Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 109

Some Thoughts on the 2014 Nebula Nominees

So the 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced and I could basically just recycle my Nebula reactions post from last year and switch out the names, because my thoughts are largely similar.

All in all, this year’s Nebula shortlist is once again pleasantly diverse with lots of women, writers of colour and non-US writers included. But then – see, I am copying last year’s post – the Nebulas have generally been much better with regard to diversity than the Hugos, probably because they are less dependant upon “popular taste”, whatever that may be, and less vulnerable to ballot stuffing attempts.

Regarding the best novel slate, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer have all gotten a lot of positive buzz this past year(not to mention that they’re all pretty damn good books), so it’s no surprise to see them on the shortlist. Never mind that Ann Leckie has won pretty much every genre award there is to win with Ancillary Justice. I’m also pleased to see The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu, on the shortlist. It’s still very difficult for non-US authors, let alone for fiction in translation, to get nominated for the big international genre awards*, so the nomination for Liu Cixin and his translator Ken Liu is a very positive sign. Charles E. Gannon and Jack McDevitt finally are both authors who seem to be popular with the Nebula electorate, since Gannon was nominated last year and McDevitt has been nominated several times and even won. However, neither author is really on my radar, since I’ve never read them. All in all, the nominees cover a wide range of speculative fiction from hard SF to secondary world fantasy and from avantgardistic to fairly traditional.

The best novella shortlist consists of well known and respected authors, though I’ve read only one of the nominated works, “The Mothers of Voorhisville” by Mary Rickert, which is also on my personal shortlist.

The best novelette shortlist looks very good. “The Devil in America” by Kai Ashante Wilson and “We Are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller are also on my personal list. Though some people really hated “We Are the Cloud”, because it’s about feelings and stuff and set in a somewhat old-fashioned cyberpunk future and contains gay people besides. I’m also very fond of both Carmen Maria Machado and Alaya Dawn Johnson, though I haven’t read these specific works.

The short story nominees also look very good. I like the stories of Aliette de Bodard and Ursula Vernon a lot, so I’m pleased to see them here. Alyssa Wong has been getting a lot of positive buzz this past year and I really liked the one story of hers that I read. I’m also happy to see Pakistani author Usman T. Malik on the shortlist as well as what is apparently the final story by the late Eugie Foster.

The shortlist for the Andre Norton Award for young adult SFF for once contains the sort of book actual young adults might read, whereas in the past we often had the forays of well regarded authors of adult SFF like Cory Doctorow, China Miéville or Paolo Bacigalupi into YA, which are not necessarily all that popular with actual teens. I’m please to see Sarah Rees Brennan nominated. Alaya Dawn Johnson pops up again as well.

Unlike last year, I mostly agree with this year’s nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award for outstanding dramatic presentation. Okay, so I’ll never get just what so many people see in The Lego Movie. I didn’t even particularly like playing with Legos, when I was a kid (I preferred traditional wooden building blocks) and I have zero interest in watching somebody else play with virtual Legos on the big screen. And while I do get what so many people see in Interstellar, I personally don’t like it. But Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America: The Winter Soldier were both excellent, if very different movies (albeit part of the same continuity). Edge of Tomorrow was IMO hampered by its star Tom Cruise, since I heard a lot of people explicitly citing the presence of Tom Cruise as their reason not to watch the film. So I’m happy to see it get some love, especially since Edge of Tomorrow is that by now endangered beast, the fairly original science fiction movie. Okay, so Edge of Tomorrow was an adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel All You Need Is Kill, but that’s hardly a well known property. Finally, Birdman is an interesting choice for this shortlist, though not one I would have made, since I don’t really view it as speculative.

At Far Beyond Reality, Stefan Raets has a round-up of reactions to this year’s Nebula nominees. Meanwhile, Jason Sanford collects various reactions from Twitter. So far, it’s mostly posts listing the nominees and “Squee!” reactions from the nominees themselves, but two posts stand out to me.

The first is
years.

The second is this post by Larry Nolan in which he expresses his disappointment with the shortlist, which he finds underwhelming. He makes a couple of good points, such as that a lot of excellent speculative fiction is found beyond the traditional genre imprints and often beyond the English language as well, but such works are invisible to the Nebula electorates. I actually agree with this, but considering the Nebulas are voted upon by the members of the SFWA, an organisation which is both very genre and very US centered, the Nebulas are probably not the awards we can expect to honour literary crossover works. Juried awards like the Clarke Award or the World Fantasy Award are a better bid there and indeed literary speculative fiction has been repeatedly nominated and even won both awards. And the number of non-US/UK authors on the Nebula shortlist (I count four, Liu Cixin, Usman T. Malik, Aliette de Bodard and Alyssa Wong, though I may be missing someone) is actually progress as is the fact that a translated novel is on the shortlist, even if it’s very much a core genre work.

Another qualm Larry Nolan has about this year’s Nebula shortlist is that even though authors, characters and settings are getting more diverse, the stories themselves are still stuck in the same old paradigms of the past forty years instead of breaking new ground. I’ve heard complaints like this before from a certain corner of the SFF community that is vehemently pro-innovation and nostalgia.

In general, I think that this year’s Nebula shortlist and indeed many genre awards shortlists of recent years are indicative of a generational and demographic shift in the larger SFF community. Speculative fiction is getting younger, more diverse and more international, which influences the works we see nominated for or even winning awards. This is also why we see so many names on this year’s Nebula shortlist we haven’t seen there before.

Now not everybody is happy with this shift. On the one side, we have a block of more conservative and traditional readers and writers, spearheaded by the so-called “Sad Puppies”**, who are not happy with the shift away from stories heavy on the engineering and explosions (and often, but not always, rightwing politics in space) and light on the characterisation (as well as on women, people of colour, GLBT people and anyone who is not a straight white man) towards more diversity and more literary stories. They just want what they consider fun and entertaining stories and are often unaware that “fun” and “entertaining” are both subjective.

On the other side, we have a group of critics who want the genre to blow up and burn down all the old paradigms and who are vehemently opposed to anything they consider nostalgic. These people are actually in favour of more diversity and more literary speculative fiction, but often the writers and stories that actually find their way onto the ballot are not radical enough for those folks.

To this second group, I want to reply with this post by Ann Leckie from last year who sums up everything so much better than I ever could. Because if you are a writer from a traditionally marginalised group, just being allowed to enter the tree house and play in the sandbox you’ve admired all your life is a victory. You don’t necessarily want to burn down the tree house and blow up the sandbox. Here is a quote:

And the whole “escape the suffocating weight of Tradition!” thing doesn’t look the same from every angle. Consider that for women, POC, and LGBTQ writers the question of forebears and tradition can be a fraught one. “She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly.” Such writers have either been denied their own tradition by this kind of erasure, or have been repeatedly erased from the dominant one. To some of us, belonging to a tradition is a valuable and hard-won thing. Sure, we all probably could profit from looking at our assumptions and cultural baggage, and being aware of that as we write.*** But burning the whole castle down? When we’ve uncovered and rebuilt these parts here, so painstakingly? When we love the castle so much and want so badly to be there, even when others are trying to push us out? “Burn it all down and start over!” doesn’t sound terribly appealing. Quite the opposite.

Both groups, the traditionalists and the anti-nostalgics, would probably never agree on what makes a good SFF story, though they are eerily united on which works they dislike, namely Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, last year’s Nebula award winning short story “If you were a dinosaur, my love” by Rachel Swirsky (okay, so I don’t particularly like that one either, though I can see why many do) and John Scalzi’s Redshirts (which I do like, but don’t necessarily consider it awards worthy). Both groups are also overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male, though the traditionalists lean American, while the anti-nostalgics lean British.

Comments closed, because awards posts tends to attract trolls.

*German writer Patrick Süskind was nominated for and even won the World Fantasy Award with Perfume in 1987, beating Stephen King’s It among others, but that’s the only translated work to win a major genre award I can think of.

**Though they should be at least partly happy with this year’s Nebula shortlist, since they seem to like Charles E. Gannon as well as several of the nominated movies.

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Gotham, Agent Carter and expanding universes

We’re currently experiencing something of a golden age of comic book adaptations both on the big and the small screen. As a longtime comic book reader, I’m thrilled about this, though I realise not everybody is.

For example, I just saw some coverage of the Berlin film festival (the list of winners is here BTW) wherein some German dude – probably Andreas Dresen, but don’t quote me on that – waxed poetic about HBO-style dramas like Breaking Bad and Homeland, because they feature broken characters, whereas Hollywood cinema is just concentrating on putting out silly comic book and superhero movies with zero depths. And I yelled at the screen, “Dude, you can watch predictable muslim bashing and the pains of a white middle class dude facing mortality and reacting by becoming a fucking drug dealer, but I’ll be over here watching one of those silly comic book stories tackle sexism instead of more white dude pain.”

As a matter of fact, the German cultural press is sticking with its traditional hostility to anything genre to the point that our oh so highbrow cultural journalists are fawning about Fifty Fucking Shades of Grey, which premieres at the Berlin Film Festival instead of e.g. Jupiter Ascending, which would’ve at least been interesting, and calling it the highest grossing movie of the year. Now Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn’t even have made highest grossing movie of the year in a regular cinema year, especially not since it is widely expected to be terrible. But in a year that will see both Avengers: Age of Ultron and The Force Awakens, i.e. long awaited new installments in two of the most popular franchises on the planet? Forget it, Fifty Shades doesn’t even have a fighting chance.

