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The Obligatory Hugo Nominations Reaction Post 2017 – and the first ever Nommo Awards

So the finalists for the 2017 Hugo Awards were announced today. And since the good folks of WorldCon 75 in Helsinki were kind enough to warn us ahead of time that they were planning to announce the Hugo shortlist today, we even had time to prepare for the inevitable discussion and dissection. And so I finished the massive space opera post yesterday, so I could fully focus on the annual Hugo nomination commentary today.

Of course, the Hugos weren’t the only SFF award that announced its finalists today. The 2017 Nommo Awards for African speculative fiction also announced their finalists today and they certainly look worth checking out. Two nominees that will be familiar even beyond the circle of those interested in African speculative fiction are the novel Rosewater by Tade Thompson (who also has a story nominated in the novella category) and Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo and Nebula Award winning novella Binti. This is the first year for the Nommo Awards, by the way, and I for one will be very interested to see how they develop in the future.

The Hugos, on the other hand, already have a sixty plus year history of recognising usually worthy works. So, without further ado, here are the Hugo finalists for 2017. The link goes to File 770, where there also is a lot of discussion going on in the comments.

At first, second and third glance, this looks like a very fine Hugo shortlist, especially given the shenangigans of the past three years. There is still a bit of residual puppy poo on the shortlist – once that stuff gets stuck under your shoes, it’s very difficult to get rid of it completely. But Vox Day is clearly suffering from Dead Elk attrition and besides, EPH and the six nominees per category rule dealt just fine with his manipulation attempts, so the occasional turd in a category is bearable. File 770 has attempted to measure the rabid puppy impact on the 2017 Hugo shortlist and found that 13 of the finalists were on Vox Day’s (much reduced) rabid puppies slate, while a further three were declared ineligible, the Supreme Dark Lord not being all that great at vetting his nominees. But then, several of the rabid puppy nominees are so-called hostages, works that are generally popular and would probably have made the ballot anyway. China Mieville, Neil Gaiman and Deadpool don’t need Vox Day’s help to make the Hugo ballot.

What is more, in spite of the puppies’ efforts, the diversity count is also great this year. The 2017 Hugo shortlist is full of women, people of colour, LGBT people, international writers and artists and yes, there are straight white men, too. I don’t think there is a single category that is entirely male. Compare that to the almost all male Hugo shortlists of the early to mid 2000s and the puppy-infested shortlists of the past three years.

So let’s take a look at the individual categories:

The best novel category looks excellent. We have the sequels to two previous Hugo winners in the category, Death’s End by Liu Cixin and The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin respectively. We have the long awaited and critically acclaimed debut novels by two accomplished short fiction writers, All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders and Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee respectively. We have a highly acclaimed debut novel with a very unique voice, Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, as well as the sort of sequel to 2014’s highly acclaimed debut novel with a unique voice, A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. A Closed and Common Orbit, Too Like the Lightning and Ninefox Gambit were also on my ballot, and I’m looking forward to reading the remaining three. And those who worry that science fiction is about to die out and be swamped by fantasy, which will inevitably lead to the collapse of the West or something, will be pleased that four of the six nominees in this category are unabashedly science fiction. The Obelisk Gate is an edge case, while the only clear fantasy novel is All the Birds in the Sky and even that one has a mad scientist character. Diversity count: 4 women, 2 men, 3 writers of colour, at least 3 LGBT writers, 1 international writer in translation, 0 puppies.

On to novella: Again, this is a fine set of finalists. A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson and Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold are both fine stories and very different from each other. Both were on my ballot BTW. The two Lovecraft retellings, The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle and The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, and the sort of Narnia inspired novella Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire all received a lot of buzz and great reviews last year and coincidentally also made the Nebula shortlist. They will be difficult for my Mom to evaluate (she’s a member of WorldCon 75 and therefore eligible to vote), though, because she isn’t familiar with H.P. Lovecraft beyond a vague idea of what Cthulhu is and hasn’t read the Narnia books either, since those weren’t available in Protestant parts of Germany, when she was a kid. That leaves China Miéville’s novella This Census-Taker, which was a puppy hostage due to China Miéville having the misfortune that Vox Day likes his work. Though China Miéville is a popular author and previous Hugo winner, so This Census-Taker is far from an unreasonable nominee and might well have made it without puppy help. Diversity count: 3 women, 3 men, 2 writers of colour, at least 1 LGBT writer, probably more, 1 puppy hostage.

The novella category is also where the dominance of Tor.com Publishing is the most notable, because four of six nominees were published as part of their novella line. But then, Tor is the only one of the big genre publishers with a dedicated novella line and they’re offerings are usually very good, so that’s not surprise. The remaining two novellas were also standalone publications – there are no magazine novellas in the novella category at all. This also shows how the e-publishing revolution has both led to a resurgence of the novella form (it wasn’t so long ago that finding enough novellas to nominate was very difficult) and also altered the delivery mechanism from magazines to standalone e-books.

Let’s go on to the novelette category: Again we have a fine shortlist, except for the single big turd sitting in the middle of it. “The Art of Space Travel” by Nina Allan, “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” by Fran Wilde, “The Tomato Thief” by Ursula Vernon, “Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman and “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay” By Alyssa Wong are all acclaimed stories by well regarded and popular writers. Two of them were also on my ballot and I look forward to reading the other three. And then, there is the big turd of puppy poo, namely Alien Stripper Boned From Behind by the T-Rex by Stix Hiscock (not their real name), which you can purchase from Amazon here. Vox Day’s obsession with dinosaur erotica continues to fascinate, but then everybody has the right to explore their kinks. Okay, so they’re really just taking the piss and Alien Stripper Boned From Behind by the T-Rex is the sort of thing that makes puppies giggle like twelve-year-olds (which would explain a lot, come to think of it). I guess that good old workhorse Noah Ward will be getting another outing. Diversity count: 5 women, 1 writer of colour, 1 international writer, at least 1 LGBT writer, 1 puppy. Stix Hiscock, meanwhile, is a complete enigma.

On to the short story category: Again, it’s a very fine category with one exception. “That Game We Played During the War” by Carrie Vaughn and “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies” by Brooke Bolander were among my favourite short stories of 2016. Both are excellent in very different ways and both were also on my personal Hugo ballot. “The City Born Great” by N.K. Jemisin and “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers” by Alyssa Wong are two very fine stories as well, though I didn’t nominate them. I have also heard many good things about “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar from the anthology The Starlit Woods, though I haven’t read it. And then there is the puppy nominee, “An Unimaginable Light” by John C. Wright. Now John C. Wright clearly has his fans, but I am not one of them. And unlike his writing and subject matter (because I really don’t like religion in my SFF) has radically improved since the 2015 Hugo ballot with its five Wright nominees, I doubt this one will beat Noah Ward for me. Diversity count: 5 women, 1 man, 3 writers of colour, 2 international writers, 1 puppy.

Let’s take a look at the remaining two fiction awards, the Campbell Award (not a Hugo TM) and the brand-new best series award. The 2017 Campbell Award nominees are Sarah Gailey, Malka Older, Ada Palmer, Laurie Penny, Kelly Robson and J. Mulrooney. Malka Older and Ada Palmer published two highly acclaimed debut novels last year. Laurie Penny has made her name as a journalist and published a delightful short story as well as a fine debut novella. Kelly Robson published a delightful novella last year, while Sarah Gailey has several short fiction credits and also published a series of very fine columns for Tor.com (some of which are nominated in the best related work category). Laurie Penny and Ada Palmer were also on my 2017 ballot, while Kelly Robson was on my 2016 ballot. The lone unknown quantity, to me at any rate, is J. Mulrooney. A bit of googling reveals that he is a Canadian author whose debut novel was published by Vox Day’s Castalia House. According to the blurb, it seems to be yet more of the religiously tinged fantasy that Vox Day loves so much and that isn’t my thing at all. Still, I’ll have to check out Mr. Mulrooney and his work before evaluating him. Diversity count: 5 women, 1 man, 1 Latina writer, at least 1 LGBT writer, 1 puppy.

On to best series: This is the first year (in addition to a one-of best series of all time Hugo in 1965, which was won by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (then) trilogy) that the best series Hugo will be awarded. I initially was supportive of the idea, because speculative fiction has become a lot more series-focussed than back in the 1960s. And a lot of excellent series are continuously overlooked by the Hugos, because by the time a series hits its stride a few books in, casual readers have problems hopping on board. However, when I saw people posting which series they were nominating/planning to nominate, my heart sank, because a lot of those were either series I had never read and had no idea how to evaluate or series where I’d read one book, found it not to my liking, and never went back.

Luckily, the actual best series ballot looks pretty good: Lois McMaster Bujold still holds the record for the most Hugo nominations and wins in the fiction categories, pretty much every book in the Vorkosigan series has either been nominated for or won a Hugo and the series is a genre classic on par with the likes of Foundation, Dune, Barsoom, Lensman and Future History. Coincidentally, it’s also excellent, one of the most varied series out there, where every book is not just different, but usually a different genre as well. Both my Mom and I nominated it and it would be a most deserving winner.

Urban fantasy, a subgenre that traditionally doesn’t do well at the Hugos, is nicely represented with Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series, Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series and The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone. I enjoy both the Peter Grant and October Daye series, though I didn’t nominate either, since there were series I enjoyed more with new books out in 2016. My Mom nominated the Peter Grant books, by the way. She hasn’t read October Daye, yet, but I think she’ll enjoy the series. As for The Craft Sequence, I read the first book years ago, enticed by a stunning Chris McGrath cover, but it didn’t do it for me. I will have to give this one another try. Coincidentally, it’s quite notable that all three urban fantasy series nominated in this category sit on the low to no romance end of the urban fantasy spectrum, whereas excellent and hugely successful series with a higher romance content such as Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series or Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series, both of which I nominated, didn’t make it. I guess the anti-romance bias of Hugo voters is still intact. And of course, the people who freaked out when Seanan McGuire got multiple nominations back in 2013 (definitely one of the low points of Hugo commentary pre-puppies) because of reasons can freak out once again.

The remaining two nominees in the series category are the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik and The Expanse series by James S.A Corey. The first books in both series were nominated for the best novel Hugo, plus Naomi Novik had an unrelated best novel nominee last year. The Temeraire series is also hugely popular and finished last year, while The Expanse profits from a successful TV adaptation. I read the first books in both series back in the day and liked them well enough, but somehow never got around to reading the rest. I also noticed, when The Expanse TV series came out, that I remembered very little of the actual plot of Leviathan Wakes (unusual for me, especially for a book that came out only six years ago). Still, all the nominated series are fine and deserving. Diversity count: 3 women, 4 men (since James S.A. Corey is the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), all white. Coincidentally, this is the most white and male of all the fiction categories.

On to best related work: This category was the worst affected by the puppy interference in the past two years and has been won by our old friend Noah Ward two years in a row. Therefore, I’m delighted to see that after the utter trashfire of the past two years, this year’s best related work shortlist is excellent. We have three non-fiction collections by popular and highly regarded genre authors, namely The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley, The View From the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman and Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin. We have a collection of interviews by another highly regarded genre author, namely Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg by Robert Silverberg (duh) and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. We have the autobiography by a beloved actress and genre icon, who also happens to be a very fine and underrated writer, namely The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher, and we have a fine series of columns on the women of Harry Potter by Sarah Gailey. Diversity count: 4 women, 3 men due to dual authorship, 1 Latino author, 0 puppies.

