It's nomination season! So, obligatory nomination-post. I had four short stories published during 2016, all science fiction:
I am also eligible for the Campbell award (last year of eligibility).
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By popular request*, I have updated my Magical Spreadsheet of Writerliness for 2017. Contains no new features, as I am actually in the middle of rethinking how I record my time and work, but does contain:
Based on Christie Yant's fantastic Google Docs Tools for Writers, which you should look up if you want something slightly less over-engineered.
* Er, one person posting a comment and a bunch of my writing friends saying "oh, yeah, that was cool" a month ago. I am easily swayed to make spreadsheets.
Write comment (1 Comment)I'm actually really late with putting this out there: this anthology Alien Artifacts (another by Zombies Need Brains, love working with those guys) dropped back in August, but between bouts of illness and moving house, I just never quite managed to get on here to tell people about it.
So: new story, "And We Have No Words To Tell You", which I have to say is pretty appropo for 2016, even though I wrote it back in 2015. Available at Amazon and other retailers.
Write comment (0 Comments)I'm quite excited to have two stories out so close together that they appear in the same blog post.
I finally have a story out free to read: If X Is A Real Number is available in issue 33 of Fireside Magazine. This is a favourite of mine: it came about as a story context on the writer's collective Codex: titles were provided, and the point was to grab a title that inspired, and write a story to fit it. I was only perusing the titles for fun, but the title above grabbed me, story in-hand, and insisted I write it then and there. If you like space stories and hard choices, I think this is a story for you.
And almost at the other end of the scale, The Calculus of Trees has been released in The City Of the Future anthology by SciFutures (amazon link). I have been writing futurist pieces for SciFutures for some time, now, and it was really exciting to be invited to submit a story that illustrated my idea of what a city could look like in our future. (And if you're still reeling from some of the endings of my other stories, rest assured this one is much lighter fare).
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I have a new story out, "Into Dust", at Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. If you like science fiction, mystery and beautiful planets this is probably one for you. It comes with an illustration by Nick Greenwood, which I adore, and sits alongside some stellar stories by Merc Rustad, Jennifer Noelle Welch, Kelly Sandoval, Anna Yeatts and Aurelia Flaming.
This is my first year of eligibility for the Campbell award, and you can find my stories via the Fiction section of this site.
Also, I'm sorry about the Server / 500 errors that have been cropping up of late. I've managed to improve the site's performance to reduce them, but they're still cropping up. I'm working with Dreamhost to track down the source of it. If you run into a 500 error, refreshing after a minute or so should clear it up.
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I first heard of this book when a friend posted a review calling it a cross between Firefly, Farscape and Girls. I'll admit, I've never laid an eyeball on Girls, but the others remain two of my favourite science fiction works, and I was eager to see what such offspring could be. Althouh initially deterred by the kindle price (yes, I'm one of those people), I chanced across the trade paperback during one of my rare ventures into a physical bookstore, and couldn't resist the gorgeous cover.
The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet is an unusual book. I enjoyed it immensely, but it's a book that made me feel I was enjoying it for reasons I don't usually consider. It does have the sense of family, ensemble-cast and crew-banter of Firefly, and the sense of wonder and smallness of humanity of Farscape, though it lacks the former's Alliance/Browncoat-fugitive tension, and the latter's overarching single narrative.
It's not a book for those who want a rollicking plot. While there are moments of tension, in fact it's quite a gentle read, but it feels all the more real for being so. When taking a great journey to do a great deed, there are a lot of smaller moments on the way. Accepted wisdom is to trim these out--they're not forwarding the plot, they're distracting from the narrative, and Chambers could have done so and we'd have yet another not-that-original space opera with some mildly interesting aliens and interspecies politics. But Chambers has done just the opposite. This is a book of the small moments that make people's lives, the small choices and actions that define them every day. It's a tapestry-book. Not a collection of short stories, but a multitide of smaller stories interweaving to make a larger, general whole that centres on the entire cast. There is a central story--the titular journey to the titular planet. But that's not at all what the book is about.
It is, as all great science fiction is, about us, here and now, in 2015. Set in Chambers' world, with multitiudes of species with different moral codes, beliefs, forms of gender, familiar structure and values, here is a book about real political correctness, in the Neil Gaiman sense of treating other people with respect. About the problems of ethnocentricism, of how we immediately compare anyone who is sufficiently other not to people, but to animals, foods and things. About respecting the beliefs of others, and the question of where the line falls when someone's belief is causing them direct harm. About how greed, capitalism and the quest for resources by the powerful can put entire societies at risk.