Though interestingly many German friends have problems believing that both Age of Ultron and The Force Awakens will thoroughly trounce Fifty Shades, because “lots of people want to watch Fifty Shades” and “well, maybe you want to watch this other stuff, but no one else has even heard of that.” Because many of my German friends live in a world where Fifty Shades still cannot be avoided unfortunately, but where neither Star Wars nor the Marvel Cinematic Universe are something that is on their radar at all. Ditto for Game of Thrones, as evidenced by the fact that Sibel Kekili, who plays Tyrion’s lover Shae, was in the Berlin Film Festival jury (well, she is a former winner of the Silver Bear) and yet none of the journalists even thought to ask her about her Hollywood success in Game of Thrones.

However, the German cultural press and what passes for a cultural elite in this country are wrong to focus on Breaking Bad and Homeland and squinting very hard to figure out just why Americans like this stuff so much (because if they are honest for once, very few Germans see the appeal), while ignoring the very interesting work that is currently done in genre and particularly in comic book based film and television. Marvel is ahead of the competition this time and it pains me that the German cultural press is so slow to take notice of the Marvel Cinematic Universe phenomenon (which is interesting and something new for movies, whether you actually like the films or not). DC so far seems to be focussed mainly on giving as 57 flavours of Batman and/or Superman with some Arrow and Flash thrown in for good measure.

In fact, it just struck me today how much this new wave of comic book based media differs from the works we had before. Because let’s face it, we’ve had comic book based film and television for a long time now. We had serials in the 1930s and 1940s, we had Adam West’s Batman and The Green Hornet on TV in the 1960s, we had the Christopher Reeves Superman movies in the 1970s and 1980s, we had the Tim Burton and later Joel Schuhmacher Batman movies in the 1980s and 1990s, we had Blade and Spawn and Spider-Man and the X-Men on the big screen since the 1990s and we had The Flash and various versions of Superman (Superboy, The Adventures of Lois and Clark, Smallville) and even Birds of Prey on the small screen. We even had more or less successful attempts to adapt Watchmen and Sin City and V for Vendetta and From Hell and Road to Perdition and Ghost World and Kick-Ass and 300 and so on… So yes, we’ve had a lot of comic book based media, including good comic book based media, in the past 25 years to the point that I can understand why it would bother people like Andreas Dresen, who is from East Germany and thus had less chance to develop a connection to these characters even if he had wanted to.

But then even many people who are not traditional comic book fans are finding something to enjoy in the current flood of comic book based media. Case in point: My Mom is not a comic book fan and didn’t even want me to read them, when I was a child because of some misguided ideas about comic books harming reading skills. Yet she happily watches Marvel’s Avengersverse movie on DVD with me (except for The First Avenger, WWII not being a cool setting for those who’ve actually experienced it) and has enjoyed the X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies with me in the past. Regarding comic book tales on the small screen, she’s very fond of Arrow.

Now the current surfeit of comic book adaptations has also reached the small screen and the US is currently enjoying no less than six comic book based live action TV series, namely Arrow, The Flash, Gotham and Constantine for DC and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter for Marvel with more on the way. And three of those series, The Flash, Gotham and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. just had their German TV premieres in the space of a week.

I made a point of watching them together with my Mom, just in case it’s necessary to explain some comic related bit to her. Though the films and TV shows usually are perfectly understandable even without comic book background knowledge, since they are aimed at a general audience.

Now my Mom thoroughly enjoyed The Flash, but then I thought she would. Though she was a bit confused when Arrow showed up in the pilot, since she had already forgotten Barry Allen’s guest appearance in that show and both shows are sadly not running on the same network in Germany.

She also thoroughly enjoyed Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., of which I wasn’t quite so sure, because that show needs quite a few episodes to get really off the ground. Coincidentally, I also enjoyed watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. again, even the slower early episodes, because upon second viewing I was able to catch all sorts of sly hints at what is to come, such as Ward mentioning his SO (Hydra agent pretending to be S.H.I.E.L.D. agent John Garrett, who is as close as the first season has to a Big Bad), Coulson lamenting that they failed to cut off Centipede’s head (and since Centipede is Hydra, that’s an interesting statement), someone mentioning Journey into Mystery, the 1960s Marvel comic wherein Skye’s father Dr. Calvin Zabo debuted (so did Thor BTW), Skye saying that since the rest of the team is just as inexperienced as she is, she might just as well be director of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which her comic book counterpart actually was for a while). Indeed, I frequently found myself exclaiming, “Oh, Joss Whedon, you are good”, much to my Mom’s confusion.

However, much to both our surprise, my Mom and I also found ourselves enjoying Gotham. Now I didn’t watch Gotham when it had its TV premier last fall. Partly because it was just another of the 57 flavours of Batman DC has been dishing up regularly in the past 25 years (Batman – now 100% Batman free) and partly because the trailers looked so uninspiring. However, the German network in its infinite wisdom scheduled Gotham after The Flash, so we started watching it and actually found ourselves enjoying the show.

Now my Mom knows who Batman is, who Catwoman is, who Robin is and probably also who the Joker is, but she doesn’t know much about the background of the character. And so, when that robber shot the Waynes in that alley, she actually flinched. “Wait a minute”, I said, “Don’t tell me you didn’t see that one coming. Cause it wasn’t just totally obvious, it was also an iconic moment in comics history.”

My Mom said that she had never read any of those comics (though she has seen at least the Tim Burton Batman films, if not the Nolans). “The little boy…”, I told her, “…the son of the murdered couple is Bruce Wayne. He’ll grow up to be Batman and this is the moment that inspires him to become a superhero.”

Since she didn’t even recognise Batman’s origin story, my Mom of course didn’t get all the other cameos by future Batman friends and villains either, though I pointed them out to her. All right, so she did get that homeless teen burglar would grow up to be Catwoman one day. “Oh, look it’s love at first sight with her and Batman”, she said, “And she’s actually older than him.”

From the POV of someone who’s familiar with the comics, I felt that Gotham was maybe a bit too blatant with giving us future Batman villains before they were villains. I mean, even in the first episode we had the Penguin (even namechecked), Catwoman, Poison Ivy, the Riddler (also namechecked) and a potential Joker in the hapless comedian auditioning at Fish Moony’s bar. I also have a feeling that the big suspect Jim Gordon was tackling might turn out to be Bane. On the non-villainous side (I’m leaving Catwoman on the villain side for now), we had Jim Gordon, Barbara Gordon (though I suspect that the future Batgirl/Oracle will be her daughter rather than this Barbara) and Alfred Pennyworth, who – though a shining beacon of a good superhero parent figure later on – is actually very much at a loss regarding what to do about the grieving child he suddenly finds himself in charge of. Though I did enjoy seeing where all those familiar characters come from and also the fact that young Bruce actually seems more troubled than some of his future antagonists and the resulting implications that Batman is as psychologically disturbed in many ways as the villains he fights, which will surprised absolutely no one who has ever read a Batman comic or seen a Batman movie.

However, since I was watching with my Mom who didn’t recognise any of the rather blatant hints dropped about the “Before they were evil” personnel of Gotham, I also envisioned what Gotham must look like to someone who has either no knowledge of Batman or at least not enough to make the connection. To such a viewer, Gotham looks like a cop show with a slight retro feel*, more Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes sans come and time travel than Batman. And amazingly it works on those terms.

That also got me thinking what Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter might look like to someone who is not familiar or at least not intimately familiar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (e.g. I don’t think my Mom would necessarily have recognised Coulson from the Avengersverse movies without prompting). And at least Agent Carter‘s connection to the Avengersverse is actually more tenuous than Gotham‘s to Batman. However, both shows are still perfectly watchable and enjoyable without that connection, though you’ll get more out of them, if you spot the many little links and Easter eggs.

Without the Avengers connection, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a mixture of the various flavours of NCIS and “hunting down the supernatural/alien artefact or monster of the week” shows in the vein of The X-Files, Torchwood and Fringe. If anything, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. looks and feels more like NCIS (which is probably why my Mom enjoyed it so much) than like Torchwood or The X-Files.

Meanwhile, Agent Carter is stylish retro-sexism in the Mad Men vein with added buttkicking. It doesn’t even matter that Howard Stark’s stolen tech is futuristic/fantastic in nature, nuclear secrets or indeed any old Macguffin would have done just as well. In many ways, Agent Carter is more Mad Men with spies than it is “Whatever happened to Steve’s girlfriend” or “The Secret Origin of S.H.I.E.L.D.” I also think it’s actually a better take on the retro sexism theme than Mad Men, because it’s told from a female POV, but then I’ve always felt Mad Men would have been a better show, if it had focussed more on Peggy Olsen with Don Draper as her mysterious boss, which would also have cut down on the draggy Don Draper family and marriage drama. It’s also interesting that both shows just happen to have a protagonist named Peggy.

Now spin-offs are nothing new. We’ve had both TV series spinning off each other as well as TV shows spun off from movies for decades now. However, the old spin-offs always stuck to the same genre and usually told a variation of the same story the original had told. The various flavours of CSI are always shows about forensics specialists solving crimes in various US cities. The various flavours of NCIS are always shows about investigators of the US Navy solvings crimes and hunting terrorists and exchanging banter, while they’re at it. There might be the occasional shift in tone, e.g. Deep Space 9 was darker than Star Trek: The Next Generation, Angel was more adult than Buffy and The Originals is more adult than The Vampire Diaries, but spin-off and original always stayed in the same genre. Meanwhile, TV shows spun off from movies usually retold the same story with different actors. In many cases, the TV shows also expanded upon the movies that spawned it, e.g. the various Stargates and Highlander vastly expanded their respective worlds, which is also why the TV shows are often better remembered than the movies.