On to best graphic story: Again, this is an excellent shortlist that is evenly divided between creator-owned Image comics and mainstream Marvel superheroes. No DC and sadly, no comics from beyond the US. Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples is probably the most popular space opera comic out there. It’s a former winner and nominee in this category and also excellent. Brian K. Vaughan is also the writer of Paper Girls with art by Cliff Chiang, which is one of 2016’s most notable comic debuts along with Monstress by Marjorie M. Liu and Sana Takeda. The three Marvel nominees are Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson and Takeshi Miyazawa, Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze and The Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta, starring respectively a Pakistani-American teenger, the king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda and a crimson-faced android. So much for the claim by Marvel’s vice president of sales David Gabriel that diverse comics with diverse characters don’t sell, which was rebutted by G. Willow Wilson and J.A. Micheline among others. Diversity count (creators, not characters): 4 women, 8 men, 6 creators of colour, 0 puppies.

On to the two dramatic presentation categories: Dramatic presentation long looks pretty good. Arrival is this year’s serious SF movie (TM), highly acclaimed and also pretty good (but sorry, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis still doesn’t work that way). Hidden Figures is an inspirational tale about the space race and three black women overcoming racism and sexism to do science. Oh yeah, and it’s also a great movie. Some people are grumbling that it’s historical fiction rather than SF, but then so were Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff, which were also nominated in thius category. And the moon landing wasn’t even fiction. Rogue One is Star Wars – ’nuff said. The irreverent Deadpool was a breath of fresh air in the crowded superhero genre and Ghostbusters, which I’m really happy to see here, was the rare example of a remake of a beloved classic that brought something new to the idea. Plus, this one will make the heads of misogynists everywhere explode.

The only real unknown quantity for me in this category is season 1 of Stranger Things. I know that the series got a lot of love and acclaim, though the combination of a 1980s setting, a plot that might have come from a Stephen King novel of that era and a cast that looks as if they stepped right out of The Goonies or Stand by Me is a bit too much nostalgia for me, especially since it looks as if it was rather cynically aimed at the childhood memories of my generation. Plus, Stranger Things is a Netflix series and I don’t do streaming services. So unless I can find a way to watch this without a Netflix subscription, I have no idea how to evaluate this.

I’m a bit surprised not to see Captain America: Civil War and Doctor Strange on the ballot, but then Captain America: Civil War is a good, but not exactly a happy movie. And while Doctor Strange was visually stunning, the plot wasn’t all that great and then there was that whole whitewashing controversy regarding the casting of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One.

Dramatic presentation short form, on the other hand, once again drives home the point that my tastes in TV are very out of touch with those of the Hugo electorate and US TV viewers in general, since I haven’t seen/listened to any of the nominated works. There is the usual Doctor Who episode, in this case the 2016 Christmas Special, and there are two Game of Thrones episodes. I used to watch both shows, but I’ve been over them for several years now. An episode of The Expanse has also been nominated, unsurprisingly, since The Expanse is the most discussed new SFF show of last year along with the conspicuously absent Westworld. I wouldn’t even be averse to watching The Expanse, but so far it hasn’t had a DVD or a TV release in Germany, because one of the streaming services is sitting on the rights. And I don’t do streaming services. San Junipero, an episode of the BBC anthology series Black Mirror, is something of a surprise nominee. It’s another 1980s nostalgia piece (guess whose generation is dominating the Hugos by now) with a mixed-race lesbian love story (yeah) and a plot that sounds actually pretty good. On the other hand, it was written by Charlie Brooker whom I vehemently dislike since his time as The Guardian‘s TV critic. I will have to see if I can track this one down. The final nominee in this category is even more surprising, since it is not a film or a TV episode, but a music album named Splendor & Misery by a band called Clipping. I’m afraid I’ve never heard of them, but I will give it a listen. Coincidentally, dramatic presentation short is the only category that is all male, whereas dramatic presentation long has two female screenwriters.

Let’s take a look at the two editing categories: The nominees in the short form category are John Joseph Adams, Neil Clarke, Ellen Datlow, Jonathan Strahan, Lynn and Michael Thomas and Sheila Williams. All very fine editors with good track records. Diversity count. 3 women, 4 men, 0 puppies.

The long form category consists of five fine and highly deserving nominees, namely Sheila E. Gilbert, Liz Gorinsky, Devi Pillai, Miriam Weinberg and Navah Wolfe, and one big pile of puppy poo, namely Vox Day who apparently still isn’t tired of losing to Noah Ward. Diversity count: 5 women, 1 men, 2 editors of colour (since Vox Day self-defines as mixed race), 1 puppy.

The semiprozine category is a nice mix of established mags such as Uncanny, Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the semi-established The Book Smugglers (who were nominated in the fanzine category back in 2015 and have graduated to semiprozine by now) and newcomers like GigaNotoSaurus and Cirsova. Cirsova, which focusses on sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy, is the puppy pick. Though it’s possible that Cirsova appeals beyond the puppy ranks, especially since fans of sword and sorcery don’t really have a lot of choice where to get their fix.

The fanzine nominees are a nice mix of different online zines, namely Lady Business, SF Bluestocking, nerds of a feather and Rocket Stack Rank, a traditional print zine, namely Journey Planet, and a puppy pick, namely the Castalia House blog. Though at least there is quite a lot of actual genre discussion going on at the Castalia House blog these days, so it could have been worse.

Best fancast was one of two categories that were no awarded last year (unfairly IMO, since there were one or two decent choices). Luckily, this year’s shortist is much better. Galactic Suburbia, the Fangirl Happy Hour and Tea and Jeopardy are all fine podcasts and were among my own nominees. The Coode Street Podcast is another good choice and while I’m not familiar with Ditch Diggers, the involvement of Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace sounds promising. The Rageaholic is the puppy pick. I bounced hard off this one last year, when I tried it.

Best fan writer offers another fine set of nominees. Natalie Luhrs, Foz Meadows and Abigail Nussbaum are three smart and insightful genre commentators, who were pushed off the ballot by the puppy shenangigans these past two years, so I’m glad to see them nominated here. Mike Glyer is a 13 time Hugo winner and many more times nominee as well as the mastermind behind File 770. Jeffro Johnson is the puppy pick in this category, but – as I’ve said before – he is one of the better puppy fan writers and focusses mainly on reviews of classic SFF. If only he’d lose the strident rhetoric, he might even beat Noah one day. The estimable Dr. Chuck Tingle, finally, proves that love is real and that he doesn’t need any devilman help to make the Hugo ballot. Diversity count: 3 women, 2 men, 1 puppy and the enigma that is Dr. Chuck Tingle.

Let’s take a look at the two art categories: Pro artist looks very good with Julie Dillon, Galen Dara, Chris McGrath, John Picacio, Victo Ngai and Sana Takeda. Diversity count: 4 women, 2 men, 3 artists of colour, 0 puppies.

Fan artist, on the other hand, has a couple of “Who?” nominees. Likhain a.k.a. M. Sereno, Spring Schoenhuth and Ninni Aalto are all known quantities and two of them have been nominated before in this category. Vesa Lehtimäki was new to me, but a bit of googling revealed that they specialise in photoshopped photos of Star Wars toys. The two puppy picks, Alex Garner and Mansik Yang, were unknown to me as well. Alex Garner mainly specialises in superhero and movie inspired art, while Mansik Yang makes fantasy and horror art. Both do nice work, puppy picked or not. The diversity of media and styles is also good, since this category covers everything from traditional drawing and painting via altered photography to jewelery design. Finally, I’m also pleased to see two Finnish artists nominated in this category.

Notable trends this year are a tendency towards retellings of genre classics such as Lovecraft’s works, Narnia and fairy tales, which I also noted in my comments on the 2016 Nebula nominees. The trend towards strong and unique narrative voices that we’ve noticed in the non-puppy nominees of the past few years (and even in some puppies, i.e. John C. Wright has a very recognisable voice, even if it is not to my taste at all) continues this year. Though unlike previous years, I don’t see a notable trend towards certain themes and subjects. Tor.com continues to dominate the short fiction categories, particularly the novella category (to be fair, they do publish a lot of excellent works), whereas the “big three” print magazines don’t have a single nominee in the fiction categories this year and only one in the editing categories. Another thing that I found really notable this year is how many of the finalists are women, people of colour, LGBT people or a combination thereof. In quite a few categories, the lone male nominee was the puppy pick.

So in short, after two off years due to canine interference, the Hugos are back on track.

I’ll probably do a follow-up post collecting reactions and commentary from around the web, but for now, this is my take on the 2017 Hugo nominees. My Mom thinks the shortlist looks pretty good, insofar as she is familiar with the works, and is looking forward to trying those she isn’t familiar with. She’s not overly keen on fairy tale and Lovecraft retellings and Game of Thrones episodes, though. She also wishes to make known that she is definitely not Chuck Tingle. Yes, she really said that.

Comments are off – puppies poop elsewhere.

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The Space Opera Resurgence

At Wired, Charlie Jane Anders talks about the current space opera resurgence and why the subgenre has become more diverse and better than it has been in a long time.

The article offers a nice overview of the current crop of space opera writers amd also highlights how diverse the subgenre has become. The authors and books mentioned – The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers, Binti and Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor, The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi, Ninefox Gambit and The Raven Strategem by Yoon Ha Lee and of course the Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie (plus shout-outs to Guardians of the Galaxy and the TV series The Expanse) – will not exactly be news to SFF fans. After all, these aren’t undiscovered gems, but some of the most discussed, anticipated and award-winning works in the genre. You could also add other names to those mentioned in the article, e.g. Rachel Bach, Ann Aguirre, Elizabeth Bonesteel, K.B. Wagers, Aliette de Bodard, Emma Newman, Sara Creasy, S.K. Dunstall, Margaret Fortune, Rhonda Mason, James S.A. Corey (who is included – sort of – via a reference to The Expanse TV show based on their books), Tobias Buckell, Mike Brooks, Michael Cobley, Jay Allan (whom Charlie Jane Anders actually planned to include in her article according to this tweet), Charles Gannon, Marko Kloos, not to mentioned established space opera stalwarts like Lois McMaster Bujold, Catherine Asaro, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, C.J. Cherryh, Melinda Snodgrass, Tanya Huff, Elizabeth Moon, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, David Weber, Mike Shepherd, Jack Campbell, Jack McDevitt, Kevin J. Anderson, etc… However, Wired is a tech magazine, not an SF magazine, and therefore aimed at a more general readership to whom the big names and seminal works of current space opera may well be new.

Charlie Jane Anders also points out that there is a lot more space opera to be found on both physical bookshelves and on the virtual shelves of Amazon, Kobo, B&N, Google Play, iTunes or Smashwords than there was only a few years ago. She writes:

Not long ago, a group of mostly British men dominated the field. Authors like Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, and Iain M. Banks wrote wild, sweeping tales, often about cyborgs and other post-human characters. You still see a lot of that in space operas, but the genre’s renewed popularity has introduced readers to a diverse array of writers, each of them bringing a new approach to tales of thrilling adventures in the cosmos.

