Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 91

And even more reactions to the 2017 Hugo Finalists

In general, the 2017 Hugo Awards shortlist is less contentious than those of previous years, but were still seeing reactions trickling in. I offered my own take on the 2017 shortlist and also did a round-up of reactions from around the web here and then another round-up a few days later.

However, since then a few more Hugo reaction and discussion posts have appeared, so here is round-up number 3. As always, thanks to Mike Glyer of File 770 for pointing out some of the links I missed. I already included some of these as ETAs to the previous post, but I’m including them again here.

At Library Journal, Wilda Williams, Megan McArdle and Kristi Chadwick cheer about the quality and diversity of the 2017 Hugo finalists and also offer brief reviews of several of the nominated novels and novellas.

At his blog, Mark Kaedrin shares his thoughts about the 2017 Hugo finalists and is generally pleased.

Camestros Felapton continues his reviews of the 2017 Hugo finalists and takes a look at “San Junipero”, an episode of the anthology series Black Mirror, as well as at Splendor & Misery, the Hugo-nominated album by Clipping, and is quite impressed. Tor.com also has a bit more about the album, which at least to me was the biggest unknown among the non-puppy nominees. I have now listened to some of the tracks and watched some of the videos and agree that Splendor & Misery is clearly SF and a worthy nominee in the best dramatic presentation category. The music itself is not to my taste, I fear, but the album definitely deserves to be on the ballot.

However, not everybody is happy about the 2017 Hugo shortlist. For example, Jonathan McCalmont is still grumbly, particularly about the best series Hugo, as these tweets show:

I don't really like space opera and I really don't like MilSF.

— Jonathan McCalmont (@ApeInWinter) April 7, 2017

I give books 100 pages and I think that's already pretty fucking generous.

— Jonathan McCalmont (@ApeInWinter) April 7, 2017

Suspect truth is that people read for social reasons. Peer-group uptake + conformity keeps them coming back and hoping it'll click.

— Jonathan McCalmont (@ApeInWinter) April 7, 2017

I wonder if McCalmont even has a membership for WorldCon 75, which would enable him to vote in the Hugos. And if the idea of a best series Hugo or the finalists in that category annoy him so much, maybe he should just leave the respective field blank or no award the whole category. Also, we get by now that Jonathan McCalmont doesn’t care for Lois McMaster Bujold’s work, considering he has been going on about how much he dislikes her work (apparently without ever having read any of it) at least since 2008 (some bonus “WorldCon is insular and small, Comic Con/Dragon Con are future” pronouncements in the comments – puppies and anti-nostalgics really do sound eerily similar at times).

Shortly thereafter, McCalmont’s feud with Mike Glyer and File 770 escalated into a long distance flame war with Scott Lynch and Ann Leckie among others.

Meanwhile, over in puppy land, it’s still conspicuously quiet. One could view this post by Dave Freer proclaiming the imminent death of traditional publishing and the total irrelevance of the Hugos, because they don’t bow to the tastes of true American Trump voter for Nutty Nuggets or something, as a comment on the 2017 Hugo shortlist, but in typical Mad Genius Club fashion he is rather oblique about what precisely he is referring to.

And at Seagull Rising*, a Castalia House blogger named Jon Mollison complains that much of the coverage of the Hugo Awards focusses on the diversity of the nominees and the fact that so many women, people of colour and LGBT people were nominated, but not on the nominated novels and stories themselves. The reason for this, Mollison declares, is that the dreaded SJWs don’t read.

For starters, accusing other people of not reading is a bit rich coming from someone who blogs at a site which celebrates the rediscovery of such obscure and long lost authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jack Williamson. Though I grant him that the Castalia House blog really does review a lot of books these days, when they are not busily rewriting the history of speculative fiction (apparently, the current version is that it all went downhill after 1937). Okay, so the puppy SFF they review is not my thing at all (one review I saw praised an indie SF novel for its “feminine heroine”, who is properly subservient to the manly hero – big eye roll here), but reviewing books and recommending them to those that might like them is a lot more productive than messing with the Hugos.