In contrast, Marvel’s TV spin-offs generally keep the same actors as the movies and instead focus on a popular supporting character like Phil Coulson or Peggy Carter. DC, on the other hand, seems to prefer to keep its movie and TV universes separate and even offers different versions of the same characters on film and TV. For example, the Suicide Squad movie that DC has planned for 2016 has entirely different cast than the Suicide Squad we saw in Arrow. Personally, I prefer the Marvel approach of having one big universe to DC’s of having several universes coexisting. In fact, we don’t even know if the TV show Gotham exists in the same universe as either DC’s big screen Batman movies (which don’t exist in the same universe either – in fact, we probably have at least two different Batman movie universes) or Arrow and The Flash. IMO it just adds useless confusion, but DC seems to want big name stars in its movies rather than the actors who successfully played these characters on TV.

It is also notable that comic book based TV series are not necessarily in the same genre as their parent movies. True, The Flash and Arrow are superhero shows, but Gotham is a cop show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a spy thriller/action show, Agent Carter is a Mad Men style period piece. What is more, neither Gotham nor Agent Carter even directly feature any superheroes (Bruce is still a kid in Gotham, while Captain America merely casts a shadow upon Agent Carter), while Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. only features superheroes tangentially for much of its run. And this is something new, because in the past movies and/or TV shows set in the same universe generally also belonged to the same genre.

The five Star Trek TV shows were all variations on the theme of spaceships (and a space station in the case of Deep Space 9) in space exploring strange worlds. The three Stargate shows were all variations on the theme of intrepid explorers stepping through a portal to visit new worlds or receive visitors from there. The X-Files, Millennium and The Lone Gunmen were all variations on “Weird shit happens, our hero(es) investigate, it’s probably a conspiracy”.

Examples where parent show and spin-off drastically vary in style and genre are fairly rare and don’t seem to exist at all before 2000. Buffy and Angel are on such example. Buffy was a highschool drama with added vampires, while Angel was a supernatural detective tale in the vein of Lee Killough’s Blood Walk series, P.N. Elrod’s Vampire Files and the TV show Forever Knight. Doctor Who and its two spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures are not just drastically different from each other, they are even aimed at different audiences. But then Doctor Who usually cannot even decide what genre it wants to be from episode to episode and Torchwood‘s four seasons are so different from each other that they might as well be four different shows. And indeed, hardly anybody likes all four seasons of Torchwood – most people like only one or two seasons and loathe the others**. The 2005 Battlestar Galactica and its spin-off Caprica finally were also two very different shows (and neither had anything in common with the original Battlestar Galactica). The new Battlestar Galactica was faux relevant political drama in space, Caprica was something about scientists creating androids apparently (I’m not sure since I never watched it).

Marvel has done these shows one better by giving us a universe of interconnected stories that – as I’ve pointed out before – are very different from each other and often not even in the same genre, although they all have the same core story about becoming a better, more rounded person, superpowers optional, though they help (interestingly, Phil Coulson explicitly states this Marvel mission statement near the end of the first episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), and finding friends, a new family and true love in the bargain (Marvel mission statement 2 is uttered by Skye in the second episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and also by Jarvis to Peggy in an episode of Agent Carter) and often the same plot as well, namely let’s all hunt the glowy cosmic thing that will eventually be revealed as an Infinity Gem.

What happened is that somewhere along the way, Marvel and to a lesser degree DC realised that they have enormous fictional universes built up over more than seven decades. They also noticed that there are a lot of stories to be told in those universes and those stories are not always about superheroes. Instead, the supporting casts of those superheroes, the cops and spies, reporters and butlers all have stories of their own, stories well worth telling. And as a result, we don’t just get an unprecedented bounty of superhero tales, we also got Gotham, Agent Carter and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which are not really about superheroes at all.

*I did like the retro feel of Gotham, though I wish the producers would have settled on what time this was supposed to be, for the sets looked Art Deco (well, it is Gotham City, world capital of Art Deco), the cars looked 1970s, the cell phones looked 1990s and the costume design was all over the place from a vaguely 1950s feel to a 1980s feel. All right, so time probably does move differently in the DC Universe, but I doubt it oscillates along a 60 year span from approx. 1930 to approx. 1990.

**I was a big fan of season 1 of Torchwood and am still bitter about the fact that a mix of white male geek entitlement and American prudishness killed the great show we might have had.

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New Shattered Empire novella available: Partners in Crime

It’s been a while (December in fact) since my last new release announcement, but I’ll make up for that with three new release coming up in February.

Let’s start with a new entry in my Shattered Empire space opera series: Partners in Crime features Holly di Marco and Lord Ethan Summerton, who have been the focus of three of the four Shattered Empire stories to date, going on a mission for the Rebellion, a mission that involves robbing a bank. Yup, it’s a science fiction heist story.

Partners in Crime is something of a departure from the other stories in the Shattered Empire series, since it is the first story in the series to feature a male point-of-view character. So if you’ve been wondering just how Ethan is adjusting to his new circumstances or simply wanted to take a peek into his head, here’s your chance. And if you enjoy the Shattered Empire series mainly for its variety of female characters, have no fear. Partners in Crime still contains plenty of Holly and Carlotta as well as new Rebel character Isabelle Kwan and passes the Bechdel test, too.

Oh yes, and if you’ve been wondering about which order my various series go in, I now have a “Series in order” subpage to help you.

Partners in Crime

The Premier Imperial Bank of Houshou is the financial institute of choice for the rich and the crooked of the Fifth Human Empire. The bank boosts a two thousand year history of excellent but discreet service and its vaults and computers are thought to be impenetrable.

However, the Premier Imperial Bank of Houshou has not counted on Ethan Summerton and Holly di Marco, ex-aristocrat and ex-mercenary respectively, finding a way to breach its impenetrable security system and redirect the ill-gotten gains stored at the bank to the coffers of the Galactic Rebellion.

On the other hand, Holly and Ethan, whose murdered family was among the select clientele of the bank, have not counted on the Premier Imperial Bank of Houshou‘s rather eccentric idea of good customer service.

For more information, visit the Partners in Crime page.

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1965 Wedding Photos

My parents are celebrating their golden wedding anniversary this year and I was drafted to design the invitations. And just in case you’re wondering, no, I’m not that old. My parents had already been married for several years when they had me.

In order to design the invitations, I also had to scan in some wedding photos. I can’t share the invitations yet, because my parents are paranoid about gatecrashers, but here are some wedding photos from 1965:

This photo was taken after the civil wedding. The suit is boring, but check out my Mom’s marvellous beehive hairdo, which supposedly took hours to do. The location seems to be the same building that still serves as the Bremen registry office 50 years later.

Here is a contemporary photo of the registry office.

And here is the official wedding portait. That marvellous beehive is back. The bouquet is quite interesting as well. According to my Mom, the dangling eight-shape were two small myrtle wreaths, myrtle being the traditional choice for wedding wreaths and bouquets in Germany.

My Mom told me that she modelled her hairstyle after the style that Princess Margaret had worn at her wedding to Lord Snowdon in 1960. Now Princess Margaret was certainly a breathtaking bride, though personally I don’t see many similarities beyond the beehive. And Princess Margaret’s looks more like a Modesty Blaise type topknot than a beehive.

The newly-weds are leaving the church. Mom and Dad seem happy enough, as do the blonde bridesmaid and the jolly looking priest. The two flower kids look considerably less than happy, as does the dark-haired bridesmaid.

This is the church in question BTW. The flower girl is my cousin Ulrike (who once told me she was a flower girl all the time and always had to wear the same dress), the flower boy was a neighbour’s kid named Joachim. The smiling blonde bridesmaid (Doesn’t she look just like Betty Draper? – shudder) is married to a cousin of my Mom. As for the darkhaired bridesmaid, no one even remembers her name. Apparently, she was the girlfriend of the best man or something and they broke up not long thereafter.

At midnight on your wedding day, they made you take off your veil and wear a nightcap instead. My Mom’s looks more like a swimming cap though, probably to accomodate the beehive. My Dad looks very silly and about twelve.

I have no idea what the reasoning behind the nightcap custom is, though it seems creepily reminiscent of relatives making sure you’re properly celebrating your wedding night. The nightcap is usually preceded by the bride having her veil literally ripped to shreds by the other guests for good luck. The veil ripping and nightcap wearing custom seems to have largely died out, because the brides hate it. Good riddance IMO, because it is a weird custom.

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for January 2015

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some December books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

January 2015 actually marks the one year anniversary of “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”, because we started out in January 2014 with 12 newly released SFF titles. One year on, we have 35 new release, covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. We have hard science fiction, military science fiction, space opera, science fiction romance, paranormal romance, Steampunk, dystopian fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, weird western, epic fantasy, urban fantasy, Arthurian fantasy, Asian based fantasy, young adult fantasy, SFnal fairytales, tiem travel, werewolves, vampires, superheroes, magic schools, sirens, super-mathematicians, rogue AIs, warlock hunters and much more. Once again, we also have a broad spectrum of authors hailing from countries as diverse as the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Kuwait.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Valen: Warlock Hunter by J.R. Armstrong

Assan, the greatest city in the known world.

Recently the Mage Wars have been tearing the city apart, but for warlock hunter Aias Valen, the underworld battles that rage through the streets mean coin in her purse, and an opportunity to settle old scores.

As the crime lords pay handsomely for her services, the mages find themselves face to face with their greatest fear – an anti-thaumaturge, a being whose very presence means a quick death to any magic. But Aias’s old enmities continue to push her further into danger. And when someone pushes back, she will find there are greater dangers in Assan than the crime lords.

Restoration by K.S. Augustin

In politics, is there a place for love?

