Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 95

New Release: Courting Trouble, an In Love and War story

Two weeks ago, I announced the start of a new space opera series and also that there would be more books coming soon. Then, three days ago, I announced the second novelette in the In Love and War series, again with the promise of more stories coming soon.

And today, I’m happy to announce Courting Trouble, the third story in the In Love and War series. Whereas both Dreaming of the Stars and Graveyard Shift are prequels of sorts, Courting Trouble features Mikhail and Anjali as an established couple on the run from their respective regimes.

The seeds for the In Love and War series were laid sometime last year, when a scene popped into my head: Two intergalactic mercenaries, a man and a woman, bantering while walking through a grimy spaceport. I knew at once that they were a couple and that they came from very different backgrounds which they had left behind to be together. They worked as mercenaries now, not because they wanted to, but because it was the only option left open to them. They were also on the run.

I was intrigued by the bantering couple, so I started writing. As I followed them through the spaceport, I learned a lot more about them: Their names – Anjali Patel and Mikhail Alexeievich Grikov – that they had both been elite soldiers on opposite sides of an endless intergalactic war, that they had fallen in love and run away together. I also got, in bits and pieces, the story of how they’d met and fallen in love and what had prompted them to leave behind everything they’d ever known and run away together. It was a pretty good story, so I decided to write it. I worked on that story on and off for several months, while it eventually blossomed into a novel or rather two.

However, I had always intended to give Anjali and Mikhail standalone adventures working together as an established couple. In many ways, Anjali and Mikhail are the ideal candidates for a series of standalone adventures. They are fugitives working as mercenaries, hopping from planet to planet trying to evade their pursuers. This gives them the opportunity to have a lot of different adventures on different worlds, solving other people’s problems, while trying to stay a step ahead of their own. Hey, it worked for Dr. Richard Kimble and the 1970s TV version of The Incredible Hulk. It’s still working for Jack Reacher.

Then July came along and I decided to take the 2016 July short story challenge. At this point, Mikhail and Anjali had been living in my head for several months. And while I was looking at SF concept art, trying to spark ideas for the story of the day, I came across this image and thought, “That place would make a great setting for an Anjali and Mikhail story.”

So I started writing and sent Mikhail and Anjali shopping. Or rather, I sent Anjali shopping, since Mikhail merely tags along. It wasn’t long until they found trouble or rather trouble found them.

By now, it has become something of a pattern that the In Love and War stories all have pretty extensive descriptions of food and Courting Trouble is no exception. I’m not sure why I write about food so much, both in this series and elsewhere, except that food is an element that’s traditionally missing in a lot of science fiction or is reduced to things such as food pills or protein sludge, which few people would willingly consume.

Food is also significant for Mikhail in particular, because his deprived childhood (chronicled in Dreaming of the Stars) has left him with massive food issues. These issues come to the fore in Courting Trouble, when going grocery shopping with Anjali triggers memories of Mikhail’s lost family and homeworld, which once again focus mostly on food and drink.

So follow Mikhail and Anjali, as they are…

Courting Trouble

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 eek out a living on the independent worlds of the galactic rim, while attempting to stay under the radar of those pursuing them.

But when Anjali and Mikhail stumble upon a protection racket during a routine shopping trip, they have to make a choice: Lay low to avoid attracting attention or stay true to their personal ethics and intervene?

More information.

Length: 6700 words

List price: 0.99 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, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

BTW, if you want to read the entire In Love and War series, there is a series bundle available at a reduced price exclusively at DriveThruFiction.

Send to Kindle

New Release: Graveyard Shift, an In Love and War novelette

Two weeks ago, I announced the start of a new series and also that there would be more stories coming soon.

So today, I’m happy to announce the second In Love and War story, a novelette called Graveyard Shift. Like Dreaming of the Stars, Graveyard Shift is a prequel of sorts, set approximately three years before the series proper.

I started writing the story that would eventually become Graveyard Shift during the 2016 July short story challenge, but set it aside, once I realised that the story was too big for the constraints of the challenge. Then, once July was over, I picked up the abandoned story and finished it.

As with many of the July challenge stories, Graveyard Shift also began with a piece of concept art, namely this rather cheerful image of a space station interior. So I spent a page or two describing the station and sending a character on a stroll through the concourse and then did something horrible to the station, the concourse and the character.

There is another inspiration for Graveyard Shift, namely my work as a translator. In the course of this work, I occasionally get what I privately call “It wasn’t my fault, honest” reports, blow-by-blow accounts of absurd, stupid and usually extremely expensive accidents. The intent of these reports is always to prove – sometimes even with lots of graphs and charts – that whatever unfortunate thing happened was totally not the fault of whoever commissioned the report. Those “It wasn’t my fault, honest” reports are more amusing than the usual stuff I get to translate, if only because so many of them are documents of truly stunning human incompetence. Luckily, so far none of these accidents killed anybody, though they cause a lot of property damage.

I always wanted to write an SF version of an “It wasn’t my fault, honest” report, a blow by blow account of human incompetence resulting in a huge accident. Since a lot of these accidents involve a ship crashing either into another ship or a stationary structure, I wanted my fictional incident to be similar, only involving a spaceship. And when I saw the image of the space station linked above, something clicked and Graveyard Shift was born.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that this story took place in the In Love and War universe, though it’s quite an unusual story for the series. For while the other In Love and War stories focus on Mikhail and Anjali, Graveyard Shift has six different POV characters, most of them new. Mikhail appears briefly during his time as a Republican operative, though he doesn’t get a POV. Anjali doesn’t show up at all, since Graveyard Shift is set entirely in the Republic.

Mikhail’s commander/mentor Brian Mayhew is one of the six POV characters and the only series regular. I’d initially intended Mayhew to be a fairly one-dimensional villain, who ruthlessly hunts Mikhail and Anjali (he has an Imperial counterpart as well). However, Mayhew steadfastly refused to cooperate and clearly did not want to be a villain. He also turned out to be rather conflicted about his job and his duty. I also realised that his connection to Mikhail goes a lot deeper than I’d initially assumed. This upset my plans for the series, though it also made Mayhew a more nuanced and interesting character. We will eventually see Mayhew in villain mode, but he’s a lot more than that.

Regarding the tribunal scene at the end, I gave a couple of friends the first half of the story to read and asked them who they thought was to blame for the accident. Though I didn’t tell them just what would happen to the parties found guilty, because I did not want their eventual fate to influence the decision. Coincidentally, all beta readers agreed that Commander Flynn and Lieutenant Kim should be held responsible, even though I initially hadn’t intended for Lieutenant Kim to be held responsible at all – but rereading the scene in question, I realised that she does goad Commander Flynn into taking that fatal trial flight. No one believed that Captain Woywood and Cadets Adeboye, Merrill and Watanabe should be held responsible. Opinions were divided on Cadet Giantano.

Just in case it wasn’t clear already, Graveyard Shift shows that the Republic of United Planets is a pretty awful place – and the Empire of Worlds isn’t any more pleasant, though a tad more competent.

Two days ago, I blogged about the 50th anniversary of the German science fiction series Raumpatrouille Orion, which was one of my big foundational SF influences. As a result, there are a lot of Orion references in the In Love and War series. It started when I needed a name for Mikhail’s lost homeplanet and decided to name it Jagellowsk, after the Orion‘s security officer Tamara Jagellowsk. Then it became something of a running gag that Republican worlds are named after Raumpatrouille Orion characters. There are a couple of other Orion references as well, six or seven altogther. Bonus points to anybody who manages to find them all.

However, the planet Burrichter, source of excellent cookies and pastries, is not a reference to Raumpatrouille Orion at all. Instead, I named it after one of my favourite bakeries, Café Burrichter in Vechta, one of whose specialties are Spekulatius cookies. You can see two photos of the real Café Burrichter here.

I included the coffee and pastries in the tribunal scene to give the characters something to do while discussing the case and also to show how blasé and desensitized Brian Mayhew, Roland Cox and Michelle Abasi are that they argue about whom to send to the firing squad, while having coffee and pastries.

Though I realised that all In Love and War stories to date have pretty extensive food scenes. And of course, Mikhail’s deprived childhood (chronicled in Dreaming of the Stars) have given him massive food issues, which also come to the fore in Graveyard Shift. But then, many of my stories include descriptions of food. I guess food is just something I like writing about and coincidentally also an aspect all too often ignored in science fiction.

So here’s a story of tragic disasters, rank incompetence and chilling ruthlessness:

Graveyard Shift

While docked at the civilian space station Unity for repairs, the Republic of United Planets battlecruiser Great Endeavour undertakes a trial flight with an inexperienced bridge crew. Disaster strikes and the Great Endeavour crashes into Unity’s shopping concourse, killing more than three hundred people.

A tragic accident, but in times of war, the public is not willing to accept tragic accidents. And so the Republic’s government sends its best troubleshooter, Colonel Brian Mayhew of the Republican Special Commando Forces to initiate a cover-up.

 

More information.

Length: 14100 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, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

Send to Kindle

Rücksturz in die Zukunft – “Raumpatrouille Orion” at Fifty

1966 was a landmark year for science fiction television. It saw the premieres of Time Tunnel, Mission Impossible, the Adam West Batman series, The Green Hornet (which also introduced Bruce Lee to western audiences) and of course, Star Trek. What is more, 1966 also marks the first appearance of the Cybermen in Doctor Who as well as the first time the world saw the Doctor regenerate.

Amidst all these international anniversaries, one anniversary remains a bit overlooked. For 1966 was also the year that science fiction arrived on (West) German television, when the space cruiser Orion 6 took off from its underwater base for the first time in the TV series officially called Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffs Orion (Space Patrol – The fantastic adventures of the space ship Orion), though it’s mostly referred to as Raumpatrouille Orion these days.