Nonetheless, Mollison is wrong, for I’ve seen plenty of discussion of the 2017 Hugo finalists and already linked to a couple of posts discussing some of the finalists in greater depth in my last round-up. And besides, an overview of the 2017 Hugo finalists is not exactly the place for an in-depth discussion of the nominated works. Never mind that many of the finalists were already reviewed and discussed in depth, back when they first came out, and will likely be discussed again, once everybody who missed the nominated works the first time around has had the chance to read them, especially since the Hugo voters packet isn’t even out yet.

Meanwhile, at Raynfall, Claire Ryan is surprised to find herself in agreement with the puppies (whom she dislikes a lot) that the Hugos are irrelevant, since they are bound to traditional publishing and have rarely recognised indie books so far.

Now she does have a point that it is more difficult for an indie author to get awards recognition, though self-published works have been nominated for the Nebula Award, the BSFA Award, the Kitschies and even the Hugos and not just by the puppies either. For example, the Penric novellas by Lois McMaster Bujold, the first of which was nominated last year, while the sequel was nominated this year, are self-published. A couple of years ago, Seanan McGuire was also nominated for a self-published novelette. So yes, it is absolutely possible for an indie author to be nominated for major genre awards, though it helps to have name recognition from prior traditionally published works.

Besides, Claire Ryan falls into the puppy trap of equating sales figures with awards worthiness, even though the two are not the same at all. There are plenty of bestsellers which will never win any awards and there are just as many award-winning books which don’t sell all that well. Besides, as I’ve said before, due to a combination of Amazon’s algorithms, the fact that their customer base is predominantly concentrated in rural parts of the the US and the write-to-market ethos currently popular among indie authors, Amazon’s science fiction bestseller lists currently look like Baen’s slushpile, a lot of Starship Troopers and Lost Fleet knock-offs with the same exploding spaceship in space covers, whereas many of the fantasy lists are dominated by shifter paranormal romance featuring bare-chested men on the cover. These books clearly sell very, very well, but does that automatically make Taken by the Alien Warlord or Destroy the Last Fleet of Terra (apologies, if those are real titles) Hugo-worthy?

Are there indie SFF books that are award worthy? There absolutely are. But they’re probably not found on the bestseller lists dominated by exploding spaceships in space or bare-chested werebear shifters. What is more, a lot of the breakout indie books like Andy Weir’s The Martian, Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet or Hugh Howey’s Wool were slow burn successes that spread via word of mouth, so by the time they reached critical mass among fandom, the eligibility period had already expired. The Campbell Award specifically has different rules, hence Andy Weir was still eligible for the Campbell Award last year, even though he began serializing The Martian on his blog back in 2012.

*Does anybody else find the idea of a rabid puppy taking inspiration from Jonathan Livingston Seagull of all things as funny as I do?

Comments are still off and passive aggressive e-mails will be deleted unread. Grumble elsewhere.

Send to Kindle

Yet More Reactions to the 2017 Hugo Finalists

Thanks to Mike Glyer of File 770, the hits on my Hugo reaction post and the space opera post of the day before have gone through the roof. My first round-up of Hugo reactions from around the web got a lot of attention as well.

Meanwhile, more reactions are trickling in, so here are the latest links:

First of all, at File 770, JJ has compiled links to all of the 2017 Hugo nominees or excerpts thereof that are available for free online.

Also at File 770, Kyra scopes out the Hugo nomination stats and distribution and comes to the conclusion that the clearest favourites were to be found in the dramatic presentation and semiprozine categories and the least clearest in the short story and fan categories.

At her blog, Cheryl Morgan offers a brief reaction post and is overall pleased with the quality of the nominees.

At newstalk, James Dempsey lists the 2017 Hugo nominees and also offers a summary of the puppy affair, which he blames on men’s rights activists. Well, Vox Day is affiliated with the men’s rights movement, but he isn’t even mentioned in the article. And while Larry Correia, who is mentioned by name, may be many things, he never struck me as an MRA type. It’s not the only inaccuracy in the article, e.g. Larry Correia lives in Utah, not in California.