Van Motaff, renowned philosopher and Rahfonist, is looking ahead to Retirement, but the planetary government has other plans. Something unprecedented has happened—a young, male Rahfoni has been raised by aliens for the past thirty years—and Van has been chosen to restore him to Rahfon society.

Even though the eyes of two worlds are on her, Van thinks the job will be straightforward enough. But when her charge, Eton Abless, is injured, an irate governor interferes, demanding that the young man be neutralised as a potential political threat. Van resists and finds herself falling into a forbidden romance with her student…a romance that may mean the end of her reputation and career, and his permanent exile. As her options narrow, Van is forced to face the conclusion that the only way to save Eton may be to lose him completely.

Pegasi and Prefects by Eleanor Beresford

Charley’s final year at Fernleigh Manor is complicated by a runaway pegasus, unwanted Games Captainship, a dangerous new rival and, most of all, falling head over heels in love with another girl. What is a reluctant Senior Prefect to do?

A magical YA school story with a sapphic twist, the first in the Scholars and Sorcery series.

Scholars and Sorcery is a series of young adult fantasy novels set in an alternate version of 1950s England in which elves invaded in the far past, leaving magic and mythical creatures such as fairies and dragons behind them. It features lesbian heroines and a sweet dollop of romance.

Medicine for Ghosts by Adam Bishop

It isn’t unusual for an investigative reporter like Jarvis to hear rumours, but a rumour about prisoners who aren’t supposed to exist? Well, that’s another matter entirely. A mysterious, unsigned letter brings Jarvis to the military border town of Daruma with a promise that the story waiting for him there will be a blockbuster. For a young reporter trying to make a name for himself, the appeal is too great to resist. But what Jarvis discovers in Daruma will force him to weigh his duty as a reporter against his obligations as a citizen. What can he, a solitary reporter, do to make his country a better place to live?

Medicine For Ghosts is a short story prequel to the full-length novel The Disillusioners.

Otherworlders by Angela Cavanaugh

When a virus threatens humanity with extinction, the desperate and dwindling number of uninfected seek refuge in a parallel universe. The technology is untested. The other universe is unprepared and one thing is made violently clear: they are not wanted.

As a weaponized, fatal virus mutates and threatens to kill all life forms on Earth, Special Agent Williams and the government conspires to send the healthy away. After space travel and going underground are ruled impossible, all that remains is the theoretical technology of an autistic savant: escaping to a parallel universe. But when they travel to the other dimension, their arrival is met with suspicion and hatred. To evade persecution, experimentation, and to save their lives, the Otherworlders must find a way to escape, survive, and outwit Agent Williams’s murderous double.

Xiao Xiao and the Dragon Pearl by Joyce Chng

Enter the world of Xiao Xiao, daughter of an imperial courtesan, and a fantastical historical Qing China, with dragons and magic and traditions. What happens when her mother adopts a baby girl found in a rice field? What does – can – the green pearl do?

 

 

 

Sacrifice by Stacy Claflin

It’s a new generation of royal vampires.

Alexis’ daughter Eylin is nearly grown, in the beginning of her transformation. Born with the mark of the dragon and placed under a spell as in infant, the young princess finds herself in the middle of an age-old battle between mortal enemies.

Eylin starts to fall for the son of their enemy: the one who kidnapped Eylin years earlier. Pulled between the ties of family and romance, she must decide between two different worlds. Depending on the decision she makes, someone will end up sacrificing their life.

This is book 6 of The Transformed series.

Bitten by A.J. Colby

Being a lone wolf could be Riley’s greatest strength, or her greatest weakness…

After surviving her psychotic ex-boyfriend’s quest for revenge, Riley Cray was ready to settle back into her quiet life and fade into obscurity. The Shepherd of the City, Alexei Cordova, however, has other plans for the lone werewolf. Someone is murdering supernaturals under the master vampire’s protection, and he wants Riley to figure out why.

Relying on the help of her friends and her paltry knowledge of the supernatural world, can Riley discover who the murderer is before Denver is consumed by a war between vampires and werewolves?

Watch out. This bitch bites!

This is the sequel to Hunted.

Vanguard No.1: Come the Exemplar by Percival Constantine

Witness the birth of heroes!

The world has changed. A mysterious event altered the genetic structure of humanity, granting a small percentage of the population superhuman powers. The government has secretly formed a superhero team to deal with threats from potential supervillains. Paragon—telekinetic powerhouse; Zenith—hyper-intelligent AI; Shift—shape-changing teenager; Wraith—teleporting shadow warrior; Sharkskin—human/shark hybrid. Led by the armored Gunsmith, they are Vanguard!

Callum King’s life has fallen apart. He lost his job, his wife left him, and he was about to end it all—when he discovered he possessed the powers of a superman. Now calling himself the Exemplar, he’s declared himself the world’s first superhero, out to prove those who doubted him wrong. But his arrogance far supersedes his good intentions! Can Vanguard overcome their internal strife in order to face their first threat?

From Percival Constantine comes an all-new team of superheroes in the vein of the X-Men and the Avengers!

Teeth: The First Bite by Chele Cooke

Medical intern Thomas awakes in a blood-drenched basement and the realisation that his life must change forever. After all, how can he practise medicine when the smell of blood turns him into a vicious killer?

Spencer thinks being a vampire is better than any teen movie made it out to be. Now he must train Thomas and make his mentor proud.

One mistake risks more than either are willing to lose, and a single broken law could turn them from predators to prey.

Providence Unveiled by Selina Fenech

Just when she is finding herself, Memory is about to lose everything. Home, friendship, family, goals, love… Memory will break all the rules to try and save what is important to her, but her actions are being manipulated by a dark force toward a dark end. Worlds will be broken, love will be stolen, and sacrifices will be made.

In this final novel of the Memory’s Wake trilogy, following Memory’s Wake and Hope’s Reign, the truth will be unveiled.

 

Starship Eternal by M.R. Forbes

A lost starship…

A dire warning from futures past…

A desperate search for salvation…

Captain Mitchell “Ares” Williams is a Space Marine and the hero of the Battle for Liberty, whose Shot Heard ‘Round the Universe saved the planet from a nearly unstoppable war machine. He’s handsome, charismatic, and the perfect poster boy to help the military drive enlistment. Pulled from the war and thrown into the spotlight, he’s as efficient at charming the media and bedding beautiful celebrities as he was at shooting down enemy starfighters.

After an assassination attempt leaves Mitchell critically wounded, he begins to suffer from strange hallucinations that carry a chilling and oddly familiar warning:

They are coming. Find the Goliath or humankind will be destroyed.

Convinced that the visions are a side-effect of his injuries, he tries to ignore them, only to learn that he may not be as crazy as he thinks. The enemy is real and closer than he imagined, and they’ll do whatever it takes to prevent him from rediscovering the centuries lost starship.

Narrowly escaping capture, out of time and out of air, Mitchell lands at the mercy of the Riggers – a ragtag crew of former commandos who patrol the lawless outer reaches of the galaxy. Guided by a captain with a reputation for cold-blooded murder, they’re dangerous, immoral, and possibly insane.

They may also be humanity’s last hope for survival in a war that has raged beyond eternity.

Bloodrush by Ben Galley

“Magick ain’t pretty, it ain’t stars and sparkles. Magick is dirty. It’s rough. Raw. It’s blood and guts and vomit. You hear me?”

When Prime Lord Hark is found in a pool of his own blood on the steps of his halls, Tonmerion Hark finds his world not only turned upside down, but inside out. His father’s last will and testament forces him west across the Iron Ocean, to the very brink of the Endless Land and all civilisation. They call it Wyoming.

This is a story of murder and family.

In the dusty frontier town of Fell Falls, there is no silverware, no servants, no plush velvet nor towering spires. Only dust, danger, and the railway. Tonmerion has only one friend to help him escape the torturous heat and unravel his father’s murder. A faerie named Rhin. A twelve-inch tall outcast of his own kind.

This is a story of blood and magick.

But there are darker things at work in Fell Falls, and not just the railwraiths or the savages. Secrets lurk in Tonmerion’s bloodline. Secrets that will redefine this young Hark.

This is a story of the edge of the world.

Noir: A Steampunk Fantasy by Jacqueline Garlick

With Urlick (Babbit) imprisoned, awaiting execution for the alleged murder of Professor Smrt, Eyelet (Elsworth) must find her way back through the criminal infested woods, among the blood-thirsty Infirmed, to the forbidden city of Brethren, in time to free him from his fate.

With the help of Crazy Legs, Eyelet overthrows a travelling freak show train on its way into Brethren, planning to use the train to distract the city long enough to free Urlick. Just as they think their luck is about to hold, Eyelet is lured astray by an image from her past. Entering an abandoned factory at the city’s edge, she unearths a series of ungodly secrets, and soon finds herself imprisoned.

With Urlick locked away in the Stone Jug and Eyelet on her way to MadHouse Brink, will C.L. be able to spring both loose in time to save the day? Or will he too, fall prey to the torturous mind of Brethren’s newest Ruler—who is, in fact, a self-appointed heir to the throne.

It appears there is an heir that’s been overlooked. An heir the new ruler is determined to keep secret.

Noir is book 2 of the Illumination Paradox series and sequel to Lumiere.

Electric Blue Butterflies by Irma Geddon

He’s been in love with her since they were children. She thinks she’s getting married to a complete stranger.

When the wedding night ends in tragedy, the only thing two lovers need is to trust that LOVE KNOWS NO LIMIT—not even death.

—–

Constance has always known her parents would choose a husband for her when she would be old enough to get married—this is part of a long tradition in her family, one she has decided not to fight despite her powerful need for freedom.

