Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 87

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for September 2017

[image error]Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some July 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.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, historical mysteries, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, crime thrillers, dystopian thrillers, pulp thrillers, men’s adventure thrillers, kidnappings, heists, the mob, intrepid reporters, murderous milk thieves, blood-sucking debt collectors, adventures in Thailand and Alaska, murder in the Pacific Northwest, bodies in the backyard and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog 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:

[image error] The Milk Truck Gang by Cora Buhlert:

Upstate New York, 1937: When the delivery vans of the Daisy Chain Dairy Company are targeted and robbed by a criminal gang and a driver is shot, Richard Blakemore a.k.a. the masked crimefighter known only as the Silencer decides to get involved.

So he stakes out the dairy company in the early hours of the morning to apprehend the criminals, only to find himself embroiled in a lethal fight on the bed of a speeding milk truck…

This is a short story of 3700 words or approx. 15 print pages in the Silencer series, but may be read as a standalone.

[image error] O Negative by Paul Curtin:

In Cole’s world, a critical shortage has made blood expensive.

Now the ticket to a hefty cash loan is running through anyone’s veins—as long as a person’s willing to put up their blood as collateral. And if the debt defaults, Cole is the man who collects. He kidnaps debtors for his boss to drain—over long, excruciating months—until death. It’s a job he doesn’t mind until his boss asks him to pick up a guy with the rare and valuable blood type, O negative.

Except the guy doesn’t have O negative—his ten-year-old daughter, Sam, does.

Knowing the horrors waiting for her if he hands her over to his boss, Cole takes Sam and goes on the run. With corrupt cops on his boss’s payroll patrolling the streets, a psychotic colleague hunting him, and a savvy detective on his trail, Cole knows this will end one of two ways: he escapes the city or Sam dies a slow, painful death.

Either way, blood will be spilled.

[image error] The Fourth Friend by Joy Ellis:

FOUR LOST FRIENDS. FOUR TASKS TO COMPLETE. ONE BIG MYSTERY LEFT.

Police detective Carter McLean is the only survivor of a plane crash that kills his four best friends. He returns to work but he is left full of guilt and terrible flashbacks. So for each of his four friends he decides to complete something that they left unfinished.

Eighteen months before the crash, Suzanne Holland disappeared, leaving a room with traces of blood, but no other leads. Suzanne was the wife of one of Carter’s four best friends.

Adding to the pressure, the boss’s daughter has a stalker. Due to the sensitivity of the Holland case, Carter is put on this investigation.

DS Marie Evans is the only person Carter can confide in. But even she begins to doubt whether he can really cope and whether he is actually losing his mind.

DI Jackman and DS Evans of the Fenland police face a battle to untangle three mysteries, and can they really believe their friend and colleague Carter?

[image error] Secrets of Wildflower Island by Michelle Files:

Wildflower Island is an idyllic place, where crime just doesn’t happen.

When 4 teenage girls discover a body, badly beaten, a nice day at the beach goes horribly wrong. As they embark on a quest to solve the murder, they find themselves as the main suspects. The girls quickly turn on each other as they are blackmailed by an unknown person and harassed by residents of the small island they live on. Who killed the boy? Will the girls be next? This mesmerizing mystery, suspense novel will have you guessing until the end. Get your copy today!

[image error] Murder in Seattle by Dianne Harman:

What would you do if your sister’s husband of twelve hours, Clark, was considered a suspect by the police in connection with his rich Uncle Vinny’s murder? And the rich uncle just happened to be a member of the Mob?

DeeDee has no choice but to enlist the help of her boyfriend Jake, a private investigator, as well as Al, Uncle Vinny’s scary bodyguard, to help her find the murderer and clear Clark’s name.

It could have been a number of people, but which one? Was it Uncle Vinny’s cousin or his wife? Uncle Vinny had a lot of money, and although he hadn’t come by it legally, the color was still green. Or the rogue cop whose father had ended the prostitution rings in Seattle, but was certain Uncle Vinny was the person who had resurrected them. Or perhaps Clark’s business colleague who was jealous of Clark’s recent promotion? Maybe it was the wedding planner who resented everything Uncle Vinny was giving the newlyweds, particularly the house on Queen Anne Hill. Or even Clark himself? After all, Uncle Vinny gave a toast at the wedding declaring him to be the sole heir of his substantial fortune.

[image error] Unwritten and Underwater by Amanda M. Lee:

Avery Shaw is living the dream … kind of.

She’s officially moved to her dream house and her boyfriend Eliot Kane is making her host a housewarming party to show off the new digs to her family. All is going well – other than the endless arguments over food and hiding from Avery’s family, of course – until one of Avery’s enemies comes calling.

Avery’s former boyfriend Jake Farrell broke up with Cara Carpenter weeks before but she’s still stalking him … and Avery in the process. When Cara turns up dead at a high-profile event, not only is Jake a suspect, but Avery and Eliot are, too.

The Michigan State Police wrestle the investigation from Jake, promptly turning Avery from the hunter to the hunted. The state police investigator assigned to the case is all up in Avery’s business – and Avery is cracking under the pressure even as she insists on covering the case, much to almost everybody’s chagrin.

From the stress associated with the new house, Grandpa’s constant naked visits to the pool, and Eliot’s insistence that Avery own up to something illegal, things are starting to get tense.

Avery is on her heels for a bit before starting to put the pieces together. When the truth comes out, though, the answers are welcome but the danger is not.

Can Avery survive to irritate everyone another day? Or will Michigan’s favorite reporter finally succumb to a mouth she can’t quite seem to control?

Mr. Miracle by Carey Lewis:

Hugh Gallant has survived being hit by lightning, throwing himself off a skyscraper, and a divorce from a redheaded woman. He has also won the lottery three times and moved to Thailand, leaving his former life behind. He is known as Mr. Miracle.

Dutch used to be Hugh’s best friend. Together, they concocted a scheme that resulted in a man plummeting thirty-eight floors to his death. Dutch must bring Hugh home or have the murder put squarely on him. But he’s not the only one searching for a Miracle.

The ex-wife has teamed up with a former rapper and a furnace repairman who moonlight as criminals to swindle Hugh. They continually raise the stakes when each plan fails, going from extortion, abduction, to even murder, until they can find some way to make Hugh give up his millions. They learn miracles are hard to come by.

Dutch realizes ‘The Land of Smiles’ isn’t just sandy beaches and bikini clad women, and moonlighting criminals can prove more deadly than full time ones. He needs to decide if he will risk his life to protect Mr. Miracle, bring him to justice, or make a play for the money himself.

The Body in the Backyard by Hollis Shiloh:

Clarence Collin is pushing up daisies—in Abe’s bed of zinnias!

When the caustic critic of a TV gardening show winds up murdered in Abe’s well-groomed backyard, both Abe and his hunky-but-irritating neighbor Gregory might be on the suspect list.

Abe starts amateur sleuthing in self-defense…and to spend time with Gregory. When the two green thumbs look into their neighborhood’s dirty little secrets, who knows what they’ll dig up?

A cozy gay mystery

51,000 words

[image error] From the Ocean to the Stream by J.D. Weston

What would you do…

How far would you go…

TO STAY ALIVE?

In this gritty psychological thriller novel, discover one man’s fight against the power of nature, and the greed of man.

‘From the Ocean to the Stream’ is a gritty thriller and suspense story that tells of one man’s account

and his battles with the greed of man, and the savage brutality of the wilderness. It can be read

as a standalone book, or as part of a survival fiction series, as the sequel to ‘Where the Mountains Kiss the Sun’.

For one so young, Jim has had more than his share of traumatic experiences. Now, he shares a simpler life with his Ma and Pa, where the mountains kiss the sun; away from the city and away from people, although at night he’s still haunted by dreams of what he’s seen and what he’s done.

Life is simple but good, until one day someone new comes into their lives to change them forever. Will he be able to extinguish his dreams, or will his new reality become more fearful than the visions of his past? Find out in the historical adventure ‘From the Ocean to the Stream’.

This is a gritty psychological thriller you can really get your TEETH into!

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Let us welcome our Robot Overlords

On a day like today, you need something to take your mind of all the bad things in the world. And no, I have zero interest in Star Trek Discovery right now, even if initial reviews are good.

One of the problematic media tendencies I alluded to in my last post is also the tendency to paint all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios. “The robots will take our jobs” is a sadly common one. Here is a recent example, which aired on TV this Wednesday.

The following day, I was in Oldenburg on my regular under- and sleepwear buying expedition at Leffers. And while I was on my way to the under- and nightwear department on the top floor, I came across this little cutie:

[image error]

Pepper, the robotic sales assistant at Leffers in Oldenburg

This is Pepper, Leffers‘ new robotic sales assistant. She can talk, she will show you pictures of the latest fashions as well as a short slideshow of Oldenburg. Here is an article about Pepper from the Leffers website.

Pepper is always surrounded by customers, because she’s fun. However, when I needed to a new pyjama, the one who quickly found one for me that wasn’t just the right size, but also matches my specific requirements regarding cut and material was not Pepper, but one of her human colleagues.

So yes, maybe robots will one day take our jobs. But that day is still quite a bit of.

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Some Comments on the 2017 German General Election

As you may know, Germany had a general election today. Angela Merkel’s CDU is still the strongest party, though they suffered significant losses. Her coalition partner SPD under Martin Schulz, former president of the European parliament, fell to only 20% of the vote. The Greens and the Left Party largely maintained their 2013 results, the pro-business liberal party FDP is back in parliament and – this is the really, really bad news – the rightwing extremist, nationalistic and xenophobic party AfD (short for “Alternative for Germany”) won 13% of the vote and is not just in parliament, but are also the third strongest party. There is an English language overview with liveblog here at Deutsche Welle.

Here are the election results for my district, Dieholz – Nienburg I, and also for my town. As you can see, the CDU won with a pretty significant majority (which is not a surprise – the CDU always wins our district). Axel Knoerig of the CDU won the direct vote for the third time. Again, this is not surprising, because the CDU always wins here and because Axel Knoerig does a good job for the region and its people. Coincidentally, Knoerig was also the only direct candidate in my district who sent out flyers explaining not just what the goals of his party are, but also what his political goals are and what he is planning to do for our region. And coincidentally, it’s notable that Knoerig’s personal results are much better than those for his party (we have two votes, one for a candidate and one for a party), because he does a good job and had a good campaign. However, and this is the sad thing, we also have between 8% and 9% AfD voters. The two Bremen voting districts bth went to SPD candidates, but then Bremen traditionally votes SPD, so any other result would have been a huge surprise. But the SPD lost only won narrowly in Bremen.

So what does this result mean for Germany? Angela Merkel will remain chancellor for another four years, though very likely in a different coalition government, since her former coalition partner SPD folded and more or less ran off. Currently, the most likeliest government seems to be a so-called Jamaica coalition. No, we’re not going to be ruled by Rastafarians (though that would be cool), but by a coalition of CDU, FDP and the Green Party. Deutsche Welle also offers an overview of German coalition shorthand, which can be confusing for people from countries with pure first past the post voting systems and the resulting two-parties and maybe a few scattered others parliaments these tend to result in.