At Metafilter, there is an interesting discussion about the 2017 Hugo finalists. I came across it, because I got hits from there.

As for nominee reactions, Natalie Luhrs, highly deserving finalist in the best fan writer category, celebrates her Hugo nomination with this post, complete with flailing Kermit gif.

The CBC radio program All in a Day has a brief segment about the Hugo Awards, featuring Hugo nominees Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

Comic artist Alex Garner is honoured to be nominated, but not quite sure why they ended up in the best fan artist category, since Alex Garner is a professional artist:

@ScottW_inks Yeah, it's a bit odd. I told them I've been pro since '93. They said this is based off outside fan work I did. So okay! I'll accept the nom.

— Alex Garner (@AlexGarnerArt) April 6, 2017

For more nominee reactions, here is Daveed Diggs of Clipping, the rap group nominated in the best dramatic presentation category for their album Splendor & Misery, on Twitter:

Thank you so much to all the #Worldcon members who voted to make @clppng a finalist for the #2017HugoAwards! We are beyond honored. https://t.co/WGOaAczIfb

— Daveed Diggs (@DaveedDiggs) April 4, 2017

Coincidentally, I’m pleased to note that Daveed Diggs makes the only all-male category on the 2017 Hugo ballot a little less white.

For more about Clipping, who at least to me are the serious 2017 Hugo nominee I know the least about, Jason Heller interviews them at The Pitch and also shares some videos for those who want a sample of their work.

However, the most mysterious of the 2017 Hugo finalists is undoubtedly Stix Hiscock, author of Alien Stripper Bones From Behind By The T-Rex, which gained a Hugo nomination in the best novelette category due to tickling Vox Day’s dino-erotica kink. The identity of Stix Hiscock was a complete enigma, but now Beth Elderkin of io9 has managed to track down the mysterious author and reveals that Stix Hiscock is a woman writing erotica under multiple pen names. Stix Hiscock apparently had no idea neither of the existence of Chuck Tingle nor of Vox Day and the rabid puppies. That makes the best novelette category a six women race, by the way. If you’re curious about the actual story, Lela E. Buis has reviewed it here.

Meanwhile, everybody’s favourite Hugo-nominated author of satirical erotica Chuck Tingle strikes again by snapping up the domain name of his evil twin Stix Hiscock and using it for good. Honestly, it’s stunts like this that gained Tingle a best fanwriter nomination and may even see him win, though he has very tough and deserving competition in Natalie Luhrs, Foz Meadows, Abigail Nussbaum and Mike Glyer. Personally, I suspect that best fan writer will be among the hardest categories for me to decide, since five nominees are brilliant in their own unique way and even the puppy nominee isn’t completely awful. Though since it turned out that Stix Hiscock is not in fact Chuck Tingle’s evil twin, but another unwitting puppy hostage, I’m hoping for a Chuck Tingle and Stix Hiscock team-up against the devilman. Because love is real.

On the other hand, very little has been heard from the puppy camp. Yes, puppy hangers-on like Declan Finn and Jon Del Arroz weighed in one the Hugos (I linked to their comments in my last post) and here is another post I missed from a Castalia House blogger called Jon Mollison declaring the Hugos irrelevant. But so far the leading sad and rabid puppies are conspicuously silent, even those that managed to snag a nomination. Perhaps, they’ve all decamped to the Dragon Awards by now. We can but hope.

Talking of th Dragon Awards, you don’t have to be a puppy to nominate and vote – anybody can sign up and nominate. The link is here.

On the other hand, puppy tears have elicited a bit of Schadenfreude among non-puppies, as these tweets from Cheryl Morgan and Charles Stross show:

@CherylMorgan @CoraBuhlert So puppies are now experiencing everyone else's experience of the Hugos for the past few years? Heart. Bleeds.