Want to see what it was like? The entire seven episode series is available on YouTube. Here is the first episode:

Raumpatrouille Orion is often called Germany’s answer to Star Trek, because both shows feature a spaceship with a maverick captain and an international crew having adventures in groovy 1960s settings. However, this is incorrect, for both shows premiered in September 1966 within nine days of each other (Star Trek on September 8 and Orion on September 17), much too close together for one to have influenced the other. Instead, the similarities between both shows are due to both Gene Roddenberry and Orion creator Rolf Honold being influenced by ideas floating around the zeitgeist of the mid 1960s.

Besides, the similarities between the two shows are largely superficial and Raumpatrouille Orion is very much its own beast. The series chronicles the adventures of Major Cliff Allister McLane, commander of the fast space cruiser Orion, and his crew, chief engineer Hasso Sigbjörnson, weapons officer Mario de Monti,  astrogator (Orion term for navigator) Atan Shubashi and surveillance and communication officer Helga Legrelle. In the first episode, the crew is joined by security officer Lieutenant Tamara Jagellowsk, who has been assigned to the Orion to keep an eye on the authority-challenged McLane and his crew.

I first saw Raumpatrouille Orion as a kid in the late 1970s, around the same time as the original Star Trek, Time Tunnel and Space 1999, all of which impressed this budding SF fan greatly and also had a lot of influence on me. Indeed, all these shows got hopelessly mashed up in the memory to the point that I spent years trying to identify a particularly scary Star Trek episode, only to find that it was really an Orion episode. BTW, those who’ve read my In Love and War series, may notice a lot of Orion references. For example, most Republican worlds mentioned are named after Orion characters.

The plots of the seven Raumpatrouille Orion episodes are borrowed straight from US science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. Orion creator Rolf Honold was obviously a fan and indeed had been trying to get an SF series off the ground since 1960. And so the stories contain a lot of the old standbys of the golden age such as hostile aliens, prison planets, robots malfunctioning due to a conflict of the Three Laws of Robotics (which are actually quoted, though without attribution), intergalactic superweapons, hynosis rays, invasion via brainwashing and an undiscovered tenth planet inhabited by a matriarchical society ruled by a beautiful queen. Longterm science fiction fans can probably name the source material for every single episode. However, one must not forget that Raumpatrouille Orion was made for an audience unfamiliar with science fiction, for whom all of those old genre tropes were brand-new. And indeed, reviews from the mid-1960s often complained that the series was pseudo-scientific nonsense and the dialogues way too complicated.

To be fair, the dialogues can be techno-babble heavy at times, which is even more notable, because Raumpatrouille Orion used its own terminology such as astrogator instead of navigator, Lancet instead of shuttle, wholly imaginary Omicron rays and “Rücksturz” (return fall) instead of landing. Though it would be interesting to see if you can find those terms in German SF translations and original science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s or if the Orion writers made them up.

Besides, it’s not as if anybody watches Raumpatrouille Orion for the plots, at least not nowadays. No, the main attraction are the characters and the delightfully retro-futuristic look of the show.

It’s particularly the latter aspect that helped Raumpatrouille Orion achieve cult status via late night marathons in art house cinemas. In the 1990s, I attended such a marathon with a Trekkie friend at a local disco/concert venue/cinema, because in the pre-DVD/pre-streaming era, this was the easiest way to watch the show without breaking out the VCR tapes recorded from a TV rerun. It was kind of obvious that ninety percent of the crowd were not SFF fans, but were watching the show for the camp factor and found the whole things totally hilarious (which was rather irritating, if you actually want to watch the show).

Nowadays, Raumpatrouille Orion is notorious for its supposedly bad special effects and a set design incorporating common household objects such as pencil sharpeners, bathroom taps and – most infamously – a clothes iron which is part of the Orion’s engine room control stand. However, this is unfair and probably due to the fact that many younger people have never seen pre-Star Wars, if not pre-CGI science fiction. Because the special effects in Raumpatrouille Orion were actually excellent by mid 1960s standards, lightyears ahead of anything in Doctor Who and on par with, if not ahead of Star Trek (it’s difficult to tell, because Star Trek was shot in colour, whereas Orion was shot in black and white, which is more forgiving of ropey effects). The German Wikipedia entry explains how the different effects were achieved. Coincidentally, Raumpatrouille Orion was the most expensive German TV production at the time and indeed the high costs per episode probably contributed to the fact that there was only a single seven episode season.

As for the set design incorporating common household objects, Orion‘s set designer was Rolf Zehetbauer, Germany’s most famous set designer at the time. He would go on to work on Das Boot, The Neverending Story and Enemy Mine among others and won an Oscar for his work on Cabaret. He not just furnished the Orion‘s bridge with futuristic looking household objects (and the clothes iron is the only really obvious one, because every family had that clothes iron in the 1960s and 1970s), but also filled the space colonies and underwater bases with classic mid century modern designer furniture by the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia and Joe Colombo. While Star Trek quickly went for a swinging sixties look with miniskirts and psychedelic colours, the visuals of Raumpatrouille Orion are a bit more Mad Men era mid century modern. It still looks great, though.

Fun fact: While the Daleks of Doctor Who fame were famously armed with a plunger and an egg whisk, Raumpatrouille Orion‘s robots were armed with an ice cream scoop and an ob-gyn forceps. I know which I find more scary.

Indeed, what sets Raumpatrouille Orion apart from other science fiction TV shows of the 1960s is that some of the top talent in German filmmaking at the time worked on the show. The music was by Peter Thomas, one of Germany’s best film composers. The famous dance scenes frequently seen in the background in scenes set at the so-called Starlight Casino may look terribly goofy today, but were created by a star choreographer. The cast were well known TV and film actors of the day. A lot of them worked on the Edgar Wallace and Jerry Cotton movies. Coincidentally, there is quite a lot of crossover between the Wallace and Jerry Cotton movies on the one hand and Raumpatrouille Orion, both in front of and behind the camera. And of course, Peter Thomas provided his squeaky jazz tunes for all three.

Indeed, the fine actors even in small roles are a large part of what makes Raumpatrouille Orion so good. Many of the characters are familiar types: the gung-ho spaceship captain, the drink-happy crewmember, the no-nonsense security officer, the shouty general and the icy general, the inept bureaucrat, the clueless and naive writer, the alien Amazon queen who is only looking for a real man and so on. In the hands of lesser actors, these characters would have been forgettable stereotypes. But in the hands of the cast, they came to life.

At the centre of the cast is Commander Cliff Allister McLane, played by Austrian actor Dietmar Schönherr. On the occasion of Dietmar Schönherr’s death in 2014, I wrote the following:

Cliff Allister McLane is basically your typical gung-ho space hero, a guy who goes into danger guns blazing, for whom orders are just optional suggestions and who regularly wrecks his spaceship (twice on screen and five times before the start of the series), which gets him demoted to patrol duties in the pilot episode and regularly brings him into conflict with the straight-laced security officer Tamara Jagellowsk. McLane is something of a womanizer, extremely loyal towards his friends and a “rather average kisser” according to Tamara Jagellowsk. In the hands of a lesser actor, McLane would have been a sterotype. Dietmar Schönherr turned him into an icon.

Lieutenant Tamara Jagellowsk, portrayed by the wonderful Eva Pflug, plays the Spock to McLane’s Kirk. A security officer assigned to the Orion crew to keep an eye on the authority-challenged McLane, Tamara is the odd person out among the closely knit Orion crew. Like Spock, she is said to have no emotions (and as with Spock that isn’t quite true) to the point that the Orion crew speculates whether she is an android. However, Tamara is also important to reign in the rather impulsive McLane at times and they quickly come to respect each other, even though they argue all the time and generate enough sparks to power not just the Orion, but also the planet destroying Overkill weapon seen in two episodes.

McLane and Tamara finally kiss in the fifth episode in a prison cell in an “OMG, we’re about to die” moment (spoiler: They don’t), whereupon Tamara famously remarks, “Well, now I’m relieved, cause that was a very average kiss.” How can you not love a female character like that? Though actress Eva Pflug complained that she was typecast as the bitchy official after Orion, because Tamara Jagellowsk ordering men around was a bit too liberated for mid 1960s audiences.

In spite of rather average kisses, McLane and Tamara get together after all in the final episode, giving at least the interpersonal plot a resolution even if the larger conflict between humanity and the alien “Frogs” remains unresolved.

Tamara Jagellowsk would be marvellous, even if she were the only female character of note in Raumpatrouille Orion. But – unusual for the 1960s – she isn’t, for there are several different and well developed female characters, even if they all wear the exact same 1960s beehive. I’m not sure if every episode of Raumpatrouille Orion passes the Bechdel test, but several of them do. The Orion‘s other female crewmember, communication officer Helga Legrelle, played by Ursula Lillig, is sadly not given a whole lot to do and her pining for McLane and jealousy of Tamara Jagellowsk are way too stereotyped. However, Lydia Van Dyke, fleet general and former commander (and, it is implied, lover) of McLane is another great female character. She is played by actress Charlotte Kerr, wife of Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Ms. Kerr BTW appeared in two other German SF productions (well, borderline SF, but they definitely were when made), the apocalyptic thriller Plutonium and the black market organ thriller Fleisch (Meat) in the 1970s. Lydia Van Dyke’s ship is called the Hydra BTW in a bit of unfortunate naming (all vessels in Raumpatrouille Orion are named after constellations). Margot Trooger, best remembered as Cora Ann Milton in the Edgar Wallace movie The Ringer (see my review here) manages to give some dimension to the stock role of the Amazon queen from outer space. After she has rendered McLane speechless and has him stammering “I don’t know what to say”, Margot Trooger’s Amazon queen from outer space replies, “Well, maybe you could yell some more.” Lieselotte Quilling, finally, has a recurring part as Ingrid, the wife of Orion chief engineer Hasso Sigbjörnson, who is not happy that her husband keeps following McLane on adventures which might get him killed. Kai Schwirzke’s article about the show’s 50th anniversary at Heise Online goes a bit deeper into the gender roles in Raumpatrouille Orion.