I’d never have thought that I’d ever say this about any CDU chancellor, but Angela Merkel does a good job and I’m glad that she will remain Germany’s chancellor for the next four years. The German economy is doing well and the unemployment rate is the lowest since 1990 (pre-1990 values are not really comparable). Tax revenue is high and the budget is balanced. The last nuclear power stations will be shut down for good in the next few years and we are in the process of successfully switching to renewables. We have full marriage equality. Education is free from the primary to the university level. The German government has a good reputation abroad, especially since several other countries of global significance have fallen to rightwing populists and straight forward incompetents. And Angela Merkel is probably the first leading CDU politician who takes both the “Christian” bit in her party’s name as well as our constitution seriously and opened the country to those fleeing war and terrorism, against opposition from her own party. And coincidentally, the vast majority of refugees are eager to integrate, find jobs and restart their lives here. I should know, cause I taught German to some of them. And yes, Angela Merkel is skilled at changing her personal views in tune with wider social trends (nuclear power, of which she first was in favour and then voted to abolish) or at least getting out of the way (e.g. the marriage equality vote). But today’s Germany is a good place to live and a lot more open than it was twenty-five, twenty or even ten years ago. And coincidentally, I’ve heard quite a few people say, “Well, I don’t normally vote for the CDU, but I really like Angela Merkel.”

Are there problems in Germany? Of course, there are problems. We still have way too much poverty, though our poor are comparatively better of than the poor in the US (at least they have health insurance, unemployment and welfare benefits). Our police and intelligence services are not very good at identifying terrorists (both Neo-Nazis and Islamists and they don’t do a great job on violent leftwing extremists either) before they do harm and sometimes even after (NSU, anybody?), plus we have a few rightwing extremists in the police forces. Parts of the infrastructure (schools mainly, but also some roads and bridges) are crumbling and our school system is in need of an overhaul (though I don’t trust any party to do a good job with the school system). Too many people, particularly young people, have unstable temp and contract jobs. Gentrification is running rampant in certain big cities, pricing poorer people out of the housing market. We don’t have enough affordable social housing, because too little has been built in the past thirty years. The non-existing interest rate in the Eurozone makes it difficult to save money for retirement. The pension system requires an overhaul (and has required it for thirty years at least, though I have even less faith in the political parties here than with education). Internet connections, particularly in rural areas, are not nearly fast enough. Not all of these problems are Angela Merkel’s fault – indeed she inherited many of them from her predecessors, while others are the result of global forces beyond her control.

So what about the SPD, the big losers tonight? Now I like Martin Schulz. He did a good job as the president of the European parliament. Quitting that job in favour of national politics was not a very good idea, because now his legacy will be “The guy who gave the SPD its worst election result since 1945” rather than respected European politician and co-winner (sort of) of the Nobel Peace Prize. And indeed Martin Schulz should have stayed in Brussels and let Sigmar Gabriel captain the sinking ship SPD this year and held back until 2021. To be fair, Martin Schulz tried. However, he and the SPD failed and I for one can understand why. After all, the very social policies which Schulz attacked were implemented by his own party during the Schröder government. And let’s not forget that the SPD supported a change in the right to asylum in the 1990s (which was my personal red line) and that one SPD-led government voted in favour of a VAT hike also in the 1990s. If you want to be the party of social justice, that sort of track record doesn’t look good. Besides, if you look at the three SPD-led governments in (West) Germany, all three of some collapsed prematurely because the SPD chancellors threw the towel: Willy Brandt because one of his aides turned out to be an East German spy, Helmut Schmidt because of protests against the stationing of NATO nuclear weapons in West Germany and Gerhard Schröder because of protests against the cuts to welfare programs and social services his party initiated. Add to that that Martin Schulz also threw the towel earlier this evening and basically declared that he and his party want no part of a new German government and an image emerges of the SPD as a party that folds in the face of controversy and runs away like a little kid. Besides – and I suspect this is a factor for many women voters – the SPD steadily ignores the capable women in its ranks in favour of men. Whenever the SPD is looking for a new leader or a chancellor candidate, no woman even makes the shortlist, in spite of female SPD politicians doing good work as state prime ministers. Hell, the SPD even brought in Martin Schulz from Brussels rather than consider a woman. Voters – well, 87% of them – aren’t stupid. They notice such patterns. In general, I like the idea of the SPD much more than the reality and it has been that way at least since 1990.

The Green Party and the Left Party are what they are. They have a certain voter base and they have largely managed to mobilise that base, which is why their results are largely unchanged. The Greens are running out of topics, since other parties, including the CDU, adopted many of their positions. The Left Party seems to be moving towards xenophobic rhetoric of late, which I personally find deeply troubling. But then, it seems that they are determined to make the same mistakes that the SPD made 25 years ago by pandering to the prejudices (imagined or real) of working class voters rather than embracing the young urban left-leaning voters who’d love to vote for a leftwing alternative. The FDP is back in parliament after four years, largely due to their young head Christian Lindner and also because of votes by people who dislike Angela Merkel, but will not vote either for a left party nor for rightwing extremists (yes, there are protest voters who are not a disgrace). Now the FDP is frequently the butt of jokes and a lot of people really don’t like them, which I’ve never quite gotten. I also have to admit that I’m not quite objective with regards to the FDP, since my cousin is an FDP politician and member of the Bremen state parliament (visible in the background here). And I think that a certain FDP presence in parliament is good for German politics, just as the Greens and the Left Party (provided they drop the xenophobic rhetoric) are good in moderate doses, because they address issues the other parties ignore. And besides, I’d much rather have the FDP in parliament than the AfD.

Which brings us to the 13% of German voters – more in certain parts of East Germany – who voted for the AfD. Sorry to be so blunt, but those 13% are a disgrace. Yes, a lot of them claim they voted against Angela Merkel rather than for the AfD. And can even sympathise – after all, I was once very desperate to be rid of the neverending Kohl government and the leaden era it imposed on Germany myself. I also have no issue with protest voting – I’ve done it myself on one or two occasions, where I genuinely disliked both alternatives. However, you don’t protest vote for racists, xenophobes and outright Nazis. There were 42 parties running for German parliament, the overwhelming majority of whom were not rightwing xenophobes and Nazis. You want to protest? Fine: Vote for the Greens, the FDP, the Left Party, Die Partei (satirical party), the Pirate Party, the Anarchistic Pogo Party, the Party of Bible Believing Christians (okay, maybe not them), the Marxist Leninist Party (okay, maybe not them either), the Humanist Party, the Grey Party (for pensioners), the Urban Hip Hop Party, the Purple Party for spiritual politics, the Animal Welfare Party, etc… There’s plenty of choice. But if you vote for racists and outright Nazis, don’t be surprised if people call you a Nazi.

And it’s not as if people don’t know what the AfD stands for, since they’re not exactly shy about airing their noxious views. One of their leaders recently stated he wanted to dispose of a German-born SPD politician with Turkish roots in Anatolia, because she dared to say that there is no such thing as a single German culture beyond the German language and the constitution, just lots of different regional cultures (which is true BTW). The same guy said he is proud of the heroic German soldiers of WWII. He also claimed that most Germans would not want to live next door to football player and member of the German national team Jerome Boateng who happens to be black. Other AfD politicians have stated that they want no more holocaust rememberance, that the holocaust monument is a monument of shame, that they want our police forces to shoot illegal immigrants at the border, including women and children, and all sorts of other grisly things. One of their former leaders later deposed as being not radical enough wanted to institute Handmaid’s Tale like policies to raise the white and bio-German birthrate. The AfD is racist, xenophobic, islamophobic, homophobic (even though one of their leaders is a lesbian woman), anti-feminist and anti-European and it has never been any different.

The 13% of Germans who voted for the AfD are at the very least willing to overlook those views, even if they don’t personally share them (and I’m sure many of them do share them – indeed this article where AfD voters state why they voted like they did is brimming with racism, xenophobia and islamophobia). And when you look at one of the many “Wah, why won’t someone think of the poor white AfD voter!” pieces in the media, you’ll see a lot of people stating that they’re definitely not Nazis, but that they are scared of all those foreigners and Muslims and terrorists, even though they live in tiny villages where there are hardly any foreigners. They are scared of everybody who isn’t like them. They constantly claim that people are afraid to go out alone by night, when they themselves haven’t been outside after dark in decades. They hate refugees and immigrants, even though several of them were themselves refugees from East Prussia or Silesia after WWII, or East Germans who were themselves welcomed by West Germans in 1989/90 or Russians immigrants of German origin who were welcomed in Germany in the 1990s (though according to this article, the percentage of AfD voters among Russian immigrants isn’t that much higher than among the general population). In short, some of them once had welcoming hands extended to them (and also faced prejudice) and now want to pull up the ladder behind them. AfD voters believe every bit of fake news they come across, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it confirms their prejudices. These people also don’t get that not every party has to cater to their particular problems – and mind you, as a single childless self-employed woman absolutely no party caters to me either. In those “Wah, won’t someone think of the poor white AfD voter” reports, you get people screaming that refugees want to take their pensions (uhm, no, refugees are supported via taxes, while pensions are paid out of social security payments, i.e. a totally separate pot). You get people whining that the local kindergarten or the maternity ward of the local hospital in their shrinking villages are closing or that the local open air pool now closes at six, when it used to be open until eight (apparently, they have no idea that such decisions are made on the local level and not on the national level). Or – my personal favourite – the elderly woman who was interviewed at a Pegida ralley and complained that the local refugee home got a washing machine (probabyl shared between 20 to 30 people), but that she doesn’t get a free washing machine, she has to pay for it. Yeah, because you’re not poor (if she was, the state would pay for a washing machine, provided she needs a new one) and you haven’t lost everything in a war. You can buy your own fucking washing machine.

That’s the sort of person who votes for the AfD. Not those who actually are poor, but working and middle class white folks who are furious that someone somewhere might be getting something that they don’t get, even if it’s only the cheapest washing machine at Media Markt. In short, the same sort of people who supported the Sad/Rabid Puppies and Gamergate, who voted for Trump, Brexit, the Front National and other rightwing parties. Mediocre white people whose see their privilege eroding and fear they can’t make it without an artificial leg up. Here is a great interview with Holger Lengfeld, a sociologist from the Univsersity of Leipzig, who researched AfD voters and came to the conclusion that they haven’t so much fallen behind economically, but culturally. These people see that Germany is changing, that it is becoming more open, more tolerant, less straight, less white and less Christian, and that bothers them. Of course, absolutely no one is stopping them from living very conventional lives, if that’s what they want. But these people can no longer pretend that those who are different don’t exist. Even in small villages and rural towns, there are muslims and black people now who go to the same supermarkets and whose kids attend the same school. There are openly LGBT people. Sometimes, they have to tolerate people speaking different languages. And merely having to see and hear those who are different is too much for the delicate sensibilities of these folks.