I remember those days of the early 2000s well, when space opera was mainly written by a bunch of white, mostly British men. Occasionally, those books made it onto the shelves of the local Thalia store and I bought several of them, because hey, there was a spaceship and/or a planet in space on the cover, the blurb sounded kind of interesting and the authors were highly regarded and/or had won a bunch of awards. But time after time, when I actually cracked the book open, I found myself deeply disappointed, because there usually was a lot of technobabble about the singularity and highly advanced civilisations with a lot of quasi-magic tech and characters that were thin as cardboard and often behaved so unbelievably that the only likely explanation would be that those books were secretly authored by advanced AIs, since it certainly didn’t sound as if the authors had ever met an actual, living, breathing human being. What is more, those books also tended to sound kind of samey, the same highly advanced civilisation meddling in everybody else’s affairs with their quasi-magic tech in book after book. It wasn’t until several years later that I realised that many of those authors were more or less inspired by Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels (who is still considered the gold standard for space opera by many UK writers and critics).

Not that all British writers were writing what became known as New British Space Opera at the time. Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker series, for example, is space opera in the truest sense of the word, with a cast of thousands, a broad sweeping canvas that spans all space and (eventually) time and everything and the kitchen sink, too, thrown in. It’s also a lot of fun. However, Green’s space opera was never to be found on the bookstore shelves, at least not at the stores I patronised, so I didn’t discover his work until years later. And for a time in the early 2000s, New British Space Opera and singularity science fiction was all there was actually to be found on the shelves.

I didn’t like any of those books. But I was an SF fan and a space opera fan and this was all the space opera there was, with very few exceptions (mostly published by Baen Books, which are notoriously difficult to find in Europe). So I kept trying the highly regarded New Space Opera of the early 2000s, until I found myself standing in the local Thalia store, the latest offering of New British Space Opera subgenre in hand (it was this one – I remember the cover very clearly), when I suddenly dropped the book to the floor and exclaimed, “Why do I keep buying this shit? I don’t even like these books.” So I turned my back on New British Space Opera and on science fiction altogether (I did put the book back on the shelf first) and read other genres for a few years, until I came back in a roundabout way via urban fantasy and science fiction romance and found a whole universe of SFF books that weren’t on the radar of the official genre critics at all.

Now, some ten to fifteen years later, there is a lot more space opera on the shelves than back in the early 2000s. It’s also a lot more diverse the than just pale Banks clones. Nor is it just written by white, overwhelmingly British dudes – indeed, some of the best space opera of today is written by women and writers of colour. And even some of those authors whose novels almost put me off science fiction altogether some ten years ago are writing much more enjoyable works these days. For example, I heartily disliked Absolution Gap, but enjoyed some of Alastair Reynolds’ more recent works like Slow Bullets and Revenger.

So we’re definitely in the middle of a space opera resurgence at the moment, which is great news, as far as I’m concerned. However, not everybody is happy about the direction the subgenre has taken. Some of them make their views heard in the comments. Yes, I know one should never read the comments, but bear with me here. First, you get a few of the usual “You missed my favourite book/author/series” comments, which are actually constructive, since they help those interested in the subgenre to find more books they’ll like (someone even gave a shout-out to good old Perry Rhodan).

There also are two what I’d call puppyish comments, though I have no idea if the commenters are in any way affiliated with the sad or rabid puppies. One commenter declares that “this type of space opera sounds more like wet dreams for SJWs”, but that the real fans (TM) want to read nutty nuggets and nothing but nutty nuggets before launching into a list of sufficiently nutty nuggety space opera.

Another commenter has this to say:

“Girl going into space, expering [sic] things and going trhrough personal growth” is a different genre. Not worse or better than space opera, but not SO. Charles Stross have (among his huge output) written some books that could be classified as SO (Saturns Children and Escaton series) but isn’t among the biggest SO writers.

Regarding the articles conclusion I beg to differ. Space Opera have given us a lot of alien invasions, memetic viruses, antimatter terrorism, fractional C strikes, genetic modifications going haywire, AI takeover, awakening of the Great Old Ones, enviromental disasters or the (repeated) end of humanity. The “girl going into space” genre could fit the bill for safety and happy ending- but it is not SO.

So in short, boys going into space, having advantures and experiencing personal growth is totally space opera, but girls doing the same thing is not, because they pollute the genre with their feelings and romance and happy endings and general girl cooties. I wonder what this commenter makes of the Honor Harrington and Kris Longknife series, both of which are very nutty nuggetty, but have female protagonists.

Paul Watson, the commenter who stated that he wants nutty nuggets rather than SJW wet dreams, helpfully included a link to a roundtable discussion with several authors regarding what makes a good space opera. He obviously wants us to click on it, so I did.

The authors Watson interviewed for his roundtable are Dave Bara, Michael Cobley, S.K. Dunstall, H. Paul Hosinger and Jack McDevitt, i.e. four men and two women, since S.K. Dunstall is the pen name of two sisters from Australia. It’s actually a pretty good discussion and a lot more nuanced than I would have expected from Watson’s comment on Charlie Jane Anders’ Wired article. Coincidentally, Watson also wrote a really nice overview about the US publication history of Perry Rhodan.

Nonetheless, the selection of authors interviewed suggests that Paul Watson’s preferences tend more towards the military end of the spectrum (though to be fair, I’ve only read Michael Copley and S.K. Dunstall of the authors in question). He’s far from the only one, cause if you take a look at Amazon’s subgenre bestseller list for space opera or for sub-subcategories like Galactic Empire or Space Fleet, you’ll find that the category is heavily dominated by indie military science fiction with a few big name trade releases such as John Scalzi’s Collapsing Empire, the Expanse novels (since they’ve gotten a sales boost due to the TV series), media tie-ins and genre classics mixed in. It’s almost as if Baen’s slushpile came alive and took over Amazon’s space opera category.

Now space opera became an early casualty of the “write to market” strategy employed by many indie authors, because Chris Fox, the author credited with coining “write to market” (he outlines his strategy on his YouTube channel), chose space opera as his example for an underserved market (the relevant video is here) and thus opened the flood gates for indie space opera. The “write to market” philosophy is probably also the reason why a lot of the indie space opera dominating Amazon’s charts is so samey, a whole lot of spaceship in space covers, while the plots are a mix of Starship Troopers, the Lost Fleet series, Mass Effect and the new Battlestar Galactica with the occasional Honor Harrington or Kris Longknife clone thrown in for good measure. There are also a few urban fantasy/space opera hybrids featuring wizards and vampires in space, which at least try to do something original.

However, while a lot of Amazon’s indie space opera offerings aren’t to my taste (and note that there are indie space opera writers whose works I like, e.g. C. Gockel, Lindsay Buroker, Patty Jansen, Jennifer Foehner Wells, Krista D. Ball, K.S. Augustin, Sandy Williams, Jenna Bennett, Chris Reher, etc…), they clearly are to someone’s taste, because those books sell… a whole lot. There is a voracious readership for military flavoured space opera out there. And due to Amazon’s algorithms and because Amazon’s customer base is mostly concentrated in the rural, landlocked parts of the US, where that sort of thing is popular, Amazon’s space opera bestseller lists has been taken over by military science fiction. Which is great, if that’s what you like to read and/or write. However, space operas that don’t fit the fairly narrow scope of manly space marines doing manly things in space can easily become drowned out by the flood of military SF.

Now my personal tastes run in a very different direction. In spite of the broad canvas and larger than life plots, I prefer my space opera character-focussed. I like a bit of romance in my space opera and a focus on character relationships (both romantic as well as friendship and family relationships) in general. I really like characters struggling to overthrow an injust system or just trying to find a place where they can live without interference by the system. I actually like space politics – I’m probably the only person who enjoyed the Imperial senate scenes in the Star Wars prequels. I don’t mind military settings and themes, but I prefer my military science fiction more focussed on the characters and their individual conflicts than on space battles, weapons technology and vanquishing the enemy. And I really hate characters blindly following problematic or blatantly illegal orders. Alien races who are evil because they are evil and who want to conquer/subjugate/exterminate humanity because that’s what they do and who just happen to be insectoid or reptilian or Cthulhu with the serial numbers filed off (if people would at least make their evil alien race look like cuddly teddy bears for a change) bore me. Honestly, if I never see a plot along the lines of “humanity is locked in a deadly war of annihilation with an evil alien race and only Captain Manly McMannister and his ragtag crew can save the galaxy”, it will still be too soon.

My own two space operas, the Shattered Empire series and the In Love and War series, are both tailored to my personal preferences, high on all the elements I love about space opera and low on those I don’t like. I write a bit more about what I wanted to do with both series here and here. And yes, I initially began writing those stories, because I couldn’t find enough of the sort of space opera I liked to read out there.

And this is precisely why the current space opera boom is great for all of us who love the subgenre. Because today’s space opera is not just New British Space Opera or nutty nuggetty military SF or the Napoleonic Wars in space or the Roman Empire in space or science fiction romance or a picareqsue Bildungsroman in space or quenderqueer feminist space opera or magical mathematics in space – it’s all that and more. And that’s good for all of us.

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for March 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 February 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 urban fantasy, epic fantasy, Asian fantasy, space opera, military science fiction, near future science fiction, post-apocalyptic science fiction, dystopian fiction, science fiction romance, time travel, horror, dragons, vampires, witches, ghosts, superheroes, aiens, robots, artificial intelligences, cyborg bounty hunters, supersoldiers, mutant assassins, galactic empires, Martian judgements, intergalactic prison breaks, radioactive wastelands, lake monsters, murder mysteries in space 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] Wisps of Spider Silk – First Thread by Athena Andreadis:

Wisps of Spider Silk, First Thread is a diptych of two interlinked space opera stories (“The Stone Lyre” and “The Wind Harp”) that tell of interplanetary cultures in conflict — and in perilous alliances — over psychic talents and the dominance they can confer.

These two stories are wisps of a vast nebula. In this universe the Minoan civilization partly recovered from the Thera explosion and some of its descendants eventually took to the stars, as did their adversaries. This is the universe of “Dry Rivers” and “Planetfall” which appeared in Crossed Genres in 2009.

[image error] Traitor by Krista D. Ball:

Seven years ago, Rebecca St. Martin took the coward’s path to save her skin. She has lived with that decision, eking out a life as an indentured servant on a space station far from home. Only now, fate has decided to give Rebecca another chance. A ghost from her past plans to execute a daring rescue from the prison bowels of the station Rebecca now works.

Rebecca has to face the same decision she made all those years ago. Could she watch her friends be murdered? Or could she, just for once, be a hero?

[image error] Aletheia by J.S. Breukelaar:

Deep below the island, something monstrous lies waiting for Thettie, and it knows her name.

“Family and small town desires and secrets simmer in J. S. Breukelaar’s melancholy and affecting mix of literary, noir, and horror by the lake. ALETHEIA is a compelling 21st century ghost story. Don’t lose your Gila monster!” — Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

The remote lake town of Little Ridge has a memory problem. There is an island out on the lake somewhere, but no one can remember exactly where it is—and what it has to do with the disappearance of the eccentric Frankie Harpur or the seven-year-old son of a local artist, Lee Montour.

When Thettie Harpur brings her family home to find Frankie, she faces opposition from all sides—including from the clan leader himself, the psychotic Doc Murphy.

Lee, her one true ally in grief and love, might not be enough to help take on her worst nightmare. The lake itself.

A tale of that most human of monsters—memory—Aletheia is part ghost story, part love story, a novel about the damage done, and the damage yet to come. About terror itself. Not only for what lies ahead, but also for what we think we have left behind.

[image error] Dead World by Cora Buhlert:

Once, Anjali Patel and Mikhail Grikov were soldiers on opposing sides of an intergalactic war. They met, fell in love and decided to go on the run together.

