This is another interview I did at FantasyCon last year and subsequently used on Ujima. It is with Joanne Harris who, as she explains, is very much a fantasy writer no matter what bookshops might think.
Joanne and I talked about Norse myths, her new book, The Blue Salt Roads, fan fiction and who might play Loki if her books about him ever get filmed. We also discussed the Child Ballads, a collection of Scottish folk tales which have become a source for some of Joanne’s recent work.
Bonus time: two for the price of one. As I was reviewing Gareth L Powell’s Fleet of Knives I figured I should go back and do Embers of War as well. It’s not like you can read book 2 of a trilogy without reading book 1 anyway.
So if you want to know more about what the publishers are hailing as being in the same league as Al Reynolds, Iain M Banks and Peter F Hamilton, go here for the review.
Or, you know, just look at these fine examples of space opera book covers.
I’m trying to make a conscious attempt to catch up on the enormous amount of audio I have stacked up waiting to be published. There are interviews I did at Worldcon in Helsinki that I ran on the radio but still haven’t put online. But before I get to those there are some slightly more up to date pieces that I should run before they become completely stale.
I’m starting with an interview that I did at FantasyCon at the end of last year. Tade Thompson is one of my favorite people to interview because he always has plenty to say, and is always in good humor even when he’s having a rant. This interview covers the success of Rosewater, the scariness of The Murders of Molly Southborne, and what it is like for black writers to live in a post-Black Panther world.
I spent Tuesday night in Oxford attending this year’s JRR Tolkien Memorial Lecture on Fantasy Fiction. This year’s guest lecturer was Marlon James, whose Black Leopard, Red Wolf I reviewed here. Along the way I got to catch up with many friends including Olivette Otele, Stephanie Saulter, and of course Juliet McKenna. (Green Man 2 is progressing well; thank you for asking.)
I was hoping to get an interview with Marlon for Ujima, but sadly his schedule was too packed. However, I did get to chat with him briefly. We talked mostly about the X-Men. If anyone at Marvel is reading this, you need to get him to write for you. Seanan, Nnedi, please put in a good word for him.
The lovely folks at Pembroke have now posted the video of the lecture, so you can get to enjoy Marlon as well. I hope you find him as erduite and entertaining as I did.
Now that I have the Wizard’s Tower bookstore open again I have been able to do something I have wanted to do for a couple of years: offer omnibus editions of some of the books we publish. The Tales of Einarinn omnibus is doing very well. This month it is the turn of Lyda Morehouse and the AngeLINK books.
Back when I was doing Emerald City, the AngeLINK books were one of my favorite discoveries. We are used to queer SF now, but back in 2002 it was much more revolutionary. How could I not love books featuring a transgender archangel?
These days the books seen scarily prophetic. The USA has been taken over by religious fundamentalists who are using the internet as a means of social control. One of the main characters is a Muslim hacker, because who else is going to save the world from the Apocalypse? Well there’s the Antichrist, of course, but whose side is she on? And what about Michael? What is more important to him: his job as commander of God’s legions, or the human woman that he loves? This series is a tremendous ride.
If you haven’t read them yet, the omnibus edition is now available as an ebook. Because we love you, it is on sale until the end of February. It is also available on Kobo, but the sale price won’t kick in until tomorrow as with Kobo you are not allowed to schedule a sale to start on the current day.
I might be able to get the book up on Google, but their site has been balky with the Enarinn book. It will not be on Amazon. Besides, Lyda gets more money if you buy direct, so please do so. If you don’t have GBP, PayPal will do the currency conversion for you.
Oh, and don’t those Bruce Jensen covers look great together? I’m so pleased that we got a new cover for Apocalypse Array so that the set was complete.
I’ve tweeted about this last week, but I wanted to do a proper blog post as well. Neil Clarke, of Clarkesworld Magazine, is to be one of the recipients of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award at this year’s SFWA Nebula Conference. The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award is given by SFWA for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community, and his many years of editing Clarkesworld certainly qualifies Neil for that. Not only has he massively raised the profile of short fiction, he has also done wonderful things for SF in translation. I’m very pleased for him.