Now I very well remember the supposed “golden” age those folks are missing. I remember what it was like to have to show your passport at every border and every airport. I remember what it was like to have to change the contents in your wallet at every border. I remember what a hassle it was and I don’t miss anything about it. I grew up in rural North West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. We had three TV stations, which mainly showed (bad) German made programming with the very occasional US TV series (and no movies younger than ten years). To watch a movie, go to theatre, listen to a concert, buy a record, buy a book or even buy anything but very basic food, you had to go to the next city. Want an English language books, a foreign newspaper, a superhero comic, decent basmati rice, curry powder, chili peppers, ramen noodles or indeed anything “foreign”? Maybe you can buy it in the city, but you’ll have to pay grossly inflated prices. And heaven help you if you couldn’t drive, because the last bus went at eight. I remember very well how stiffling and conformist and outright hostile to anything that was different the atmosphere was. Now I was different. I had seen a bit more of the world than my classmates and teachers. And I took my teachers by their word, when they told us to question everything, and did. I always got good grades, so they couldn’t get rid of me (which they tried with several other kids who didn’t fit in), but it was very clear that I didn’t belong there and wasn’t welcome. And the only reason I didn’t run screaming as soon as I could was because things gradually started getting better in the 1990s.

The AfD and the people who vote for them want to take us all back to that stiffling monocultural era with some kind of universal German culture, which never existed, just because they can’t hack the modern world. They also don’t care who they throw under the bus to get there. We are having a huge problem with rightwing extremism in Germany and not just outright terrorists like the NSU either. All over Germany, rightwing extremists are harrassing and threatening anybody who disagrees with them, whether people who work with refugees, pro-immigrant politicians, artists who dare to speak out against the right, scholars and academics (gender studies professors are targeted in particular) and even priests, which is particularly disgraceful considering these people are claiming they want to protect the Christian West. And now we have people like those sitting in our parliament, ready to spread their hate and venom there.

And yes, our media are at least partly at fault, because they kept giving a platform to rightwing and xenophobic views. The media gave a platform to people like Thilo Sarrazin, Claus Strunz, Henryk M. Broder (particularly sad, since he’s Jewish, i.e. a very likely target of rightwing extremists) and others, who may not support the AfD themselves, but promoted similar views and made them first sayable in public and then respectable. The media reported about the AfD, when they were still a tiny fringe party, and invited AfD politicians into talk shows. And no, they didn’t have to invite the AfD every time, especially since representatives of many of the smaller of the 42 parties running for German parliament never get invited either. And when the AfD and Pegida folks started calling the German media “Lügenpresse” (lying press), they didn’t double down, but changed their reporting to placate those who cannot be placated. Suddenly, reports about garden variety crime included the nationality of the suspect again, if they were not German (if the nationality is not mentioned, you can assume that they are German), something which was common well into the 1990s, but vanished in recent years. Journalists who didn’t give a damn about sexual harrassment when the perpetrators were white men suddenly felt the need to report about every incident where the perpetrator was not a white man. Meanwhile, positive reports about immigrants and refugees and those Germans who help them, which had been common throughout 2015, largely vanished from our media. Instead, we got the familiar flood of “Wah, won’t someone think of the poor widdle white AfD voter” opinion pieces that we also got after the Brexit vote and the US election. In the months before the election, there were some attempts to expose the racists inside the AfD, but it was too little too late. What is more, I don’t think it is a good idea in general to do opinion polls until one week before the elections or to have political talkshows and political comedy programs airing mere days before an election, something which wasn’t allowed in Germany until fairly recently.

So what’s the solution? Moving back towards the right clearly isn’t it, especially since the CDU’s Bavarian sister party CSU, which is very anti-immigrant, also suffered significant losses. And thankfully, Angela Merkel quietly removed most of the xenophobic conservatives from her party years ago, making the CDU electable for people who would never have considered voting for Helmut Kohl. The SPD running away like a little kid isn’t the solution either and indeed the party continues to disappoint. However, treating the AfD like a normal party or a transient phenomenon isn’t the solution either. Because they’re not a normal party and while I hope they will turn out to be a transient phenomenon, I fear they may not be. After all, the Greens and the Left Party were also once upon a time a transient phenomenon, the sort of party no one would ever form a government with, and now we have a Green (Winfried Kretschmann in Baden-Württemberg) and a Left (Bodo Ramelow in Thuringia) state prime minister. And while no one would form a government with the AfD on any level at the moment, there is no guarantee that this won’t happen in the future. There is also no guarantee that the AfD will vanish again like the Pirate Party (who actually filled a political niche) or other rightwing populist parties like the Schill Party in Hamburg or Arbeit für Bremen in Bremen or rightwing extremist parties like the Republikaner, the DVU or the NPD.

What needs to be done is fight the AfD by all democratically possible means both inside and outside parliament. It’s also necessary for people to speak up against noxious political views wherever they show up and not ignore the racist at the dinner table, because that’s just what Uncle Herbert is like. Let’s make it very clear that they don’t speak for the German people. Cause there’s 87% of us and 13% of them. The spontaneous anti-AfD protests that broke out in several German cities tonight are a good sign, but we need to remain wary and resist.

Comments are off.

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A New Adventure of the Silencer: The Milk Truck Gang

As mentioned in my last post, there will be a couple of new release announcements in the near future, as I work through the backlog of stories I wrote during the 2017 July short story challenge.

The first story from the 2017 July short story challenge to see the light is The Milk Truck Gang, the latest adventure of the Silencer. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the series, The Silencer follows the adventures of Richard Blakemore, hardworking pulp writer by day and the masked crimefighter known only as the Silencer by night, and is my homage to the hero pulps of the 1930s such as the Shadow, the Spider, Doc Savage and others.

The Silencer stories are fairly research intensive because of the 1930s setting and also because New York City, where most of the stories take place, has changed a lot in the past eighty years. Luckily, New York City’s past is extensively documented, though tracing what the city looked like in the mid 1930s, what long gone buildings were in which location and what shops, restaurant, hotels, theatres, etc… were called (cause they change names and tennants often) can still be a pain. On the plus side, researching locations for a Silencer story often yields plenty of interesting facts that provide ideas for more stories. Coincidentally, I recently came across this fabulous site, which is a basically a Google Streetview into the past and links historical photos to particular locations. Invaluable, particularly when dealing with an area that had changed drastically in the past eighty years.

Because the Silencer stories require so much research, they don’t really lend themselves to a project like the July short story challenge, where speed is of essence and there usually isn’t a lot of time for research. I did write a Silencer story during last year’s July short story challenge, but Fact or Fiction is a housebound story that takes place entirely in Richard’s study and therefore required a lot less research than the average Silencer story. Though even Fact or Fiction required some research, e.g. was white out fluid available in the 1930s (no, invented in the 1950s) and if not, what did people use instead?

While doing the 2017 July short story challenge, I chanced to listen to a report on the radio about a wave of thefts, where cargo – mostly electronics – was stolen directly from the backs of trucks. The report was about a new alarm system that would alert the driver, but what piqued my interest was the crime itself. “That would make a great Silencer story”, I thought to myself.

The July short story challenge requires coming up with a whole lot of ideas in a very compressed time period and so it didn’t take long before I thought, “Hey, that idea for a Silencer story about a wave of thefts from truck beds was pretty good. Maybe I should write that one.”

The next question was what should the thieves steal? It needed to be something that was shipped in sufficient quantities and on a predictable schedule, that was easy to sell and difficult to trace. And so I settled on milk. Milk was ideal for the purpose of my story, because a city the size of New York consumes a lot of it, it is delivered on a predictable schedule and by trucks following predictable routes in the very early morning, it is easy to sell and almost impossible to trace, particularly with 1930s technology.

This led to the question, where precisely did the milk consumed by New Yorkers in the early 20th century come from? Researching this led me to the swill milk scandal of the mid 19th century, which in turn made its way into the story, for the gang not just steals milk and attacks truck drivers, it also adulterates the milk and so poisons young children, which gives the story an extra sense of urgency.

There were a couple of other questions to research, such as what route would the milk trucks take to get the milk from Westchester County to New York City and did those streets already exist in the 1930s (thanksfully yes – what is now Broadway was first mentioned in 1642 and is likely much older)? The reminder that Broadway extends quite a bit beyond the city limits of New York into Westchester County brought to mind the George M. Cohan song “Forty-five minutes from Broadway”, which not only made it’s way into the story, but also stuck in my head for several days.

After the Christmas extravaganza that is St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen, The Milk Truck Gang is a more low-key Silencer adventure that basically centres on a single fight scene. The investigation take place largely off-stage and of the Silencer’s usual supporting cast, only Constance and Edgar, the kitten, as well as Baby Kenny (introduced in St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen) appear. I’m somewhat troubled by the fact that this is the third Silencer story in a row, where Constance doesn’t get a very much to do aside from making coffee and breakfast and patching up Richard after his adventures (the fifth story in the row, actually, since Constance doesn’t appear at all in The Great Fraud and Mean Streets and Dead Alleys). Okay, so she does get a bit more to do in St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen, but it’s not nearly close to the level of Constance’s involvement in Countdown to Death or The Spiked Death. However, in the hopefully not all too distant future, there will be a Silencer story where Constance goes on an undercover mission of her own.

But for now, here is the Silencer’s latest case, as he battles…

The Milk Truck Gang

[image error]Upstate New York, 1937: When the delivery vans of the Daisy Chain Dairy Company are targeted and robbed by a criminal gang and a driver is shot, Richard Blakemore a.k.a. the masked crimefighter known only as the Silencer decides to get involved.

So he stakes out the dairy company in the early hours of the morning to apprehend the criminals, only to find himself embroiled in a lethal fight on the bed of a speeding milk truck…

 

 

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Length: 3700 words

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A New Cover and a New German Short Story Available – Ein neues Cover und eine neue Kurzgeschichte auf Deutsch erhältlich: Der Lohn des Henkers

There will be a few new release announcements in the next days and weeks, since I’m currently editing my way through the backlog of stories I wrote during the 2017 July short story challenge.

However, today’s double announcement has nothing to do with that. For starters, my science fiction short story Whaler has a new cover. Now Whaler is one of those stories I refer to as a never-seller. It was my lowest selling book for a long time and though it isn’t my lowest selling title any more (currently, that’s Parlour Game, but since that’s a fairly new release, that will probably change), it’s still a story that sells very little.

Because Whaler doesn’t sell and isn’t part of any series, I was reluctant to invest any more time and money in it. However, I recently had to update the file because of an issue with epubcheck, that had gone unnoticed for six years. And while I was updating the file, I also noticed that the cover was getting really long in the tooth. It wasn’t bad for its time, but that time was six years ago. Whaler is one oldest covers I have that has never been updated (Outlaw Love and Rites of Passage are even older, but those are still pretty good) and it was really in dire need of an update.

