UnCommonwealth

Cover me

Editors Ellen Datlow and Martin Sûst have both sent me cover images in the last couple of weeks. The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy will be out in Spring '08 and will feature a new story by me called "Gather." Martin's book features a passel of reprints from various, mostly newish anglophone sf/fantasy writers and will reprint my story, "The League of Last Girls," in a Czech translation.

Hmm, that'll be the third story I've had in Czech in the last year or so. (Will he be able to resist a terrible pun, wonders the reader).

Maybe soon I'll have enough for a Czech book. Thank you! Thank you!

And now his power is mine...

 

Holy crap, I accidentally Sylared Jeremy Lassen!

Here's how it went down. There was a biggish box from Night Shade Books in the post office box, and, unlike most times when there's a box of books, it was addressed to me! My immediate assumption was that Gwenda had surprise gifted me as congratulations for the Stats midterm that I aced last week by buying me the gotta-have-'em hardback Malazan novellas by Steven Erikson that Night Shade puts out.

So naturally I ripped into the box and accidentally took off the top of Jeremy's head, supervillain like. Sorry, Jeremy!

As it turned out, what was inside the book was not the novellas, but something else very, very shiny. This year, Night Shade, who, if you didn't know, are the hippest kids on the street, have launched a new series edited by Jonathan Strahan, who would be the coolest kid on Coode Street, except that I'm pretty sure Coode Street is in the middle of a desert. Or in Australia at any rate, which I believe amounts to the same thing.

The new series is The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, this is volume the first, and you can order it direct from that link or probably pretty much from anyplace that sells new American books. You can also check your local library system's website for a form for inviting suggestions for books to purchase and see if they'll buy it for you (and all your neighbors). Hell, you could do both.

I guess that I should mention that the reason they sent me copies is that my story, "Another Word For Map is Faith," is included, along with a big bunch of other stories by some very fine writers indeed. I'm on page 93, right between Ellen Klages and Margo Lanagan.

Anyway, check it out. Pretty, eh?

Enter to Win

This is cool. AbeBooks, one of the best places to buy books on the web, is joining with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to offer readers a chance to win a pair of tickets to this year's Nebula Awards Banquet. No travel provided, alas, but there's a two-night stay at the Marriott included, so if you live in the northeast you should enter. You have to answer a trivia question, but I'm assuming you're up with the google.

Spotted at SFScope.

"They're like jackals. Yet they're...children."

We were at the library last night so I could pick up an inter-library loan of a Fables collection (I love I.L.L.!) and so that Gwenda could pick up sixty pounds of young adult novels. On a whim, I pulled down Essential X-Men Volume 2. These Marvel "essential books" collect huge runs of comics on the cheap by reprinting them on pulpy paper sans color. Works well enough, for plot driven stuff drawn all clean and John Byrney, anyway.

I had my second nostalgia attack of the week when I flipped through and realized I was reading a reprint of the very first X-men comic I ever saw. I must have bought it on a Thursday afternoon right at the end of fourth grade, almost thirty years ago. It had to be a Thursday, because Thursdays were the day that my grandmother had a rinse and set at the Glamorette (still does, I believe) and I got to hit the library and the little convenience stores that sold comics.

Man, this issue is something else. Just 17 pages of story, but 25 named characters and settings that jump from Westchester to the "Imperial Center" planet of the Shi'ar Empire to the Outer Hebrides to Harlem to a private jet above London. Heroin addicts, alien princesses, Soviet mutants and guys with really big helmets speaking comic book versions of at least a half dozen accents.

I can't remember what my nine year old self thought about Luke Cage busting down a door to prevent Storm from being stabbed by a punk named "Bluie," but in that time and place, his dialogue must have been as alien to me as the outer space lady with the crazy eyebrows: "What's a righteous lady like you doin' in a dump like this?"

It's funny, I think of myself as a "DC guy," but the stories in the hundred or so issues of X-men that followed this one are the ones I remember best.