This year’s other Solstice recipient is Nisi Shawl who, as well as being a wonderful writer, has done great work through the Carl Brandon Society. I don’t know her as well as I know Neil, but she is a very worthy recipient.
Yes, it is that time of year again: Hugo neepery time. Over the past few days I have seen several people talking about nominating Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. There has been much confusion over categories, so I’m here to explain.
As with the clipping material that was on the final ballot for the past two years, Monáe’s music belongs in the Dramatic Presentation categories.
The dividing line between Long Form and Short Form in these categories is 90 minutes (as stated here). So Dirty Computer is definitely Short Form, no matter which version you nominate.
Which version? Ah yes, here is the difficulty. “Dirty Computer” is the title of two different things. There is Dirty Computer the album, which is composed entirely of music, and there is Dirty Computer the Emotion Picture, which is a short film about an android called Jane 57821, and which features most of the songs from the album.
One of the things about the Hugos is that Hugo Administrators very rarely make public pronouncements about eligibility. That means we have to second guess them. I’m not privy to the inside of Nicholas Whyte’s brain, but I am fairly sure that he will view these two versions as separate works. One is solely a piece of music, the other is a film with a script and actors. They are both eligible in the same category.
Now of course you could always nominate both of them. You have six slots, after all. But if you are also filling your ballot up with episodes of Supergirl and a whole lot of lesser TV series (me, biased, surely not?) then you might not have space for both.
I’m going to ask you, if you only have space for one, to nominate Dirty Computer the Emotion Picture. Why? Because I think it has wider appeal than just the album. Fans of the music will love it regardless, and those who want something more substantial than a concept album will have the movie (starring Monáe and Tessa Thompson) to consider as well.
Your ballot entry should therefore be for: Dirty Computer the Emotion Picture; Janelle Monáe, Andrew Donoho & Chuck Lightning; Wondaland.
Donoho and Lightning are the directors, Monáe wrote all of the music and, as far as I know, the script as well.
On, and if you want to watch the film before making up your mind, you can find it on YouTube. It isn’t embeddable so you’ll need to click through. And you’ll need to log in to see it because it contains naughty words and sexy stuff.
In addition to the Locus Recommending Reading List, the other thing I do a lot of reading for each year is the Crawford Award. That is for a first fantasy book. This year it has been won by RF Kuang’s widely lauded The Poppy War. That’s hardly a surprising winner, but those of us involved in the process had many spirited discussions about other books, some of which have not had so much publicity. The short list is well worth checking out as well. Here it is:
I should also add that it was an absolute pleasure to work with Mimi Mondal. I have learned so much about India and the Indian literary scene from her.
For those of you who missed all of the excitement on social media on Friday, this year’s Locus Recommended Reading List is out. There are some fabulous books on there, and I am proud to have been involved in the creation of the list. You can find the full list here. And don’t forget to vote in the Locus Poll (once they fix the IT issue which is still ongoing as I type).
As you may know, Clarkesworld magazine has been publishing translated fiction as a regular part of the magazine for some time. Neil has now decided to ramp that up by publishing printed books of translated fiction. The first of those will be A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight, a short fiction collection from the wonderful Xia Jia. There is a Kickstarter campaign running to fund the book. I’m definitely signing up for this one, and I hope that it leads to many more books of translated fiction in the future.
I will be hosting BristolCon Fringe again tomorrow night. The readers will be Mark Lewis, an experienced short story writer, and Peter F Hamilton, who needs absolutely no introduction.
As ususal the event will be at the Gryphon pub (in the event space upstairs) on Colston Street. People will start gathering from around 7:00pm and the event is due to start at 7:30pm. Full details here. I hope to see some of you there.