So behold the beautiful new cover for Whaler (and maybe buy the story, while you’re at it):

[image error]

The second announcement is for a new German language short story. During the long hot days of summer, when I don’t feel creative enough to work on new stories, I occasionally translate some of my existing stories into German. My historical romances have always done well in Germany, so I decided to tackle Hangman’s Wages for my next translation project.

***

Die zweite Ankündigung für heute (die erste war für ein neues Cover einer Science Fiction Kurzgeschichte, die es bis jetzt leider nur auf Englisch gibt) betrifft eine neue Kurzgeschichte auf Deutsch. Während der langen heißen Sommertage fühle ich mich manchmal nicht kreativ genug, um etwas Neues zu schreiben. Also nutze ich die Zeit, um einige meiner älteren Geschichten ins Deutsche zu übersetzen. Meine historischen Liebesgeschichten haben sich auf Deutsch immer gut verkauft, also habe ich mich der Kurzgeschichte Hangman’s Wages angenommen, die es jetzt auch auf Deutsch gibt:

Der Lohn des Henkers

[image error]Während der öffentlichen Hinrichtung eines berüchtigten Banditen wird die junge Anna beim Taschendiebstahl erwischt und an Ort und Stelle zum Tode verurteilt. Der gnadenlose Graf Dietmar von Finsterwalde weist seinen Henker Ulrich an, die Diebin unverzüglich aufzuhängen.

Ulrich hat Mitleid mit Anna, aber Befehl ist Befehl. Also führt er das verängstigte Mädchen zum Galgenbaum vor den Toren der Stadt hinaus. Ulrich ist entschlossen, dafür zu sorgen, dass sie so wenig wie möglich leidet. Aber als er Anna die Schlinge um den Hals legt, wird Ulrich sich bewusst, dass diese junge Diebin sein Herz rührt wie keine andere Frau zuvor.

Aber wie kann er Anna retten, wenn Graf Dietmar schon ihren Tod befohlen hat?

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Länge: 3800 Worte

Preis: 0,99 EUR, USD oder GBP

Erhältlich bei Amazon Deutschland, Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Amazon Niederlande, Amazon Frankreich, Amazon Italien, Amazon Spanien, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australien, Amazon Brasilien, Amazon Mexico, Amazon Japan, Amazon Indien, Kobo, Apple iTunes, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, BOL, Osiander, Mayersche, buecher.de, buch.de, eBook.de, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, 24symbols, Playster, txtr, Inktera, Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, Flipkart, e-Sentral und XinXii.

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2017 Dragon Awards Reactions

I already posted my own reactions to the 2017 Dragon Awards, so here are some reactions from around the web:

At Women Write About Comics, Doris V. Sutherland offers a detailed summary and analysis of the 2017 Dragon Awards and the resultant drama, including lots of quotes by nominees, organisers and bystanders. She also declares that as of 2017, the Dragon Awards are no longer the puppy awards. This is probably the best summary of the Dragon Awards and the debates surrounding them I have seen, so if you read only one article on the Dragon Awards, make it this one.

George R.R. Martin has a brief post about the Dragon Awards, in which he congratulates the winners, particularly James S.A. Corey a.k.a. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck who won in the best science fiction category with Babylon’s Ashes, the latest novel in The Expanse series, and Stranger Things which won in the TV series category. George R.R. Martin also expresses his pleasure at the increased numbers of votes cast and hopes that the Dragon Awards will eventually become the People’s Choice Awards (an American pop culture award voted upon by the general public) of science fiction and fantasy.

Daniel Humphreys, whose novel A Place Outside the Wild was nominated in the best apocalyptic novel category and lost to Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, offers a gif-laden reaction to his Dragon loss.

At Adventures Fantastic, Keith West says that he did not vote for the Dragon Awards this year, because he felt he hadn’t read enough of the works on the ballot (fair point). He goes on to says that he considers the Dragon Awards, the David Gemmell Awards and the Shamus Awards the only awards he pays attention to, because they reflect “the view of the readers” (TM), whereas he considers some other awards (probably the Hugos, though he doesn’t name them directly) anti-recommendation lists. There’s nothing wrong with ignoring awards that rarely award works you like – I don’t pay much attention to the David Gemmell Legend Awards, for example, because the books they honour are not to my taste at all. However, I find it funny that he believes that the Dragon Awards and the Gemmell Awards reflect the true taste of the readers, whereas the Hugos apparently don’t. Ahem, Hugo voters and nominators are readers, usually very active and engaged readers. That doesn’t mean that those who vote for the Gemmell Awards or the Dragon Awards are not readers – they simply are readers with a very different taste. Readers are not a monolith.

Keith West is also incensed that several authors decided to withdraw from the Dragon Awards, which he considers a slap in the face of their fans. This is a view I’ve heard a few times, usually from the puppy camp (not saying that Keith West is one, just that he shares some views with them), and one I don’t get at all. There is no obligation to accept a nomination for an award, if you don’t want it for whatever reason. The Hugo Awards had plenty of withdrawals over the years, both publicly or privately before the ballot was announced, for all sorts of reasons. At least once, a finalists who withdrew (Black Gate in 2016) was someone I nominated. However, I didn’t consider this a slap in the face, because it was their right and their decision. There have also been authors who have asked their fans not to nominate them in a particular year – most recently Charles Stross asked his fans not to nominate The Laundry Files for best series. And whenever someone asked people not to nominate them, I respect that (though I wouldn’t have nominated The Laundry Files anyway, since I don’t like the series). Because there is no obligation to accept a nomination or an award, if you don’t want it. And indeed that’s why the Hugo Award administrators contact finalists before announcing the final ballot, to give them a chance to withdraw or also to confirm eligibility. The Dragon Awards should have done the same thing, contact the finalists beforehand. I hope they will do so next year to avoid a repeat of the withdrawal drama.

Now let’s venture into puppyland and see what they have to say:

Larry Correia, who won the Dragon Award in the fantasy category together with John Ringo, talks about the Dragon Awards in the context of a general report about Dragon Con. Apparently, he enjoyed himself thoroughly, though he cannot help but get in a swipe at other “stuffy cons” and “snooty awards”. Correia also seems to believe that the Dragon Awards represent every group in fandom (no, they don’t) and that anybody who criticises the Dragon Awards automatically also dismisses Dragon Con and the crowd of 70000 fans it draws. There are quite a few people criticising the Dragon Awards, mainly because there still is a lot to criticise about them, even though they have taken steps to improve. However, I have heard absolutely no one criticising Dragon Con itself, at least not in connection with the Dragon Awards. I have seen discussion of sexual harrassment and of an incident where two women cosplayers were injured by chairs thrown from a hotel balcony.

At the PulpRev website, which is apparently the hub of the Pulp Revolution movement, a rabid puppies offshoot, someone named Bradford Walker is very happy about the 2017 Dragon Awards and declares that the winners did their best to please their audience and that the Dragon Awards are a boost for “fun fiction” (a.k.a. books Bradford Walker enjoys) rather than what he calls “Pink Slime SF” (I guess that would be what I like to read and what I write, even though I actually write pulp style adventure).

Bradford Walker also shows up at the Superversive SF website to declare that the 2017 Dragon Awards are a win for the superversive, which is something of a stretch, since none of the authors associated with the Superversive SF site won anything. However, if you read the post, it becomes clear that what Walker really means is that at least the people he dislikes didn’t win either.

Jon Del Arroz, whose novel Star Realms: Rescue Run was nominated in the best military science fiction category, is totally happy about the 8000 votes cast for the Dragon Awards, even if he lost out to Richard Fox. Del Arroz also praises his fellow nominees in the military SF category, though he seems to have forgotten Amy J. Murphy (or maybe her book has too many girl cooties for him). Oh yes, and Tor.com and Locus are so mean, because they won’t report about the Dragon Awards. Which is wrong BTW, because Locus did report about the Dragon Award winners, even if Tor.com didn’t. Coincidentally, the Castalia House blog didn’t report about the Dragon Award winners either, at least not yet. And yes, I checked.

Richard Paolinelli, whose novel Escaping Infinity was nominated in the best science fiction category, does not mind losing to James S.A. Corey and believes that the 8000 votes cast for the Dragon Awards, more than for the Hugos or Nebulas, means that the Dragon Awards are the premier SFF awards. Paolinelli also writes a follow-up post in response to “another blogger’s screed”, though he doesn’t tell us which blogger, in which he elaborates why he thinks the Dragon Awards are so wonderful, namely because he feels that they are the true representation of the best in science fiction and fantasy. If the Dragon Awards eventually work as advertised – and this year was an encouraging sign in that direction – they may offer a representation of what is popular in the various categories. But popular does not equal best.

Paolinelli also dismisses all the criticisms that the Dragon Awards process is vulnerable to ballot stuffing with a fairly lame, “I’m sure they checked IP-adresses” (even though there is no evidence they have done so and at least one person has said she was able to cast three joke nominations from the different e-mail addresses), and also accuses Hugo voters of casting multiple votes, even though that’s very difficult to do with the Hugos, not to mention expensive.

Kevin Standalee has an interesting theory about why the various puppy factions seem to have no problem with the almost complete absence of voting controls in the Dragon Awards and why they keep accusing the Hugo Awards of being rigged in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary. The reason is, so Standalee claims, because the puppy factions consist of the sort of people who believe that everything and everybody is corrupt anyway. And as long as their choice wins, they don’t care about the how.

Benjamin Cheah a.k.a. Cheah Kai Wai, whose novel No Gods, Only Daimons was nominated in the best alternate history category, doesn’t mind losing to Harry Turtledove, because Turtledove is a legend. He’s also not sad that none of his Dragon Awards recommendations actually won the award and then launches into the usual rant that the Dragon Awards are clearly superior to the Hugo Awards, because of the higher number of ballots cast, that the Social Justice Warriors are furious that John Scalzi did not win (I haven’t seen anybody upset that Scalzi did not win, not even Scalzi himself) and that the Dragon Awards are totally not sexist and racist, even though the winners are overwhelmingly white and male.

Brian Niemeier, whose novel The Secret Kings (sequel to last year not-a-horror novel Nethereal which won the Dragon Award in the horror category) was nominated in the best science fiction category, also jumps on the number of voters to claim that the Dragon Awards are clearly superior to the Hugos and the Nebulas. Niemeier is also very happy that John Scalzi did not win the Dragon Award for best science fiction novel (which Scalzi made pretty clear he did not want anyway), because Niemeier is still very confused about a photo of John Scalzi wearing blue lipstick. There’s also the usual rhetoric about SJWs, CHORFs and whatever who want to destroy science fiction, western civilization and mom and apple pie (okay, maybe not the last two).