Okay, 'nuff o' that, true believers. Here's a little bit of writing news. Both "Another Word For Map is Faith" and "The League of Last Girls" are listed among the short stories on Locus Magazine's Recommended Reading List for 2006, where they're keeping some pretty heady company.

Hugos

Some good work and some good folks won shiny statues last night. Congrats to all--especially to Scalzi for his Campbell win. And it's good to see one of Robert Charles Wilson's fine novels finally get some award love.

"I am different," he wrote, "let this not upset you."

Here's something science fictioneers and others might find interesting and useful. It's a quote from a fascinating new book by Andrew Ball that I picked up today at the library, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science.

If we really want to see where science came from, it is no good starting from today's perspective. Now we have the luxury of being able to regard astrology and magic as forms of foolishness. There was very little luxury in the sixteenth century, when ideas like this were all that was on offer. Science resulted not from efforts to get rid of them but to make sense of them.

PS: The title of this post is the first line of the book, by the way.

PPS: Yes, yes, I'm trying to creep back onto the internet and pick up my responsibilities after losing July to injuries resulting directly and indirectly from a moderately ugly bicycle accident. More later.

Of Nebulas and Novels

I'm serving on the Nebula Novel jury this year. The Nebulas are the awards given annually by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America and one interesting wrinkle (among the many, many devastatingly uninteresting wrinkles) in how the awards process works is the existence of "jury adds."

To wind up on the final Nebula ballot, a work must either have survived a round of recommendation and preliminary voting that makes up in Kafka what it lacks in elegance, or it must have been "added" by one of several juries, each of which look at different kinds of work (short fiction, produced screenplays, novels) and each of which operates under its own set of rules and protocols.

Still with me?

A jury consisting of myself and several of my peers may or may not elect to add one novel length work of fiction published in the USA in 2006 to the final ballot of next year's Nebulas (for our purposes a novel is a work of fiction 40,000+ words long).

Our job is to keep an eye out for the rum and the fey, for excellent works that might have escaped the notice of the SFWA membership at large owing to details of the work's publishing history. Perhaps they're books that were under-publicized or which were published by small houses. Perhaps they were published "out-genre," that is, presented as a mystery or a romance or even "straight" fiction while still fitting a generously broad definition of "science fiction" or "fantasy." Perhaps they were tightly targeted at particularly gendered readers, or readers of a particular race or ethnicity, but have things to say to everybody.

If we find one (and there can be, as the man with the sword said, only one), we'll add it to the final ballot. If we don't, we won't.

So your job, reader, is three-fold. First, if you happen to be a writer, publisher or publicist involved with putting out a book in calendar year 2006 that you feel might fit the bill(s), please send it to me:

Christopher Rowe
PO Box 1304
Lexington, KY  40588-1304

Second, if you're not a writer, publisher or publicist etc etc, but you happen to read such a book that you're enthusiastic about, please let me know about it via e-mail and I'll try to track down a copy (if you have info on obtaining a review copy, please send that along as well).

Third, if you have an electroblog yourself, and you think some folks read it who might fit category the first (keywords: writer, publisher or publicist 2006 sf/fantasy might be overlooked etc), will you please let them know that I'm over here, looking for books? Thanks!

UPDATE: It's been suggested that I emphasize that the jury is empaneled for all of 2006--the awards  will be given in  Spring of '07--so we'll be looking for work all year long. Keep those cards and letters coming, folks!

The Future Isn't Through With You Yet

Tomorrow is apparently the publication date of Beyond Singularity, a book that reprints my story The Voluntary State along with thirteen other stories by authors I would list if I knew who they were (I haven't seen a copy yet). The editors were Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. Here's a squib from the publisher's page about the book.

Featuring stellar contributions from some of today's most masterful practitioners of speculative fiction, Beyond Singularity presents fourteen visions of a tomorrow where rapid technological and genetic breakthroughs have rendered humanity obsolete.