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) April 6, 2017

And at Amazing Stories, Steve Davidson counters some of the usual puppy criticism that the Hugos and WorldCon are dead, long live DragonCon and the Dragon Awards by telling people to educate themselves about the history of WorldCon and the Hugos.

What is more, after two years of talking mainly about puppies, we’re also finally back where we were in 2013/2014, debating and grumbling about the relative merits of the nominees:

At the Barnes & Noble Science Fiction and Fantasy blog, Ross Johnson focusses on the nominees in the new best series category and declares it one of the hardest to vote upon. I agree with Ross Johnson that the best series category has come up with an excellent set of finalists, even if not every series is to my personal taste. Though interestingly enough, best series is one of the fairly few categories, where I already have a preliminary ranking, though that may change, as I revisit series I haven’t read in a long time. I’m also pretty certain which series will take my number 1 spot, namely the Vorkosigan Saga.

On the other hand, best fan writer wil be one of the hardest categories for me to vote in, since we have five very different and highly deserving nominees and even the puppy pick isn’t a complete disaster. So Camestros Felapton offers his evaluation of the 2017 best fan writer finalists here.

But as usual, most debates so far focus on the best novel category.

Cametros Felapton is ambivalent about Death’s End by Liu Cixin, but find it’s closer to The Three Body Problem, the Hugo-winning first volume in the series, than the somewhat lacklustre second volume The Dead Forest. Now I have to admit that though I was happy when The Three Body Problem won the best novel Hugo in 2015 and finally put the “world” into WorldCon, the actual book did not do much for me and wasn’t my first or even my second choice on the ballot. I haven’t read Death’s End yet (nor The Dead Forest for that matter), but I’m pretty sure it won’t be my top pick in this category, especially since some of the other nominees were books I enjoyed a whole lot and even nominated.

On the other hand, I’ve heard from quite a few people that they bounced off Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer due to the narrative voice. For example, here is Chris Gerrib deciding that Too Like the Lightning is just not the book for him.

I find these reactions to Too Like the Lightning interesting, because the 18th century style narrative voice was a large part of what drew me to the novel in the first place, even though I dislike theological and philosophical discussions in my SF and Too Like the Lightning promised to have a lot of that. But then I read many of the actual 18th century novels whose style and voice Ada Palmer is imitating at university and therefore had exposure to that style that others might not have had. Too Like the Lightning is not without flaws (and note that I haven’t read the sequel, Seven Surrenders, yet, because it’s still only available in hardcover and as a very pricey e-book), but it’s definitely an ambitious work in an era that has seen a lot of ambitious SFF works. Coincidentally, Too Like the Lightning also proves, along with The Fifth Season, the Imperial Radch series and several of the short fiction nominees of recent years that this is a time for strong and unique narrative voices in SFF.

Another work that has caused some divisive reactions is Becky Chambers’ second novel A Closed and Common Orbit. Now this is not a book I would have considered controversial at all – in fact, it’s probably one of the most accessible novels on the shortlist, a lot more accessible than Ninefox Gambit or Too Like the Lightning or The Obelisk Gate (I haven’t read All the Birds in the Sky yet, though my copy arrived today).

But for some reason, Becky Chambers’ novels are really controversial, particularly among the anti-nostalgic fraction of UK fans and critics. I’m not entirely sure why, but there was a lot of grumbling from the usual quarters when Becky Chambers’ debut, The Long Way to Small, Angry Planet, was nominated for Golden Tentacle in the 2014 Kitschies and subsequently shortlisted for both the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Here is Jonathan McCalmont eviscerating The Long Way to Small, Angry Planet in his Interzone column and here is Megan doing the same to Becky Chambers’ novel and the rest of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist at her blog From Couch to Moon.