I also honestly wonder just why some puppies are so hung up about John Scalzi that they seem to view him of all people as the representation of all that is wrong with SFF. I can understand why the works of Ann Leckie or N.K. Jemisin incense them, but Scalzi? A straight white guy who writes space opera that’s enjoyable enough, but also fairly nutty nuggetty, and whose political views would put him somewhere in the political centre in Europe (Scalzi reminds me of those CDU politicians who voted in favour of marriage equality). That’s your great enemy?

So far, the puppy narrative about the Dragon Awards seems to focus mainly on the number of votes cast (approx. 8000, a figure I have no reason to doubt), which was higher than the number of votes cast for the 2017 Hugo Awards (3319 valid final ballots). And since the number of votes cast for the Dragon Awards is much higher than the number of votes cast for the Hugo Awards, the Dragon Awards must therefore be superior.

There is only one problem with this narrative: There is no corelation between the prestige of an award and the number of people deciding who wins said award. The SFF genre award with the highest number of voters are not the Dragon Awards, but the Goodreads Choice Awards, which is open to every Goodreads member and has participation numbers in the six to seven figure range. Going by puppy logic, the Goodreads Choice Awards should therefore be the premier SFF awards. Which they obviously aren’t. Meanwhile, the most prestigious literary award in the world, the Nobel Prize for Literature, is decided by a committee consisting of four members and two associate members. So between four and six people (depending upon whether the associate members get a vote) decide who wins the most prestigious literary awards in the world. Other prestigious awards such as the Pulitzer Prize or the Man Booker Prize are also decided by fairly small juries. Because no matter what some people might think, there is no link between the prestige of an award and the number of people deciding over said award.

So let’s tackle the next puppy talking point, namely that the Dragon Awards represent the true tastes of fandom, whereas – that’s the implication – the Hugos and the Nebulas don’t. Well, for starters no single award can represent the tastes of all fandom, because fandom is pretty damn big and consists of lots of small subgroups with their own tastes, which may or may not overlap with those of other groups. That’s also why we have several awards with different focusses, simply because no one award can represent all of fandom. However, when the same work shows up among the finalists or even winners of several awards, it’s a pretty good indicator that this is a broadly popular work. But while there was some overlap among the Dragon finalists and the shortlists for other SFF awards, so far none of the 2017 Dragon Awards winners except for Stranger Things have shown up among the finalists and winners of other awards (part of which may be due to the odd eligiblity period). Make of that what you will.

So what part of fandom do the Dragon Awards represent? Based on this year’s results, it seems to be a part of fandom that goes for broadly popular and fairly middle of the road fiction, written by overwhelmingly male authors with brand-name recognition (but then, let’s not forget that there wasn’t much choice, since many categories were overrun by obscure niche candidates of various flavours). The Dragon Awards certainly don’t represent the puppies and their various offshoots, because while there were plenty of puppies and puppy-favoured authors on the shortlist, none of them won anything except for Larry Correia who has a broader fanbase that goes beyond puppy circles.

Nor are the 2017 Dragon Awards a win for conservative politics in SFF, since Cory Doctorow and the duo that makes up James S.A. Corey tend politically to the left. I have no idea what Victor LaValle’s political views are, but I’d be very surprised if he didn’t tend towards the left. The political views of Jim Butcher and Rick Riordan are not known. I have zero idea about Harry Turtledove’s political views. Richard Fox is a US military veteran according to his bio and veterans tend towards the conservative side of the political spectrum, but again I am not aware that he ever explicitly stated his political views. That leaves Correia and Ringo as the only outspoken conservatives.

Do the Dragon Awards accurately represent the tastes of Dragon Con attendants? The puppies seem to think so, but based on what I’ve heard about Dragon Con, I’d say that the Dragon Awards only represent a minority of Dragon Con attendants. Cause as I understand it, Dragon Con’s attendance skews younger, less male, less white and less straight than that of more traditional cons, including World Con (even though there were plenty of young people at World Con 75). But when I look at the Dragon Awards finalists and winners, those don’t really strike me as the choices young queer women of colour would make. The YA category is a good example. Sarah J. Maas is massively popular among young women and yet the Dragon Award in the YA category went to Rick Riordan, who is more of a middle grade author and appeals mainly to teenage boys. Furthermore, I also have trouble believing that the attendants of a media-focussed convention like Dragon Con would vote for two fairly unremarkable tie-in comics over the many excellent comics and graphic novels on the Dragon shortlist, including such fan favourites as Saga, Ms. Marvel and Monstress. Instead, the win of the two Harry Dresden tie-in comics strikes me as the result of people who don’t know a whole lot about comics, but really like Jim Butcher voting.

I’ve also heard (it’s somewhere in the comments to Camestros Felapton’s Dragon Awards post) that Dragon Con’s science fiction literature track skews older and more male than the con in general, plus Dragon Con is apparently a big gathering for Baen authors and their fans. And the 2017 Dragon Award results do strike me as fairly representative of what that group might vote for, broadly popular SFF by established white and male authors.

In fact, the heavily skewed gender ratio of the 2017 Dragon Awards, especially compared to the 2017 Hugo and Nebula Awards, is another point that often comes up in discussion of the Dragon Awards. A lot of puppy commentators seem to respond to an alleged claim that the Dragon Awards are sexist, because the winners are almost all men (except for Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins and one of the winning games, whose developer team includes Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian among others), by screaming that the Hugos and Nebulas are sexist, since pretty much all winners in 2017 were women. Now a lot of us did notice that the 2017 Dragon Awards were one huge sausage fest (it’s kind of hard to miss), but the only place where I’ve seen them called explicitly sexist is this Twitter thread. And even there the main point is that the Dragon Awards are out of touch with what is happening in the SFF genre right now, since some of the most highly regarded authors at the moment are women and writers of colour.

However, the puppies immediately jumped on these comments. Apparently the current narrative in puppyland is that mainstream SFF publishing is ignoring the poor widdle male authors, because some folks have got their knickers in a twist about “women only” issues of magazines that they donb’t read anyway. There’s even some math to prove their point. And let’s not even talk about all those female protagonists who aren’t even properly feminine. Honestly, if the puppies don’t want to be perceived as sexist, they’re doing an awfully bad job of it.

This brings us to the final puppy talking point, namely that those of us who criticise the Dragon Awards hate either the Awards or Dragon Con or both. Well, I can only speak for myself, but I don’t hate the Dragon Awards. And I certainly don’t hate Dragon Con – why should I? In fact, I want to see the Dragon Awards succeed, because they could fill a niche that other awards don’t cover. And in fact, pretty much every non-puppy post I have seen points out that the 2017 Dragon Awards have taken a big step towards becoming what they want to be, a popular SFF award. However, as we know from previous go-arounds, a lot of puppies tend to mistake criticism for hate.

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Some Comments on the 2017 Dragon Awards Winners

The Dragon Awards, a new “popular” SFF award handed out at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia, have been plagued by controversy in their first two years. I blogged about some of it, though the vast majority of this year’s uproar happened, while I was enjoying myself at WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, so just read Andrew Liptak’s summary at The Verge.

Then, in the past week, the Dragon Awards plot thickened even further when a heretofore unknown group calling itself the Red Panda Fraction entered the fray, criticising the Awards and offering their own recommendation list. Camestros Felapton reports about the mysterious Red Panda Fraction here and also posts a response from one of the Red Pandas, wherein they explain who they are (left-leaning fans and Dragon Con regulars from the greater Atlanta area), what they want to do, how they arrived at their recommendation list, etc…

The Pandas’ recommendations actually overlap with my own Dragon Award votes in most categories and I agree with their criticism of how the Dragon Awards are run. However, in the space of two years the Dragon Awards have become a contest between competing parties (various overlapping Rabid Puppy affiliated groups, Inkshares, the Red Pandas) rather than individual fans nominating and voting according to their personal preferences, a fate the Hugo Awards have managed to avoid (with a few hick-ups, mostly notably 2015 and 2016) for more than sixty years. And with Rabid Puppies, Happy Frogs (Jon Del Arroz’ group) and the Red Panda Fraction all actively campaigning, the Dragon Awards are now beginning to look more like the Conference of Animals than an SFF award.

Just so you won’t get lost regarding which fraction is backing whom and who the various fractions are anyway, the tireless Camestros Felapton offers not just an overview of the 2017 Dragon Award finalists, noting which works are backed by which fraction, but also a map visualizing the various players in the Dragon Awards.

Tonight now, the winners of the 2017 Dragon Awards were announced at Dragon Con in Atlanta. But before we go there, let’s take a moment to look at the other SFF award whose winner was announced at Dragon Con, the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for short fiction. This year’s winner (highly deserved) is “The City Born Great” by N.K. Jemisin, which you can read here. “The City Born Great” was also a Hugo finalist this year. My Mom and I both ranked the story highly, because it really is a very good story (the concept behind which will apparently be expanded into a trilogy of novels). And indeed when I told my Mom today that “The City Born Great” won the Eugie Foster Memorial Award, she immediately said, “Oh yes, I remember that one. That was a lovely story.”

The Eugie Foster Memorial Award have no connection to the Dragon Awards beyond the fact that both awards are given out at Dragon Con and that both are in their second year. So far, the Eugie Foster Memorial Award has had a very good track record. By contrast, the Dragon Awards track record for their first year wasn’t so good. For their second year… well, let’s see:

The Dragon Awards website is still crap, so here is a list of the winners as well as a report about the ceremony from File 770. Camestros Felapton also offers an overview of the winners and some analysis. There are also some interesting discussions going on in the comments at both places.

More importantly, we finally have voting numbers according to which there were an impressive 8000 final ballots cast this year, supposedly twice as many as last year (though we never got the actual 2016 numbers and we don’t have any 2017 nomination figures either, let alone a breakdown). I’ve heard that Dragon Con started promoting the awards more in the past few weeks and it shows.

So let’s taken a look at the categories. Babylon’s Ashes, the latest Expanse novel by James S.A. Corey (a.k.a. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) wins in the science fiction category. It’s an unsurprising and uncontroversial win, since both the novel series and the TV series based on the novels are highly popular. My own vote was for Becky Chambers BTW.

The winner in the best fantasy category is Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge by Larry Correia and John Ringo. One could see this as a win for the puppies, except that as Camestros Felapton notes, only Declan Finn backed Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge, while every other puppy-aligned fraction backed A Sea of Skulls by Vox Day. Besides, Correia and Ringo are popular authors and big fan followings, even if their work is not to my taste at all (To be honest, I’m not sure if I’ve ever read anything by John Ringo, but Larry Correia’s work is definitely not to my taste). Larry Correia also repeatedly asked his fans to vote for him (which is not against the rules for the Dragon Awards). So this win is far from unreasonable. My own vote was for Faith Hunter BTW. Coincidentally, I find it interesting that the majority of finalists in the fantasy category are urban rather than epic fantasy.