One of the most eagerly awaited fantasy novels of the year is Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Written by Booker Prize winner, Jamaican Marlon James, it comes with an effusive blurb from Neil Gaiman. Gary Wolfe waxes lyrical about it in the most recent Coode Street episode. Both men say that it is unlike any epic fantasy they have read.
It is very exciting, therefore, to discover that James will be giving this year’s J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Pembroke College in Oxford. The date is February 26th, which is just a couple of days before the book is officially launched in the UK. Full details are available here.
I have an ARC of the book, and I have rarely seen such care put into a review copy. It looks gorgeous. And given what my friends are saying, I can’t wait to read it. I will also be at the lecture. If you are interested in fantasy fiction and can get there easily, I suggest you book a ticket now. Last year’s lecture with VE Schwab sold out in days.
When Kevin and I were in Canada for the Moving Trans History Forward conference this year, one of the people we met was Charles Ledbetter. It used to be the case that I was pretty much the only person talking about trans characters in speculative fiction, but now there are at least three people doing PhDs in the subject, all of them trans identified. Charles is one of them.
A unique feature of Charles’ research is that they are looking, not at works that get wide distribution (which up until recently meant works written by cis people, for cis people), but at works published by independent presses, in fanzines, and self-pubished material. Charles rightly surmised that they would find much earlier examples of trans-authored works this way. Consequently, even though they are based at the University of Tübingen in Germany, Charles is spending time in Victoria going through the archives looking for material.
If you happen to know of anything that would fit the type of work Charles is looking for, I’m sure they would love to know. Bogi Takács and I have both been corresponding with Charles, and Kevin has suggested a bunch of webcomics, but there’s bound to be more out there.
In November, to mark Trans Day of Remembrance, the folks at UVic asked Charles to give a public lecture. I have finally found time to watch it, and it is good stuff. (And I don’t just say that because I get cited.) I was particularly pleased to see the Transvengers comic mentioned. Hopefully some of you will find it interesting too.
As most of you will know, I spent the first third of December in Austria. Part of it was tourism, of which much more later, but the main purpose of my trip was to attend the Worlding SF conference at the University of Graz.
I had an absolutely amazing time. Vienna and Graz are both beautiful cities in their own, very different, ways. I’ll have more to say about them in later posts. This post, however, is all about saying thank you. That’s thank you to the organisers, to the University, to my fellow keynote speakers (Mark Bould & Gerry Canavan), to all of the great presenters whose papers I heard, and to everyone who said such kind things about my keynote.
If you’d like to get some idea of the sorts of things that were discussed, Julia Grillmayr has an excellent report on her podcast, Superscience Me.
And if you want to see what all the fuss was about with respect to my keynote, you can watch the whole thing here. Inevitably it begins with film of me tweeting.
Mark and Gerry gave great speeches too. There was apparently an issue with the sound on the film of Mark’s talk, which the film crew are trying to fix, but Gerry’s talk and some other great videos are available here (Farcebook login required by the looks of it).
In a week and a bit’s time I will be in London for a couple of decidedly Queer events.
On Saturday 17th I will be at the Fringe! Queer Film Festival for a showing of TransGeek, a documentary film about trans people who also happen to be geeks. I’m one of the people interviewed in the film. Roz Kaveney and I will be on hand to answer questions afterwards, as will the film’s Director, Kevin McCarthy.
On Sunday 18th I will be at the National Maritime Museum as part of their Lost in a Book literary festival. Roz and I, together with Sacha Coward from the NMM, will be hosting a discussion on Queer Futurism. As the blurb says: “This is an informal chance to talk about LGBTQ+ representations in science fiction and fantasy. We want to imagine what a queer-inclusive future might look like.”
If you happen to be in the area and fancy popping along to either of these, I would love to see you.
If you happen to live in or near Bath, you may be interested in Small Publishers’ Gathering which is taking place in the city tomorrow. Wizard’s Tower will be one of the publishers attending, as will our good friends Tangent Books who do all sorts of amazing titles about Bristol.
