Christopher Rowe

Pens on Fire. ON FIRE!

Hey all. Just a quick note about the event described on this flier. I'll be at the Woodford County Library tomorrow, Saturday, November 23rd, 2013, from 2 to 4 pm, discussing science fiction and fantasy, writing, and related things on a panel with a few of my colleagues. If y'all can make it, come on out!

Bibliographia

I'll figure out how to put this up as a permanent, linkable page or something around here sometime, but for now, since I was working it up for other reasons, here's my current bibliography for those who might be interested. At some point, I'll work in links to the stuff that's available online.

 

Novels

Sandstorm, Wizards of the Coast, 2011.

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Collections

Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003.

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Short Stories

“The Contrary Gardener,” Eclipse Online, edited by Jonathan Strahan, forthcoming.

“Nowhere Fast,” Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, Candlewick Press, 2011. Reprint: Steampunk Revolution, edited by Ann VanderMeer, Tachyon, forthcoming.

“Feast of the Moon,” Realms of the Undead, edited by Susan J. Morris, Wizards of the Coast, 2010.

“Gather,” The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow, Ballantine, 2008.

“Another Word For Map is Faith,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2006. Reprints: Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2007; The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Twentieth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, St. Martin’s, 2007; The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books, 2007; The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/Czech Republic Edition (Czech translation), March 2007; The Tenth Dimension (Hebrew Translation), April 2007; The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/Poland Edition (Polish translation), 2010. Long list: The Best American Short Stories 2007.

“The League of Last Girls,” Aegri Somnia, edited by Jason Sizemore and Gill Ainsworth, Apex Publications, 2006. Reprint: Trechu Divné Kusy 3 (Czech translation), edited by Martin Sust, Lazer, 2007.

“Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms,” Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi, All-Star Stories, 2006.

“The Queen of the Moon,” Apex Digest Online, February 2006.

“Whether to Go Through,” Electric Velocipede Autumn 2004. Reprint: Apex Digest, Summer 2006.

"The Voluntary State,” Sci Fiction, May 2004. Reprints: Science Fiction: The Best of 2004, edited by Karen Haber and Jonathan Strahan, iBooks, 2005; The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, St. Martin’s, 2005; Beyond Singularity, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Ace Books, 2005; Hayakawa’s SF Magazine (Japanese translation), June 2005; Nebula Awards Showcase 2006, edited by Gardner Dozois, Roc, 2006; Rewind: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, Tachyon, 2007.

“Relativity in the Gospel: Five Looks at Matthew 2:9-10” Ideomancer, December 2003.

“Men of Renown,” Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003. Reprints: Apex Digest Online, February 2006; Hayakawa SF Magazine (Japanese translation), June 2009.

“The Children of Tilford Fortune,” Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Simon & Schuster, 2003. Reprint: The Dark of the Woods, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Aladdin Paperbacks, 2006.

“The Force Acting on the Displaced Body,” Trampoline, edited by Kelly Link, Small Beer Press, 2003. Reprints: lcrw.net, October 2003.

“Seared Scallops and Steamed Green Beans,” Infinite Matrix, July 2003. Reprint: Scattered Covered Smothered, edited by Jason Erik Lundberg, Two Cranes Press, 2004.

“Interim Discussions,” Beyond The Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, SFF.Net, 2002.

“Leadership Secrets of the Prince of Darkness,” The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, 2002.

“The Dreaming Mountains,”  Ideomancer Unbound, edited by Chris Clarke and Mikal Trimm, Decadent Moon Publications/FictionWise, 2002. Reprint: Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003.

“Horsethieves and Preachermen,” Ideomancer, July 2002. Honorable Mention, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Sixteenth Annual Collection.

“High Water,” The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Spring 2001.

“VFD Adventures,” Quantum Speculative Fiction, edited by Kurt Roth, Obscura Press, 1999. Reprint: Ideomancer, September 2002.

“Sally Harpe,” Realms of Fantasy, October 1999. Reprints:  Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003; lcrw.net, December 2003. Honorable Mention, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Thirteenth Annual Collection.

“Baptism on Bittersweet Creek,” Realms of Fantasy, April 1999. Reprint: Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003.

“Long Live the King,” Pulp Eternity, September 1998.

“Kin to Crows,” Realms of Fantasy, June 1998. Reprints: Ideomancer, August 2002; Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003. Honorable Mention, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Twelfth Annual Collection.