Now Anjali and Mikhail are trying to eke out a living on the independent worlds of the galactic rim, while attempting to stay under the radar of those pursuing them.

When they are hired to retrieve a weapons prototype from an abandoned planet, it seems like a routine job. But it quickly turns out that the planet is not as empty as they had thought. And soon, Anjali and Mikhail find themselves caught in a deadly chase across a radioactive wasteland.

This is a novella of 27500 words or approx. 95 print pages in the “In Love and War” series, but may be read as a standalone.

[image error] The Bay of Sins by J.D. Byrne:

The war is over, but nothing is settled.

On the Neldathi side of the Water Road the clans are slowly pulling apart following a sudden murder. Hirrek is tasked with getting to the bottom of a mystery: was this killing the random act of a violent, unstable man? Or was it something more sinister, a hint of what the Neldathi thought they’d defeated during the war? The unity won in blood may be slipping away.

In the rebuilding city of Innisport, life is returning to something like normal. That’s largely due to Mida, given the task of rebuilding the city by Antrey Ranbren herself. After Mida hands power over to the Guild of Politicians, she finds herself on trial for her life, charged with treason and being a collaborator. Along the way she meets someone, a curious remnant of the war, who makes her rethink the way she sees those that destroyed her city.

In the meantime, Antrey returns from exile, escaping to the wilderness of Telebria. She gains new allies, including Rurek, and a new foe, the Sentinel Faerl. He’s best known among the other Sentinels as the man who let Antrey slip away once before, getting all his men killed in the process. Now he has a chance for redemption and revenge. But Antrey is willing to do anything to ensure that her legacy does not slip away.

The chase is on, as the saga of The Water Road barrels toward its explosive conclusion.

The Boy With The Blue Sky by N.C. Davis:

How far would you go to bring back a loved one from the dead?

Theo returned her stare. ‘It’s not just a program.’

‘Then what the hell is it?’ she said.

‘It’s a digital reconstruction of our son.’

On the anniversary of their young son’s death, teacher Eury can only find peace by descending into an electronically-induced world of dreamless sleep.

Her husband Theo, a music lecturer, is at the end of his tether and has tried everything he can think of to drag Eury out of the darkness. So, in a final act of desperation he acquires software that can digitally resurrect their child.

Will it bring Eury back to him or will the shock drive her deeper into a world of endless slumber?

The Boy with the Blue Sky is a story that shines a light on the steady creep of technology, into the most intimate parts of our lives.

[image error] Starbound by J.J. Green:

Humanity has colonized Mars and invented interstellar travel—joining the thousands of alien races that explore the deepest reaches of the galaxy.

Jas Harrington is the sole survivor of a Martian colony disaster. After growing up in institutions on Mars and Earth, she travels to Antarctica to train as a deep space security operative. All she wants is to graduate college and escape her past, but it isn’t long before she faces familiar prejudice against returned colonists.

Jas must navigate aggression, bigotry, and the frozen Antarctic wastes if she’s to fulfil her dreams.

For once, fighting her way out of her problems isn’t an option, until it is.

Prequel to the 10-book space opera serial, Shadows of the Void.

[image error] Prominence by A.C. Hadfield and Colin F. Barnes:

They tried to destroy our planets. Our way of life. They tried to send us into extinction. But we, the Coalition, fought them and won. That was a decade ago. We had assumed they were beaten for good.

We were wrong.

They’re known as the Host: a cabal of aliens seeking to dominate our sector of space. And they’re back—with help from a powerful new enemy.

Against their wrath, we must stand. We’re outnumbered and unprepared. If we lose, we lose everything.

But there is hope. An ancient race of long-dead but technologically advanced aliens called the Navigators have a ship called the Blackstar that could potentially turn the tide. That is if I, Kai Locke, a humble ship racer, can find it and learn how to harness its power in time.

If I fail, the Coalition will fall, and the Host will consign us to a distant memory. I refuse to let that happen. I will fight to my last breath for the Coalition’s survival.

[image error] Simon Rising by Brian D. Howard:

Five years ago, an alien ship crashed into the bay. Since then, vigilantes and criminals with extraordinary powers increasingly dominate headlines.

A man wakes up in the hospital with no memory. He’s told he is Steve Ambrose, a serial bank robber who was shot while being arrested. Everything changes when he discovers he has telekinetic powers. Hunted by FBI Special Agent Rachel Moore, and with unknown enemies around every corner, can he change who he is, or is the dark criminal everyone accuses him of being too deeply a part of his nature to escape?

[image error] Ambassador 6: The Enemy Within by Patty Jansen:

Two men went on a surfing trip in a remote area. Only one came back, accused of murdering the other.

Sounds simple, right?

Not quite, because the alleged murder happened on another planet, the accused is a member of the secretive Pretoria Cartel of super-rich business tycoons–with illegal off-Earth ventures–and the only person who can remotely be called a witness is an alien, the elder Abri from the Pengali Thousand Islands tribe.

Diplomat Cory Wilson is asked to accompany Abri to the Nations of Earth court, but when he and his team arrive there, their contacts have been moved to different cases, their rooms are bugged and their movements restricted. No one is answering their questions, but it is when a lawyer is murdered and Cory’s team captures a mysterious stalker that things get interesting.

Just as well they are prepared in the usual way: alert and highly armed.

[image error] Dances of Deception by J.C. Kang:

An invincible empire threatens to invade Cathay, and only a Dragon Song can ensure peace.

After vanquishing the Last Dragon with the power of her voice, all Kaiya wants is a quiet life of anonymity. Instead, the Emperor sends her to negotiate peace with the aggressive Teleri Empire.

The critical mission reunites her with her childhood friend Tian, now an assassin-spy who loathes killing. He is no longer the adorable, gullible boy from her memories, any more than she is the adventurous, sweet girl from his. Instead of rekindling nostalgia for a youthful innocence they both yearn for, their reunion ignites a mutual hatred.

When the Teleri Empire breaks off talks, Tian must help Kaiya escape. Orcs, Ogres, and enemy soldiers stand between them and home, and their volatile relationship could get them captured… or killed.

Chameleon Uncovered by B.R. Kingsolver

The dark sequel to the best-selling Chameleon Assassin.

Libby has a chance to build a legitimate reputation when she’s hired by one of the world’s most prestigious museums to bolster their security. The gig is in Chicago, where her heartthrob lives, so she hopes for a little romance.

She’s on a first-name basis with larceny, mayhem, and death, but Libby’s not used to being on the receiving end. Chicago is far darker and more dangerous than her native Toronto. Amidst terrorist bombings, stolen treasure, and murder, a mutant prophet calls for revolution. Away from her family and friends, Libby has nowhere to turn as enemies assault her from all sides.

Their mistake. Libby is a dangerous enemy.

2184: Beneath the Steel City by Ben Lovejoy:

In London 2184, the government monitors every move its citizens make, logs every action, notes every visit, supervises every communication, penalises the slightest transgression with all the warmth and sympathy of a hungry piranha.

Computer tech David Lafferty has grown tired of living beneath the crushing weight of a billion petty rules, and decided it was time to create his own rules in an underground life beneath the steel city. Aided by Saira, a Self-propelled Artificially Intelligent Robot Assistant, and a small circuit board stolen from the government, all is going well until an unknown adversary appears to have learned his every secret …

[image error] The Cosmic City by Brian K. Lowe:

In the conclusion to The Stolen Future trilogy, Keryl Clee finds himself at the center of a crisis which could mean the destruction not only on Earth, but of Time itself. Hostages of a time-traveling madman who is creating an army from the past to conquer the world of the future, before Clee and Lady Maire can defeat him they must come to grips with the shocking truth behind the 300-year-old Nuum invasion of Earth.

Beset by new and powerful enemies, betrayed by the Council of Nobles itself, Keryl Clee has one last chance to unite the peoples of Earth–Nuum and Thoran, human and non-human alike–because even he is powerless against those who are coming from beyond the stars to reach…The Cosmic City.

[image error] Insurgence by Lori Ann Ramsay:

Earth’s last hope relied on the mission to Xeoron, to save the captive from the horrid alien virus that claimed so many lives and plagued mankind for over three centuries. The mission would also set those bound on the alien planet free, even if it meant giving their own lives. The team had trained most of their lives for the mission, with many entering the Academy of Space Exploration as young as twelve years old. Now the launch propelled their starship into space at warp speed to a planetary system on the other side of the galaxy. The team sought to free the humans held captive there, whether dead or alive and to bring back a cure to save mankind and to save planet Earth from an alien invasion and annihilation. But the underlying possibility of captivity on Xeoron and failure to complete the mission hung in the air, would they succeed in saving Earth and mankind?

Insurgence is the first book of The Realm of Xeoron series. A space opera sci-fi series with genetic engineering, colonization on an alien planet, and contact with aliens.

[image error] Prison Break by Jim Rudnick:

The Warlord Noriega, once captured is now being tried for the destruction of the Barony destroyer the Gibraltar with hundreds of casualties. But his lawyers are claiming that the Confederacy does not have jurisdiction and that is the court cases that begin with this tale. Added is the threat from the largest Warlord, Konoe, that if the Confederacy does sentence Noriega to life, then that constitutes a declaration of war with his realm.

The Barony is also now a part of the investigations over on Birdland, where the Duke and Duchess are discovering more about the mysterious ball-birds–and why they seem to be important even though the knowledge about them is scant. This however is also a factor in the new dissolution of the partnership between the Duke, the Baroness and the Caliph. With all the Xithricite that is currently known on the RIM, the Caliph and his new admiral are formidable powers on the RIM.

As the Warlord is sentenced to life on Halberd the lawyers file with the RIM Confederacy Supreme Court and yet the Warlord Konoe will not wait, and tries to break Noriega out of the prison planet–something that has never happened before. Ships clash and battles occur as the breakout rises to Pike Station up above the prison and threaten the security of the RIM Confederacy too…

[image error] Blood Hunt by Izzy Shows:

Wizard without a license. Defender of London.

The Hunter in the Darkness. Not a title I wanted, but that’s who I am now. Vampires are trying to destroy my city. We’re one mistake away from the world knowing about magic, but the vampires don’t care. They just crave their next fix. I have to stop them, but I can’t risk using the demonic powers I have. Whatever lurks inside me, it’s dark, and it’s hungry. I will find a way to fight on my own.

Vampires are not the only evil in this world.

[image error] Judgment of Mars by Glynn Stewart:

A war fought in the shadows

A conspiracy shattered in fire

A moment of weakness…

When politics are played for blood.

The destruction of the secret archive of the Royal Order of Keepers on Mars has left Damien Montgomery, Hand of the Mage-King, with his enemies defeated, his lover dead—and his questions unanswered.

When he seeks out the remaining Keepers for answers, he discovers only violence and death in their strongholds. Someone else is hunting down the survivors to make sure they never answer Damien’s questions—or anyone else’s.

As a wave of murder sweeps Mars and the consequences of the Keepers’ conspiracy sink home, Damien is summoned before the Council of the Protectorate to answer for the deaths of two other Hands. In the political heart of the Protectorate of Mars, he finds he may be forced to choose between honoring the oaths he swore and preserving the survival of the Protectorate itself!

[image error] Team Guardian by Naomi Stone:

This collection includes the three Team Guardian adventures: Sweet Mercy, Safe Haven and Shining Hope.