In spite of its good record on the gender front, Raumpatrouille Orion is still a very white show made in what was still a largely white country. The Orion crew and the space fleet personnel in general is international and indeed the opening narration (de rigeur for 1960s TV science fiction) explains that nation states have been abolished. However, international in this case means white European. And so the Orion crew consists of a Scotsman, a Russian, a Swede, an Italian and a Swiss woman. One member of the Orion crew, astrogator Atan Shubashi, is supposedly Japanese – however, he is played by white actor F.C. Beckhaus, one of the two surviving actors of the main crew together with Wolfgang Völz who played weapons officer Mario de Monti. There actually were a few actors of colour working in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, but apparently all of them were off filming Edgar Wallace or Jerry Cotton that month.

Another thing that Raumpatrouille Orion shares with Star Trek (and Firefly, for that matter) is that it ended much too soon. The original Star Trek at least got three seasons, while Raumpatrouille Orion got only seven episodes. Since the conflict between humanity and the hostile alien “Frogs” is far from resolved at the end, it is obvious that there was probably intended to be a second season. However, in spite of the sort of high ratings that only World Cup finals can achieve these days upon first broadcast, dozens of TV repeats over the years and the show’s cult status, those seven episodes are all there is.

As for why there never was any more Raumpatrouille Orion, there are several theories, listed by Frank Behrens in this Spiegel Online article. Probably the silliest, claimed by producer Hans Gottschalk, is that there simply weren’t enough ideas for further episodes. This is profoundly silly, because the first seven episodes did pretty well borrowing from forty years of American magazine SF and five years of Perry Rhodan. Indeed, even a single yearly run of the big American SF mags of the time would have yielded more than enough ideas for further episodes.

Another complaint against Raumpatrouille Orion was that the series was “too militaristic” and even fascistoid. Of course, leftwing German pop culture criticism of the 1960s and 1970s pretty much called any popular entertainment “fascistoid” that was not aimed at raising the consciousness of the working class. G-Man Jerry Cotton was fascistoid, even though he was played by a gay actor on screen. James Bond was fascistoid. Even poor Captain America was fascistoid, which makes Steve Rogers cry and Hulk smash.

Science fiction of any kind was inevitably suspected of fascistoid tendencies, because it was not overly connected to everyday lives, which was considered the only subject worth exploring in art, and also didn’t do much to raise the consciousness of the working class. And yes, you’ll find those words pretty much verbatim in German leftwing pop culture criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. These attitudes were still lingering on well into the 1980s, as plenty of debates with German teachers who attacked students for reading speculative fiction (because attacking and belittling your students’ reading choices is such a great way to get them to read) abundantly showed. Coincidentally, a lot of the complaints of the sad puppies about preachy leftwing message fiction that has supposedly infected speculative fiction sound as if they’re arguing not with today’s genre, but with the over-the-top leftwing pop culture criticism of the 1960s and 1970s which was way past its sell-by date even when I encountered the primary sources (rather than the watered down version spouting from the mouths of teachers) at uni in the 1990s.

1970s pop culture critics accusing anything at all of fascistoid tendencies were inevitably wrong and often hadn’t actually read/watched the work in question at all. For example, SF pulp hero Perry Rhodan, who was constantly slammed for his supposed fascistoid tendencies, actually allies himself with peaceful aliens against a militaristic Earth and proceeds to destroy all nuclear weapons on Earth – yeah, really fascist. As for how anybody could call Captain America fascist (proper, pre-Hydra brainwashing Cap), honestly I have no words except “Hulk smash.”

As usual, the critics accusing Raumpatrouille Orion of fascistoid tendencies and glorifying the military were wrong. The fascism accusation is actually offensive, considering that the star of the show was an outspoken peace activist and the cast included at least one Jewish actor and one actor who was banned from working during the Third Reich because of “non-aryan origin”.

Does the military feature prominently in the show? Well, it’s called Space Patrol Orion, so of course it does. And people involved in the production have said that the military content was even stronger in the original scripts (writer Rolf Honold was a WWII veteran, whose other writing credits include a couple of war movies) and was toned down during shooting. But that the show features military characters doesn’t mean that it glorifies the military. Quite the contrary, it’s actually quite critical of military structures, very much mirroring West German attitudes about war and the military some twenty years after the end of WWII.

The various generals and other high ranking military officials, all played by the creme de la creme of postwar German acting talent, are usually portrayed as inept, overly hierarchical and bureaucratic and unconcerned about the lives of those under their command. Plenty of scenes show overzealous generals ordering preventive strikes against alien planets, space colonies potentially under the control of hostile aliens and anything else that doesn’t respond as expected, regardless of the loss of human life. There are lots of tense moments as McLane is ordered to destroy some outpost or other, usually while either members of the Orion crew or other sympathetic characters are still on board, and either refuses to follow those orders or does his best to resolve the situation before someone else can carry them out. It’s also striking that all high-ranking officers in the series are universally unlikable – probably due to the lingering memory of WWII generals sendings thousands of soldiers to die in hopeless battles – except for the above mentioned General Lydia Van Dyke and Colonel Villa (delightfully played by Friedrich Joloff), head of the galactic intelligence service and Tamara Jagellowsk’s direct superior. Indeed, Colonel Villa is often the one who keeps the overzealous Generals Wamsler and Kublai-Krim from bombing the planet or outpost of the week to smithereens. When he is brainwashed and turned into a villain for the final episode, I actually felt betrayed, even though Friedrich Joloff’s evil Villa is probably the most chilling character in the entire series.

Meanwhile, Cliff Allister McLane is part of the military, but clearly supposed to represent the burgeoning counterculture of the 1960s. McLane is a rebel, he considers orders merely suggestions and frequently ignores them. Interestingly, McLane also expects his subordinates to use their common sense rather than blindly following orders. When Atan Shubashi almost gets himself and Helga Legrelle killed maintaining an energy-intensive illusion, McLane berates him for blindly following orders rather than “switching the damn thing off”. Coincidentally, that scene is also the first instance – at least, to my knowledge – that the word “Scheiße” was uttered on German TV, fifteen years before Horst Schimanski shocked conservative audience doing the same. It’s striking that throughout the series, McLane’s first concern is always saving (human) lives, even against the opposition of his superiors and at times his own crewmates.

I often say that Raumpatrouille Orion permanently ruined me for the “Rah, rah, space marines” brand of US military science fiction, because after watching McLane go against orders again and again, I simply couldn’t take characters blindly following orders seriously. Also compare McLane refusal to bomb an outpost that has been taken over by hostile aliens, even though there are still two Orion crewmembers on board, to President Laura Roslin ordering a ship that may have been taken over by Cylons destroyed in one of the first episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica. When faux Starbuck and faux Apollo actually destroyed that ship, even though there might still be humans on board, it killed the new Galactica for me (to be fair, I disliked the show from the very beginning), because McLane would never have done that and he would have pulled it off, too.

Besides, there are plenty of hints that in spite of the optimistic opening narration, the pan-national society of Raumpatrouille Orion is not nearly as utopian as it looks at first glance. It not only has rather trigger happy military commanders, but there are also hints at widespread environmental pollution. When the Orion lands on the matriarchical planet Chroma, the crew are stunned how lush and green it is. What is more, poodles are nigh extinct, Orion astrogator Atan Shubashi is the proud owner of one of the last survivors. And when the Orion is forced to land on a prison asteroid in one episode, there is a throwaway line that the prisoners are not actually criminals but that the place is a gulag for rebels and malcontents, quite a few of them former celebrities. No, a utopia this is not. Coincidentally, I also think that in only seven episodes, Raumpatrouille Orion manages to present a more complete picture of the future world in which the series is set than the original Star Trek manages to do in ten times as many.

So if it wasn’t unfounded criticism of fascistoid tendencies, what is the true reason why Raumpatrouille Orion only lasted for seven episodes. The most likely answer is, as so often, money. For though the show was a huge success, it was also extremely costly to produce. And the impending switch to colour would have made the production even more costly, especially since sets, uniforms, etc… would all have to be redone, because as the few surviving colour stills show, everything was literally black and grey.

Of course, the question remains why – unlike Star Trek – Raumpatrouille Orion was never revived. There is a single feature film, which is basically key scenes of the series edited together with a bit of new framing material. However, there never was a movie version containing only new footage, there never was Raumpatrouille Orion – The Next Generation, there never was a reboot. Seven episodes, a few spin-off novels and audio dramas are all that remains of Germany’s first SF series.

In this Tagesspiegel article published on occasion of Orion‘s fortieth anniversary in 2006, Leila Knüppel attempts to answer the question just why there was no more German science fiction after Raumpatrouille Orion and the answer is depressing as hell.

First of all, Ms. Knüppel is wrong, because there was the occasional West German foray into science fiction post Orion (and the East Germans made a few as well) such as the brilliant dystopian media satire Das Millionenspiel (The Million Game), the near future thriller Das Blaue Palais (The Blue Palace), Roland Emmerich’s directorial debut Das Arche Noah Prinzip as well as his follow-ups Joey and Moon 44 (the latter two are hybrids with an international cast, but Germans behind the camera), the Tatort episode Tod im All (Death in Space), an X-Files parody starring former Orion star Dietmar Schönherr, and the apocalyptic depression fest Die Wolke (The Cloud), based on Gudrun Pausewang’s eponymous novel. True, most later German science fiction is dystopian or post-apocalyptic, but even German space opera still exists post-Orion. Roland Emmerich’s Noah’s Ark Prinziple and the vastly underrated Moon 44, Es ist nicht leicht, ein Gott zu sein (It’s not easy being a god), the adaption of the Strugatsky brothers’ eponymous novel, and the Spaceman Ijon Tichy series, based on Stanislav Lem’s eponymous stories, are all examples, as is Bully Herbig’s Star Trek parody Traumschiff Surprise.