Both reviews are quite typical of what I called the “anti-nostalgic fraction” in my “three fractions of speculative fiction” theory in that a well regarded novel that was praised for its diversity and progressiveness is criticised by anti-nostalgics for being not progressive enough, e.g. there are complaints that the character of Rosemary, you know the brown-skinned human woman who is in a lesbian interspecies relationship with a polyamorous reptilian alien, has the shockingly conventional job of administrative assistant or that The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet fails to criticise capitalism and that the captain and crew of the Wayfarer want to – horror of horrors – make money. In many ways, these reviews sound eerily like the 1970s pop culture criticism that I came across in mouldy paperbacks during my time at the university, where any pop cultural phenomenon was inevitably attacked for not raising the consciousness of the working class or not criticising capitalism or similar, which usually left me yelling in frustration, “It’s G-Man Jerry Cotton, for fuck’s sake. It’s not supposed to usher in the communist revolution.” I though that sort of thing had died out decades ago – at any rate it was obvious that the mouldy paperbacks containing those pronouncements hadn’t been checked out of the university library in years – but apparently it’s still alive and well among the Shadow Clarke Jury.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet never made it to the Hugo shortlist (and it does have its share of flaws) and wouldn’t have been eligible last year anyway due to being originally self-published in 2014, though Becky Chambers might well have gotten a Campbell nomination last year, if not for puppy interference. However, this year, Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit, a sort of sequel set in the same universe as Chambers’ debut novel, made the Hugo shortlist in the best novel category. And predictably, some people are not happy.

At the Metafilter discussion I linked above, Charles Stross (yes, I checked, it is the author) has this to say about Becky Chambers’ Hugo nominated novel A Closed and Common Orbit:

I’m … I don’t like to trash-talk other authors, but I’m not happy to see that particular Becky Chambers novel on the best novel shortlist. She’s a good writer: I’m sure she can (and will) do a lot better. (Confession: I have a mad hate on for “teching the tech”, Star Trek style, especially in space opera. Also for aliens who are humans in funky latex face-paint, starships bumping into asteroid fields, and about two other cliches per page of that novel. YMMV and it’s just a matter of taste, of course, but I’ll be happier if the win goes to any other novel on the shortlist, and I bounced hard off two of them.)

Considering that two of Charles Stross’ early contributions to the New British Space Opera, Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, were at least partly responsible for my frustration with the entire space opera subgenre in the early 2000s, as chronicled here, I’m not surprised that he doesn’t like Becky Chambers’ books and that he has no idea why anybody else would like them either. After all, IMO the biggest strength of Becky Chambers’ novels are the characters. And characterisation has never been Charles Stross forte, to put it mildly.

Interestingly enough, I have never seen anybody from the puppy camp comment on either The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet or A Closed and Common Orbit, probably because those books are not on their radar at all. But considering that both books feature a diverse cast, including LGBT and non-binary characters, are explicitly nonviolent and are set in a future where all humans are mixed race and the lone white guy is something of a freak, I’m pretty certain that the vast majority of puppies would not like them.

Which once again shows that the traditionalist (which includes the puppies) and anti-nostalgic fraction will probably never agree on what makes a good SFF book, but are often eerily united with regard to books they dislike.

Comments are off. Puppies (and disgruntled anti-nostalgics) whine elsewhere.

Send to Kindle

Reactions to the 2017 Hugo Finalists

Currently, the SFF world is all abuzz talking about the Hugos, but of course there are other awards announcing their shortlists at this time of the year as well. One of them is the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and this year’s shortlist includes a science fiction novel, The Power by Naomi Alderman. This isn’t the first time the Bailey’s Prize has recognised speculative fiction – The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers was one of last year’s nominees.

But now, let’s get back to the Hugos: My own take on the 2017 Hugo Awards shortlist is here (and hits are currently going through the roof thanks to Mike Glyer of File 770 linking to it), so let’s take a look at other reactions from around the web:

At Forbes, Kevin Murname offers a list of the 2017 Hugo finalists as well as a brief summary of the whole puppy mess.

At the Barnes & Noble SFF blog, Joel Cunningham is very pleased by the scope and diversity of the 2017 Hugo nominees and declares that the future of science fiction is diverse. He also makes a crack about the Marvel Comics diversity uproar, but then it is low hanging fruit.