When a probability bomb exploded in the heartlands of the US, no one couldhave predicted the results. Spreading chaos was the point of using a probability bomb. Thousands died. Others were gifted with strange powers. Ten years later the world had become a different place.

When Rachel Connolly — a Reverse Empath — and Franklin Luke Delano (Fluke) — a Probability Talent — meet in the course of capturing a would-be bomber, they have little time to explore their powerful connection before they must draw a mad Puppet Master into the open.

Beth Talbot’s psychometry Talent is a curse as well as a blessing, making Time for her less a smoothly-flowing river than a storm-tossed ocean. She sees David Connolly as a rock of stability in that maelstrom, with his Talent for neutralizing other Talents like hers. But how can she even try to turn his attention her way when everyone on Team Guardian needs him, especially with amad Talent out to take control of the entire world’s computing – and banking -systems.

Maybe Tom could have called on another Illusionist to help in the hunt, but Sophia Alvarez is the best, and she’s been on his mind since the last mission they worked together. Tom takes on the authority and responsibilities of leading the Team – in time to join the FBI in tracking down a rogue Talent behind a string of killings they believe the work of a vigilante Talent bent on destroying sexual predators.

[image error] The Piranha Solution by John Triptych:

In the near future, a new space race begins. Private industry is now pushing the limits of human exploration and colonization. NASA has changed its mandate into a regulatory agency to oversee all US-based corporations and individuals involved in interplanetary expansion.

Stilicho Jones always has his hands full while working as a personal troubleshooter for eccentric trillionaire Errol Flux and his numerous cutting edge space projects. When a mysterious and potentially deadly situation threatens the colonies on Mars, Stilicho must team up with a feisty NASA special agent in a race against time to avert a looming catastrophe that could end any hope of inhabiting the Red Planet.

Check out The Piranha Solution. If you were ever inspired by the NASA Space Program, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Robert Zubrin’s The Case for Mars, or Andy Weir’s The Martian, then have a look at this newest, edge of your seat technothriller!

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Genre versus Literary – the Crime Fiction Edition

The old genre versus literary fiction debate has reared its ugly head again – and just when you thought that horse was well and truly dead.

This time around, the opening volley was fired by one William O’Rourke, emeritus professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. O’Rourke was actually trying to do a nice thing, namely praising his former student and protegé Michael Collins in the Irish Times.

The first half of the article is actually pretty good, a profile of Michael Collins, the multi-gifted student but perpetual outsider, written from the POV of his former professor. But then O’Roure goes off on a tangent or several, bemoaning the lack of literary culture in the US and what little there is of it is hopelessly fractured. He complains about Bookscan and how it can kill writing careers. O’Rourke even goes as far as to lament the sad fate of the straight white dude, because straight white dudes – a long as they’re still alive – are no longer fashionable.

To be fair, O’Rourke does have a point there, though putting it into blatantly offensive “Wah, won’t someone think of the poor widdle straight white dudes!” words doesn’t help him bring his point across at all. But the truth is that the US is focussed mainly on race, gender and sexual orientation (and to a lesser degree disability), but tends to ignore other axes of marginalisation such as ethnicity or socio-economic background. As a result, international writers are often lumped in with whatever their race happens to be in the US, which completely ignores the fact that their nationality will often act as a roadblock, even if they happen to be white. And though Michael Collins is white, he is not American but Irish (and was apparently rejected by the prestigious writing program of the University of Iowa for being “too Irish”) and of course writes from a different perspective than American-born writers. So yes, O’Rourke does have a point there, though he expresses it not just badly, but in a blatantly offensive way.

And of course, O’Rourke doesn’t do himself any favours either by comparing his own novel Notts to GB84 by David Peace, since both novels happens to be about the 1980s miners’ strike, and declaring GB84 inferior. Okay, so I understand that O’Rourke prefers his own interpretation of the events, but David Peace is pretty damn brilliant, so brilliant he made me read a novel about a miners’ strike of all things.*

But the kicker of O’Rourke’s article, the one bit everybody is talking about, is this one:

Very few non-commercial writers know how to successfully advance their careers. Michael was no exception. He changed agents, publishers, gave up writing short stories – a critical mistake in this country, if you want to continue to be noticed as a literary writer – and attempted to jump into the crime genre to entice the vagrant reader. If bestsellers were easy to write there would be more of them. Michael, unfortunately, had, has, too much talent to succeed as a crime writer. He doesn’t possess the fatal lack of talent required. He asks too much of a reader. America really doesn’t possess enough of a literary culture anymore to maintain a writer like Michael.

Ouch. That’s really nasty, especially since crime fiction is the most “respectable” of genre fiction. If O’Rourke accuses even crime writers of a having fatal lack of talent**, I don’t even want to imagine how he feels about science fiction and fantasy writers or – gasp – romance authors.

The response was swift, since plenty of primarily British and Irish crime writers felt compelled to call out William O’Rourke on his remarks. Also at the Irish Times (which seems to have a very good literature section), Martin Doyle collects responses by various Irish crime writers (including one authors I met years ago, before he was famous and before he wrote thrillers), which range from “We’re still having this discussion? Really?” via “If he thinks it’s so easy, then let’s see him try it” and “Talent is only a small part of it – perseverance is what matters” and “Hey, dude, look at the list of great classic writers you’re dismissing as untalented.” to “Duh, 90 percent of any genre is crud. Can we talk about specific books, please?” and “You’re just jealous, because crime writers have higher sales than you.”

Meg Gardiner has a lovely response:

I had a drop of talent once. I got rid of it. Sold it out of the boot of my car so I could write a crime novel.

As has Steve Cavanagh:

William O’Rourke’s comments that crime writers lack talent and that white males get a raw deal in publishing were a little surprising. I look forward to his next piece focusing on his experience being amongst the one-hundred-and-eleventy million people who attended Donald Trump’s inauguration.

I also liked this response by Barbara Nadel:

Until recently the only two types of literature in Turkey were known as fiction and non-fiction. Turkish friends in the business didn’t understand what was meant by “genre fiction” or why it was, in some quarters, considered a lesser art form. To them, it all seemed like a lot of unnecessary snobbery. Clearly they were right and maybe we should all consider going back to a simple fiction/non-fiction form of categorisation. Such spiteful ignorance is unworthy of the person who said it and the people it targets.

Now I’d have to talk to someone more familiar with Turkish bookstores than me to determine whether Turkish bookstores really recognised only two categories until fairly recently. Though in the many hours of my life I have spent browsing bookstores, I have seen all sorts of odd sorting systems. For example, well into the late 1990s, Foyle’s flagship store (then their only location) on London’s Charing Cross Road, categorised non-fiction by subject, but fiction by publisher, which made it nigh impossible to find anything. The many used book shops also found on Charing Cross Road back then (most of which are long gone now) generally consisted of a small street level shop and levels of mazelike catacombs accessed via a series of rickety stairs. Categorisation was extremely basic and the SF was usually located in the further corner of the deepest basement. How those places ever passed any fire inspection is still a mystery to me (not that my 23-year-old self would have cared). On the other hand, the crime fiction focussed bookstore Tatort Taraxacum in the East Friesian town of Leer divides up East Friesian set crime fiction (already a highly specialised category) according to whether the setting is an island or the mainland. Meanwhile, Bremen had (and still has, to my knowledge) an independent bookstore that basically consisted of stacks of books piled up everywhere with no apparent system. We have one bookstore located opposite the courthouse which specialises in law and tax books and has incredibly fine-grained categories for those books, but lumps all fiction together under a single header. The late lamented Wohlthat’s bookstore had huge tables full of discounted art and coffee table books in the centre and shelves full of fiction organised alphabetically along the walls. I bought a lot of art books there (and haven’t bought a single one, since Wohlthat’s closed), but no fiction at all. And of course, foreign language sections in German bookstores are usually divided only by language (with approx. 85% devoted to English language books, while the rest is a mix of French, Spanish and Turkish) and sorted into fiction and non-fiction. Only a handful of German bookstores divide their foreign language section by genre and even there, the categorisation can be messy or just plain wrong.

In general, I prefer bookstores to sort books by genre and/or subject, because otherwise browsing or just finding something becomes a chore. However, Barbara Nadel makes an important point, namely that genres, their definitions and the divisions between them are not fixed and may not even be the same from country to country. I have already touched on this regarding crime fiction, which is a far broader category in both Germany and the UK than the narrower mystery genre in the US (and indeed Michael Collins might well have fallen afoul of this). Subgenres are different as well and so US subgenres like “cozy mystery”, “hardboiled mystery”, “police procedural”, etc… don’t exist on our side of the pond, wheres both in Germany and the UK crime fiction is divided more according to the setting, though rarely with such fine-grained detail as at the Tatort Taraxacum store in Leer. Meanwhile, romance – if it has its own section at all, since many bookstores in both the UK and Germany don’t have a romance section and neither do Dutch bookstores – is combined with women’s fiction, chick lit and sometimes erotica. Historical fiction has its own section in Germany, but rarely in the US. Once solid genres such as the nurse novel or the gothic novel have been folded into romance, whereas men’s adventure fiction has been folded into the thriller genre.

But not just genre divisions are arbitrary, but the distinctions between literary fiction and genre fiction are arbitrary as well (and far more problematic than mere genre divisions). Never mind that a lot of what is found on the “literature” or “general fiction” shelves is not literary at all, since anything that cannot be sorted into a specific section tends to end up there. For example, if a bookstore doesn’t have a separate romance section (and many bookstores in Europe don’t), the “literature” or “general fiction” section is full of romance. William O’Rourke would probably spontaneously explode in horror.

Of course, the responses by the various crime and thriller writers have thoroughly debunked O’Rourke’s ridiculous claim about the fatal lack of talent writing crime fiction requires. However, the person I’m really feeling sorry for here is Michael Collins, because not only was the profile of him completely derailed by a debate that has very little to do with Michael Collins or his work – no, his name will no also always be linked to “that guy who thought all crime writers had no talent”. Now I haven’t read Michael Collins’ fiction, but I’m pretty sure he deserves better than this.

*My personal views on the 1980s British miners’ strike were strongly coloured by the fact that in 1980s West Germany, every coal mine or steelwork in the Ruhr area that was at risk of closing down was deemed a national tragedy, whereas the dying shipyards of North Germany were completely ignored, because our states were smaller and had fewer voters than North Rhine bloody Westfalia. As a result, I developed a vehement and completely misplaced dislike for miners and steelworkers, which of course influenced how I viewed the 1980s British miners’ strike. Adult me of course knows that miners and steelworkers were not to blame for dying shipyards and that British miners absolutely were not to blame, but for me to voluntarily read a novel about the British miners’ strike is still a minor miracle.

**Come to think of it, O’Rourke’s rival David Peace writes crime fiction such as the brilliant Red Riding Quartet, which impressed me so much that it enticed me to read everything Peace had ever written.

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Of narrative catnip, cultural taste differences, telling my own stories and a new “In Love and War” novella: Dead World

As many of you probably know, I currently have two space opera series going on: The Shattered Empire series and the In Love and War series. Both are stories of rebellion and of fighting an unjust system, because such stories are narrative catnip to me to the point that my personal definition of science fiction once included “there is a rebellion or a struggle against an all powerful system” as a crucial ingredient of SF.

Shattered Empire tells the story of a political rebellion against the typical evil SF empire. The focus is very much on the various characters, their stories and their reasons for joining the rebellion, but overall it’s mainly a story of a political rebellion.