However, Leila Knüppel is right that there is comparatively little German science fiction and that it is extremely hard to get the funding to make an SF series or TV movie in Germany. The argument that science fiction is simply too expensive for Germans to make is wrong, because the public TV stations ARD and ZDF have a budget comparable to the BBC’s (which manages to make SF just fine) and German public film funds are wasted on Hollywood productions that just happen to shoot in Germany all the time. And of the private TV stations, RTL manages to spend roughly one million per episode on Alarm für Cobra 11 and produce a slick product that looks like a Hollywood action movie with one hundred times a budget. So the money to make a German SF series would certainly be there.

The argument that German productions could not match the special effects of US productions is bunk as well, because there are actually quite a few special effects companies based in Germany these days. However, they work on those international productions we supposedly cannot match rather than on homegrown fare.

So a far more likely answer is that there is simply no will to make science fiction in Germany, because it is assumed that German audiences simply do not care for science fiction, even though both Raumpatrouille Orion and a few years later Star Trek were big hits. Leila Knüppel offers a few quotes along those lines from a spokewoman of the TV company Sat 1 group and the head of the Bavaria Studios in Munich, where Raumpatrouille Orion was shot fifty years ago.

The Sat 1 spokeswoman declares that they used to broadcast Star Trek weekly on their flagship channel as well as daily reruns of old original series and Next Generation eps on a smaller channel, but that the ratings were too low, because audiences supposedly want programming that has something to do with their everyday lives (I hear the echoes of 1970s pop culture criticism there). Telenovelas and reality shows are where it’s at, not science fiction. What she does not say is that Star Trek Enterprise finished in 2005, so by 2006 there was no more new Trek to broadcast. As for falling ratings for the reruns, considering how often both the original series and Next Generation have been rerun, I’m not surprised that ratings were falling. She also fails to mention that those telenovelas and reality shows the audience is supposedly craving are much cheaper to make than SF shows, even imported SF shows. Though she is correct that SFF shows of any kind, whether space opera, urban fantasy, epic fantasy, post-apocalyptic, superhero shows, etc… are often shunted to small channels in graveyard slots, which never gives them the chance to find their audience. However, it’s the anti-SFF prejudices of the TV stations which are to blame for this, not the audience which never had the chance to even find those shows.

The quote from the head of the Bavaria Studios is even sadder, because he simply states, “Well, science fiction is not a German topic.”

This is not just fucking depressing – “Hey, forget about the future. That’s not a German topic. Watch this TV show about a kindly doctor or a nun harrassing a small town mayor instead.” – it also shows why everybody who wants to make science fiction or fantasy in Germany quickly escapes to friendlier climates. This attitude is why we lost Roland Emmerich and Wolfgang Petersen to Hollywood (as well as Uwe Boll, but he’s not exactly a big loss). Coincidentally, it’s also why I write in English – because I grasped early on that there wasn’t a market for what I write in Germany and what little market there is prefers US imports.

So let’s celebrate fifty years of Raumpatrouille Orion and look back at a time, when German filmmakers and TV producers still had the guts to take a chance on a science fiction series, before drowning us in a swamp of kindly doctors, concerned cops and the insipid going-ons aboard cruiseliners.

Send to Kindle

The Three Fractions of Speculative Fiction

A few days ago, Mike Glyer of File 770 linked to this post by Nathaniel Givens at a site called The Loose Canon about the Hugos and the Dragon Awards.

It’s a curious post that attempts to offer a neutral assessment of the conflict. Nathaniel Givens is clearly no puppy, though he is sympathetic to some puppy talking points such as that US SFF publishing* is dominated by what passes for the far left in the US, that WorldCon is a monoculture and that the Hugos are broken and have been awarding substandard work in the past few years. However, unlike most puppies of either stripe, Givens is also critical of the Dragon Awards and criticises them for having too many novel categories, which make it difficult to read everything and cast an informed vote, and for ignoring short fiction, in spite of its importance to the field.

As for which recent Hugo winners Nathaniel Givens considers substandard, he names Redshirts by John Scalzi (slight and forgettable, nadir of the best novel Hugo), Among Others by Jo Walton (unreadable, but not overly political), “If you were a dinosaur, my love…” by Rachel Swirsky (kind of liked it, but it’s not SF and makes a loaded political point) and “The Water that Falls on You From Nowhere” by John Chu (not SF and makes a loaded political point).

In short, it’s the same names we hear over and over again from the puppy camp as an example of how the Hugos are broken, except for Among Others, which the puppies rarely talk about. Add in Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (which Nathaniel Givens liked, though he found it provocatively political), The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, the non-fiction anthology Chicks Dig Time Lords, “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt and “Cat Pictures, Please” by Naomi Kritzer (both works that were ironically handed victory by the puppies themselves) and you’ve got the puppy canon of works that ruined the Hugos. If you’re wondering what on Earth could be objectionable about “Cat Pictures, Please” of all things, S. Schwartz has the answer. It’s the same thing that makes the puppies hate “The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere”, namely the fact that it includes gay people and said gay people are neither unhappy nor dead.

As I’ve pointed out before, the puppies’ intense dislike for Redshirts, Ancillary Justice and Chicks Dig Time Lords make little sense, since these are exactly the populist core genre works they claim the Hugos are ignoring. Of course, Ancillary Justice has feminine pronouns used throughout and taverns in the snow, which have no place in science fiction, and Chicks Dig Time Lords had the misfortune of beating the collected columns of Brad Torgersen’s mentor Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, plus it’s by and about women. But Redshirts? What on Earth could be objectionable about a Star Trek parody, except for the fact that it’s written by John Scalzi who is a hate figure for many puppies?

Now let’s take a trip back in time to the 2013 Hugo Awards, the year before the puppy wars broke out. The nominees in the best novel category that year were Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold (my personal favourite), Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, Blackout by Mira Grant a.k.a. Seanan McGuire and of course the eventual winner Redshirts by John Scalzi. At first glance it doesn’t seem an overly controversial ballot: All five nominees are core genre works, nothing experimental or borderline literary about them. Lois McMaster Bujold, John Scalzi, Kim Stanley Robinson and Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire are all established and popular authors with multiple Hugo nominations and a few wins under their belt, while Throne of the Crescent Moon was a debut novel by an author who’d been nominated for the Campbell Award the year before. It seems to have been a bit forgotten since then, probably because the sequel won’t be out until 2017, but at the time Throne of the Crescent Moon certainly got a lot of buzz.

Nonetheless, I did remember that there was a controversy involving the 2013 Hugos at the time, a controversy I chronicled in several posts here, here and here.

Interestingly, most “The Hugos are broken” complaints that year came not from the puppy side (though Larry Correia waded into the fray, being his usual charming self) but from overwhelmingly British critics, who complained about the alleged lack of sophistication of the nominees. For examples, check out these posts by Justin Landon, Aidan Moher, Adam Callaway and Jonathan McCalmont.

The critics who wrote those posts are not puppies. Quite the contrary, they are probably the polar opposite. Where the puppies complain that the Hugos aren’t populist enough and reward obscure literary works, these critics complain that the Hugos are too populist and not sophisticated enough. However, if you read through those posts (and particularly Justin Landon’s remains a marvel of condescension) you’ll notice that their criticisms of the Hugos eerily mirror those made by the sad and rabid puppies a few years later: The Hugos are broken, they are dominated by a small and incestous clique of aging babyboomers who have been attending WorldCon for decades and/or an equally incestous clique of livejournal posters voting for their friends, those cliques are hostile to outsiders and disregard everybody who doesn’t attend cons as “not a real fan”, only works that appeal to that clique of insiders are nominated and the books/authors the critics like are never nominated. So the Hugos should be burned to the ground or reformed to represent all of fandom or maybe a new award should be established to better represent what’s best in SFF. And as if the puppy parallels weren’t striking enough, many of those posts also contain some bonus condescension towards women writers and writers of colour. Oh yes, and they all agree that Redshirts is an unworthy nominee. Ditto for Lois McMaster Bujold and Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire. Opinions are divided on Saladin Ahmed.

So what is going on here? Why do two seemingly diametrically opposed groups make so very similar points?

Let’s take another trip on the time machine, this time to February 2015, when the Nebula nominees for 2014 had just been announced to the usual controversy. At the time, I wrote:

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

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

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

[…]

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

The traditionalists and anti-nostalgics have both been part of SFF almost since the establishment of science fiction as a defined genre and their struggles for dominance have been at root of many a genre conflict over the years. Campbellian SF vs. New Wave is the classic example, the rise of Cyberpunk and the debate about Mundane Science Fiction. In fact, you could probably trace this general conflict all the way back to the exclusion of the Futurians from the very first WorldCon back in 1939. Sometimes, traditionalists and anti-nostalgics reverse position, as the genre moves on, e.g. the Campbellians started out as the radical new kids on the block opposed to Gernsbackian pulp SF in the 1930s and 1940s and wound up the staid old guard resistant to change by the time the New Wave rolled along in the 1960s.

However, there is also a third group of readers and writers, which neither uncritically worships the (largely imaginary) past of the genre nor wants to burn it all down. This group tends to prefer stories that privilege characters over big ideas. They love SFF and its tropes, but don’t mind if genre elements are merely used as furniture for whatever story they want to tell, stories which often contain protagonists (women, characters of colour, LGBT characters, disabled characters) and/or settings (non US/UK settings, non-western settings) not normally found in classic SFF.