Case in point, at Fusion.net, Charles Pulliam-Moore focusses on the Hugo finalists in the graphic story category and points out that the nominations for Ms. Marvel and Black Panther (as well as for the Image comics Monstress and Saga) belie the claim by Marvel’s vice president of sales David Gabriel that diverse comics don’t sell.

At Bleeding Cool, Jude Terror focusses mainly on the comic related Hugo finalists, but then Bleeding Cool is a comics site. Of course, he also cannot resist making a crack about three of Marvel’s supposdly so unpopular diverse series getting Hugo nods.

David Gerrold is happy to see the Hugos return to their pre-2015 form, as the sad puppies fade into obscurity, and hopes to see the rabids fade away soon as well. He also points out that the attacks on the Hugos by the sad and rabid puppies caused the WorldCon community (and SFF fandom in general) to come together to repeal them.

At Dreaming About Other Worlds, Aaron Pound is happy to finally have a good Hugo shortlist full of fantastic nominees again. He also points out that the sad puppies faded away and that while the rabid puppies managed to get a few of their choices onto the shortlist, their impact has been much diluted by the 5/6 and EPH voting systems as well as by the rabids’ own incompetence in determining what is eligible.

At Bookriot, Alex Acks is also generally pleased by a very good Hugo shortlist before proceeding to measure the impact of the rabid puppies on the 2017 Hugo ballot. He comes to the conclusion that there is still puppy poo on the ballot, but it’s manageable. And since the 5/6 system has given us an extra nominee per category, we are basically getting a full category of five finalists plus an occasional additional serious finalists.

Camestros Felapton offers his comments on the 2017 Hugo ballot and is overall very pleased with the outcome. So far, nothing has been heard from Timothy, the talking cat.

In a follow-up post, Camestros Felapton also offers a guide how to evaluate the nominees in the best series category, since the reading load for a long and unfamiliar series can be heavy.

Ana Grilo and Thea James of The Book Smugglers are thrilled to be nominated for the Hugo in the best semiprozine category in a year with such a great shortlist.

Ana Grilo is also nominated in the fancast category along with Renay Williams for the Fangirl Happy Hour, which is one of my favourite SFF podcasts. They have now uploaded a special 2017 Hugo nomination edition of the Fangirl Happy Hour. Renay and Ana are also happy that the Hugos are finally back to normal and that people are back to agonising about how to rank the many good choices on the ballot rather then looking for something, anything at least halfway decent to vote for. They also have some strong words about the rabid puppies.

At The Mary Sue, Kaila Hale-Stern is really happy about the 2017 Hugo ballot and particularly about the organic best fan writer nomination for Dr. Chuck Tingle.

Meanwhile, the estimable Dr. Chuck Tingle has responded to his second hugo nomination in his own unique way by writing and publishing Pounded In The Butt By My Second Hugo Nomination. Because love is real.

Abigail Nussbaum is happy about her well deserved Hugo nomination in the best fan writer category, but frustrated about the continued puppy poo presence on the shortlist. She also finds the finalists in several categories a bit predictable and middle of the road and would like to return to those pre-2014 of arguing about the Hugo shortlist and the various nominees and not about puppies.

Indeed, we are seeing some predictable grumblings about the quality of the shortlisted works from the anti-nostalgic part of the SFF spectrum (for my theory of the three fractions of speculative fiction, see this post).

On Twitter, Ian Sales had this to say about the 2017 Hugo finalists in the short fiction categories:

this weekend I have to read the Hugo short fiction categories for a panel at Eastercon. May not make it out the other side…

— Ian Sales (@ian_sales) 5. April 2017

Also on Twitter, Jonathan McCalmont shares his thoughts about the 2017 Hugo finalists:

Also amused that Penny is up for a Campbell. We’ve gone from nominating fascists to nominating people who write apologia for fascists.