The event is taking place at the Friends’ Meeting House on York Street and will be open to the public from Noon for you to come any buy books. If you weren’t at BristolCon you should come along and pick up a copy of Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner. This is an author I have been longing to read since hearing about her at Gendered Voices last year. Kudos to Handheld Press for bringing out a new edition.
You only get to be on the Tiptree Jury for one year, which given the amount of work is just as well. However, one book I would have looked forward to reading this year would have been Maria Dahvana Headley’s feminist re-telling of Beowulf, The Mere Wife. Maria lives in the USA, but she’s doing a short UK tour this month, so you’ll have a chance to meet her.
On Nov. 6th she will be at Foyles on Charing Cross Road where she is being interviewed by Neil Gaiman, who knows a bit about Beowulf himself. Tickets are £15 but include a copy of the book.
And on Nov. 12th she will at at St.John’s College, Oxford where she is being interviewed by Professor Carolyne Larrington who knows one heck of a lot about literature from the Norse sagas all the way through the high Middle Ages. Prof. Larrington is also someone I’d love to meet, so I’m going to be wending my way over to Oxford for that one. I hope to see some of you there. It’s free.
I have been catching up with Hannah Fry’s BBC 4 series, Magic Numbers, which is a history of mathematics. Today I watched the second episode in which Hannah touched on some of the revolutions in mathematical thinking that took place at the end of the 19th Century. One of those revolutions was the development of non-Euclidian geometry, which is a perfectly respectable field of mathematical study. I, of course, started to think of something else.
These days we tend to think of Lovecraft as a horror writer, but I suspect that he saw himself as much more of a science fiction writer. Many of his stories involved aliens, and he seemed to keep up with what was happening in science, and in maths. He was very much disturbed by the way in which the foundations of human knowledge, which had been accepted for hundreds of years, were being eroded.
Euclid’s geometric theorems had been the basis of much of mathematical thought since the time of Classical Greece. They still hold good today, but only in certain circumstances. Because the Earth is so large we can approximate living on it to living on a flat surface. On such a surface, if you follow a path that turns through four right-angles, with equal distances between each turn, you get back to where you started. But, as Fry demonstrated in the program, that’s not the case if you live on the surface of a cube. In that case you only have to turn through three right-angles to get back where you started. That’s very weird.
The program also touched on the story of the German Mathematician, Georg Cantor. He was responsible for the development of Set Theory, as part of which he discovered that some infinities are bigger than others. This too is very weird. In the latter part of his life Cantor had very poor mental health and was institutionalised on several occasions. You can just imagine the tabloid headlines: “Famous mathematician driven mad by contemplating infinity!”
If you then throw in the development of quantum physics, which was also happening around the time that Lovecraft was writing, it is easy to see how one might come to the conclusion that unravelling the mysteries of the universe might drive men mad.
I don’t have the time to keep up with my former colleagues at Clarkesworld as much as I would like these days, but I do keep an eye open for what they are doing. Today I’m delighted to report that the 2018 Small Press Award, given by the Washington Science Fiction Association, has gone to Suzanne Palmer’s “The Secret Life of Bots”. The story did win the Hugo for Novelette as well, but that news tended to get lost in the excitement around Nora Jemisin’s historic hat trick. This time around the glory is all Suzanne’s.
Also another former non-fiction editor of Clarkesworld, Jason Heller, will be appearing in Bristol in October. He’s going to be at Bristol Library on the evening of Monday, October 22nd, to promote his new book, Strange Stars. This is about the symbiosis between pop music and science fiction in the 1970s. It makes a perfect start to BristolCon week. Tickets are available here.
An interesting call for papers has turned up on Academia.edu. Mythlore, the academic journal of the mythopoeic society, is having a special issue devoted to children’s fantasy. This is of rather more interest to the likes of Farah Mendlesohn and Cathy Butler than me, but I’m very happy to share it. They want draft papers (not abstracts) by March 30, 2019. Full details here.