When she meets William, her future husband, just one day before the wedding, she falls for him on the spot. He is strikingly handsome, he’s a succesful business man, but most of all, he is completely under her spell and looks at her like she’s hung the moon.

William is killed in a horrible animal attack during the wedding party, before he can be alone and confide in Constance. Trying to cope with the sudden death of her husband, Constance will unearth all of William’s secrets. But, as it turns out, William isn’t gone for good.

Time is running out for William and Constance’s love story—will she find a way to get back the husband she didn’t know she wanted so much?

Division: A Collection of Science Fiction Fairytales by Lee S. Hawke

From LEE S. HAWKE, author of “The Changeling and the Sun” (published by Ideomancer Speculative Fiction Magazine) comes DIVISION: A COLLECTION OF SCIENCE FICTION FAIRYTALES.

Featuring 7 original, fairytale-inspired science fiction short stories, this collection explores the division between mind, body, technology and humanity.

Includes:

A chronically ill civilian discovers that his immune system may be the key to human survival

A schoolgirl tries to escape her demons through levels of virtual reality

A data analyst falls in love with a software coder during a forced government assignment

A young boy is confronted with a horrifying truth about his constructed world

A jaded medical technician rediscovers the meaning of beauty

A girl scrambles to escape a horrifying alien invasion in a futuristic dystopia, and

A spaceship engineer struggles with the death of her only daughter.

Half Life by S.L. Huang

Cas Russell is back — and so is her deadly supermath.

Cas may be an antisocial mercenary who uses her instant calculating skills to mow down enemies, but she’s trying hard to build up a handful of morals. So when she’s hired by an anguished father to rescue his kid from an evil tech conglomerate, it seems like the perfect job to use for ethics practice.

Then she finds her client’s daughter… who is a robot.

The researchers who own the ’bot will stop at nothing to get it back, but the kid’s just real enough for Cas to want to protect her — even though she knows she’s risking everything for a collection of metal and wires. But when the case blows up in her face, it plunges Cas into the crossfire of a massive, decades-long corporate espionage war.

Cas knows logically that she isn’t saving a child. She’s stealing a piece of technology, one expensive and high-stakes enough that spiriting it away is going to get innocent people killed. But she has a distraught father on one hand and a robot programmed to act like a distraught daughter on the other, and she’s never been able to sit by when a kid is in trouble — even a fake one.

Screw morals and ethics. All Cas wants to do is save one little girl.

This is the sequel to Zero Sum Game.

Ambassador 3: Changing Fate by Patty Jansen

Fifty thousand years ago, a meteorite hit the planet Asto, giving its Aghyrian inhabitants mere days of notice. Three ships escaped the Armageddon. Two went to the neighbouring planet. The third, a massive generation ship, refused to take on refugees, and then vanished without a trace.

It’s coming back.

Its initial burst of communication caused the outage of the Exchange, the FTL network for transport and communication, but since then the ship has been silent. It jumps about at random, using wormholes it generates with a drive the likes of which no one has seen before.

Meanwhile at the gamra assembly, people jostle to be in the best positions when it inevitably turns up in inhabited space. What the ship wants or whether there is anyone on board no one knows, but diplomat Cory Wilson knows one thing: when it turns up, he must avoid a conflict at all cost.

If only gamra presented a united viewpoint. If only Asto’s army wasn’t keen to get involved. If only the Aghyrians at gamra didn’t do what they do best: manipulate and play games with everyone. While the ship approaches, the delegates bicker, and the time for negotiating is fast running out.

This is book 3 of the Ambassador series, following Seeing Red and Raising Hell.

Mission: Attack on Europa by V.A. Jeffrey

The affair on Langrenus now settled, Bob plans to return home. But an urgent cry for help from an old friend interrupts his homecoming. The Big Boss sends him a fleet of newly built fighter ships, seemingly just in time for this new and unexpected mission. Bob brings along a new ally, enlisting him in his growing little band of U-net agents. The new guy is James Jenkins, a.k.a Diamond Dog, a young, hot-shot pilot with smuggling connections and as soon as they set foot on Mars trouble blows up in their faces.

A new city is being built and there will be a final gathering of the Allied Martian Powers. They’ve been planning their long-awaited and perilous mission – to destroy the loyalist alien military base on Europa. Bob and Diamond bring along much needed help to the cause, more than willing to rally to the side of the Alliance of Martian Powers but Bob finds that things are changing faster than he can keep up with and his experience in Langrenus haunts him in more ways than one. On Mars, alliances between humans and aliens are complex, tenuous things and Bob finds that even relationships with one’s allies can be uneasy.

This is book 3 of the Mission series, following Flight to Mars and Lights of Langrenus.

Solace by Therin Knite

Corina Marion’s father is dead.

Off to a never-ending war as a Red Cross doctor before Corina was even born, Luther Marion has been a constant but increasingly distant presence in his daughter’s life for sixteen years. Damaged pictures. Short letters. And three brief phone calls received before Corina was old enough to walk.

But now, Luther Marion has returned home at last—as a body in a box to be buried. Corina’s mother is devastated. Her small, backwoods town mourns the loss of its local hero.

And Corina…isn’t sure how she feels about the death of a father she never really met.

But when a mysterious old man confronts Corina at her father’s funeral, she finds herself drawn to his impossible offer: a chance to know the now late Luther Marion. And in a moment of uncertainty, Corina makes a choice with consequences she can barely fathom. A choice that sends her to the last place she ever expected to go.

Her father’s hometown. Six hundred miles south.

And twenty-five years in the past.

Knight of the White Hart by Kathryn Marlowe

Guigemar is a Breton knight who fights alongside King Arthur. His excels in all the courtly arts, save one: he has always scorned love.

Returning home, the knight goes hunting with a friend and shoots a white deer. The arrow bounces back to wound him, too. The doe curses him: the wound will never heal until he meets a woman who will love him truly and suffer for that love like no one ever has ever suffered before.

Mad with pain, he stumbles to the shore where a stunning ship sails him away, despite lacking a crew. He tosses and turns in fevered dreams until he awakes to find the most beautiful woman he has ever seen peering in at him.

And there his real troubles begin.

The Middle Ages: when ‘romance’ meant adventure!

Segue by John Marsh

A thousand years after travelling into space, humans have spread across the Milky Way. Ancient platforms maintain stable wormholes, allowing rapid travel between planets tens of thousands of light-years apart. In a union of systems spanning thousands of habitable worlds, huge interstellar companies operate to exploit resources in remote corners of the galaxy.

Segue is a planet on the outer borders of human controlled space, with vast tropical continents covered in steaming jungle, far away from the laws of civilization. Company agent Ves arrives on Segue with a mission to find a missing company manager, and discover how a valuable export is being contaminated. A dangerous boat journey takes her into the dark interior to find answers.

White Seed by Kenneth Marshall

The White Seed Brings Life to Worlds

Three thousand years ago, the seeds arrived from Earth on hundreds of worlds. The developed ones formed the Network, connected only by radio and laser. Since the time of the seeds, nothing but information has traveled between the stars. Now a starship, The Child of Ambition, is changing that. Her first mission: to explore the dark worlds, the ones that failed.

Kali Hakoian, pilot-astronaut and war hero, thought landing on the super-Earth of Keto would be routine. The emptiest seed world—its global ocean matted with algae and crawling with hurricanes—hides the oldest human ruins. Her crew of scientists: a dreamer, a believer, and a retired assassin. Their hypothesis—self-termination of the seed base.

But when an act of sabotage strands her in the path of a superstorm, she’s forced to escape with the man she trusts the least. They may never find out what happened to the settlers—unless it happens to them. Can she trust her crew enough to find a way out of the darkness?

A Time of Shadows by Monique Martin

It’s been a few months since Simon and Elizabeth returned from their adventure in 1888 London. Jack is back with them and all is as it should be, until a knock on the door changes that. A visitor from the future turns their world upside-down.

Unable to return her to her time, they go to the Council for help, only to discover there are bigger problems afoot. All of the watches have been shut down until a dangerous and secret weapon–a watch that can change any point in time–can be found. Too powerful for anyone to possess, it was hidden. But now the secret’s out, and the mysterious Shadow Council will do anything to get their hands on it.

Simon, Elizabeth and Jack race to find it before the Shadow Council does or it will be the end of…everything.

This is book 8 in the Out of Time series.

Emissary by Melissa McShane

When unquiet ghosts walk the earth, the servants of Atenas, God of Death, guide them to their final rest in His domain. For six years, Zerafine, priestess of Atenas, and her companion Gerrard have walked the known world, bringing peace to the dead and fair judgment to the living. Hated and feared as a death-bringer by many, Zerafine has never regretted her decision to serve Atenas and never doubted her ability to carry out His will.

Until now.

An unexpected assignment from the Archpriest of Atenas sends Zerafine and Gerrard to Portena, the oldest city in the world, in pursuit of a kind of ghost no one has ever seen before: spirits that vanish before they can be sent to Atenas’s court, appearing and reappearing at random. As emissary of Atenas, Zerafine’s task is to discover the true nature of these ghosts and find a way to bring them peace. But Zerafine’s assignment puts her at odds not only with the rulers of Portena, but with the high priest of another God, and she soon realizes that all is not as it seems in the great city. If Zerafine fails to learn the truth and put these ghosts to rest, it could mean disaster not only for Portena, but for the world.

Siren by Jennifer Melzer

Siren Talbot’s life is plagued with storms. Her mother’s insanity was the first, though not the last. Called to the ocean, not even the shores of Edisto Island can calm the tempest inside her.

Though she’s settled into a life with Patrick, his promises of a happily ever after can’t still the foul weather of her past or the brewing squall on the horizon. She’s haunted by the disappearance of her first love, Carver, and the lack of answers.