In Love and War is different. It also has an evil galactic regime or rather two of them, the Republic of United Planets and the Empire of Worlds, and protagonists rebelling against them. However, Ajali and Mikhail’s rebellion is personal rather than political. They are not trying to overthrow their respective regimes and free the galaxy from oppression. No, all they want is to be left alone to spend their lives together in peace.

Of course, it doesn’t quite work out that way, for starters because both regimes pursue them relentlessly, though the Republic is a tad more enthusiastic about it. What is more, Anjali and Mikhail – being the sort of people they are – cannot just stand idly by, while others are in danger. And so they hop from planet to planet, trying to survive and stay one step ahead of their pursuers, while helping those in need.

I write a bit more about the background of the In Love and War series, what inspired it and what I want to do with it here, here and here.

In short, I had two characters I enjoyed spending time with, the potential for many adventures featuring those characters and what I thought was a compelling overall story arc full of cultural clashes, forbidden love, the conflict of love versus duty, heroic sacrifices, characters standing up against an unjust system and choosing to do the right thing, even if it could cost them everything. I had two lonely people overcoming their troubled past and finding companionship, love and a purpose in life. I also had two characters who roam the universe, helping others in need and solving those people’s problems (and eventually aquiring a makeshift family in the process), while remaining permanently on the run and unable to solve their own. In short, the In Love and War series combines various elements that are narrative catnip to me. So I reasonably assumed that the series and its elements would also be narrative catnip to others.

Alas, the In Love and War series doesn’t sell very well or at least not nearly as well as I’d hoped. Part of that might be due to the fact that I launched the series just as the US presidential election was reaching its hottest phase, when books sales fell across the board. Part of that might also be due to the covers, which are stylistically quite different from other indie space opera and indie SF romance covers.

However, in a way, the covers are appropriate, because the In Love and War series is also quite different from other indie space opera and indie SF romance series. I’ve written before about how the indie mantra of “Writing to market” is causing indie SFF to become a lot more narrow ad formulaic than traditionally published SFF ever was at its worst. And so, when I look at the also-boughts/also-vieweds of the In Love and War books, on the one hand, I see a lot of cookie cutter military SF with plots and ideas that weren’t new when Heinlein was writing them sixty years ago, and on the other hand, I see a lot of equally cookie cutter alien warlord romances that read a lot like the werewolf/werebear/shifter paranormal romances that were popular a few years ago, only with aliens instead of werwolves. The covers are naked manchests with strategically placed dots for SF romance and exploding spaceships for space opera. There was one space opera cover in my also-boughts that looked uncannily like a recruiting poster for a hypothetic Nazi space program. And people who are attracted fascist aesthetics in space probably won’t particularly care for my quirky little series about a mixed race couple who just happen to be deserters on the run from their respective governments.

No offence to the people who read and write about bare-chested alien warlords, exploding spaceships and manly space marines doing manly things in space. Those books may not be my cup of tea, but they’re obviously somebody’s – a lot of somebodies in fact – cup of tea, so more power to those authors and their readers. However, my stories – though they absolutely fit into the space opera and SF romance categories – don’t feature bare-chested alien warlords and manly space marines doing manly things in space.

Last year, I did a guest post on Sarah Ash’s blog as part of her “Nobody Knew She Was There” series on women SFF writers, where I wrote the following:

Another problem facing international writers is more subtle. For in a market – whether indie or traditional –that is still dominated by American tastes and expectations, our stories often fail to hit those expectations. Because even though we have consumed more than our share of American cultural products – books, films, comics, television – we nonetheless aren’t Americans. Our history and culture, not to mention our experiences and influences, are different. In fact, you may have noticed that I mentioned a lot of works above that few people outside Germany have ever heard of. So the stories that rise out of the stew pot of our subconscious are quite different from what an American writer would produce, even if they are nominally part of the same genre. In fact, it took me a long time to realise that a lot of what I perceived as bugs in the fiction I consumed, were actually features to the American audience those works were aimed at.

A lot of what I write, including the original spark behind the In Love and War series, is an attempt to fix the bugs in other people’s stories. And though I’m aware that many of those bugs are actually features for the (American) target audience of those works, I still can’t resist fixing them, even if it means subverting the tropes that attract part of the audience to the genre.

That truth was brought home to me sharply, when I was entering the changes resulting from the final proofread of the next In Love and War novella, while the 2017 Academy Awards ceremony was running in the background. Now US TV generally has a lot more commercial breaks than German TV and this includes the Academy Awards. What is more, the Academy Awards are on in the middle of the night in Germany, i.e. not exactly prime TV advertising real estate, unless it’s for phone sex hotlines. And so the German broadcaster fills up the commercial breaks in the Oscar ceremony with trailers for the nominated movies (since it can be assumed that people watching the Oscars will be interested in movies).

And this is how I chanced to see a trailer for a movie called Allied, which was nominated for an Oscar for best costume design. I’d never heard of the movie before and the brief clips shown during the Ocar ceremony made it look like “Agent Carter – the Movie” (which I would actually watch). However, the trailer (and the movie I presume) told a very different story: We got a couple of action scenes and a handsome 1940s couple played by Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard having adventures and falling in love. So far, so good. But then the trailer took a sharp turn, when we got a scene where Jared Harris (the British suicide guy from Mad Men) in a military uniform told Brad Pitt that they suspected Marion Cotillard was a Nazi spy and ordered Pitt to find out the truth and personally execute her. If he refused, he would be hanged.

So what does Brad Pitt do? Does he tell Jared Harris where he can shove his order, even if it means risking the gallows? Does he go on the run with Marion Cotillard, shadowy military guys hot in pursuit? Does he shoot the bunch of them? No, he begins to doubt Marion Cotillard, whereupon the trailer descends into a series of increasingly tense scenes between the two of them.

Now these days, comparatively few movie trailers excite me. Most just leave me bored. This one, however, made me actively angry. It made me angrier than I’d been at a stupid movie trailer in years (and coincidentally, the last one was also a WWII movie starring Brad Pitt – I do sense a pattern there). It also made me wonder how a movie with such a terrible plot could ever get made, let alone with obviously high production values, good actors and a good director (Robert Zemeckis, who can do so much better).

Remember that I was entering the final changes into the manuscript for the next In Love and War novella, when I saw that trailer. And the very premise of the In Love and War series is that two elite soldiers fall in love against all odds and turn their back on their respective regimes, because they both refuse to hand over the other to certain death. In short, the story, the whole series I was working on at that moment, was the polar opposite of that movie.

Like everybody, I have a few tropes that I really, really hate. And one of my most hated tropes – a trope that’s pretty much an instant “Book meets wall” and “Movie/TV show meets OFF button” moment for me – is characters turning against friends, loved ones and family members at the slightest hint of any wrongdoing and subsequently turning over those friends, loved ones or family member to the police, the courts, the FBI or whomever. I can tolerate that trope, if the suspect is actually guilty and turns out to be a serial killer or something similarly awful. However, in the vast majority of cases – even if the suspect is guilty and most of them aren’t – the crime is comparatively minor like smuggling or theft or drug possession. That trope is what killed Quantico for me, what killed Blindspot for me, what killed Picket Fences for me, what caused me to dislike Benjamin Sisko from Deep Space Nine. Amazingly, it did not kill The Maltese Falcon for me, but then I find I can never be angry at any character played by Humphrey Bogart for any reason.

However, it wasn’t until I chanced to see a trailer for a movie featuring a particularly noxious instant of that trope, while working on a story that is the exact opposite, that I realised that this trope I hate so much might not be a bug for US audiences at all, but a feature. For while Germans – and most Germans I have talked to hate this trope, too – value personal loyalty to friends and loved ones more highly than loyalty to a state or system, Americans don’t necessarily seem to share this preference and indeed find something compelling in stories where someone chooses loyalty to the state/system over loyalty to a loved one. As for why this is so, I suspect the reason lies in our sorry history. For within living memory, we had not one but two regimes where plenty of people decided to value loyalty towards the system more highly than personal loyalty and chose to sell out their friends and loved ones to the state (and it happened. A lot). This sort of history leaves its mark, both on our collective psyches and on the stories we choose to tell.

So is part of what made the story of Anjali and Mikhail so very compelling to me, the fact that they are both willing to turn against their respective regimes (and both the Empire and the Republic are pretty damn awful – these are not nice democracies) and turn their back on everything they ever strove for in their lives for the sake of love, the very thing that puts off American readers? I don’t know.

As I said before, I can only tell my own stories, not somebody else’s. And I hope that at least some of you will give Anjali and Mikhail a chance and follow their adventures.

Which finally brings me to the actual point of this post, namely that there is a new In Love and War novella available. It’s called Dead World and sends Anjali and Mikhail on a deadly chase across a nuclear wasteland, relentless pursued by a bounty hunter who’s after the prize on their heads.

It’s got action, emotion, vile villains, heroism and of course, true love. So just check it out, will you? And if you want to read the whole series, there’s a handy bundle available at a sharply reduced price at DriveThruFiction.

Dead World

[image error]Once, Anjali Patel and Mikhail Grikov were soldiers on opposing sides of an intergalactic war. They met, fell in love and decided to go on the run together.

Now Anjali and Mikhail are trying to eke out a living on the independent worlds of the galactic rim, while attempting to stay under the radar of those pursuing them.

When they are hired to retrieve a weapons prototype from an abandoned planet, it seems like a routine job. But it quickly turns out that the planet is not as empty as they had thought. And soon, Anjali and Mikhail find themselves caught in a deadly chase across a radioactive wasteland.

More information.

Length: 27500 words.

List price: 2.99 USD, EUR or 1.99 GBP

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Scribd, Smashwords, Inktera, txtr, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

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The Puppies Are Pooping Again

Well, at least the rabid puppies are. No one is quite sure what the sad puppies are up to these days.

But as for the rabids, Vox Day has released his rabid puppy slate for 2017 (the link goes to File 770, so it’s safe to click). Only that this year, his usual slating tactics won’t work due to the “E Pluribus Hugo” nomination system, so the rabid puppies focus on only one or two items per category now, hoping they can push at least one nominee onto the shortlist in every category. As for the actual list, it’s the usual mix of Castalia House publications, “hostages” and “human shields”, i.e. nominees that are widely popular and probably would have made the ballot anyway (China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, File 770, Ralph MacQuarrie, Deadpool, Game of Thrones), and dinosaur erotica, since Vox Day appears to be a fan of this niche genre. Though considering how hilariously he was pwned by Chuck Tingle last year, Day has chosen to put his support behind another author of dinosaur erotica this year. He has also managed to actually find two decent nominees in the best related work category (which was a complete trashfire in the past two years) and is not pushing Jeffro Johnson’s Appendix N project at us for the third year in a row (Johnson is one of the better puppy fan writers and his Appendix N project was actually sort of interesting, though not two years in a row). Though unfortunately, he has found another John C. Wright story to nominate. Talking of which, the latest post at John C. Wright’s own blog (archive.is link) postulates some very out there political theories.

Of course, even if the rabid puppies manage to push some items onto the ballot, in the end the outcome will be the same as in the previous three years. The obvious human shields will place above “No Award” and might even win, everything else gets no awarded and some people will probably withdraw. Indeed, Mike Glyer has already preemptively withdrawn File 770 from consideration for this year.

Talking of File 770, the reaction over there to the Rabid Puppies 2017 announcement was a resounding “meh”. Meanwhile, Camestros Felapton points out at his blog that the puppies both rabid and sad seem to be rather tired this year.

