been a nexus of cross-cultural pollination since ancient times, creating a rich and diverse cultural and literary heritage that is yet poorly represented in the English language.
We hope to bring some of its finest work into English, the modern world’s lingua franca, to help it achieve the international acclaim it so richly deserves.
Currently Zoran is their only signed author, but it sounds like an admirable project. Hopefully Zoran’s books will do well for them and help finance bringing other authors to our attention.
Thanks to some really quick work by the folks at Pembroke, this year’s Tolkien Lecture, given by Terri Windling, is now available to enjoy online. They have a podcast version and a video version. You can find them both, along with some photos, here, and it would be nice to pop over there and say thank you. But I know people are put off by the need to click through to things so here, by the magic of embedding, is what you need.
The podcast
The video of the lecture
And the video of the Q&A
The good folks at Pembroke College videoed the whole of Terri Windling’s Tolkien Lecture, so you will be able to enjoy it yourselves soon. However, while you are waiting, here are a few thoughts from me. I should make clear at the start that I’m pulling a couple of key themes out of the lecture and following them up with my own interpretation. Terri may disagree (and hopefully will say so if she does).
Right at the beginning of the lecture Terri made the point that it is in the nature of fantasy to be unknowable. She went on to lament the absence of the numinous from much modern fantasy. I’m right with her there. I think there are two areas where this is so.
In epic fantasy I think we see too much of what I call “Dungeons and Dragons stories”. Back when I did a lot of GMing, there was a big rift among RPG players between those who saw the activity as “just games”, and who required clear and obvious rule systems so you could work out the optimal strategy, and those who saw the activity as more like communal improvised free-form story-telling. I was very much in the story-telling camp.
A lot of modern epic fantasy, however, seems to me to be more in the game playing camp, because writers design their worlds in such detail that it is obvious how everything works, even magic. There’s no room for the numinous in such a world. Indeed, a hard-core gamer would regard such a thing as “cheating”. Everything has to be capable of being explained within the rules.
As far as urban fantasy goes, much of what we see these days with such a tag is more crime or romance fiction with a few super-powered characters than fantasy. Some of it is very good crime and/or romance, but that doesn’t mean that it is good fantasy. Once again, the magic is not magical.
Terri also lamented the absence of sense of place from modern fantasy. Again I agree. There’s something about magic, I think, that is rooted in the land. With modern fantasy fiction we see too much of the generic castles and taverns of FantasyLand, and too much of the generic mean streets of a cookie-cutter modern city where every shopping mall contains the same chain stores.
This isn’t always the case. One of the reasons I love Emma Newman’s Split Worlds books is the way she uses locations such as Bath and Oxford to give a sense of the longevity of the fairy folk. Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police books were rightly mentioned by an audience member as an example of urban fantasy with a strong sense of place. Authors can and do get it right, but they have to put in the effort.
Something else that I think is often missing from modern fantasy, to its detriment, is music. I don’t mean the tendency of fantasy authors to fill their books with bad poetry passed off as song, I mean the sense that music is integral to the world and its magic. Whether it be high elven choral pieces, dwarvish drinking songs, tragic folk ballads, or orcish death metal, music has the ability to draw in that sense of the numinous whose absence Terri laments.
None of this should surprise us, of course. Publishers today are looking for product, not art. Terri mentioned that small presses are doing really good work still. I suspect that’s more the case in the US than in the UK because the bigger market makes it easier to take a punt on something different. However, distribution is much easier these days, especially if you are happy with ebooks, so a lot more of us can benefit. (And a nod of sympathy here to Charles Tan because I know there are parts of the world where buying online isn’t simple.)
Anyway, that’s my 2c worth. Juliet has a few thoughts here. And hopefully the video will be available soon.
My thanks as ever to the good folks at Pembroke for putting on a great show. As is often the case with universities, some of those involved are moving on having completed their studies. However, it looks like a committee is being put in place to ensure that the lecture series continues long into the future. Roll on next year.
Juliet has published a new short story on her blog. “Rocks and Shoals” is the third in a series of stories branching off from the events of the Aldabreshin Compass series. To read it, and the others in the series, click here.
This is a gentle reminder that if you haven’t signed up for the Ray Gunn and Starburst crowdfunding campaign then it will soon be too late, because it ends today.