A single clue unlocks mysteries she can’t explain. A murder cements the impossible as possible. The more magic she uncovers, the darker her suspicions become and the more the hurricane inside her starts to rage.

Patrick isn’t the Prince Charming he claims to be.

And he knows exactly what happened to Carver.

The Enchanted Rose by Nadia Nader

When Vivian’s mother dies in a tragic accident, Vivian’s world is turned upside down. Her life, as she knows it, is over. A new life, full of her mother’s secrets, begins…

Sent away by her father to live with two eccentric aunts on the mysterious Tremaine Estate, Vivian comes to learn that a powerful curse lurks over her family – one that only she may have the power to break. With each day she spends in Misty Hills, Vivian uncovers more unsettling discoveries about the town, her reclusive family, and herself.

Can Vivian let go of every truth she’s ever believed and discover who she really is, before the dark secrets hidden within the supernatural town threaten to consume her and those she loves?

Hoarder in the Down Deep by Marilyn Peake

It’s against the law to have children without winning the lottery. Implanted with a birth control device as required by law, Evangeline Hubbard, a dirt farmer in the down deep, discovers that implants sometimes fail. But in a world strictly controlled by the authorities, one pays a terrible price for tampering with the established order. Consumed by fear and madness after things go horribly wrong, Evangeline hoards in order to hang onto things. She adds them to the nest she’s building in the down deep.

HOARDER IN THE DOWN DEEP is a novella based on the best-selling WOOL series by Hugh Howey, and was written with his permission. It’s set in the time when Sheriff Holston and his wife Allison had won the lottery, giving them one year to conceive a child. Investigating the case of Evangeline Hubbard, Sheriff Holston and Mayor Jahns are unprepared for what they find. HOARDER IN THE DOWN DEEP explores how psychological issues and emotional pain can lead to hoarding. It also explores the mental strain placed on women who have lost control over their own reproductive processes.

Song of Blood and Stone by L. Penelope

Between love and duty lies destiny

Orphaned and alone, Jasminda is an outcast in her homeland of Elsira, where she is feared for both the shade of her skin and her magical abilities. When ruthless soldiers seek refuge in her isolated cabin, they bring with them a captive – an injured spy who steals her heart.

Jack’s mission behind enemy lines nearly cost him his life but he is saved by the healing power of a mysterious young woman. Together they embark on a perilous journey straight into the heart of a centuries-old conflict.

Thrust into a hostile society, Jasminda and Jack must rely on one another even as secrets jeopardize their bond. As an ancient evil gains power, Jasminda races to unlock a mystery that promises salvation.

The fates of two nations hang in the balance as Jasminda and Jack must choose between love and duty to fulfill their destinies and end the war.

This adult fantasy romance is recommended for readers 17 and older.

The Future Collection by Beth Revis

This collection of short stories by New York Times bestselling author Beth Revis features science fiction tales about the future.

DOCTOR-PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY: A young woman wakes up in a cryomed ward of a hospital. As she recalls what led to her confinement, she starts to realize just what the consequences of her actions were, and how much time has passed since she was injured.

THE MOST PRECIOUS MEMORY: In a world where memories can be bought and sold as highly addictive drugs, one transaction takes an unusual turn. *Note*: this story was previously published in the Soothe The Savage Beast anthology.

THE GIRL AND THE MACHINE: A man has limited abilities to travel through time, but a cute girl pops up in his life, informing him that her time machine can open the door to far greater powers. But there’s something ominous about it… *Note*: This story is available as an individual short in Amazon.

LAG: A reporter had been chasing down a lead…but after a malfunction in the teleporter she used, she’s forgotten what the lead was. Now she’s searching for clues in her own life to discover what it was she’s missing.

THE TURING TEST: A college student participates in a turing test to see if she can distinguish which of the two subjects is human and which is an android. *Note:* A version of this story is a part of the Special Edition of THE BODY ELECTRIC novel and was previously published in Lightspeed Magazine.

AS THEY SLIP AWAY: A group of artists on a generation space ship that reviles art is given a unique assignment, one that draws one young lady far too close to a possessive man protected by the ship’s government. *Note:* This short story is available free online and is linked to the ACROSS THE UNIVERSE world.

RIGA, AI by Tobias Roote

Her decisions are final, her justice swift, her tolerance of those who would risk the fragile peace is zero.

RIGA,AI is a new kind of heroine set in a future where AIs and humans live alongside each other in a fragile peace. RIGA is a non-human but there is much about her that is unknown, even to her. Her unique composition means RIGA is often ‘the hunted’ in an increasingly dangerous universe where humans, transhumans and artificial intelligence all struggle to survive together.

RIGA’s unique skills make her extremely valuable to the Emporium’s secret service, the ESSG. Trained in the roles of Diplomat, Assassin and Spy, means she has to rely on her unique abilities to keep her alive and one step ahead of her enemies. But, the enemy has plans and RIGA is in their way.

The Fire Mages by Pauline M. Ross

Kyra has always been drawn to the magic of spellpages. She is determined to leave her small village far behind and become a scribe, wielding the power of magic through her pen. Halfway through her training, she has a mage as patron and her ambitions are within her grasp. But a simple favour for her sister goes disastrously awry, destroying Kyra’s dreams in an instant.

Devastated, she accepts an offer from a stranger to help her find out what went wrong. The young man sees growing power within Kyra, potentially stronger than spellpages or any living mage. The answers to unlocking that power may lie within the glowing walls of the Imperial City, but its magic is strong and the unwary vanish without trace on its streets. Thirsty for knowledge and desperate to avoid another accident, she feels compelled to risk it.

While she focuses on controlling her abilities, a storm of greed and ambition boils up around her. Kyra is a pawn in the struggle for dominance between unscrupulous factions vying for rule of her country. Trusting the wrong side could get her killed–or worse, the potent magic she barely understands could be put to unthinkable evil.

The Icarus Plot by Jenny Schwartz

Ivana March runs a very special toy shop in the heart of Victorian London. The last person she expects to see enter it is an earl. Not that she has time to entertain him. Someone is stealing children, and the street kids whisper tales of a “Metal Man”. Ivana must find the monster, rescue the children, and if the earl really wants to help, he can come with her. Only, no one warned her she’d have to venture to places better left unexplored. A good thing, then, that the new Earl of Somer is a noted explorer. When the two of them join forces, what could possibly go wrong?

A short Steampunk novella

The Null by Vincent Trigili

He had left that life behind, sworn he would never return to it. He had a new life—a wife, a daughter. He was happy. But in a wretched twist of events, he finds himself forced to reclaim what he once was in order to save those who are most precious to him. Or else…

The Null is a short superhero thriller that would cover approximately 20-25 pages in a traditional paperback.

 

 

Monsters of Elsewhere by Matthew Waldram

There is a land – let’s call it Elsewhere – that is in no small amount of trouble. Giant wolves are tearing villages apart, a monster king is bringing his army across the sea to capture the legendary Hall of Glass, and the High Lord has completely disappeared.

Henry Whistler was eight when he got lost at a bus station in Hounslow. There his adventure began. For that was when he met the exiled invisible man, the monster swordsman, and the girl with the bright red hair.

Now a grown-up, Henry’s childhood adventure is a faded memory… until his fiancée vanishes. Until he is drawn into another world. Until he is pursued by a blind assassin – with only a monster and a dead man for company – across a land that is in no small amount of trouble.

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The “Is my book a romance?” flowchart

Because this question keeps popping up on writers forums and the like, here is a handy flowchart to answer the question “Is my book a romance?”

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Snow 2015

This morning, we had our first real snow of the winter, about two centimetres. It supposedly won’t last long, but it looked quite pretty. Shovelling it away was quite tiring though.

I wish I could go hiking today, but I don’t have the time. Maybe tomorrow, if we still have snow by then.

Meanwhile, enjoy these snowy photos I took in my neighbourhood:

Snow covered oak tree, meadow, neighbour houses and brand new garage.

Looking up my street.

Looking down my street. In the distance, you can see a neighbour shovelling snow.

Snowy driveway and neighbour house. The man living in that house eyed my camera quite suspiciously. He’s one of those people who always think the world is out to rob them.

Snowy driveway, mailbox, street and the butt-ugly houses they built across the road.

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Guardians of the Galaxy, the Marvel Movies and Found Families

Now that Guardians of the Galaxy is out on DVD, I rewatched it with my Mom. She liked superhero movies, particularly those of the Marvel variety, but really doesn’t like movie theatres, so I keep her supplied with slightly out of date blackbusters via DVD.

Coincidentally, my Mom has been expressing her desire to watch Guardians of the Galaxy with a fervour usually reserved only for films starring Robert Downey Jr. (she’s a fan), ever since seeing Rocket Raccoon in the first trailer. She’s also eager to watch Avengers: Age of Ultron next year (but then it has Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Hemsworth), though she has zero interest in Ant-Man, because – quote – that’s a stupid name for a superhero.

Spoilers, obviously, for Guardians of the Galaxy and other Marvel movies:

One thing I noticed upon rewatching Guardians of the Galaxy for the first time since its theatrical release is that though it’s usually considered the most light-hearted and comedic of all Marvel movies, it’s not actually all that happy a story and indeed has plenty of dark and tragic moments. And indeed my Mom, who often cries at movies and still managed to make it through The Winter Soldier without a single tear*, shed plenty of tears during Guardians of the Galaxy, starting with the hospitel scene at the beginning. But then, there have been several cancer deaths on my Mom’s side of the family, so it’s obvious why that scene would resonate so deeply with her.