Ann Leckie, one of the big names of the third group, says it best:

If SFF is a huge Lego castle that we’ve all been building on for decades, some of us might want to tear their part down and set it on fire and then build on the ruins. Fair enough. But some of us might want to renovate a particular wing that’s taken their fancy. Others of us might just want to add some filigree to a particular battlement.

All of these approaches, and a zillion others, can produce great results. But if you insist that only the set it on fire approach is going to produce great work, you’ve erased the work of everyone else. Go a step farther (too much of what’s published didn’t radically transform the genre! Set it on fire!) and you’ve denied those other artists the right to even exist.

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

This third group is more diverse than the other two, more female, more international, less straight, less white, less cissexual***. They have been around for as long as the other two and have left their mark on the genre as well, e.g. the rise of Star Trek fandom and media fandom in general is probably due to this group, as is the rise of fan fiction. I was tempted to call them Social Justice Warriors, but that term is both loaded and overly reductive****, so I decided to go with diversity fraction or character-driven fraction*****.

Until fairly recently, this third group was often reduced to the role of a spectator watching the fights of the other two (though I’d argue that the suppression of feminist SF by the Cyberpunks was an example of a fight between the anti-nostalgic and the character-driven fraction). However, the character-driven fraction is growing due to demographic shifts in SFF fandom and due to the internet, which allows previously isolated fans and writers to find each other. And in the past five to ten years, their preferences have started to influence awards shortlists and winners. RaceFail in 2009 was a watershed moment and it’s probably no accident that from 2010 on you see the number of women, writers of colour and LGBT writers on the awards ballots sharply increase after holding largely steady at a low level for the previous ten years or so.

Neither the traditionalists nor the anti-nostalgics are happy about this demographic shift, since it means that the genre mainstream is moving away from the sort of work they prefer. Besides, as Samuel Delany predicted back in 1998, the SFF world is liberal and welcoming as long as there are only a handful of women, writers of colour, LGBT writers and other marginalised people. As soon, however, as the numbers begin to rise to the point that straight white men feel squeezed out, the backlash will begin. Though the anti-nostalgics usually limit themselves to writing long, more or less polemic think pieces (and note that quite a few notable anti-nostalgics have stopped blogging altogether in the past few years), whereas the nastier fringe of the traditionalists has started flinging poo at the opposition, their writers, awards and institutions.

So where does the genre go from here? At the moment, the swinging pendulum seems to favour the character-driven fraction, since the traditionalists seem to have decamped to the Dragon Awards after thoroughly getting trounced by “No Award” two years in a row, while the anti-nostalgics have decamped to the Clarke Award and are either still writing the same polemic think pieces they were writing a few years ago or have given up on blogging altogether.

However, the pendulum can easily swing into another direction again. And women, writers of colour and LGBT writers, who make up a large part of the character-driven fraction, are a lot more susceptible to erasure than straight white men of either fraction. Just remember how Cyberpunk – knowingly or not – erased feminist science fiction.

Comments are off, since I don’t feel like dealing with angry traditionalists or angry anti-nostalgics.

*Mind you, puppy talking points, particularly those of the sads, are exclusively focussed on the US. The rest of the world doesn’t exist, as far as the sad puppies are concerned.

**Though not every traditionalist is a puppy.

***Though it should be noted that every fraction includes women, people of colour and LGBT people.

****Also note that I did not call the traditionalists “puppies”, because again that would be too reductive.

*****”Diversity” is also a loaded term in parts of the SFF world, so let’s go with the more neutral character-driven.

Send to Kindle

More 2016 Dragon Awards Reactions

I don’t expect to do four different posts and reaction round-ups about the Dragon Awards like I did for the Hugos, but there have been a few more reactions and responses to the inaugural Dragon Awards in the meantime. My previous post on the Dragon Awards is here.

At Women Write About Comics, Doris V. Sutherland offers her analysis of the Dragon Awards winners and points out how heavily dominated by puppy tastes the fiction categories are. There is also an interesting comment from a Dragon Con attendee who said that many congoers were not even aware of the Dragon Awards and also that Dragon Con’s literary track is heavily dominated by “older white dudes” and Baen readers.

Camestros Felapton offers his own Dragon Awards analysis and also attempts to calculate how many total votes there might have been. His estimate is a bit higher than my own, but the analysis is sound. Besides, the barrier to entry for voting/nominating in the Dragon Awards is a lot lower than for the Hugos, since all you need is an e-mail address and both Vox Day and Larry Correia have proven that they can motivate a crowd.

I think the most interesting point in estimating how many Dragon Awards voters there were and how many of them were Vox Day’s dead elk is John C. Wright’s win in the best science fiction novel category. Because as I said in my last post, Larry Correia has a big and active fanbase, even if I can’t see the appeal of his books at all, and it’s likely that there is quite a bit of overlap between Correia’s fanbase and Baen books readers in general and Dragon Con’s audience. Plus, Larry Correia probably also have profited from Vox Day’s recommendation, which may well have given him the edge over Jim Butcher.

As for Nick Cole and Brian Niemeier, two rather obscure puppy associated Dragon Award winners, Nick Cole became something of a cause celebre for both sets of puppies, when Harper Collins declined to publish Ctrl Alt Revolt! for offensive content. Nick Cole was also nominated in a generally weak category with N.K. Jemisin (whom both sets of puppies hate) his strongest competition. What is more, Larry Correia previously supported Nick Cole via one of his “book bombs”, so a lot of Correia’s fans either read him or at least recognised his name. I also have no problems believing that Ctrl Alt Revolt! with its focus on action and gaming (plus the bit which caused Harper Collins to reject the book) appeals more to Larry Correia’s readers and general Baen fans than The Fifth Season. As for Brian Niemeier, as discussed in this post, horror doesn’t seem to be the puppies’ thing, plus they were likely familiar with his name.

However, it doesn’t seem all that likely that a whole lot of Larry Correia’s fans and general Baen fans would vote for John C. Wright – both Charles Gannon and the RPG tie-in seem much more down their alley than Wright’s traditionally wordy fiction. And indeed, Wright himself admits that his works are not for everybody. Besides, John C. Wright only appeared on the puppy slates, after Correia had handed the reigns over to Brad Torgersen, though Larry Correia did organise a “book bomb” for him. Sure, Correia’s fans might vote for Wright to “make the heads of the left” explode, but not if there is something on the ballot that appeals to them more. John C. Wright’s win is most likely due to Vox Day’s support.

But unless we see actual numbers, all this remains speculation, especially since the “first past the post” or simple majority voting system of the Dragon Awards allows a nominee to win with a very narrow margin, particularly if the other nominees in the category split the vote. In fact, this might well have led to Naomi Novik winning in the alternate history category over Eric Flint whose two nominated novels may well have split the vote between themselves.

Writer Lela E. Buis briefly weighs in on the Dragon Awards and claims that they look as if they will be more friendly to popular fiction than either the Hugos or the Nebula Awards. Well, it’s certainly the intent behind the Dragon Awards to be more friendly towards popular fiction than other genre awards, but so far the reality shows a mix of broadly popular works and works which appeal to a specific niche, namely the puppy niche, winning. Lela E. Buis also points out that the Dragon Awards winners are very white and very male, though she views this as white men voting their taste. Because white men obviously never read books by women and writers of colour.

At File 770, Mike Glyer offers a round-up of Dragon Award reactions from winners and nominees. I already linked to most of those in my previous post, but there are two which are new to me. The first is this brief thank you post from Michael O’Brien of Chaosium Inc., publishers of Call of the Cthulhu, which won in the RPG category.

The second is this post from Marko Kloos, nominated in the best military SFF category. Marko Kloos eventually lost out to David Weber, but is neither surprised nor disapppointed. He also thinks it’s an honour to be nominated and thanks his fans.

Nick Cole, author of Ctrl Alt Revolt!, also weighs at Facebook about winning the Dragon Award in the post-apocalyptic category. Mostly, he thanks those who supported him, but he also cannot help making a crack about “fighting for the right of fans to tell the world what their favourite books are”.

Meanwhile, Brian Niemeier is rather angry about the Doris V. Sutherland article linked above. He also still has no idea how Amazon algorithms and bestseller lists work.

As for how well publicised the Dragon Awards were, Rob Daviau, one of the creators behind Pandemic: Legacy, which won in the best boardgame category, as apparently entirely unaware that he had been nominated for, much less won the Dragon Award, as this Twitter exchange shows.

2015 Sad Puppy in chief Brad Torgersen has not yet weighed in on the Dragon Awards on his blog, but John C. Wright shares what I presume is a comment Torgersen made in a comment thread elsewhere. At any rate, Torgersen complains that people criticise the Dragon Awards for having hardly any control measures to keep people from voting more than once (which is a big flaw) and yet are opposed to voter ID laws in the US. Because obviously a national election is just like an internet poll about favourite SFF books.

Comments are still off.

Send to Kindle

The 2016 Dragon Awards or Participation Trophies for Puppies

I posted a lot about the 2016 Hugos, Nebulas and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, so it’s only fair I do the 2016 Dragon Awards, the winners of which were announced at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia on Sunday, as well. I also covered the Dragon Award nominees (along with the 2016 Retro Hugo winners) here.

Anyway, the full list of the 2016 Dragon Award winners may be found here at File 770, since the official Dragon Award website is slow to update. There’s some good discussion and analysis in the comments, too.

As you can see, it’s a mix of generally popular works, particularly in the comics, film, TV and games categories, and the sort of thing puppies like with some overlap between the two.