The winner of the best YA/middle grade novel is The Hammer of Thor by Rick Riordan. Again, it’s a popular choice by a popular author. Though personally, I expected that A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas would win in this category, because Maas is hugely popular and writes YA, whereas Rick Riordan, while popular, is more of a middle grade author. I’d have expected the electorate to skew more towards the higher end of the YA spectrum. My own vote was for Sarah J. Maas BTW.

On to best military science fiction or fantasy: The winner is Iron Dragoons by Richard Fox. I have to confess that this was the first winner I had to look up, but then military SF is its current form is not really my genre. Turns out Richard Fox is a popular indie science fiction author (and come to think of it, I have come across his name in that context) and judging by the blurb, Iron Dragoons is the sort of Starship Troopers inspired military SF novel that is popular with the Amazon military SF crowd. I’m somewhat surprised that Richard Fox beat popular Baen authors Charles Gannon and Eric Flint, but again his win is neither unreasonable nor puppy-backed. My own vote was for Amy J. Murphy BTW.

Fallout: The Hot War by Harry Turtledove wins in the alternate history category. This novel was backed – sort of – by Declan Finn who couldn’t decide between Harry Turtledove, Eric Flint and Lou Antonelli, but I’m pretty sure he had little to do with the fact that it won. After all, Harry Turtledove’s name is pretty much synonymous with the alternate history subgenre by now, so he is a logical winner, even though I voted for Beth Cato.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is the winner in the best apocalyptic novel category. Now Cory Doctorow is a writer whose fiction does nothing for me (though I like his non-fiction), but he is also very popular, probably the most popular author in this category. My own vote was for N.K. Jemisin and then, after she withdrew, for Omar El Akkad.

The Dragon Award for best horror novel, finally, goes to Victor LaValle for The Changeling. Coincidentally, this was also my choice. Besides, we finally have a genuine horror novel winning in the horror category rather than a space opera with horror elements like last year.

Both comic categories go to the Harry Dresden comics/graphic novels by Jim Butcher and different artists. Now I have to admit that these wins surprise me a little, since The Dresden Files is primarily a novel series with the comics more of an adaptation. Besides, there were some very fine and popular comics and graphic novels nominated and Dragon Con is more media and comics oriented than e.g. WorldCon. However, The Dresden Files is a masively popular series with a huge fan following, so this is not an unreasonable win. The Dresden Files graphic novel was backed by Jon Del Arroz’s Happy Frogs, but I doubt they had much of an influence. My own votes were for Saga and Genius Girl respectively.

Stranger Things wins in the TV category and Wonder Woman in the film category. Again, both are extremely popular choices, even though Stranger Things relies a bit too much on 1980s nostalgia for my taste and while there was a lot to love about Wonder Woman and Gal Gadot is fabulous in the role, the anachronistic World War I setting and some of the choices connected with it (e.g. German bad guys once again or choosing a real historical figure like Erich Ludendorff and killing him off 20 years before he died) left a bad taste in my mouth. My own votes were for Lucifer and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 respectively.

I’m not gamer, so I don’t have very much to say about the four gaming categories. But Magic the Gathering and Legend of Zelda are both highly popular franchises and Pokemon Go! is a genuine phenomenon, so none of those wins is unexpected. I have never heard of Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow’s Walk, the winner in the boardgame category, but that doesn’t mean anything, since I haven’t played a boardgame in ages.

So for their second year, the Dragon Awards managed to do exactly what they set out to do, reward popular works and authors with big fan followings. There are still points to criticise, of course, such as the easily manipulated nomination and voting system or the flat out odd subgenre choices. I also can’t help but notice that the winners are one massive sausage fest with Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins the only woman among a sea of men. At least they’re not all white – I spot at least three writers of colour among the winners. However, the massive sausage fest that is the 2017 Dragon Award does match what we see in some other SFF popular vote awards such as the David Gemmell Legend Awards. It’s still a sad truth that books (and other creative works) by men get more promotion than books by women, so popular vote awards with a large voter base often default to male winners and nominees, because the average fan is more likely to be familiar with them.

ETA: Annalee Flower Horne also noticed the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the 2017 Dragon Awards and launched into a rant on Twitter to point out that the Dragon Awards do not accurately represent the state of the SFF field in 2017. I agree with her that today’s SFF is a lot more diverse than the 2017 Dragon Awards winners would let you believe (though two of the winning authors self-identify as Hispanic, so there are three winners of colour instead of one). Besides, there were popular and high profile female authors among the 2017 Dragon Award finalists such as Becky Chambers and Sarah J. Maas and yet none of them managed to win. However, does anybody honestly look solely to the Dragon Awards of all things as a measure of state of the SFF field in 2017? Well, I suspect puppies and their offshoots might, but I hope everybody else is better informed.

Will the Dragon Awards become a valuable addition to the SFF Awards spectrum? Time will tell, though things are looking better than they did last year. Will they eventually supplant the Hugos or Nebulas? No they won’t, if only because the Hugos and Nebulas tend to award more innovative works, which expand the scope of the genre and push it forward, whereas the Dragon Awards tend towards the tried and true (and currently male and white). But that’s what they’re trying to do and in that respect, they succeeded. Okay, so the Dragon winners and nominees are less to my taste than the Hugo or Nebula winners and nominees of the past few years, but that’s okay. Not every award needs to mirror my tastes and in fact, many of them don’t.

And more importantly, the 2017 Dragon Awards have managed to rise above their vulnerability to small interest groups (the various puppy offshoots, but also the Inkshares crowd), probably due to the vastly increased voter base. To put it more succinctly, the puppies resoundingly lost even the award they believed was theirs.

So far, there is only resounding silence from the puppy camp except for this surprisingly gracious (by his standards) post by Vox Day. His commenters are their usual unpleasant selves, rant about the fact that Rick Riordan has LGBT characters in his books now and also claim that this seals the Hugos’ demise, because… well, it doesn’t really make any sense to me, either, but apparently it has to do with the bigger voter base.

Meanwhile, John Scalzi has the following message for the various puppy fractions:

Note to the authors who tried to win an award by positing it as a culture war with me on the other side: You sure wasted your time, dudes.

— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 3, 2017

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for August 2017

[image error]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 July 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.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, historical fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal mystery, paranormal gothic romance, science fiction romance, space opera, military science fiction, young adult science fiction, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, superheroes, ghosts, haunted valentines, alien invasions, FBI dark fae, magical circusses, galactic outlaws, space pirates, girl scientists and much more.

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:

[image error] Rotten Magic by Jeffrey Barwell:

Devin will do anything to win. Even resort to magic.

Devin competes to become the best artificer in the mage phobic Iron Empire. Who needs magic when you can master the art of machinery? The other apprentices envy his genius and skills . . . especially Benson. Every apprentice hones their craft building and fighting in crude prototypes of powered armor. Some add frills, others barbs or horns. When Devin transforms himself into a mechanical dragon to slaughter the competition, Benson steps into the role of dragon slayer.

But Devin harbors a secret as he claws his way to the top of the Artificer’s Guild: he’s a mage. These new abilities are thrilling and frightening, and the voices more so. How long can Devin be content wearing a steel dragon mask when the seductive promise of true arcane power whispers in his ear?

Experience the novella prequel to the Artifice Mage Saga: a fantasy steampunk brawl of metal vs. magic where sorcery is bloody, science is greasy, and nobody’s hands are clean.

[image error] Resistance by Max Carver:

DISCOVERY…INVASION…WAR…

On a rocky, desolate planet, a small band of gold prospectors find themselves making a discovery they never expected–valuable and powerful relics of the galaxy’s deep past.

They also discover a hostile alien species: gigantic, hideous, ruthless monsters who wipe out all humans on sight.

Humanity’s first contact with intelligent aliens becomes a war for survival. The invasion has begun…but the beginning of the invasion is also the beginning of the resistance.

[image error] Renegade Star by J.N. Chaney:

Jace Hughes is a Renegade.

That means taking almost any job that comes his way, no matter the situation. So long as he can keep his ship floating, he’s free to live the life he wants.

But that all changes when he meets Abigail Pryar, a nun looking for safe passage out of the system.

Too bad there’s something off about the cargo she’s carrying.

Jace knows he shouldn’t ask too many questions, but when strange sounds start coming from inside the large, metal box, he can’t help but check it out.

Big mistake.

To make matters worse, he’s being pursued by unknown ships–people who want that cargo. Does Jace give up the goods and hand over the nun…or does he risk it all for an even bigger payout?

[image error] The Contending by Cynthia Joyce Clay:

“If I survive this, I must make amends to Princess Royal Tristabe-airta. If don’t, when I become her liege, she be too powerful of an enemy.”

Royal swords possess the unhuman strength and temperament of their ancestors, dragons. Burta, a young royal sword, resents that she must always defer to Tristabé-airta, Princess Royal of Allsongs, a poet. But Burta is so skilled in arms she expects to win the Allsongs’ Contending and that will make her Tristabé-airta’s liege. The problem is, though, she is trapped between the monster that hunts her and the deadly drop down the cliff to the turbulent sea. In Book Two of the Saga of the Dragon Born, all the poets of Allsongs, including Tristabé-airta, must unite their power to rescue Burta. Once rescued, will she unwisely keep a secret close to her heart that will be a rending betrayal to Allsongs’ best hope and defense, Tristabé-airta?

[image error] The Dance on the Moons of Serenity by M.D. Cooper:

Everyone deserves a day off, right?

That’s just what Jessica and Cheeky are enjoying when a pair of old “friends” show up and force them to smuggle weapons into the Serenity System.

On their own with just a small interstellar pinnace at their disposal, Jessica and Cheeky aren’t going to let someone else force them to smuggle weapons (especially when there’s no profit in it for them) and they take control of their ship and escape.

Unfortunately, they still end up in the Serenity system…with the weapons. Now they must unravel a tangled web of deception in a highly stratified aristocratic society to learn the intended recipient of the weapons.

Attending a series of gala events, Jessica will have to use a particular set of skills she’s acquired over the years (as a TBI Agent, seriously, people) to start a war between two aristocratic families.

What could go wrong?

[image error] Agent of Darkness by C.N. Crawford and Alex Rivers:

There’s a dark power growing within me. And I’m not sure I can control it.

The fae king wants me dead. His assassins tracked me down and nearly killed me— now they’re the ones lying lifeless in a pool of blood. But the price I’ve paid is too high. They hurt someone I love, and I burn for revenge.

I’m done watching from the sidelines. Following the seductive fae Roan, I join the rebels but find myself surrounded by suspicion at every turn. But with the strange new magic in my blood, no one trusts me anymore.

It’s the magic of fear, of terror, of nightmares. The king’s minions have given me another name: Mistress of Dread. My power is unstable and deadly, and to get my vengeance, I must learn to control it. Yet with fury boiling in my blood and desire for Roan kindling my heart, it seems like an impossible task.

FBI Agent, Pixie, Terror Leech, Mistress of Dread. Will I become a King Killer as well?