Camestros also pointed out this little gem of a post by Brad Torgersen (archive.is link), which is a response to this post, where Greta Johnsen interviews N.K. Jemisin. Now personally, I don’t see anything even remotely objectionable in N.K. Jemisin’s answer and I baffle at some of the commenters at Brad’s post who claim that the N.K. Jemisin interview reads like a dense academic paper in postmodern gender studies. Because believe me, I have read dense academic postmodern papers at university and this interview sounds nothing like them.

As for Brad Torgersen, he basically restates the same point he made in his infamous “Nutty Nuggets” post, namely that SFF (since I suspect he’d hate the term speculative fiction) no longer delivers what Torgersen believes readers want, that traditional publishing and traditional SFF are dying and indie publishing rules (a.k.a. the point of every second post on every second indie writing blog) and that it’s no longer possible to judge an SFF book by its cover (whereas these vintage SF covers from the 1960s and 1970s totally illustrate the contents of the respective novels). He also draws another food parallel, though this time about “New Coke”, the spectacularly unsuccessful change in the Coca Cola formula in the 1980s. Now I’m always baffled that Americans are still going on about “New Coke” more than thirty years later, but then I’m not American and have never been a drinker of sugary softdrinks, so any kind of Coke tastes equally offputting to me.

So in short, it’s business as usual, albeit cooked on a smaller flame, in puppy land.

Meanwhile, I intend to do what I did the past three years, namely nominate works I enjoyed, regardless of who else enjoyed them, and will vote for whatever I consider Hugo worthy, regardless of how it got on the ballot.

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An interview and a new post-apocalyptic collection: After the End

For starters, I’ve been interviewed by C.E. Martin, author of the pulpy Stone Soldiers series, as part of his Chowmageddon series about post-apocalyptic fiction and particularly food after the apocalypse, so head over there and check it out. And while you’re at it, you can also read the other interviews in the series with Ann Christy, Marcus Richardson, Lawrence Herbert Tide and Leo Nix.

The timing of the interview is highly convenient, because I also have a new release to announce, which just happens to fall into the post-apocalyptic subgenre.

The new release is a short story collection entitled After the End – Stories of Life After the Apocalypse. All but one of the stories in the collection were the result of the 2016 July short story challenge. The objective was to write a story per day in July 2016.

When you attempt to write a whole lot of stories in a very limited time frame, certain themes inevitably emerge. And one of the themes that emerged during the 2016 July short story challenge was post-apocalyptic stories. As for why I felt so drawn to this particular theme, I suppose the unstable geopolitical situation and general apocalyptic mood in the summer of 2016 (which has not exactly become any more stable since then) had something to do with it.

The apocalyptic scenarios featured in After the End are all different. Five of the apocalypses are triggered by climate change, one of the likelier end of the world scenarios, though the particulars vary. There are three stories set in a world flooded due to global warming and melting ice caps, a story set in a world suffering from massive droughts due to global warming (with an extra shout-out to the depletion of the ozone layer) and a story set in an ice-bound world where climate change has paradoxically triggered global cooling and a new ice age in the Northern hemisphere.

Other apocalypses are more fanciful. I have a story set in a world where modern technology has ceased to work due a massive electromagnetic pulse caused by a solar storm and where humanity suddenly has to rely on nineteenth century technology. There is the requisite zombie apocalypse story, of course, and a story set after the robot apocalypse.

However, as varied as the end of the world scenarios are, one common theme became notable as I was putting together this collection. For while the vast majority of post-apocalyptic fiction focuses on the struggle for survival in the immediate aftermath of the apocalypse, the stories in this collection are all set years or decades after the apocalypse, when a new normal has asserted itself. And most of them feature young protagonists with little to no memories of the world before who are just trying to get through their everyday lives.

Initially, I wondered why the theme of young people living in the new normal after a world-shattering apocalypse resonated with me so much. And then it hit me: The reason why that theme resonated with me so much was because I had been that young person growing up after a world-changing catastrophe and just trying to live my life in the only world I knew, while older people, the generation of my parents and grandparents, just could not stop talking about the bad old times.

Of course, I did not grow up after the literal end of the world. However, I grew up in postwar Europe at a time when the Third Reich and the bombings of World War Two were still within the living memory of my parents and grandparents. And World War Two was pretty damn apocalyptic for those that lived through it, particularly in Europe and Asia. Even by the time I was a kid, some thirty to forty years later, there was still visible bomb damage in our town, either hidden behind billboards or in the form of suspiciously empty lots in otherwise densely built areas.

Nor was World War Two the only apocalyptic event within living memory. Very old people also still remembered World War One, which was equally apocalyptic and probably even more successful at totally destroying the world as it had been before. Then, when I was a teenager, the Berlin Wall fell, once again spelling the end of life as they knew it for friends and relatives from beyond the iron curtain. And finally, as an adult, I teach German to refugees who have fled the apocalyptic hellscapes of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea and Mali for the relative safety of Europe.

The thing about real world apocalypses is that unless humanity is wiped out altogether, life goes on. People still go to work, fall in love, get married, have children. And to those children, life after the apocalypse will be the new normal.

It’s this new normal that the stories contained in this collection focus on. And it’s no coincidence that After the End starts with a funeral and ends with a man holding a baby in his arms.

Of the eight stories included in this collection, two probably require a bit of further explanation. The optical telegraph or semaphore described in “Lifeline” was a real communication technology that was developed in France in the late eighteenth century and became obsolete by the mid nineteenth century, when electrical telegraphs came along. You can learn more about optical telegraphy here.

One of the fairly few surviving optical telegraph stations is located in the town of Brake in North Germany. It was once part of an optical telegraph line stretching from the North Sea port of Bremerhaven to the city of Bremen. You can learn more about that line here (only in German alas). Nowadays, the Brake telegraph tower has been restored and turned into a museum. I had the chance to visit the museum during a trip to Brake. It occurred to me that optical telegraphy would be the ideal long distance communication medium after an apocalypse, which eventually inspired “Lifeline”.

The port of Bremerhaven is also mentioned in “Shelter” as the destination of the ice-locked vehicle carrier MV Aniara. Among other things, Bremerhaven is the one of the biggest transshipment ports for cars and other motor vehicles in the world. Every day, some four thousand cars pass through the port of Bremerhaven, more than two million per year, as well as a further million of busses, trucks, tractors, construction equipment and other heavy vehicles. The giant car carriers and the huge lots full of brand-new cars waiting to be loaded either onto vessels for export or onto trains for further distribution are truly a sight to see. And just like Paul tells Karla in “Lifeline”, pretty much everybody driving through Bremerhaven’s car terminal has probably thought of just climbing over the fence and nicking one of the ten thousands of brand-new cars waiting at the quay.

There really is a car carrier named MV Aniara by the way, operated by Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics who tend to name their vessels after operas. I chose it because of the science fictional connotations of the name, which of course refers to Harry Martinson’s epic science fiction poem Aniara and Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s eponymous opera adaptation. Here is a photo of the real MV Aniara, BTW.

So if you’re looking for some post-apocalyptic fiction that’s not all bleak, then check out:

After the End – Stories of Life After the Apocalypse

[image error]When the apocalypse has come and gone, life still goes on for the survivors struggling to adapt to the new normal.

In a drowned world, the descendants of surface dwellers remember the cities that were lost, the inhabitants of ocean floor colonies cling to outmoded customs and scavengers search the flooded ruins for anything that might be of use. In a world ravaged by droughts, two college students come face to face with how the other half lives. A lone explorer traverses the icy wasteland that used to be Europe. A group of children travels across a zombie-infested America in search of shelter and safety. After a robot uprising, a police officer is assigned to clean-up duties and finds an unexpected miracle among the ruins. And in a world blasted by electromagnetic solar storms, a nineteenth century technology suddenly becomes the sole means of long distance communication.

More information.

Length: 24500 words

List price: 2.99 USD, EUR or GBP

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Scribd, Smashwords, Inktera, txtr, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for February 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 January 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 urban fantasy, epic fantasy, a whole lot of space opera, military science fiction, post-apocalyptic science fiction, dystopian fiction, science fiction romance, alternate history, Cyberpunk, LitRPG, horror, dragons, aliens, werewolves, cyborgs, supersoldiers, galactic empires, FBI witches, Appalachian monsters, zombie insects, revenge of nature, The King in Yellow 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] After the End – Stories of Life After the Apocalypse by Cora Buhlert

When the apocalypse has come and gone, life still goes on for the survivors struggling to adapt to the new normal.

In a drowned world, the descendants of surface dwellers remember the cities that were lost, the inhabitants of ocean floor colonies cling to outmoded customs and scavengers search the flooded ruins for anything that might be of use. In a world ravaged by droughts, two college students come face to face with how the other half lives. A lone explorer traverses the icy wasteland that used to be Europe. A group of children travels across a zombie-infested America in search of shelter and safety. After a robot uprising, a police officer is assigned to clean-up duties and finds an unexpected miracle among the ruins. And in a world blasted by electromagnetic solar storms, a nineteenth century technology suddenly becomes the sole means of long distance communication.

This collection contains eight stories of life after the apocalypse of 24500 words or approximately 85 print pages altogether.

[image error] Chronicles of the Last Days by Amelia Smith:

Myril doesn’t need prophecy to see that her world is going to end – the city is sinking before her eyes. Foreign ships fill Anamat harbor, bringing traders bent on pillaging the city’s treasures – with help from the governor – as its people flee to hostile lands.

Her guildmaster calls on her to help save the Chronicles of Anamat from the pillagers. Meanwhile, her old friend Darna needs healing, Iola wants to go to her death in the dragons’ realm, and the Defenders are airing their secrets at just the wrong time.

How will any of them survive when the waters rise again?

[image error] Duchess of Terra by Glynn Stewart

When Terra knelt to an alien Imperium

They guaranteed our safety and our future

But now their enemies are coming for us

To preserve humanity’s survival and freedom in a hostile galaxy, Annette Bond tied her world to the A!Tol Imperium, taking on the mantle of Duchess of Terra to rule humanity in the Imperium’s name.

The A!Tol have provided technology, ships, and money to uplift the new Duchy of Terra, but those gifts come with strings attached. The Imperium has their own plan for Terra—but Bond has tricks of her own.

With enough time, she can build Earth a place in the galaxy. But as Bond’s many enemies gather their forces, the clouds of war threaten not only the recovering Terra but the entire Imperium.

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More 2016 Nebula Awards Reactions.

For starters, the nominees for the 2016 Bram Stoker Awards have been announced as well and some very fine works they are, too, including an anthology we featured at the Speculative Fiction Showcase last year.

Meanwhile, further reactions to the 2016 Nebula Awards are slowly trickling in. The G. responds to my reaction post from yesterday to clarify his tweets about the lack of near future speculation on the Nebula ballot:

@CoraBuhlert …that if SF doesn’t speculate on plausible futures based on current conditions, it loses something important. But…

— The G (@nerds_feather) February 23, 2017

@CoraBuhlert …the stuff that is rigorous in that way isn’t being read anymore.