— Jonathan McCalmont (@ApeInWinter) 4. April 2017

McCalmont’s issues with Campbell nominee Laurie Penny stem from the fact that Laurie Penny knows internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos from way back and uses those connections and the fact that Milo considers her a friend to get an inside look at the so-called alt-right movement and uses this access to write revealing articles about them. Here is an older article from The Guardian where she follows Milo and friends around the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, during last year’s presidential campaign, and here is a more recent article from Pacific Standard Magazine written during Milo’s fall from grace.

Now I’ve been quite critical myself of the flood of “We must understand how the white rustbelt Trump voter thinks, so I visited Dogshit, Ohio*, to interview a few of them” thinkpieces or the German variant, “We must understand how the white East German AfD voter thinks, so I visited Klein Ostkotzski in Saxony** and interviewed a few them”, because a lot of those articles and thinkpieces can be reduced to “Wah, won’t someone think of the widdle white man” whining. However, Laurie Penny’s articles are not like that. For starters, the Milo and Trump supporters she looks at are not unemployed steelworkers in the rustbelt, but young white middle class men from a generally privileged background. And she reveals these characters for what they are, pathetic and whiny little boys. And unlike the many “Wah, won’t someone think of the poor widdle white man” articles, I don’t see those artices as an apologia, but rather as a scathing look at what those people are truly like. Because that’s what journalists do, go to dark places, so we don’t have to.

Besides, Laurie Penny is nominated for a Campbell Award not for her journalistic work, but for her fiction, i.e. the short story “You Orisons May Be Recorded” and the novella Everything Belongs to the Future. Besides, she is one of six nominees in a very strong category, so those who disagree with Laurie Penny’s nomination still have five other nominees (well, four organic nominees and one puppy) to vote for.

Others have issues with works that did not make the Hugo shortlist. Here is someone named Will Ellwood complaining that Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe trilogy did not make the shortlist. Which I’m actually grateful for, because I do not like those novels. And besides, a lot of my favourites did not make the shortlist either.

@ApeInWinter A society which does recognise the Europe books is not mine.

— Will Ellwood (@fragmad) 4. April 2017

I’ve also seen grumblings about the fact that the Fireside Fiction report on the state of black science fiction is missing from the best related work shortlist and indeed it would have been a most worthy nominee. Though I suspect that when the extended nomination lists come out in August, we’ll see that it narrowly missed the nomination threshold. And given the trashfire that the best related work category was these past two years, I guess we’re all just glad to have something decent to vote for.

But in general, the British contingent of the anti-nostalgic fraction seems to have decamped to the Clarke Award Shadow Jury project, which not just generates some interesting reviews, but is also a lot more productive than what the majority of puppies are doing.

And while we’re on the subject, let’s hear what the puppies, both sad and rabid, have to say (all links go to archive.is):

Vox Day lists all the rabid picks he managed to get onto the ballot, predictably chuckles a bit over Alien Stripper Boned from Behind by the T-Rex and grumbles about the best novel (unsurprisingly, he still hates N.K. Jemisin, though he urges his fans to vote for The Obelisk Gate, because… well, I guess it makes sense to him, if not to anybody else) and best series finalists (he hates everything except for the Vorkosigan saga). In short, nothing new or even overly shocking from the Supreme Lord of Darkness or however he refers to himself these days. He also seems to be a lot more interested in the latest US political scandal.

Declan Finn, an indie writer who attached himself to the puppies, is not at all happy about the 2017 Hugo ballot and declares that it has been swamped by crap. Besides, there are way too many women on the ballot for his tastes and that’s just not possible without interference by the shadowy SJW cabal that meets every Wednesday in the basement of the Flatiron building, cause women can’t possibly be any good, can they? Plus, the one woman he really wanted to see there, Toni Weisskopf of Baen, is missing from the ballot (good point, actually. I suspect her status as a puppy cause celebre cost her organic nominations). He also claims that he hasn’t heard of most of the nominees in the series and novel categories, though he knows they are inferior to his personal favourites, because those sell so much better. Coincidentally, I had to google what Black Tide Rising even was (a series by John Ringo, it turns out). Though I’m stunned that Finn missed The Expanse (written by two white men at that), even though everybody is talking about the TV series based on the books these days. Oh yes, and the Dragon Awards are much better, so would you please vote for him? In short, Finn manages to fill the whole puppy bingo card in one post (with bonus misgendering and transphobia in the comments), which takes some doing.