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Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for August 2017

[image error]Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some July 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.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, culinary mysteries, small town mysteries, paranormal mysteries, romantic suspense, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, crime thrillers, medical thrillers, legal thriller, science fiction thrillers, men’s adventure thrillers, YA thrillers, serial killers, missing girls, stolen Shakespeare manuscripts, murderous apple thieves, forensic photographers, lawyers, guns with a mind of their own, adventures in the Caribbean and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog 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:

[image error] Apple Assassination by Stacey Alabaster:

An apple a day keeps the homicides away…or maybe not!

When apples go missing from Pippa’s farm, the Bakery Detectives have another mystery on their hands. When someone turns up dead at a rival bakery, things turn far more sinister than a simple case of apple thievery. Can they put aside personal feelings and business rivalry and clear their rival or will this be the first case the Bakery Detectives can’t (or won’t) solve?

Apple Assassination is part of the Bakery Detectives Cozy Mystery series. If you like fast paced mysteries full of quirky characters and unexpected twists, you’re going to love the Bakery Detectives.

[image error] The Carlswick Deception by S.L. Beaumont:

Theft. Murder. Love Tested.

A priceless Shakespearean First Folio is stolen from an English manor house.

A man is dead.

Oxford student Stephanie Cooper is drawn into the dangerous criminal world of art theft when she meets attractive young detective Luke Spencer.

While her rock-star boyfriend tours Japan with the band, Stephanie and Luke’s quest becomes personal as they follow an increasingly perilous trail that leads from Oxford to London, Paris and Venice.

But when Stephanie takes an unnecessary risk, the stakes turn deadly. Can she stay alive long enough to expose the identity of the thieves, help recover priceless literary works and resolve her conflicted feelings for Luke and her boyfriend James?

The Carlswick Deception is another exciting instalment in the Carlswick Mysteries series and can be read as a stand-alone novel.

[image error] Buried Secrets by T.J. Brearton:

What if your dream home became your worst nightmare?

Newlyweds Brett and Emily Larson have just moved into a new home deep in the countryside, and are overjoyed when Emily finds out she’s pregnant.

Then they discover human bones in their garden.

As the police start to investigate, three things become clear:

The bones are recent.

They are not here by accident.

They are a message.

When the police put three photographs of known criminals on the Larsons’ kitchen table, the couple realize the danger may be closer to home than they think.

As the situation escalates, can Brett and Emily keep one step ahead to protect themselves – and their unborn child?

[image error] The Girls in the Water by Victoria Jenkins:

When the body of Lola Evans is found in a river in a local park on a cold winter’s morning, Detective Alex King and her new recruit Chloe Lane are called in to lead the hunt for the killer.

Days later, another girl goes missing, and another body is found in the water. It seems the two girls shared a troubled history, and were members of the same support group. What secrets were they keeping? And who is the monster preying on these vulnerable girls?

As the detectives start to piece together the clues, it becomes clear that the murderer’s reach goes even further – back into the painful past of Chloe Lane herself. Chloe realises that she too is in danger – as she uncovers secrets about her own brother’s death which someone will kill to keep hidden.

Alex and Chloe are soon caught in a race against time to reach the next victim before it’s too late… and they must face terrifying truths from their own lives to have a chance of catching the killer.

[image error] Freaky Games by Amanda M. Lee:

Look out Sin City, here comes the Mystic Caravan Circus.

The city that never sleeps has something lurking in the darkness and Poet Parker can’t decide if it’s friend or foe. The rich history of the area comes into play when research uncovers a mine disaster more than a hundred years in the past … and a tragic outcome that still haunts the locale to this day.

Between dust storms bringing forth a creature with glowing red eyes, screams in the desert and Poet’s increasing conviction that they’re not alone, the team has their hands full. That’s on top of the fact that Max decides now is the time to make his move and get to know his son – who also happens to be Poet’s boyfriend – in a new light and the unwelcome realization that Luke has seemingly become obsessed with gambling.

Poet’s attention is split in numerous directions, although Luke’s quagmire is closest to her heart. She wants to help her best friend, even as he spirals out of control. He’s not the same best friend she’s spent the past few years loving, but she’s determined to get him back … even if it means facing off with some of Las Vegas’ most perilous residents.

The mystical world of the circus is due to collide with the dangerous underbelly of the gambling world and the two sides might not be as far apart as they initially assume.

When the dust storm settles – and the final battle is upon them – more than one person will be in danger … and Poet will have to make a hard choice to protect those she loves while sacrificing someone else to the unending darkness.

It’s the ultimate game, but money isn’t the only thing at risk.

[image error] Ice Lake by John A. Lenahan:

An abandoned body

Deep in the woods of north-eastern Pennsylvania, the body of a man is found – shot three times, dumped under the trees where the local kids will find him.

A haunted psychologist

Psychologist Harry Cull, tormented by his past, arrives in the picturesque town of Ice Lake to help with the murder investigation. There he unravels a web of lies and deceit that leads to the dark heart of a community torn apart by fracking, drugs and murder.

A desperate killer

It’s not long before the second corpse turns up, this time a lawyer left for dead in the forest, and Harry finds himself on the trail of a twisted killer – who will do anything to keep the town’s darkest secrets buried.

[image error] Cause of Death by Patrick Logan:

How do you catch a killer when no one believes that a murder has been committed?

Detective Damien Drake is back, but after what happened with the Butterfly Killer, he’s no longer associated with the NYPD.

Now Drake heads his own PI firm, which specializes in dealing with paranoid housewives and rich suburbanites suspicious that their nannies are stealing their silverware.

That is until a visitor comes to him with a series of photographs of dead people. The problem is, no one believes that the victims in the images have actually been murdered.

Staged to look like suicide, the victims follow a pattern that Drake is determined to crack. But as the body count rises, the real difficulty becomes determining the victims’ true Cause of Death…

[image error] Dead in Bed by Wendy Meadows:

Brenda Sheffield is thrilled to host the East Coast Acting Troupe in her inn set above the Atlantic Ocean. Excitement permeates the Sheffield Bed and Breakfast and injects new life in the small town of Sweetfern Harbor. Ellen Teague, the famous actress will be given a large suite on the second floor. From the adjoining room she will have access to her assistant Chester Boyd. Chester caters to her every whim. Ellen is demanding and narcissistic. She is liked by very few members of the troupe who are there to perform “The Rich Game.”

After the first performance at Harbor Park, Edward Graham pulls Brenda aside and tells her he has serious business to discuss with her. The lawyer informs her that Ellen Teague states she is the rightful owner of Sheffield Bed and Breakfast, not Brenda. Brenda argues her uncle’s will states she is the heir to his property. Ellen argues she and Randolph Sheffield signed an agreement that the bed and breakfast would be hers.

When Brenda confronts Ellen late at night, a loud argument ensues. Brenda’s raised voice awakens the cast members who were sound asleep. Brenda doesn’t think about this and goes to her apartment seething in anger. The next morning, she becomes fully alert when one of the cast members informs her that Ellen Teague is dead in her bed. As if this discovery isn’t shocking enough, Brenda is dismayed when Detective Mac Rivers narrows her down as his prime suspect and states she has the strongest motive for killing the star who demanded her rights to the bed and breakfast. Brenda and Mac are in love with one another, or at least that is what he told her when he gave her the Promise ring the day before. The estrangement leaves Brenda to solve the murder case as soon as possible or Mac plans to serve the warrant for her arrest.

This will be no easy task since at times all of the actors argued with Ellen. Combined with the fact that none of them cared for her egotistical behavior they also had individual motives for wanting her dead. Brenda knows she is on her own. Will the forty-eight hours the detective gave her be enough to prove who the killer really is? It is the only way Brenda will avoid prison for the rest of her life, and she realizes time is of essence.

[image error] L.A. Defense by Rachel Sinclair:

Ginger is back, and her mouth is as unfiltered as ever…

Ginger Perry, Harper’s star witness in her previous murder trial, left Kansas City for the greener pastures of the Los Angeles adult film scene. As soon as she gets out to the West Coast, however, she catches a case. A big case. A murder case.

The victim is a powerful studio head. Ginger insists she was framed. Harper’s not so sure. She wants to give Ginger the benefit of the doubt, but Ginger’s always been a little shady. Nevertheless, she agrees to take the case. After all, she hasn’t had a vacation in years, and a trip to Los Angeles is as much of a vacation as she’s ever going to get – even if it’s not really a vacation, but another murder case. Harper knows that she needs another murder case like she needs a hole in the head, but she just can’t resist a lost cause.

And Ginger’s case seems to be as lost of a cause as you can get.

With the twists, turns and lightning-fast pace you’ve come to expect from a Harper Ross Legal Thriller, L.A. Defense is not to be missed!

[image error] Picture Perfect Murder by Jenna St. James:

Ryli Sinclair had no idea that moonlighting as a Forensic Photographer for the Granville Police Department would put her directly in the path of a crazed killer. Determined to identify the murderer before she becomes the next victim, Ryli enlists the help of her best friend, Paige, and her elderly great-aunt, Shirley, a former private investigator. From the driver’s seat of Aunt Shirley’s coveted ’65 Falcon, Ryli and the girls are hot on the trail of the murderer…and hilarity ensues, as the ridiculously handsome chief of police, Garrett Kimble, throws stumbling blocks in their path at every turn.

Hold on to your seats as hilarious and talented Cozy Mystery Author, Jenna St. James, takes you on the ride of your life! You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, you may even scream during this rollicking romp through the town of Granville. This down to earth non-traditional Cozy is an absolute delight that pushes the boundaries of the genre in some daring ways that make it all the more enjoyable.

[image error] Rising Storm by Wayne Stinnett:

Miles from the laid-back lifestyle of No Name Key, and just shy of the raucous nightlife of Miami and South Beach, lies Coconut Grove, a tropical oasis with a distinct Bohemian flair. Lately, a seedy underside has emerged along the Grove’s waterfront, preying on adventurous young women.

Somewhere amid all the glitz and glamour, hides a thief who stole a fortune in Aztec emeralds. Or did he? Jesse McDermitt must first determine if the victim herself is a thief. The trail of clues leads him to evidence that the thief may be involved in a string of more heinous crimes.

Jesse and Chyrel enlist the help of the recently returned Charity, and the trio go “undercover” at a floating swinger’s party headed for the Bahamas, which may well be a front for torture and murder.

When a sudden violent storm strikes Stiltsville, Jesse finds himself alone on the ocean, trying to recover the treasure and put a murderer behind bars—but first he must win the battle with Mother Nature.

The Haunted Valentine by J.A. Whiting:

Lin and her cousin, Viv, stop into a gift shop in Nantucket town and while browsing, Lin sees an antique Sailor’s Valentine.

The valentine, made of tiny beautiful shells, pulls at Lin and she decides to buy it and bring it home.

At times, the object feels hot to the touch and sometimes the shells illuminate and dim in a sequenced pattern. Once in a while, the valentine makes appearances outside the house in places Lin happens to be. A ghost pays a visit, but Lin has no idea what he wants from her or what his link might be to the sailor’s valentine. With the help of her boyfriend and her cousin, Lin works to solve the mystery of the haunted valentine.