Currently the campaign is just shy of 50% funding, but it is on a flexible scheme so it doesn’t have to make the target. Hopefully Olly and the crew can make up the shortfall elsewhere. But in the meantime every little helps.
Those of you who follow my radio show will remember that last week I was lucky enough to have Olly Rose in the studio. Olly is the scriptwriter for Ray Gunn and Starburst, a fabulous audio comedy series. However, not everyone wants to listen to me playing at being a DJ, so I thought I should remind you that Olly and the crew have a crowdfunding campaign going to help finance season two of the show.
Why should you give them money? Well for starters you could just listen to season one, and if you enjoy it as much as Kevin and I did I think my case is made. Otherwise, you’ll just have to trust me, OK?
I’m a cute feline, of course you can trust me.
Wait… what?
Last September I did a Skype interview with Stephanie Saulter for Women’s Outlook to promote her new book, Regeneration. As is usual with such things, Stephanie and I talked for far longer than I could possibly broadcast. As the book is being published in the USA this month I thought this would be a good time to dig out the full interview and publish it.
Obviously the discussion is a little old, but as far as I can make out the only thing that is dated is our discussion of Marlon James’ chances in the Booker. I’m delighted that he won, even though that meant I had no chance of getting an interview.
I have a bunch of other SFF-related interviews from Ujima shows that I really need to get online because the Listen Again links have vanished. All I need is a little time, right?
The podcasts for the January edition of BristolCon Fringe have gone live. This was a comedy special featuring Nick Walters and Will Loram.
As Will had been eaten by aliens, or by the Welsh, or by Bristol’s traffic, Nick kindly agreed to take the mic first. Nick had arrived hotfoot from a training course on project management, which is perhaps ideal preparation for reading from a novel in which the Earth is menaced by alien bureaucrats. Fortunately a certain Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart will arrive to save the day, though not in the extract that Nick reads.
Fortunately Will did finally make it to the event. His reading is from a novel in which… well, maybe it is best to let him explain that. But there are pirates, OK? And dragons. And lots of bureaucracy, because there’s nothing that the British like more than making fun of bureaucrats.
Finally our readers for January were asked to explain themselves, which was almost certainly a bad idea because you should never try to explain comedy. I tried hard to make project management sound amusing and failed dismally. Nick explained ASBOs for the benefit of foreign readers. Will explained more about the world of his book. We narrowly avoid mention of fluffy cushions.
The next Fringe event will be on May 16th and will feature Paul Cornell and Martyn Waites. Full details here.
One of the places I would love to be this weekend is Ã…con. Sadly I can’t afford to do Finncon, Barcelona and a second trip to Finland. So profuse apologies to Zen Cho, whom I would have loved to hang out with, and best wishes to everyone currently in Mariehamn.
Fortunately, even though I can’t visit the Finns, they have visited me, in the form of a new issue of The Finnish Weird. This excellent little magazine features all that is good in Finnish weird fiction. Issue #3 includes the fabulous Johanna Sinisalo and Anne Leinonen. It also features three authors that I am less familiar with. They are all women, naturally. Magdalena Hai has blue hair for extra bonus weirdness.
The new issue, and the two previous issues, are available for free download as ebooks here. They do normally make paper editions too. Hopefully I can pick one up at Finncon.
May 26th in Oxford. This year’s Pembroke College Lecture in honor of JRR Tolkien will be given by the fabulous Terri Windling. Be there, or be menaced by tiny boggles who will poke you with sharp twigs.
Attendance is free, but please book so that the college can keep an eye on numbers. Details here.
I have email from Jonathan Green asking me to promote the call of submissions for SharkPunk 2, an anthology of genre fiction featuring sharks. There has been a SharkPunk 1, which apparently featured:
space sharks, ghost sharks, Franken-sharks, psychological sharks, and “sharks with frikkin’ laser-beams attached to their headsâ€
The book will be financed through a Kickstarter campaign and published by SnowBooks. Payment will be £50, a copy of the book, and royalties if it earns out. Word count is 3,500 to 7,000. Further details here.
So: pirate sharks, zombie sharks, kick-ass woman warrior sharks… Or maybe alien shark people who decided that Earth has to be destroyed because the dominant indigenous species is too vicious and needs to be culled. It is entirely up to you. Good luck!