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Poems

“Our Prize Patrol Will Find You, No Matter Where You Are,” Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, 2001.

Book List, and a bit of news

As announced elsewhere already, I've just sold another short story. "The Contrary Gardener," which serves as a sort of companion piece to "The Voluntary State," will be in the next volume of Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse series of anthologies. I think the book will be out sometime in 2012, and I'll say more about it closer to publication time.

I'm spending most of my time this summer working on my next novel, but my first semester as a graduate student in Eastern Kentucky University's MFA program will start in a week or so. The two courses I'm taking (one of which is a fiction workshop) combine to yield this list of assigned books. I've read about half of them before, but look forward to reading or rereading all of them in an academic setting.

• The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• After This by Alice McDermott
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, annotations and other apparatus by Alfred Appel, Jr.

All but the García Márquez and the Kundera are available for the Nook (well, the Nabokov isn't quite available yet, it'll be out on the 16th, I think, and here's hoping that the notes &c. are hyperlinked) which brings up the point that I've lately learned to enjoy being a reader of screens. I've even been reading on my computer, just this week having read the first four of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley mysteries on my laptop. I like having other windows open with the OED and Wikipedia live so I can flip back and forth when I come across a word or something else I'm not familiar with. In the case of Elizabeth George, that means I now know what secateurs are (well, I guess I already knew what they were, just not their proper name), and now know a lot more about the furniture makers of England than I ever thought I would.

Workshop

Starting this Wednesday, I'll be leading an eight-week workshop down the street at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. Here are the details, as they appear in the Center's Spring Catalog.

Science Fiction
Wednesdays April 18 to June 6 6:00-7:30 pm
This peer review workshop will consider short stories and novel extracts in science fiction, fantasy, and allied genres. For intermediate to advanced writers. Led by a Hugo and Nebula finalist. $80 Christopher Rowe

If you're interested in attending, or know somebody who might be, the Center can be contacted via e-mail or phone (859-254-4175).

Will Shetterly Wants You...

...to answer a couple of questions.

Those of you who have been attempting to follow all the buzz buzz about the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America that's erupted following John Scalzi's decision to run a write-in campaign for that organization's presidency will be thrilled, thrilled, to find out that there's now another place to talk about issues related to the whole thing.

Will Shetterly has a couple of questions he'd like to ask current members, former members, and (to my mind most importantly) potential members of SFWA.

Go see Will!

"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.

My Year in Fiction, plus Year's Besteses and other News

2006 was a pretty busy year for me in terms of seeing new stories published. Which, for me, means three. Hey, we all work at our own pace. I read that on a blog.

So, to review.

I was much honored when my teeny-tiny story, "Two Figures In a Landscape Between Storms," was chosen as the lead piece for the fab Twenty Epics anthology, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi. I wrote about the book and the story in this post. If you don't have a copy, well, your relative level of indie press street cred is none of my business, but I should tell you that you can still order it here.

At the very end of the year, the horror anthology Aegri Somnia, edited by Jason Sizemore and Gill Ainsworth, included my story, "The League of Last Girls," which Jonathan Strahan recently called "darkly odd." Which is not at all the same thing as oddly dark. I wrote about the story in this journal entry, which includes a link to a free, that's free, zipped PDF of the piece. The book itself can be ordered rightchere.

The story of mine from 2006 which enjoyed the most (and most varied) critical attention was "Another Word For Map is Faith," in the August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. If you're a fan of parallel structure, you won't be surprised to learn that I wrote a journal entry about the story. That entry also points to a downloadable PDF of the first half of "Map." You can still order a copy of the magazine at Clarkesworld, or alternatively, you can wait awhile and read it in convenient book form.

I've been told that "Another Word For Map is Faith" will be reprinted in these fine venues:

• Science Fiction: Best of the Year 2007, edited by Rich Horton for Prime Books
• The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 1, edited by Jonathan Strahan for Night Shade Books
• The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007: 20th Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin Grant for St. Martin's Press

I'll have more to say about reprints as I learn more about 'em myself.

Bonus material! 2007 sneak preview! I just signed the contracts on a new science fiction story, "Gather," which will appear in a forthcoming anthology edited by Ellen Datlow for Del Rey. Here's to four stories in 2007!

First Day

Jose at MemeTherapy has put up one of his group interviews, in which a bunch of writers answer the same question. I answered several questions for him, and today's is about research. UnCommonwealth faves Terry Bisson and Catherine Shaffer join in the fun.