ETA: Declan Finn also chose to take issue with some commenters at File 700 picking apart his post, so he made a follow-up point declaring that he totally doesn’t care about the Hugos, and besides, Honor Harrington totally was eligible for best series (yes, it was. Hugo voters still chose not to nominate it. They also chose not to nominate four of my five best series nominees. It happens). Finn also can’t grasp that File 770 commenters make fun of Terry Goodkind. Now I’ve never read Goodkind, since extruded fantasy product is not my thing, but I’ve also never heard of anybody over the age of fourteen who genuinely liked his books. Finally, Finn still feels the need to whiteknight for Toni Weisskopf and is apparently really upset that last year’s all-female Ghostbusters film got a Hugo nod. Though I’m surprised he believes it will win, considering it’s up against the massively popular and critically acclaimed Arrival and Hidden Figures (but then, he’d probably hate Hidden Figures, too) as well as against the nostalgia appeal of Stranger Things.

Jon Del Arroz, a newish puppy recruit (he joined their ranks after complaining that a con was discriminating against him for voting for Donald Trump), insists on pointing out that the number of Hugo nominations in 2017 (coincidentally the second highest number of nominations ever after 2016) means that WorldCon is dying, because it discriminates against “real fans” (TM) who are conservative and Christian. The Superversive SF blog makes the same point, nominations are down from an all-time high in 2016, so that means the Hugos and WorldCon are dying. Aw, puppy math! I guess it makes sense in some parallel universe.

Meanwhile, the editor of Cirsova magazines is just happy to be nominated in the best semiprozine category and manages to express his joy without any swipes at Tor, social justice warriors and other nominees. He also offers some links to interviews about the magazine from around the web for those who are interested in learning more.

At Every Day Should be Tuesday, a Castalia House blogger named H.P. declares that the 2017 Hugo Award shortlist does not interest him enough to purchase a supporting membership for WorldCon 75, so he can vote. However, he does like some of the finalists and is looking forward to reading/watching some of the others and not just the rabid puppy picks, too. So it is possible for puppy sympathisers to write about the Hugos without getting rude about it.

Larry Correia, the man who started it all when he was angry about losing the Campbell Award to Lev Grossman back in 2011, has emerged from his mountain top retreat, where he paints miniatures and writes Monster Hunter books, to remind people to nominate and vote for the Dragon Awards where wrongfuns are still allowed to have wrongfun (and voting controls are non-existent), since the Hugos seem to have fallen back to the Tor SJW cabal. Aw, and I’d thought Larry Correia had gotten tired of the whole puppy thing and decided to focus on his career rather than piss off a whole genre.

John C. Wright is happy that his novel Iron Chamber of Memory placed third in the 2017 Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance Book of the Year Awards (the winner was Peter Grant – the writer, not the protagonist of Ben Aaronovitch’s Hugo-nominated series) and also notes that he was nominated for a best short story Hugo as the token white dude in that category. I guess he has finally realised that he can’t win that one and focusses on the awards he can win. Good for him.

Meanwhile, Brad Torgersen and the Mad Geniuses are conspicuously silent on the 2017 Hugos beyond some of the usual “Traditional publishing is dying and we are the future”.

Comments are still off – Puppies poop elsewhere.

*Town totally fictional

**Town totally fictional as well

Send to Kindle

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.

Send to Kindle

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.

Send to Kindle

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!

Send to Kindle

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.

Send to Kindle

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.

Send to Kindle

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.

Comments are off.

Send to Kindle

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.

Send to Kindle