Nonetheless, it is striking that the most lighthearted Marvel movie to date starts off with a little boy losing his Mom to the rather mundane evil of cancer. It’s not as if the greater Marvel Universe in general and the Marvel movies in particular aren’t full of heroes/heroines who lose their parents. However, with the exception of Frigga’s death halfway through Thor: The Dark World, we never see any of it happening on screen. The opening scene of Guardians of the Galaxy is the equivalent of the first Iron Man movie opening with a young Tony Stark learning that both his parents were killed in a car crash. Not that the opening scene of the first Iron Man isn’t dark, because it is. But it’s not a tearjerker, unlike the Guardians of the Galaxy opening.

But the opening isn’t the only part of Guardians of the Galaxy that is rather dark, indeed there is plenty of darkness among the colourful anarchy that is the cosmic side of the Marvel Universe. Yondu and his crew are perfectly willing to eat little children, as Yondu is only too happy to remind Peter again and again. The Collector enslaves young women. Drax, Gamora and Rocket all have horrible traumas in their respective pasts, even if we don’t actually see them play out on screen like Peter’s story.

For all its colourful weirdness, the Kyln space prison is a very dark place, where Gamora is threatened with rape and death, where Peter is brutally beaten up (to the cheery tunes of “Hooked on a feeling”, which makes the moment even more disturbing) and where the guards do fuck all to help. And once Ronan’s people arrive at the Kyln just a little too late to apprehend the Guardians and the orb, they are ordered to slaughter every single living being in the prison in order to leave no witnesses. We don’t actually see it on screen, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.

And let’s not forget that Ronan kills a shitload of people over the course of the film, starting with the Xandarian ambassador, and that he would have been perfectly willing to wipe out the entire population of Xandar, if he hadn’t been stopped by a coalition of the Guardians, the Ravagers and the Nova pilots, most of whom likely die when Ronan’s ship breaks through their barrier.

Another thing I noticed is that while the Marvel movies in general are quite good at being perfectly comprehensible even to those who haven’t watched the previous movies or read the comics (though you get more out of them if you have), Guardians of the Galaxy has a steeper learning curve than most of them. After that brief anchoring scene on Earth, the viewer is quickly thrust into a universe of strangeness.

During the scene where Thanos first shows up, I actually paused the movie to give my Mom a quick rundown of who all of those people were, since I was pretty she didn’t remember Thanos, even though she’d seen him in mid credits sequence in The Avengers. Because at this point in the movie, we’d already met Peter, Yondu, Ronan, Korak, Thanos, Gamora, the Other and Nebula, i.e. a whole bunch of people in various shades of blue and green (plus Peter and Korak), all of whom were after the orb, so it’s easy to get confused regarding who is who.

Of course, most Marvel movies and both TV shows to date can be summed up as “Everybody is after this thing, preferably a glowing mythical thing”. In many ways, Marvel movies are the ultimate MacGuffin movies, because here we have a series of movies about people (and the occasional Norse god, raccoon or tree) chasing after a series of glowing MacGuffins which will eventually (in Avengers 3.1 and 3.2) combine into the ultimate mega massive universe destroying MacGuffin a.k.a. the Infinity Gauntlet. It absolutely shouldn’t work, because who wants to watch umpteen movies about people chasing after cosmic glowing things, yet amazingly it does. But then, no one really watches the Marvel movies for the Infinity Gems and indeed in true MacGuffin fashion, it doesn’t really matter what the cosmic glowing thing is or does.

Indeed, when watching The Avengers with my Mom, I launched into a big explanation what the Tesseract is and does (especially since she didn’t want to watch The First Avenger) only to stop and say, “You know what? It doesn’t really matter what that thing is, cause it’s only a MacGuffin. All you need to know is that it’s dangerous and that everybody in this film wants it.” I did give her a bit more explanation for Guardians of the Galaxy, namely, “You remember those glowing MacGuffins that sometimes show up in these movies? There are six of them and the big purple guy wants to collect them all and use them to destroy the universe, because he is in love with Death and wants to impress her.”

But if no one really watches the Marvel movies for the plot, then why do people watch them? A lot of critics of the snootier kind would probably say because of the effects and the general spectacle and that’s not entirely untrue. However, the true reason why the Marvel movies are so successful, while other equally spectacular and effects laden movies are not, are the characters, their arcs and interactions. And it’s not just that these are beloved comic book characters with decades of history and ten thousands of devoted fans either, because none of the characters from the Marvel movies with the possible exception of Hulk (who ironically has the least popular solo movie) were A-list superheroes before the respective movies came out. Some like the Guardians of the Galaxy were so obscure that even hardcore comic fan themselves exclaiming, “They’re filming WHAT?” upon hearing the announcement.

Now I’ve pointed out before that all of the Marvel movies and TV shows basically have the same core story – and no, it’s not the story of the quest for a glowing cosmic object of unimaginable power. Instead, we get what can broadly be called a coming of age and redemption story.

All Marvel films start with a person – usually, but not always a white man – from a problematic family background (parents who died prematurely, cold and indifferent parents or a combination of both). This person is often privileged (but not always, e.g. Steve Rogers is not), often something of a jerk (again Steve is the big exception here), often stuck in a sort of arrested development (Peter Quill is the clearest example, since he literally is a confused 10-year-old in an adult body), usually isolated, even if surrounded by others (Tony Stark is the clearest example, since he literally has no friends except those he built himself and people paid to put up with him), and more or less lives a life that’s stuck in a rut determined by others, often parent figures or surrogate parents figures. Then this person undergoes a life-changing ordeal in the wilderness and becomes a hero, usually with new superpowers (though there always is a strong message that superpowers aren’t what makes the hero and indeed not every character gets them), and vows to change their life and make up for whatever sins they committed in the past. So they fight evil and eventually discover their limitations. And so they join up with others who have undergone a similar development, bicker a lot and still find friends and eventually a surrogate family. There comes a moment of decision where they must sacrifice their own life to save their friends/the world/the universe. The arc ends with our heroes divorcing themselves from the life that parents, parent figures and families of origins have planned for them to become their own person, a better person.

It’s basically a variation on the hero’s journey, but with a strong focus on breaking away from less than ideal family structures and building your own found family. The stations I described above are most visible with Iron Man and Skye from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., because they had the biggest space to develop (four movies for Iron Man and one and a half seasons of TV show for Skye), but they are present in all Marvel movies or TV shows, including Guardians of the Galaxy.

We only see Peter’s family background (lost mother at an early age, abducted by aliens and raised by Yondu, who’s not anybody’s idea of a good father), but the film makes it clear that all Guardians have similarly troubled backgrounds. They undergo the ordeal in the wilderness of the Kyln, band together and escape, initially just to get back to their old lives. Eventually, they decide not to sell the orb and reject the lives that others have planned for them. This is most clearly visible with Gamora rejecting Thanos and Peter telling Yondu that he is sick of having to be grateful just for not getting eaten. They decide to defend Xandar, because it is the right thing to do. There are the requisite moments of heroic sacrifice and the story ends with our heroes taking off as a newfound family.

The found family aspect of these stories is so important that we also see various dysfunctional variations throughout the movies. Guardians of the Galaxy has one of the most notable with Thanos and his bizarre little family (Ronan, Gamora and Nebula) made up of children whose families he slaughtered. But there is also Odin’s frankly crappy parenting in the Thor films, which turns Loki into the tragic villain that he is. And in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., there is Grant Ward who escapes a horrible family situation (and we still don’t know for sure what really happened there) only to find himself at the mercy of John Garrett and Hydra to the point that when Ward finally lands in a good place and finds a surrogate family that is functional (Coulson’s team), he promptly betrays them, because by then Ward is so screwed up that he can’t recognise a good thing when he has it. Hell, it’s even right there in the dialogue, when Coulson yells at Ward at the end of season 1.

But even though they all have the same core story and often the same plot, the sheer variety of the Marvel movies and TV shows is stunning. We have technothrillers (the Iron Man films), we have high fantasy/portal fantasy (the Thor films), we have an alien invasion cum disaster movie (The Avengers), we have a WWII film (The First Avenger), we have a 1970s style political thriller (The Winter Soldier), we have a gonzo space opera adventure (Guardians of the Galaxy), we have an X-Files/Torchwood/Men in Black type alien object hunt crossed with espionage action (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), we have a Mad Men style period piece (Agent Carter). And just to inject some more variety, the upcoming Ant-Man will apparently be a caper/heist film, while Avengers: Age of Ultron looks like a Terminator style techno-apocalypse). This variety of genres and styles is a large part of what keep the Marvel movies fresh, even though the core story is always the same.

In thirty years or so, people will probably be writing dissertations about why we liked this core story so much in the early 21st century that we were willing to watch it over and over again, retold with different characters and in different settings. If I might be allowed to psychoanalyse, I think the great appeal of this core story lies in the fact that many of us have problematic backgrounds and family structures from which we long to escape and that we all want to become better people and find friends and/or a new family who will accept us as we are without all the bullshit. Now none of us are superheroes and indeed the Marvel films quite explicitly stress time and again that superpowers aren’t what makes the hero. But what these films do is tell us that we, too, can break away from our problematic pasts and become better people, that we, too, can find friends, love and a family of our own. And this is a message that resonates with all over the world, even if the protagonists of those films are more white, more male and more American than they could be. Though even this is changing now that we have two Marvel TV shows with female leads, including a woman of colour (since Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. turned out to be Skye’s story more than Coulson’s), and that we will be getting a Black Panther and a Captain Marvel a.k.a. Carol Danvers movie among many other goodies.

*Come to think of it, she didn’t cry at Phil Coulson’s death in The Avengers either and that one gets me every time, even though I know that I’m falling for one of Joss Whedon’s patented manipulative “kill the likable regular” tricks and I also know that Coulson comes back.