Let’s start with the generally popular works: Ms. Marvel and The Sandman: Overture in comics/graphic novels, The Martian and Game of Thrones in film and TV as well as the winners in the four gaming categories are all massively popular (the games have to be popular, if I’ve heard of them, since gaming is so not my thing) and have thousands, if not millions of fans. You’ll also note a lot of overlap here with past and presen Hugo winners in the respective category (except for the games, since the Hugos don’t have a category for that). And since DragonCon is primarily a media convention, it’s no surprise that the categories most likely to appeal to DragonCon attendees went to highly popular works.

League of Dragons by Naomi Novik wins in the alternate history category, beating out both Harry Turtledove and Eric Flint, who are popular with the Baen and the puppy crowd. Coincidentally, this is also the only one of my choices (I registered and voted, though I left the gaming categories blank, since I have no idea how to evaluate them) to win.

The Shepherd’s Crown by Sir Terry Pratchett in the YA category is another generally popular winner. Plus, The Shepherd’s Crown was Sir Terry’s final novel, which might well have given him an extra boost, because this is the last chance to give an award to a beloved author.

Let’s go on to things that puppies like, but that also have a broader fanbase beyond the two overlapping puppy cliques. It just occurs to me that Sir Terry Pratchett might fit into this category, since the sad puppies seem to like him a lot (“Terry Pratchett never won a Hugo” was one of their rallying cries in 2015), though the rabids generally dislike him for his pro-euthanasia stance. But Sir Terry and his books were beloved all across the spectrum, so the puppies can’t really claim his win for themselves. Never mind that Sir Terry beat a prominent sad puppy writer in the YA category.

Another author puppies like, David Weber wins in the military SFF category for Hell’s Foundations Quiver, which is apparently part of his Safehold series. Now David Weber is a conservative writer, but he’s not a puppy. He also is massively popular and his strongest competition in the military SFF category, John Scalzi, withdrew The End of All Things from consideration. So once again, this is neither an unexpected nor an undeserved win, even though personally I voted for Django Wexler.

In the fantasy category, Son of the Black Sword by sad puppy founder Larry Correia wins, beating among others Jim Butcher’s The Aeronaut’s Windlass and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. Now this is clearly a win for the puppies, but Correia also has a big fanbase that extends beyond the puppy groups. I’m a bit surprised that he beat Jim Butcher, whose overall fanbase is bigger and who also is popular among the puppy crowd. But then, Larry Correia is an avid self-promoter and campaigned heavily for the Dragon Awards and Jim Butcher didn’t.

Now we come to the three categories where the winners can only be explained by heavy puppy voting. Ctrl Alt Revolt! by Nick Cole wins in the post-apocalyptic category, beating N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and S.M. Stirling among others. For those who’ve forgotten, Nick Cole was the author who loudly cried censorship, when Harper Collins declined to publish Ctrl Alt Revolt! because of offensive content, which promptly turned him into a cause celebre among the puppies and the US rightwing in general. Now Nick Cole is far from the most obscure authors on the Dragon Awards shortlist – before he went full puppy, he had some success with the Apocalypse Weird series and also had a book published by Harper Collins, the prequel to his Dragon Award winning novel. Nonetheless, he is clearly a puppy pick and indeed was pushed heavily by Vox Day.

Souldancer by Brian Niemeier won in the horror category, beating Cherie Priest, Christina Henry and Paul Tremblay among others. Brian Niemeier is an unapologetic puppy and was also promoted by Vox Day over fellow puppy Declan Finn who was also nominated in the horror category. Niemeier also heavily campaigned for the Dragon Awards. In one of my Hugo posts, I go a bit more into the problems with the horror category of the Dragon Awards and the fact that the puppies don’t much care for the horror genre in general. I’m also not sure if the regular Dragon Con crowd is much into horror, though I doubt it. My own vote was for Chapelwood by Cherie Priest BTW.

But the biggest “There is no way this would have won without puppy interference” moment of the 2016 Dragon Awards is Somewhither by John C. Wright winning in the best science fiction novel category, beating Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie, Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson and Raising Caine by Charles Gannon among others. Now John C. Wright is – to put it mildly – an acquired taste and he was up against three very popular and multiple award winning and nominated SF authors, a tie-in novel to a popular RPG and a popular indie novel that caught the eye of a publisher. Even if one considers that the Dragon Awards seem to be aimed at populist and action-packed SFF, Raising Caine or Agent of the Imperium still fit the bill much better than Somewhither, which – going by previous experience with Wright’s work – is neither action-packed nor populist and probably also very preachy. Somewhither also doesn’t sound very SFnal, going by the blurb. But Vox Day and Wright himself heavily pushed Somewhither and their minions voted.

Unlike the Hugos, the Dragon Awards don’t release voting and nomination statistics, so it’s impossible to say how many voters and nominators there were. I suspect that number is pretty small, going by the many little known and downright obscure works to make the ballot. Never mind that the various puppy fractions were the only ones who heavily promoted the award – whereas Dragon Con barely promoted it at all.

Unlike with the Hugo or the Nebula or the Arthur C. Clarke Awards, media coverage of the Dragon Award winners is slight so far.

At The Verge, Andrew Liptak offers an overview of the Dragon Award winners and also points out that the results point at a heavy puppy influence, though without detailed statistics, one cannot say how heavy.

At The Beat, Kyle Pinion briefly discusses the Dragon Awards, but only the winners in the comic, graphic novel, film and TV series categories.

ETA: There’s also a bit about the award on the Dragon Con website itself.

So let’s see what the puppies have to say:

John C. Wright is very happy about his Dragon Award win and then descends into the usual garble-grable about the Hugos, secret cabals, Morlocks and Damien Walter (who hasn’t commented on the Dragon Awards at all). He also gets the Hugos and the Nebulas mixed up, since Alfred Bester won the first ever Hugo Award for best novel for The Demolished Man, while Frank Herbert won the first ever Nebula Award for best novel for Dune. Coincidentally, even Wright himself feels that Somewhither was misclassified as science fiction and expected that Charles Gannon would win.

Larry Correia is also very happy that he won a Dragon Award and responds with a surprisingly gracious post. He even makes the sensible suggestion to have separate categories for epic and urban fantasy and maybe even paranormal romance. No namecalling or gloating about how the Hugos will be destroyed either. Maybe Correia was just really desperate to win an award and now he finally has one, he’s satisfied.

Brian Niemeier is also very happy that he won a Dragon Award. He’s also a lot less gracious about it than Larry Correia and launches into a lengthy gloating diatribe about how the Dragon Award is the true voice of Dragon Con’s 60000 attendees and of SFF fans everywhere, how he totally knew he would win and how the Hugos and WorldCon are dead. I suspect he believes it, too.

Declan Finn didn’t win a Dragon Award, but acted as acceptor for Brian Niemeier, John C. Wright and Nick Cole. He’s also gloating about how the Hugos are totally destroyed.

Dave Freer also didn’t win a Dragon Award, but is still happy, because he thinks it’s an honour to lose to Terry Pratchett and Larry Correia. That’s also the most gracious thing he says, then he goes into how WorldCon and the Hugos are cliquish and elitist, complete with a made-up parable about evil Muslims disrupting a Bavarian beer festival, which never happened outside the fevered imaginations of the AfD (Oktoberfest has not been banned, beer and grilled pork are sold and Muslims happily go there, though they mostly refrain from the beer and the pork). There a crack against Mary Robinette Kowal, too, as someone who writes about social justice and doesn’t sell (more than Dave Freer, I bet). Oh yes, and the Dragon Awards honoured popular and good authors from across the political spectrum (which is why the winners in the fiction categories are a bunch of rightwingers, Terry Pratchett and Naomi Novik).

Vox Day is happy that two Castalia House titles won the Dragon Award, but doesn’t have much more to say, since he is too busy ranting about Hillary Clinton.

At a blog named The Liberty Zone, someone named Nicki is really happy about the Dragon Awards, because her favourite authors and books won (except for Declan Finn – apparently, she is a fan). She also declares, like some of the other puppies I linked to above, that the Dragon Award is a true fan award, voted on by real fans and that SJWs, CHORFs or whatever stupid acronym the puppies have come up with this week for anybody who is not them are clutching their pearls that outspoken puppies have won.

Uhm no, that’s not what I’m seeing at all. What I saw was a lot of people saying, “Well, it’s nice that the puppies finally have an award of their own. Maybe they will leave the Hugos alone now.” I also saw a lot of people saying, “Well, those books are totally not my thing, but good for those who like that sort of thing.”

This is also my view on the whole thing. Most of the winners and many of the nominees are not the sort of books I like. Which is okay, because there are plenty of awards that rarely honour the sort of books I like. For example, I rarely care about the winners of the David Gemmell Legend Award, the Prometheus Award and the German Book Prize either. Not every award has to reflect my personal tastes.

And if the puppies finally have found an award that honours the sort of books they like, then that’s a good thing. The puppies get to take home a pretty trophy (and it is pretty), their followers get a recommendation list of books they might like and the Hugos can go back to nominating and honouring the sort of works Hugo voters like. That’s a win-win for everybody.

Of course, the puppies are kidding themselves when they proclaim that the Dragon Awards are the true voice of fandom or even the true voice of Dragon Con’s sixty to eighty thousand attendees (I saw very different numbers). First of all, unless voting and nomination statistics are released, we don’t know how many votes there really were. I suspect that the number was not all that big, since the Dragon Awards were little promoted outside the puppy sphere and Dragon Con hardly promoted them at all. Never mind that I’m pretty sure that the “true voice of fandom” would not have voted for John C. Wright of all people, since his work appeals to a fairly small niche.

Will that eventually change and will the Dragon Awards become the populist SFF awards they were supposedly designed to be? I guess that depends on how things work out in the next few years. A few early off years are normal for new awards, just witness the second ever Hugo Award for best novel going to They’d Rather Be Right, a novel that’s completely forgotten except as the supposedly worst Hugo winner of all time. And I do think that a popular vote SFF award which distinguishes between different subgenres could be a valuable addition to the SFF awards world.