I have email today from the very fine people at Aqueduct Press, informing me of new books that they have available. A couple of them look very interesting.
The first is a new novel from Andrea Hairston. Will Do Magic for Small Change is a follow-up of sorts (though a couple of generations later) to her Redwood and Wildfire, which won the Tiptree and Kindred awards. It looks like a really interesting book.
Of great interest to me, though possibly not to many of you, is The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism, a collection of non-fiction writing by the legendary Judith Merril. Given that Samuel Delany describes Merril as, “perhaps the most important intra-genre critic the field has had”, she is someone that every aspiring SF critic needs to read.
Over Easter I posted about a crowdfunding campaign for a set of anthologies, including Fantastically Horny, the book that will contain my story, “Camelot Girls Gone Wild”. Yes, it is that book of erotic fantasy tales. Mea Culpa. But people at BristolCon appeared to enjoy the story.
Anyway, Easter is not a good time to publicize that sort of thing, so I am giving it another shot. The campaign page is over here. You don’t have to get my book. You can get the one about retired heroes instead as it looks really interesting. All support gratefully received. Struggling author with blogging habit to feed and all that.
Keith Stevenson has emailed me to let me know that the latest issue of the Australian speculative fiction magazine, Dimension 6, is now online. It is available in ePub and Mobi formats, and you can download it for free from Keith’s website. The new issue contains stories from Emillie Colyer, Jeff Suwak and Dustin Adams.
I might not be able to visit the Bay Area again, but I can now listen to some of the SF-related event there. The excellent SF in SF readings series is now podcast once again. Their March meeting featured Hannu Rajaniemi & Daryl Gregory, and you can listen to the entire event here.
Local fantasy writer, Sarah Ash, is starting a new blog series highlighting women fantasy and science fiction writers. It is titled, for obvious reasons, “Nobody Knew She Was There…”. The series will start on April 28th with Jessica Rydill and will also include Jan Edwards, Freda Warrington, Stephanie Burgis and Liz Williams. As it is going to be weekly, there’s plenty of time for many more. For more information about the series, see here.
While I have been traveling, the news broke that Sylvia Anderson had died. Always glossed over in her partnership with husband Gerry, Sylvia was a key part of the team that made all of those great puppet shows. She also outlived Gerry and had a lengthy career as a TV executive after Supermarionation became a thing of the past.
Sylvia was responsible for all of the key female characters in the puppet series. That included Lady Penelope, Venus from Fireball XL5, the Angels from Captain Scarlet, and my personal favorite, Atlanta Shore from Stingray. Atlanta was a redhead, she had a responsible job in the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, she was also a pretty good pianist, and her name reflected that of one of my heroines from Greek mythology. The fact that Troy Tempest appeared to prefer to blonde fish girl merely served to confirm my suspicion that boys were pretty daft.
Thanks, Sylvia, you made girls part of the Supermarionation world. That was an amazing thing for kids like me.
The finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards have been announced, and I am delighted to see Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull listed in the Transgender Fiction category. There are only three finalists listed, which is a bit worrying, but statistically it makes Roz’s chances better.
Elsewhere I see there is a new Transgender Poetry category, which is encouraging. Notorious transphobe, Alice Dreger, has a book in the LGBT Non-Fiction category, which shows that the Lammys still have a way to go in dealing with inter-community strife.
The SF/F/H category is mostly a mystery to me. The only book I have heard of on this list is The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan, which people have been saying really good things about. Frankly the idea of an LGBT SF short list that doesn’t have Luna on it is absurd, but the Lammys are a submission-based award and if a book’s publisher doesn’t think it worth submitting then their books cannot be considered. I’d put Radiance on the list too. It has much less specific LGBT content, but what is there is crucial to the plot. And the central character of Planetfall is a lesbian, though that’s one of the less significant aspects of her character. Then there’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and The Traitor Baru Cormorant. That’s one kickass Lammy shortlist right there. I’m sure there is stuff I have forgotten.
Of course there is always the question as to whether the jury are looking for good SF/F/H books that happen to include LGBT characters, or good stories about LGBT characters/issues that happen to be SF/F/H. That may be down to the make-up of each individual year’s jury.