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Indie Publisher Mega Bundle

I’m a big fan of DriveThruFiction and particularly their bundling option. I already offer several series and theme e-book bundles at DriveThruFiction and also participate in multi-author/publisher bundles, if the opportunity arises.

And so Mercy Mission, the first novella in my Shattered Empire series, is now available at a drastically reduced price in the Indie Publisher Mega Bundle, together with fiction by Nicholas Andrews, T.M. Bilderback, Max Booth III, Percival Constantine, Robert Dahlen, Julie Ann Dawson, Sarah Ettrich, Edward M. Grant, Tess Mackenzie, Scott Marlowe, Landon Porter, Joe Vasicek and Misti Wolanski.

The bundle covers a broad spectrum from space opera via dystopian and post-apocalyptic science fiction via steampunk via horror via urban fantasy via epic fantasy all the way to time travel romance. The bundle has a retail value of almost 60 USD, but is available at DriveThruFiction for only 21.99 USD.

So what are you waiting for? Grab your bundle now!

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Hugo Awards Debate 2015 – earlier every year

Yes, I know I already said last year that the inevitable Hugo Awards debate starts earlier every year, but it’s still true.

Indeed, it seems by now that we are having at least three big Hugo debates every year, one early in the year during the nomination period, one when the nominees are announced and one when the Hugos have been awarded.

This year’s first Hugo debate is driven by pretty much the same issues as last year’s, namely political bloc voting and whether awards consideration and eligibility posts are tacky or necessary.

Let’s start with the debate about eligibility posts:

Ian Sales comes out against awards eligibility posts, because they carry the danger of skewing the nominations. Besides, he feels authors don’t belong in fan spaces. He also believes you shouldn’t need to be reminded of work you consider awards worthy and that Hugo voters and nominators should take their responsibility seriously and nominate only works they truly consider awards worthy, which should go without saying.

On the other side, Catherine Lundoff comes out in favour of awards eligibility posts, because the playing field still isn’t level for women, POC and LGBTQ writers, especially considering how many of the “Most anticipated books of 2015″ lists were comprised mainly or entirely of straight white American and British men. What is more, Catherine Lundoff has also created the Twitter hashtag #2014awardeligsff for linking to awards eligibility lists by women, POC, LGBTQ, small press, indie or otherwise marginalised writers.

Mary Robinette Kowal also comes out on the pro-self-promotion side of the debate and points out that no one would know about an author’s works, unless the author talked about them

I tend more towards Catherine Lundoff’s and Mary Robinette Kowal’s position, because they are right: The playing field isn’t level. And writers not making awards eligibility posts will do nothing to tilt the playing field away from the big names. If anything, it will tilt it further towards them.

Besides, unlike Ian Sales, I believe it is possible to forget a work one enjoyed or at least forget which year it came out. Now in order to counter this forgetting, I keep a running list of works I enjoyed enough to consider nominating them for the Hugos. And while looking through my 2014 list, trying to wittle it down to five nominees in those categories where I have more candidates, I came across some works in the various short fiction categories where the title didn’t immediately ring a bell and I had to look up the story again to check which one it was and why I liked it.

Personally, I won’t do a separate eligibility post, because the one time I did, I felt extremely silly about it. However, I will probably post my personal list of Hugo picks (either the long- or the shortlist – not sure yet), because I don’t believe we should leave posting such lists to the biggest names and loudest voices. And while I’m at it, I will probably also add an “And here’s what I have available this year” paragraph.

Meanwhile, John Scalzi is offering his usual open awards awareness for SFF authors, editors, artists and fan creators. The Hugo eligible artists tumblr is also active again. There is also a page listing authors eligible for the Campbell Award.

Meanwhile, the loudest and most unashamed self-promoters won’t be deterred by insinuations that what they’re doing is tacky. Case in point: The Sad Puppies are wailing again, because their preferred brand of speculative fiction still isn’t very popular with Hugo voters.

This year’s puppy in chief is Brad Torgersen who posts his campaign announcement here and calls for submissions for crowdsourcing what will presumably be another fixed slate. Some of the suggestions so far are actually decent like Skin Game, Jim Butcher’s latest Harry Dresden novel.

The post contains a mix of the usual arguments we hear from that part of the SFF spectrum, namely that the works that tend to be nominated for the Hugos and other genre awards are too literary and not entertaining enough, that they don’t contain sufficient speculative elements, that authors and themes skew to the left side of the political spectrum and that a lot of authors are only nominated because they belong to the right demographic group and not because of the merits of their work.

What always strikes me about those arguments – apart from the fact that the best antidote to nominating authors because of their demographics and political views rather than the merit of their work is apparently nominating authors because of their political views rather than the merit of their work – is that the Sad Puppies genuinely seem to believe that their ideas of what makes a work good or entertaining are universal and that everybody else nominates works they don’t actually like, just because the author has the right credentials or the work ticks the right boxes. After all, it can’t possibly be that people nominate works the Sad Puppies find boring, because – gasp – they actually enjoy them.

Taste is subjective. This means that ideas of literary merit and entertainment value are subjective as well. For example, I thoroughly enjoyed Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie and The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison to list two 2014 SFF novels which show up on a lot of people’s favourites lists. However, I also understand that the fact that the plots of both novels mainly involve their respective protagonists sitting in meetings, trying to find solutions to unsolvable socio-political dilemmas, does not exactly make them thrilling reading for those who prefer their SFF with lots of action and explosions. On the other hand, I found the supposedly oh-so-entertaining works from last year Sad Puppy slate that made it onto the Hugo ballot about as entertaining as a visit to the dentist, when I tried to read them. Because taste is subjective.

Besides, it is not as if the Hugo shortlist is overrun by literary fiction with very tenuous genre elements. It’s not as if names like Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Thomas Pynchon, Juli Zeh, Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz or Gary Shteyngart are dominating the fiction categories. True, occasionally a more literary work with genre elements may make it onto the Hugo shortlist. Very occasionally, such as The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, which won both the Nebula and Hugo Award as well as a number of other genre awards in 2008, it may even win. But in general, the novels we’ve seen on the Hugo shortlist in recent years are core genre works published by mainstream SFF imprints. The works on the short fiction shortlist were not published in literary journals but in genre magazines. The nominated films and TV episodes are Hollywood or BBC productions, not small indie films or foreign movies. The Hugos generally reward work that is pretty mainstream.

What we are seeing is a shift in sensibilities away from so-called “big idea” stories where characterisation is optional and towards fiction which uses SFF backgrounds to tell personal, often mundane stories. Some people don’t like this (and mind you, this critic is about as far away politically from the Sad Puppies as you can get), but a whole lot of people – frequently a majority, judging by recent short fiction shortlists and winners – do. In general, these changing tastes and sensibilities as well as the increasing diversity of the nominees in the fiction and fan categories is a symptom of a demographic shift in fandom.

John C. Wright has apparently recovered sufficiently from his shock at seeing two women holding hands at the end of the Legends of Korra cartoon to endorse the sad puppies campaign. He also wishes to make the heads of the literati explode.

File 770 is rather snarky about the whole thing, but then File 770 has won more Hugos in the fanzine category (six, if I counted correctly) than Larry Correia and pals have been running Sad Puppy campaigns.

At Amazing Stories, Steve Davidson points out that the Sad Puppy campaigners don’t understand fandom very well and that sales figures and commercial success have never been the decisive factors for the Hugo Awards, even if the occasional megaseller like J.K. Rowling or Neil Gaiman has won them.

Now the tendency to use sales figures as the sole arbiter of literary merit has become quite common of late. I see it a lot in indie writing circles, where you often have people saying that unless you’ve sold X number of books or made X amounts of money, you shouldn’t even open your mouth. I also see it on the right side of the speculative fiction spectrum where the assumption is that just because Wheel of Time or Shannara or the latest media tie-in sold a gazillion copies, that automatically makes them awards worthy. Uhm, nope, it doesn’t. It simply makes them books that sold a gazillion copies. Besides, there already is an award for writers of speculative fiction that have hit a bestseller list. It’s the right to put a “New York Times and/or USA Today bestelling author” banner onto the covers of every book thereafter.

Besides, if you actually study the bestseller lists for a while – before they became all distorted by “Get 10 books for 99 cents” boxsets – you’ll notice that not a whole lot of speculative fiction in general makes it onto those lists. And that which does is usually speculative fiction which appeals to audiences beyond the core genre audience such as media tie-ins, genre hybrids like paranormal romance or romantic urban fantasy, speculative YA, speculative fiction that has been adapted for the movies or TV and entry-level SFF. It’s not necessarily the sort of speculative fiction that the core genre audience, i.e. the people who nominate and vote for the Hugos, likes best, even though they may read it.

Besides, if the Hugo shortlists were compiled based solely on sales figures, we should have seen such names as Stephenie Meyer, Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, Suzanne Collins, Charlaine Harris, Veronica Roth, Christine Feehan, Sherrilyn Kenyon, James Patterson and some of his co-authors, Jim Butcher, Patricia Briggs, Brandon Sanderson (who has been nominated a couple of times and even won), etc… among the nominees. We might also have seen more literary writers who just happen to write speculative fiction in occasion such as Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Justin Cronin, Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz, etc… pop up on the Hugo shortlists, because those books usually hit the New York Times bestseller lists and stay there for weeks due to the literary fiction publicity machine behind them.

Now such a Hugo shortlist would amuse me and I’d probably find more to enjoy there than on the actual shortlist. But I doubt it’s the sort of shortlist the Sad Puppies want to see.

Comments disabled, because I don’t need the grief.

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