Will the Dragon Awards destroy the Hugos and the Nebulas? Sorry, but no fucking way. The Dragon Awards will no more destroy the Hugos than the Nebulas or the Locus Awards or the Arthur C. Clarke Award or the David Gemmell Legend Award or the Tiptree Award or the Bram Stoker Awards or the World Fantasy Awards or the Goodreads Choice Awards or the Prism Awards or the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards did. At best, they will become a valuable addition to the spectrum of SFF awards that offers a different focus. At worst, they will solidify into a niche award, a sort of participation trophy for puppies.

Finally, let’s not forget the other awards that were given out at Dragon Con, namely the Parsec Awards for SFF podcasts with what looks like a pretty good list of winners and the first ever Eugie Foster Memorial Award for best speculative short fiction (a category the Dragon Awards ignore completely), which was won by Catherynne M. Valente for “The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild”.

Finally, here are some residual links about the 2016 Hugos and Retro Hugos:

At Dreaming About Other Worlds, Aaron Pound takes a look at the short- and longlist for the 1941 Retro Hugos and point out that yes, Robert A. Heinlein can still win a Hugo or three in 2016.

At Rocknerd, David Gerrard tackles the most notable assertion from Brad Torgersen’s infamous Nutty Nuggets post, namely that in the past it used to be able to tell the content of an SFF book from the cover and points out that “No, it wasn’t”. He also offers some example of totally misses the point SFF cover art from the 1970s and 1980s.

Comments are closed, puppies celebrate and gloat elsewhere.

Send to Kindle

A new release and a new series: Dreaming of the Stars

As mentioned before, there will be quite a few new release announcements coming up (well, I can’t blog about SFF awards all the time). And today, I have a special new release to announce, because I not only launch a new book, but also a new series.

Let’s have some background:

Sometime last year, a scene popped into my head: Two intergalactic mercenaries, a man and a woman, bantering while walking through a grimy spaceport. I knew at once that they were a couple and that they came from very different backgrounds which they had left behind to be together. They worked as mercenaries now, not because they wanted to, but because it was the only option left open to them. They were also on the run.

I was intrigued by the bantering couple, so I started writing. As I followed them through the spaceport, I learned a lot more about them: Their names, that they had both been elite soldiers on opposite sides of an endless intergalactic war, that they had fallen in love and run away together. I also got, in bits and pieces, the story of how they’d met and fallen in love and what had prompted them to leave behind everything they’d ever known and run away together.

I’ve always enjoyed science fiction romance, particular science fiction romance which is basically space opera with a strong romance thread running through it. So I decided to write the story of how they’d met and fallen in love against all odds, with the option of sequels featuring them having adventures together (because there aren’t nearly enough books featuring established and happy couples having adventures together).

So I worked on the story on and off for several months, while it eventually blossomed into two novel length works. However, I had also always intended to give my couple smaller standalone adventures.

Then in July 2016, I did the July short story challenge, which involved writing a short story per day in July 2016. But I also still had the characters I’d been living with for several months at this point at the back of my mind. Then one day, while I was looking at concept art for inspiration, a piece sparked an idea for a standalone adventure featuring my mercenary couple. So I wrote that story.

Eventually, I wrote two more stories about these characters during the July short story challenge. One was another standalone adventure, the other was a prequel featuring the characters as teenagers, chronicling how they ended up becoming elite soldiers in the first place. After I finished the July challenge, I also wrote a fourth story, another prequel of sorts set in the same universe.

So now I suddenly had four stories in a new series, now called In Love and War. I’ll release them over the next weeks, but for now here is the prequel novelette, Dreaming of the Stars.

Of the 31 stories I wrote for the July short story challenge, this was the longest. It’s currently 8500 words long, though it gained a thousand words or so in rewrites. But even the first was definitely over 7000 words long. It was also one of the most emotionally harrowing stories to write, particularly the second half featuring the young Mikhail.

By the time I wrote Dreaming of the Stars, I already knew that Mikhail had lost his entire family to the war (unlike Anjali who comes from a largely happy family background – we meet her sisters in Dreaming of the Stars) and that he’d grown up in a prison-like camp for war orphans. However, until I started writing his story, I didn’t realise how horrible that place really was.

Coincidentally, writing Dreaming of the Stars also gave me a lot more insight into Mikhail’s character and how he came to be the man he is. For the novel I’d been working on for several months at that point was told almost entirely from Anjali’ POV for reasons that will become apparent, so I’d spend a lot more time in her head than in his.

So get ready to meet Anjali Patel and Mikhail Alexeievich Grikov, as they are…

…Dreaming of the Stars

Even in a galaxy torn apart by war, the young still have dreams.

On Rajipuri, a poor planet in the Empire of Worlds, Anjali Patel and her two younger sisters look up at the stars and dream of escaping the limitations of a traditional and rigidly stratified society.

At the same time, in a camp for war orphans in the Republic of United Planets, Mikhail Grikov also looks up at the stars and dreams of escaping a life of pain and abuse.

One day in the far future, they will meet and change the galaxy. But for now, they’re merely dreaming of the stars…

This is a prequel novelette of 8500 words or approx. 29 print pages to the “In Love and War” series, but may be read as a standalone.

More information.

Length: 8500 words

List price: 0.99 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, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

Send to Kindle

Why we celebrate that so many women and writers of colour won Hugos this year

As extensively discussed in a series of four posts to date, the winners of the 2016 Hugo Awards have been announced, the rabid puppies have been resoundingly defeated and all four fiction categories went to women writers, three of them women of colour. This is a reason to celebrate.

In the puppy camp, the most common reaction after “The Hugos are dead. Long live the Dragon Awards” seems to be “But the winners are just political affirmative action choices. It’s not as if those books and stories could be any good.”

Early on Sunday morning German time, shortly after the Hugo ceremony had concluded, I made a fairly innocuous tweet pointing out that the Hugo winners in the four fiction categories were all women, three of them women of colour. In the heat of the moment, I even got the number of winners of colour wrong – I initially said “two”, not “three” – as Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, the leader of the non-existent Hugo cabal himself*, pointed out to me on Twitter.

The tweet got a lot of retweets and a few nice responses. I also got some not so nice responses by butthurt puppies who accused me of voting only for social justice reasons, whereas they only want good books and don’t care about the gender and the race of the author at all. At the time – it was five a.m. on a Sunday morning, after all – I had neither the inclination nor the energy to debate angry puppies.

So here is my belated response to all angry puppies who claim that I only celebrated the fact that four women won Hugos in the four fiction categories for reasons of social justice:

First of all, only one of the four winners in the four fiction categories was actually my first choice, though my top picks were all women and I ranked the eventual winners fairly high in every category. But even though not all of my top picks won, I’m still very happy with the outcome of the 2016 Hugos, particularly in the fiction categories. Because the fact that – for the first time in Hugo history – we have four women winners in the fiction categories, three of them women of colour, is a reason to celebrate.

Now speculative fiction in general and the Hugo Awards in particular have been heavily dominated by white men for a long time. The Hugos had already been in existence for fifteen years by the time that the first woman won a Hugo Award in a fiction category – Anne McCaffrey for “Weyr Search”, the novella that eventually became half of the first book in the Pern series, in 1968. Two years later, in 1970, the Hugos finally had their first winner of colour, Samuel R. Delany for the short story “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”. Coincidentally, in the same year, the first woman also won a Hugo in the best novel category, Ursula K. Le Guin for The Left Hand of Darkness. By the late 1970s/early 1980s finally, we had several women nominees and even winners every year due to the rise of feminist SF, though writers of colour were still thin on the ground, much less writers of colour not named Delany.

However, the number of women nominated for the Hugos dropped off again in the 1980s, as feminist SF gave way to Cyberpunk and leading Cyberpunks did their best to – knowingly or not – characterise the previous decade’s SFF, much of it written by women, as “boring and not worth remembering”, as Jeanne Gomoll points out in her Open Letter to Joanna Russ. The number of women nominees continued to rise and fall in the following three decades, while the numbers of writers of colour nominated for the Hugo remained tiny until very recently. And let’s not forget that as late as 2007, the Hugo shortlist in the four fiction categories was almost entirely male, except for a single female nominee, Naomi Novik, and – at least as far as I can tell – entirely white. Meanwhile, a quick check of my personal collection reveals more than two dozen SFF novels by women that came out in 2007 alone, including works by Catherine Asaro, Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews (okay, it’s a husband/wife team, but still), Diana Gabaldon, J.D. Robb, Rachel Caine, Kim Harrison, Linnea Sinclair, Richelle Mead, Charlaine Harris, Shanna Swendson and many others.

Looking beyond awards, male SFF writers still get more promotion and reviews. Display tables at bookstores and promo mails and newsletters still overwhelmingly push books by male authors, almost all of whom are white. All-male and all-white table of contents and recommendation lists still happen all the time, though both seem to be getting less common than a couple of years ago (or maybe women and writers of colour just got tired of pointing out the issue every single time). Women writers are still told by publishers not to bother submitting, because science fiction by women doesn’t sell. Earlier this month, the Fireside Fiction report revealed that black writers were heavily underrepresented in speculative short fiction markets. Every single tactic Joanna Russ outlined in How to Suppress Women’s Writing is still being used against women, writers of colour, LGBT writers, etc… and both sets of puppies are some of the worst offenders.

So in the light of this history alone, four women, three of them women of colour, one of them an international writer in translation, winning the Hugo Award in the four fiction categories is worth celebrating. Because it’s still so very rare that women and people of colour writing SFF are recognised by the big genre awards. Indeed, as N.K. Jemisin points out in this interview with Alexandra Alter in the New York Times, she is the first black writer and the first woman of colour to win the Hugo Award for best novel, since since previous black Hugo winners Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler only won in the short fiction categories.