Not to make the book sound like some sociopolitical diatribe: it is wonderfully engaging, amusing and entertaining. There isn't a hint of preachiness, merely exploration. This is a book based on what it would be like if that very respect (or attempts at it, because we are only human) were woven into the fabric of society, in ways that many of us can only wish it could be. And for that, it was such a refreshing read. I would not be surprised if it winds up a seminal work of the early twenty-first century, though, for pinning down the very concepts that society was struggling with.
It is not without its faults, although those are few. A character in the book takes a moment to wonder at the marked similarity of all the alien species, that they all breathe oxygen and require water, and I found myself cringing at the artificial coincidence not only constructed by the author, but then pointed out. One could read this as a parallel of how similar all humans really are to one another, but for this reader, it missed the mark. One or two developments in character could have benefited from being slightly more fleshed out, and a crisis involves a perculiar misunderstanding of basic technology that I just have to assume was overlooked (uh, guys, the beauty of data banks is that you can download the data to somewhere else if you need to. Just saying.) But look at that--out of an entire book, I'm complaining about a brief passage of text and a small logic hole.
It's a wonderful read, full of engaging characters, and a fantastic reflection of our time.
Write comment (0 Comments)So, I've upgraded the site, after about a month of slowly upgrading and testing on a demo site. Not only is it no longer dinosaur-era Joomla, there are actually new features (that I really hope work correctly, because configuring these things is never as simple as the initial documentation makes out, and building it on a test site and then transferring just adds confusion. I know, I know, "real coders develop in production" but they really shouldn't.)
We have the fabulous newsletter over on the sidebar there, that'll let you sign up for fabulous updates from yours truly, a mobile view that doesn't involve absurd pinch-to-zoom acrobatics, and the ability to share/like/tweet posts, huzzah. When I list it like that, it's a little sad how long this took, but there was a lot of effort cleaning up the back end to get things running smoothly. If you find any gremlins, please let me know.
I'm also planning some changes to site content. When I started this site six years ago, the idea was to build a readership for my fiction. Along with most writers-blogging-about-writing, I discovered that blogging about writing nets you an audience of writers, rather than readers. (Yes, writers read, but there are fewer writers out there than readers, most writers probably aren't really my audience, and most readers aren't that interested in writing. At least, not at the obsessively analytical level that I am).
So the site languished for a good twelve months (at least) while I did life things and vaguely tried to think of what on earth I'd blog about if it wasn't about writing, because I didn't have some cool-and-tangentially-related hobby to draw on. I work and I write. I occasionally art (totally a verb, now), but not often enough to make a blog out of it. And then, as I was musing over the age-old debate about writing for yourself vs writing for a market, I realised: I love cool concepts, awesome science, intriguing ideas and beautiful things. This is, not coincidentally, what I try to bring to my fiction. Therefore, my readership is probably a group of people who also like cool concepts, awesome science, intriguing ideas and beautiful things.
So that's the new direction of this blog.
There will still be the occasional writing post, because that's where I'm really spending my time, some reviews of books I read, and as more of my work is published, some fiction and work-in-progress chatter, but broadly, I'm planning to take this site far more in the direction of Things I Found To Be Cool. And we'll see how that turns out.
Write comment (0 Comments)So it's been a while since there was any life on this blog; it was busy happening elsewhere. For the record, my plans to revive this in a rather different direction are coming to a head pretty quickly, so there will be stirrings returning to this corner of internet. Erm, soon.
Some of the life that was happening elsewhere is: I have a short story coming out in an anthology by Zombies Need Brains (don't you just love the name).
The anthology is called Temporally Out of Order:
It’s frustrating when a gadget stops working. But what if the gadget is working fine, it’s just “temporally” out of order? What would you do if you discovered your cell phone linked you to a different time? Or that your camera took pictures of the past?
In this collection, seventeen leading science fiction authors share their take on what happens when gadgets run temporally amok. From past to future, humor to horror, there’s something for everyone.
Join Seanan McGuire, Elektra Hammond, David B. Coe, Chuck Rothman, Faith Hunter, Edmund R. Schubert, Steve Ruskin, Sofie Bird, Laura Resnick, Amy Griswold, Laura Anne Gilman, Susan Jett, Gini Koch, Christopher Barili, Stephen Leigh, Juliet E. McKenna, and Jeremy Sim as they investigate how ordinary objects behaving temporally out of order can change our everyday lives.
My story is titled A is for Alacrity, Astronauts and Grief. I'm also thrilled to be sharing a table of contents with one of my classmates from Odyssey, Jeremy Sim.
The anthology is coming out in August in both paper and ebook.
It's available for preorder here.
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