This is book 7 in the Lin Coffin Mystery series from USA TODAY Bestselling Author J A Whiting. Although the main mystery is solved in each story, the books should be read in order for the most enjoyment as story threads run from book to book. This story has ghosts and some mild paranormal elements.

[image error] Spider Jack by Cyrus Winters:

CAN YOU GUESS THE KILLER?

Detective Taylor Shandling is one of the only good guys left standing after events that have shaken her city precinct. Indefinitely suspended and spending her days drinking alone, things spiral further into desolation as an old nemesis from Taylor’s past makes an unexpected return.

Once again she finds herself on the hunt for a killer, in a day where friends become enemies, enemies become friends and the unexpected is always sure to happen.

 

[image error] Dead Weapons by Simon Paul Woodward:

Ciaran Richards’ father was a soldier. A hero. But now he’s dead. Or is he?

Ciaran has lost his way. He’s forgotten the boy he was and the man he wanted to become. Worst of all, he’s betrayed his only true friend, Isobel, leading her to a tragic accident.

His estranged brother, Patrick, forces him to carry out one last job for his crew: collecting a stolen gun and delivering it to the gangster Eliza Frost. In return, Patrick reveals a startling secret: somebody faked their father’s death.

When the gun malfunctions, fastening itself to Ciaran’s hand, he’s framed for the murder of two policemen and forced to go on the run. He searches for a way to remove the weapon and find his father, but the police, Eliza Frost and a black ops team of frighteningly modified soldiers are all hunting him and Isobel may be the only person who can help.

Dead Weapons is a young adult, urban fantasy; a story of father figures fair and foul, broken friendships and the fleeting possibility of redemption.

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WorldCon 75 Photos and a Report

Now the extended Hugo commentary is out of the way, here is my WorldCon 75 report with plenty of photos. Many of the photos are already in this video I posted on YouTube, but here you can see them without effects.

So, as most of you already know, I went to WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, Finland. It was my first WorldCon as an attending member after a near miss with Loncon in 2014, where I had an attending membership, but couldn’t go in the end. This time, however, I jumped in with both feet, filled out the programme participant form and wound up on four panels.

The night before the start of the convention, there was a reception for convention staff, programme participants and other volunteers at Helsinki’s beautiful city hall. I got an invitation to the reception, but wasn’t sure about going, since I don’t feel very comfortable in formal social situations where I don’t know anybody. But in the end, I went anyway and had a good time. There was a speech by Helsinki’s deputy mayor, a buffet consisting of feta salad, salmon salad and lentil salad as well as free drinks. And though I didn’t yet know any of the people at the reception, a shared love for SFF always makes for good conversation.

Of course, I took some photos as well:

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Helsinki City Hall, built in 1833 as a luxury hotel by German architect Carl Ludwig Engel.

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SFF fans under chandeliers at the pre-WolrdCon reception at Helsinki City Hall

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More SFF fans under chandeliers at the pre-WorldCon reception at Helsinki City Hall.

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And here is a closer look at the ceiling of Helsinki City Hall with one of the chandeliers. Because chandeliers are cool.

The convention proper opened the next day. My Mom and I set off to the Messukeskus convention center and arrived fairly early, when the registration lines weren’t very long yet. We got our badges and goodie bags and went in. The trade and exhibition halls weren’t open yet and there weren’t any panels or other programming, so we hung out in the seating area opposite the Hesburger inside the convention centre.

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The Messukeskus convention center in Helsinki welcomes the members of WorldCon 75.

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A blacksmith display and shop outside Messukeskus.

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WorldCon 75 badges and ribbons – my Mom’s and my own.

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The WSFS banner flies at WorldCon 75. On the lower gallery you can see some of the various eateries at Messukeskus.

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SFF fans (including a Deadpool cosplayer) having lunch at the Hesburger inside Messukeskus.

I’ve heard some complaints about the lack of places to eat near the convention center, but IMO Messukeskus itself was well supplied with eateries, including several cafés, a burger shop, a sandwich shop, a pizza and pasta shop, a curry restaurant as well as the restaurant of the adjacent Holiday Inn. The only problem was that they all closed in the evening, so if you wanted dinner you had to go to downtown Helsinki or the restaurant at the Holiday Inn. But since Helsinki has a good public transport system and all WorldCon attendants were provided with a free travel pass for the time of the convention (which saved a lot of money, cause a single tram or train ticket was 3.20 EUR), that wasn’t much of a problem.

The widely reported overcrowding, on the other hand, was a problem, albeit one that the con com immediately took steps to solve. And in the end, WorldCon 75 turned out to be the second largest WorldCon ever (after the 1984 WorldCon in Anaheim, California) with more than 7000 people on site. The crowds weren’t so notable in the trade and exhibition hall, but panels were full and queues were long. The layout of the Messukeskus convention center didn’t help either, since it required people exiting panels and those queuing for the next panel to move through a fairly narrow corridor that was quickly dubbed “the hallway of death”. In general, I found the layout of the Messukeskus convention center very confusing. I’m not a person who gets lost easily, but I kept getting lost inside Messukeskus until the very last day. None of this is the fault of the con com – they had to work with the building that was there.

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Queuing up for panels was a common experience at WorldCon 75.

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Panel audience at the “alien language in science fiction” panel seen from the panelists’ POV. The front row seats were reserved for people with disabilities and access issues.

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Panel audience, here at the Fannish Inquisition, seen from the audience POV.

I wasn’t on any programming on the first two days, so I had plenty of time to go to panels, meet people and wander around the trade and exhibition hall. There was one panel I didn’t get into, because of overcrowding. After that, I learned and came early to queue up.

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The entrance to the trade and exhibition hall at WorldCon 75 at a relatively quiet time.

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Signposts inside the exhibtion hall at WorldCon 75. The front of the signposts pointed at mundane destinations such as the trade hall, fan lounge, art show, site selection table, etc… The back of the signposts, seen here, pointed to much more interesting destinations. The helpful note from Ambassador Kosh is a nice touch.

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Star Wars, Mad Max and Discworld characters assembled from Lego on display inside the exhibition hall at WorldCon 75.

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More Disworld characters made from Lego, including Sir Terry Pratchett himself, on display at WorldCon 75.

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Hugo Awards past and present on display in the exhibition hall.

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A display model of a 2017 Hugo Award in the WorldCon 75 exhibition hall.

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The “Romance and the Power of the Female Gaze” panel at WorldCon 75, featuring Donna Maree Hanson, Carrie Vaughn, Nick Hubble and Cassandra Rose Clarke. Fiona Moore was also on the panel, but isn’t pictured here.

The “Romance and the Power of the Female Gaze” panel was very interesting, by the way (and it’s available online here), even if its very existence has infuriated SFF’s least favourite rabid dog so much that he decided to take it as yet another sign for the impending death of science fiction (no link, because the post is basically just offensive remarks about the panelists’ appearance). I guess he missed all the panels on military SF (I counted at least three and I might have missed some), space opera (okay, one of them talked about – gasp – colonialism in space opera) and other properly nutty nuggetty subgenres as well as the many science panels, which usually had the longest queues.

As a panelist, I was on four panels, about alien languages in science fiction, adapting the Hugos to a digital future, machine translation and book blogs. All of the panels went well IMO and the audience seemed to enjoy themselves. I don’t have a lot of good photos of myself on panels, because my Mom is not a very good photographer. However, two of the panels I was on, “Alien Language in Science Fiction” and the “Digital Hugo” panel, have been recorded and are available at the official WorldCon 75 YouTube channel, where you can also see recordings of plenty of other panels and events.

I also wound up moderating the Book Blogs panel, because the WorldCon 75 team didn’t have enough moderators. They asked me and I said I’d do it, if there was no one else, whereupon I was promptly taken up on the offer. Luckily, the panel I moderated was on the final day of the con, so I had plenty of opportunity to watch how other moderators handled their job and to see what I did and didn’t like about their approach. What is more, I had to remember that English was not the first language of many people in the audience, which sometimes led to awkwardly phrased questions. I’d seen moderators at other panels not dealing very well with that, e.g. getting impatient at a non-native speaker who was having problems finding the correct words, and that was something I wanted to do better. There were some technical challenges as well, e.g. the microphones at Messukeskus were highly directional, so you had to get very close and speak directly into them (which is easy to forget, especially if you’re used to more sensitive microphones). In the end, I think I didn’t do too badly. The audience seemed to enjoy it, too.

And now let’s have some panel photos. Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of the “Alien languages in science fiction” panel, but a Finnish fan named Melanie Marttila who was in the audience tweeted this photo:

Alien languages in science fiction. #Worldcon75 pic.twitter.com/Rk8MdLReA6

— Melanie Marttila (@MelanieMarttila) August 11, 2017

The next two photos were taken by my Mom. She’s not a very good photographer, especially with a smartphone camera. Still, some of them came out okay.

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The Digital Hugo panel, featuring Kristina Knaving, Nicholas Whyte and myself.

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The backs of the audience at the Book Blogs panel with myself and the top of Theresa Nielsen-Hayden’s head just visible. Shaun Duke and Thomas Wagner are not pictured, but were definitely on the panel.

Finally, WorldCon is also a chance to meet old and new friends and to finally meet people you only know online in person. I don’t have a lot of photos of this, simply because you often forget to take a photo, if you’re having fun and geeking out. Still, I have a few, mostly taken at the File 770 meet-up at the Belge Bar & Bistro. File 770 has a few more photos of that meet-up, taken by Eric Wong of Rocket Stack Rank.

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The File 770 meet-up at the Belge Bar & Bistro in Helsinki.

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The File 770 meet-up at the Belge Bar & Bistro in Helsinki

Finally, here is a really nice photo Paul Weimer took of me on the first day of the con:

And its @CoraBuhlert pic.twitter.com/DxG3NQFLxv

— Paul Weimer (@PrinceJvstin) August 17, 2017

All in all, I had a great time at WorldCon 75. I also think the convention staff did a great job, even if there were some hiccups. And indeed, when I still had some of the German candy I’d brought to Helsinki left over on the final day of the con (the chocolate was all gone by this point), I gave the final two bags to the program ops team, because they really deserved a thank you for all their hard work.

Coincidentally, my Mom enjoyed WorldCon a whole lot, too. She’s not a hardcore SFF fan – SFF is just something she enjoys watching and reading on occasion. However, she was very impressed by the sheer number and variety of people who’d been brought together at Messukeskus by their shared love for science fiction and fantasy. There were fans of all ages, shapes and sizes at WorldCon 75, from babies being carried in a sling at their mother’s chests to people in their eighties and beyond (Robert Silverberg, now 82, was the oldest person I recognised). It was a testament to what a welcoming place fandom is.

The 2019 WorldCon will be in Dublin, Ireland. I already bought my membership at the con, so see you there.

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