— The G (@nerds_feather) February 23, 2017

Afterwards, the discussion took a turn towards 2016 works that qualify as plausible near future speculation that weren’t nominated for some reason. Infomocracy by Malka Older is the most obvious contender in the novel category, while Everything Belongs to the Future by Laurie Penny and Brushwork by Aliya Whiteley in the novella category would be possible contenders as well. All three are on the Nebula suggested reading list. Other 2016 works along the same line include the novelette Loser by Matthew Hughes (a longshot, because it was published on the author’s website) and the entire short story output of Terraform, which specialises in near future speculation. However, Terraform got off to a bad start with the SFF community, since their launch announcement suggested that they were completely unaware of the existence of a broad range of online markets for short science fiction and they also keep themselves separate from the wider SFF community. I must admit that their “too cool for fandom” attitude put me off at first (and the blog post linked above didn’t help either, since I habitually disagree with that particular critic) and I found their fiction a mixed bag, though they score highly with regard to author diversity and some of their stories like this one are pretty good. However, for some reason I keep forgetting that Terraform exists and I suspect I’m not the only one. At any rate, I only found two Terraform stories on the Nebula suggested reading list.

So in short, near future speculation is out there, even though much of its seems to have moved to short fiction, but for some reason, none of it got nominated for the Nebulas this year in spite of some strong contenders. It might be a fluke, it might be a trend or it might be that the political situation has driven people towards other subgenres that hit less close to home.

In other news, Ryan Britt’s lament that the Nebula Awards totally failed to recognise his two favourite SF novels of 2016, which I linked to yesterday, has caused a lot of eye-rolling all around such as in the comments on this post at File 770. John Sclazi also issued a reminder that there is no such thing as an automatic awards nomination and that good works are ignored all the time, since there are more possible awards contenders than nominee slots for every award out there. What is more, tastes differ and what I consider one of the best works of the year is not necessarily what the next person considers one of the best.

Meanwhile at Inverse, Ryan Britt shoots back and declares that the Nebulas and all of the other genre awards are bullshit anyway. The Nebulas, Hugos and other genre awards are too much of an insider thing and don’t carry a whole lot of weight outside SFF publishing (that must be why publishers regularly emblazon “Winner of the Hugo or Nebula Award” on the cover of the respective books), they are useless as a guide to newcomers to the genre regarding what to read (even though countless of new fans have used them exactly for that purpose), they often ignore SFF works that aren’t published in traditional SFF venues, they ignore near future speculation in favour of space opera and epic fantasy (Didn’t we just have that discussion?) and they ignore popular science fiction novels like The Martian (probably an eligiblity issues due the being originally self-published), Death’s End and Babylon’s Ashes.

In many way, Britt’s post feels like a greatest hits album of genre award criticism. The points he makes are all things we’ve heard dozens of times before, both from the puppies and from awards critics at the anti-nostalgic end of the spectrum. Not that there isn’t a kernel of truth to some of those arguments, i.e. the Nebulas and the Hugos really aren’t all that great at recognising SFF works not published by traditional SFF imprints, unlike the Clarke Award, though they occasionally do so, e.g. with The Yiddish Policemen‘s Union by Michael Chabon, which was nominated for the Pulitzer and Edgar Award and won both the Hugo and Nebula.

The argument that most genre awards are too insider focussed also contains a kernel of truth, for this year, it is notable that several nominees in the short fiction categories require a certain amount of genre knowledge, and are aimed at insiders, e.g. The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe and The Ballad of Black Tom probably won’t make much sense, if you’re not familiar with Lovecraft. And indeed, my Mom remarked, when I told her about the Nebula Award nominees, that there seemed to be a lot of stories this year that were references to/retellings of previous works and that she prefers stories which can stand on their own and don’t refer back to other stories. And my Mom is a member of WorldCon 75 and therefore a 2017 Hugo nominator and voter, so it will be interesting to see how she reacts to e.g. Every Heart a Doorway or The Ballad of Black Tom, should they show up on the Hugo ballot.

But while some of Ryan Britt’s points are valid individually, taken together they don’t make a whole lot of sense. At any rate, I have zero idea where Ryan Britt is coming from. On the one hand, he laments that literary science fiction like Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story or The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus were ignored by the Nebulas, on the other hand, he complains that the Nebulas fail to recognise fairly commercial core genre works like The Martian, Death’s End or Babylon’s Ashes. Of course, it’s entirely possible that someone might enjoy all of those books, but finding all of them on the same nomination ballot would be rather unlikely. And I also have no idea what Ryan Britt even wants beyond seeing his personal favourites on the Hugo or Nebula ballot. And that’s something everybody wants to some degree.

Meanwhile, from the puppies we hear… resounding silence, while they twist themselves into increasingly complicated pretzel shapes to defend Milo Yiannopoulos. Strange, it’s almost as if they never cared about SFF at all.

Comments are still off – safer with this sort of topic.

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Reactions to the 2016 Nebula Award Nominees

I already posted my comments on the 2016 Nebula Award nominees in this post, so let’s take a look at some other reactions from around the web:

Rich Horton is generally pleased with the 2016 Nebula nominees, for even though not every nominated work is a personal favourite, he does not find a single poor story among them.

Camestros Felapton shares his thoughts on the 2016 Nebula nominees and is generally pleased with the works nominated and the diversity of the nominees, though he is also flabbergasted by how much of the nominated short fiction he still hasn’t read.

Talking of the Nebula nominees in the three short fiction categories, Rocket Stack Rank offers an annotated list with links to the stories themselves, mini-blurbs, reviews and more.

So far, most reactions I’ve seen to the 2016 Nebula nominees have been positive. I did see some grumblings, mostly on Twitter, that the Nebula shortlist contained for fantasy than science fiction and that the science fiction that was nominated is not the “right sort” of science fiction, i.e. it’s not hard enough or not political enough or whatever. Here are some exmples:

Do any of the Nebula nominees for best novel involve speculation on plausible futures? Haven’t read any so this is an honest question.

— The G (@nerds_feather) February 21, 2017

@ian_sales @ApeInWinter …pretty weird to me that there isn’t a single book that imagines plausible near/medium-term futures.

— The G (@nerds_feather) February 21, 2017

I feel a bit mean for singling out The G. like this, especially since most grumblings along those lines seemed to come from the same crowd involved with the Clarke Award shadow jury. However, Twitter makes embedding whole conversations difficult and The G. simply stated the point in the most succint way.

As for the point, the Nebula shortlist does seem rather fantasy dominated this year with only one explicit SF novel (Ninefox Gambit), two edge cases (The Obelisk Gate, Everfair) and two explicit fantasy novels (Borderline and All the Birds in the Sky) nominated. Last year, we had three SF novels and one edge case out of seven, in 2015 we had five SF novels out of six, in 2014 four SF novels out of eight. However, in 2013 there was only one explicit SF novel out of six nominees (which promptly won in spite of being the IMO weakest book on the ballot), so a fantasy dominated Nebula ballot is not exactly unusual. Besides, SFWA stands for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America these days, so fantasy novels are perfectly legitimate Nebula nominees, unlike e.g. the Arthur C. Clarke Award which is explicitly for science fiction.

This year’s lone science fiction nominee is a far future space opera, rather than a near future novel. This isn’t actually unusual for the past few years, since most SF nominees of recent years were not near future speculation, but space opera (Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, Jack McDevitt), military SF (Linda Nagata, Charles Gannon) or far future post-apocalyptic and post-human SF (Lawrence M. Schoen). The recent Nebula nominees that come closest to plausible near future speculation are The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, Annihilation by Jeff VanDerMeer and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, though that one is more literary fiction with some speculative bio-technology thrown in.

As for why near future speculation seems to have fallen out of favour recently, at least with novel length SF, one explanation might be that the world is currently changing so rapidly and in unexpected directions (Brexit, the Trump election) that speculating about the near future is extremely difficult and near future fiction is likely to be made obsolete by reality. I recall that Charles Stross once said that he had to scrap a novel, because reality had made it obsolete. Given what a time investment writing a novel is, I can understand why authors would not be willing to take that risk. Never mind that near future SF tends to age very badly, e.g. a lot of Cyberpunk classics like Neuromancer are horribly dated only thirty years later.

Finally, the accusation inherent in some of the complaints about the lack of near future speculation on the Nebula shortlist, namely that science fiction has become apolitical and ceased to care about the future, is just plain wrong. For there is more than one way of being political and a lot of the works, both on the 2016 Nebula shortlist as well as those nominated in previous years, are definitely political, just not in the way certain people seem to want. Also, there is a notable contingent mostly among British critics who seem to be almost personally offended by the existence of epic fantasy and space opera, both of which are deemed as too escapist.

Meanwhile at Inverse, Ryan Britt complains that two of his favourite SF novels of 2016, namely Death’s End by Liu Cixin and Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey were snubbed by the Nebula Awards. Now for starters, my favourite SF novels of 2016 were also snubbed by the Nebula Awards – it happens, especially if your tastes don’t align with the genre mainstream. And while I have to confess that there are some titles I expected to see on the Nebula shortlist that didn’t make it – Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer is the most obvious one for me (and coincidentally, it was snubbed by the Locus Recommended Reading List as well) and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers also comes to mind, though others have also suggested City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennett, Undergroud Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Underground Airlines by Ben Winters – neither Death’s End nor Babylon’s Ashes were the first or even the fifth titles that came to mind.

Now a Nebula nomination for Death’s End would not have unduly surprised me, since the first book in the trilogy, The Three Body Problem, was nominated for a Nebula and Death’s End was on the Nebula recommended reading list, though it did not make it in the end. But Babylon’s Ashes is a really long shot. For starters, it’s the sixth book in an ongoing series and later installments of ongoing series rarely show up on genre awards ballots. Besides, Babylon’s Ashes is nowhere in sight on the Nebula recommended reading list and none of the previous five books in the Expanse series were nominated for a Nebula Award either (and no episode of the TV adaptation shows up on the recommended reading/watching list, let alone among the nominations for the Ray Bradbury Award), all of which would seem to suggest that The Expanse, whether in book or TV form, simply isn’t to the taste of the Nebula voters.

In general, those grumblings about the Nebula Awards nominations I have seen largely boil down to “My favourites didn’t get nominated”. Which isn’t actually all that different from what we see every year. What is more, quite a few people seem to be suffering from genre awards fatigue, as Abigail Nussbaum and Ian Sales point out.

So what about everybody’s least favourite award contrarians, the Sad and Rabid Puppies? So far, the major and minor puppy blogs are conspicuously silent on the matter of the Nebula Award nominations. Of course, the Puppies never really focussed on the Nebula Awards in the first place, since the Nebulas are less easy to influence than the Hugos or the Dragon Awards, especially considering that most big name puppies are not SFWA members. Nonetheless, they used to complain about the wrong books by all the wrong people getting nominated. This year, however, we get outraged posts about this Washington Post article on YA authors employing “sensitivity readers” (I’m stunned how much anger that article caused and not just among puppies either, KBoards also exploded over it), whiny posts about how mean the left is and how those leftist meanies forced them to vote for Trump and a lot of folks twisting themselves into truly impressive pretzel shapes about that Milo thing (Link goes to a round-up of the best bits courtesy of Camestros Felapton). Of course, it was pretty obvious to everybody with half a brain that most of the concern the various puppies showed last year over alleged and actual pedophilia (three cases, mostly decades old) in the SFF community was never genuine, but just a handy weapon to use against those they perceived to be their enemies.

Besides, I suspect that both sets of puppies may be suffering from genre awards fatigue as well, especially considering that they got thoroughly trumped every time they tried to influence anything but the Dragon Award, whereas they feel empowered in the real world due to trumping the opposition (puns totally intentional).

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