Available wherever books are sold, I'm sure. I'll add it to the books over to the left when I get back from my Kentucky history class, so you can click through that if you're interested. Oh, and my story doesn't technically render humanity obsolete, but why quibble?

Books for Geeks by Girls

Lots of folks are talking about this ridiculous list of the "Top Twenty Novels for Geeks" that resulted from a Guardian survey. And yeah, pretty much anybody who looked at the list was immediately struck by the complete absence of any books by women. That's not the list's only deficiency (not by a long shot), but it's the one that's easiest to correct with our own lists, as folks are doing in this post at Velvet Threads.

Clearly, the list below is incomplete. And I'm not saying that these are (necessarily) the best books by these authors or that the books are, in and of themselves, geeky. But I definitely think you're a geek if you've read 'em all. And if you haven't read 'em all, you should get to it, 'cause your geek street cred is weak!

Alphabetical by author, natch:

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
Synners by Pat Cadigan
Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh
Heritage of Hastur by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
Rats & Gargoyles by Mary Gentle
Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Slow River by Nicola Griffith
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
Life by Gwyneth Jones
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh
Golden Vanity by Rachel Pollack
Natural History by Justina Robson
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone by JK Rowling
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge

A girl named Cigarette

This is the way the web works, this is what it's for.

This morning, I saw a "blinked" news item on Locus Online which led me to an entry in Rick Klefel's Agony Column all about an extraordinary new book called The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, written by Jess Nevins and published by MonkeyBrain Books (awesome cover, Picacio!). Reading the sample entry--describing an early novel of the Chasseurs d'Afrique (kind of a gentleman's version of the Foreign Legion) titled Under Two Flags by one Ouida, neé Marie Louise de la Remée--convinced me to figure out how to put in a purchase request with my local library via their website.

Which, if you don't have the fifty bucks to buy that book right now (which is what I'd do if I had the fifty bucks), is what you should do too.

If it was in print, I'd also request a copy of Under Two Flags because of Nevins's description of the character Cigarette. It's Cigarette who merits the encylopedia entry, by the way, more than the book itself. And how could she not?

Cigarette wins the reader's affections almost immediately. She is a camp follower for the Chasseurs, but she is no whore. Rather, she is the Chasseurs' mascot and mother figure. Her mother was a camp follower and her father a soldier unknown to her. She was an infant during the 1848 revolt in Paris, sitting on the barriers and laughing as "La Marseilles" was sung and the bullets flew. After that she wandered to Africa with her mother, and then, after her mother's death, Cigarette attached herself to the Chasseurs. She is seventeen years old during the events of Under Two Flags. She is a patriot for France, devoted not to the government or the upper classes but to the people, to the soldiers, and to the country itself, and when she wins the Cross of the Legion of Honour, for gallantry on the battlefield, it is the crowning moment of her life and something she has dreamed about from when she was young.

{...}

Cigarette is beloved of the Chasseurs, feared and respected by the Arabs, a "swearing, killing, fighting, laughing, dancing bastard heroine," and a woman who can ride like a cavalryman, drink like a Zouave, and fight like a Chasseur.

While describing how cool a woman is by stressing how much like a man she is doesn't rest all that comfortably on my mind, in this case I'm willing to cut a little slack owing to the 1867 publication date.

The book's table of contents is online, and is tantalizing to say the least. My favorite entry titles (right this second, anyway) are: the list of various Captains that would leave a comics encyclopedia in the dust, starting with Captain Black, ranging through two(?) Nemos and ending with Captain Virex; an equally impressive list of Doctors, the best of which is Doctor Materialismus; Electric Elephant (Schwartz, wake up!); Arsène Lupin; Lord James Marauder; Martians (I) and Martians (II); six separate entries for Nameless Man; Nora van Snoop; and, of course, the Undying Thing.