Today was my first day as an English major at the University of Kentucky. The classes on Baldwin and Chaucer were much larger than I expected, but I also expect that attendance will drop as time goes on. I'm also in a weekly poetry workshop that meets on Wednesday afternoons, but I don't expect to be writing much about that.

One thing that was kind of interesting, but has also led to some frustration; between classes I was reading Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" in the collection Coming to Meet the Man. Early in the story, when the narrator is talking about Sonny's situation with another character, a sort of wastrel from their youth (Sonny and the narrator are brothers if you haven't read the story). The guy says something to the effect that he thought Sonny was too smart to get in the trouble he's in, to "get hung."

The narrator replies: "I guess he thought so too," I said sharply, "and that's how he got hung. And now about you? [...]"

Okay, contextually that "now about you" can make sense, but it jangles. The obvious thing was that it's a typo--it should be "And how about you?" (italics mine). I happened to be in the library while I was reading this so I went an dug up the Summer 1957 issue of Partisan Review in which the story originally appeared and sure enough, it's "how" there.

I can't find an info on whether the stories in the collection are "corrected" or "the author's preferred text" or whatever, so now I have to decide whether or not to ask the professor--a Baldwin scholar natch--if that's the case. Which will make me look like a jackass to the other students but I honestly am, in fact, interested in variant texts and how they impact meaning and, y'know, crap like that.

I already know how fly-specky/nit-picky this is, you don't have to tell me.

Go Wildcats! Go Tod Goldberg!

Today I mostly registered for classes at the University of Kentucky. ("Mostly" because I'm waitlisted--at the top of the list, so I'm pretty confident I'll get in--for one additional course I'd like to take.) I might be wrong about the exact numbers, but I believe that means I can now say I've attended the four largest colleges in the Commonwealth; UofL, Western, KCTCS, and UK. I can say it, but I don't expect to often. And that's not even mentioning the semester at my hometown college.

I was surprised to learn that I've actually busted 90 hours. So Gwenda is totally dating a senior. And not the kind that gets the discount at Cracker Barrel, even!

I'm happy to finally be taking classes that mostly involve people talking about, to take two of my courses for example, Geoffrey Chaucer and James Baldwin instead of classes that involve people talking about parking and how many visits twenty bucks will get at Tan Shack. (Fingers crossed.)

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As I do with every link she posts, I followed a pointer off G's blog and found this essay by Tod Goldberg questioning whether writing can be taught. I don't know why, but I find this sentence hysterical:

You can tell a person what makes up strong dialog, but that doesn't mean they'll ever figure out how to write it without it sounding like two people pumping each other for information.

When Reviews Collide!

Here are my favorite phrases from reviews of "Another Word For Map is Faith." The issue of F&SF the story appears in is no longer on the stands, but if you're of a mind, you can still order a copy online at Clarkesworld Books.

"Rowe's look at religion and science is not only timely, but...points out how difficult it is to relate a fundamentalist approach to the realities of scientific observation."
        —Steven H Silver, Tangent Online

"...truly captured my imagination...both amusingly absurd and disquietingly plausible."
        —Nic Clarke, Emerald City

"...the inner voice of disbelief keeps whispering to the reader: this just doesn't make sense."
       —Lois Tilton, Internet Review of Science Fiction (free registration required)

"...a timeless examination of orthodoxy and conformance."
       —Rich Horton, Locus (August issue, review not online)

"...Rowe does not make me believe this world for a minute. It may just be me, but his stories do not impress me the way they apparently do others."
       —Sam Tomaino, SFRevu

"This is a perfect allegory on religious inflexibility and Creationist dogma, and Rowe delivers it with style and grim aplomb."
       —Nick Gevers, Locus (July issue, review not online)

"...characters that I cared nothing about and a situation that I actually found repulsive."
       —David Roy, epinions.com

I tried to take a picture of myself looking all grim and aplombous, but could only manage amusingly absurd. (My original idea was to Photoshop the bad guy half of a drawing of Harvey "Two-Face" Dent over the goofy half of my face to provide exciting visual shorthand for the, shall we say, generously broad range of opinion this story elicited. But then I remembered I don't know how to use Photoshop that well. Scalzi? Help a guy out?)

Special Bonus Intentional Fallacy Post-script: I actually don't think of this story as being "about" science versus religion at all, but I'm clearly in the minority.