The most common argument that comes up whenever someone dares to point out that a table of contents, a recommendation list or an awards shortlist is very white and very male or whenever someone – gasp – starts a challenge to read only works by women or writers of colour for a certain period is, “I only read good books. I don’t pay attention to the gender and skin colour of the author and if you do so, you’re the real racist/sexist.”

Amazingly, when you ask these readers of “good books only” to list the last few books they read or take a look at their bookshelves, you’ll usually find white man after white man after white man. Because for some reason, what these people consider “good books” are inevitably written by white men. No matter how statistically unlikely that is.

As mentioned above, books by white men are promoted more, reviewed more, pushed more by bookstores. As a result, an SFF reader is far more likely to run across a book by a white men than a book by a woman or a writer of colour. A lot of people also have unconscious biases against books by women or writers of colour. This is how bookshelves and recommendation lists full of white men happen, even with otherwise well intentioned people. This is also why popular vote awards like the David Gemmell Legend Award regularly end up with all white, all male shortlists.

Of course, you also get those who claim they would love to read more books by women and writers of colour, they simply have problems finding good ones, because women just write YA and paranormal romance and urban fantasy, because writers of colour write about racism all the time, because LGBT writers write about LGBT characters and so on. For an example, check out this post from February 2016 at an SFF review blog, where the blogger laments that he would love to read more books by women, but publishers keep sending him paranormal romance and YA (which he doesn’t read, but knows is crap). And anyway, feminists and social justice warriors are out to get him, blah, blah.

To be fair, the blogger actually did try to do better, since browsing recent reviews revealed several books by women and at least one by a writer of colour. Nor do I want to single out this one reviewer, since he is but one example of a larger problem. And yes, everybody has the right to read what they like. But if you run a review blog or edit an anthology or write a recommendation list and it’s all white men, then you need to do better.

Another really common argument (so common that it shows up several times in the comments to the above linked post) that always comes up whenever anybody dares to point out that women and writers of colour are underrepresented in magazines, publisher’s catalogues and tables of content, that they are less promoted and less reviewed is “Well, women and people of colour just aren’t into SFF. They don’t write it, they don’t submit it, they don’t care about SFF. Publishers can’t publish what isn’t being submitted.”

This argument is – saying it politely – bullshit. Women have always read and written SFF. People of colour have always read and written SFF. LGBT people have always read and written SFF. People from beyond the US/UK have always read and written SFF. Women, people of colour, LGBT people, international people have always been part of the genre. However, they are less likely to be published in the first place, less likely to be reprinted, less likely to show up in histories of the genre and lists of influential writers, more likely to be forgotten and erased, as Kari Sperring points out in this article on Katherine Kurtz. The women SFF writers of the Golden Age have been dismissed as “silly little housewives writing silly little stories set in galactic suburbia”, the feminist SF writers of the 1970s were redefined as boring and relegated to a memory hole by the cyberpunks.

This does not mean that there is no submission gap. If women, writers of colour and LGBT writers are constantly given the message that the stories they tell aren’t welcome or that their stories are not SFF at all, they will eventually stop submitting. Maybe they’ll go to a more welcoming genre (romance, YA, urban fiction, comics and graphic novels). Maybe they’ll say “Screw all that” and go indie. Maybe they’ll become discouraged and stop altogether. P. Djeli Clark, N.K. Jemisin and L.E.H. Light all go into this with regard to the Fireside Fiction report on the underrepresentation of black writers, but you could apply many of the same points to women, LGBT writers or international writers. And the puppy wars of the past few years have contributed to this hostile atmosphere, since several of the leading puppies are on record that they want anything that does not match their narrow idea of what SFF should be cast out of the genre.

Occasionally, you even get something like this column, which argues that the 18th and 19th century novel was created as a leisure time pursuit for middle class women. But science fiction is different, because science fiction was not intended to be escapist literature for bored housewives, but literature that engages with science and technology and the real world and is therefore aimed at men. And now women are invading the genre, so the men have to keep them out via rituals of exclusion such as filling SFF with misogyny and rape scenes. To be fair, I don’t think the author actually agrees with this, he merely points out the mechanism.

So considering how much the deck is still stacked against women and writers of colour, four women, three of them women of colour and one of them an international writer, winning the Hugo in the four fiction categories is a damned good reason to celebrate. As is the fact that women writers, two of them women of colour, won in all Nebula categories except best dramatic presentation this year.

And no, the fact that women, including several women of colour, have won many of the major SFF awards this year does not mean that straight white men have been banished from the genre. For starters, there is the fifth winner in a fiction category at the 2016 Hugo Awards, namely the Campbell Award for the best new writer. Which in 2016 was won by Andy Weir, a white man who wrote a very traditional hard SF novel about another white man stuck on Mars. And another white man, Adrian Tchaikovsky, just won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. So yes, white men can still win awards. But they’re no longer the only ones.

Besides, we can no more banish straight white men from the genre (nor would I want to, since I enjoy quite a few books by straight white men) than reactionaries can banish women, writers of colour, LGBt writers and international writers. Because science fiction and fantasy belong to everybody and genre awards are finally beginning to reflect this fact.

ETA: Someone at File 770 linked to this lovely WorldCon recap by Monica Valentinelli, who points out that the sad and rabid puppies and other genre jerks (cause the puppies don’t have a monopoly on that) try to hurt people and keep them from making the art they want to make. However, the 2016 Hugo Awards have been a massive rejection of these attempts.

Let’s close with a quote:

Everyone deserves to see themselves as the hero, to play as the hero, to be the hero. And this, my friends and dear readers, is why the Hugos were so significant this year. It’s not just because love won, it’s because the garbage fires do not stop us from making the art we want to make, nor does it stop those who are making great art be recognized for their efforts.

*No puppies, this is not a confirmation. There is no Hugo cabal and has never been one.

Comments are closed.

Send to Kindle

Even More Hugo and Clarke Awards Reactions

The debate about the 2016 Hugo Awards is still going on and there is a somewhat more low-key debate about the Arthur C. Clarke Award as well.  Previous posts on the 2016 Hugos are here, here, here and here, for those following along.

So here are the latest links. Let’s start with the Hugos first:

At the New Statesman, David Barnett profiles Hugo winner N.K. Jemisin and also goes a bit into subjects such as racefail and the puppy debate.

At the law blog Duets Blog, Laurel Sutton points out that the aim of the rabid puppies is to tarnish the Hugo brand and points out that they didn’t succeed, because Hugo voters continued to award outstanding works. It’s an interesting perspective on the Hugo drama. Coincidentally, I’m also stunned what a big deal the whole New Coke thing apparently was in the US, since it did not really cause a big uproar in Germany at all. But then Coke is very much a kids’ drink here that adults only drink once in a while.

At nerds of a feather, Joe Sherry shares his reaction to the 2016 Hugos and shows what a slate-free ballot would have looked like (though he made a mistake in novelette, since Brooke Bolander got onto the ballot under her own steam).

Like me, Joe Sherry voted on merit, regardless how the nominees got on the ballot. As the results show, a majority of Hugo voters seems to have done the same this year, since rabid puppy “human shields” like “Folding Beijing”, The Martian and Andy Weir nonetheless managed to win in their respective categories, while other rabid puppy “human shields” like Slow Bullets, The Aeronaut’s Windlass, Seveneves, etc… managed to finish above “No Award”.

However, Joe Sherry also points out that there were worthy nominees that did not deserve to finish under “No Award”, but were apparently punished for the misfortune that Vox Day happens to like their work. The example Joe Sherry gives is fan artist nominee Matthew Callahan. I agree and indeed, I ranked Matthew Callahan and Christian Quinot both above “No Award” and above the eventual winner Steve Stiles. In fact, I think that most of the nominees in the two art categories were worthy – the fan artist with the unfunny comics and bad drawings of naked superheroines was the only one who deserved to finish under “No Award”. Other undeservingly no awarded slate nominees IMO are Sebastien de Castell and Pierce Brown for the Campbell award, Supernatural and My Little Pony in dramatic presentation, Invisible Republic and The Divine in graphic story, Daily Science Fiction in semi-prozine, “What Price Humanity?” in novelette, Jerry Pournelle in best editor short form, etc… Okay, so I didn’t like Pierce Brown’s trilogy, but I was still surprised to see him finish under “No Award”, since he apparently has a big fanbase. However, I also saw very little buzz about Pierce Brown’s trilogy both in the SFF sphere and in the YA sphere, so whoever his fans are, they don’t have a whole lot of overlap with WorldCon members.

At Dreaming About Other Worlds, Aaron Pound takes a look at the 2016 Hugo Awards longlist and wonders whether some nominees were no awarded, even though they were neither explicit puppies nor unworthy, because Hugo voters were mentally comparing them to the stronger works they had nominated that had not made the shortlist. He certainly has a point and indeed I have heard Hugo voters state that if a work is not as good as the weakest work on their personal nomination ballot, they will no award it. This is not my approach to Hugo voting, if only because my personal taste is quite different from the majority of the Hugo electorate and very few of my nominees make it. If I really were to no award everything I like less than my own nominees, I might well wind up no awarding more than half the ballot every year. However, Hugo voters have different voting strategies and “This is okay, but much weaker than X, Y or Z, which would also have been eligible last year” may well have hurt some of the slate nominees.

At Women Write About Comics, Doris V. Sutherland also offers a puppy slate free Hugo ballot, though her conclusions are a bit different than those of Joe Sherry and Aaron Pound.

The main problem here is that it is difficult to estimate exactly how many rabid puppies there are, though everybody seems to agree that there were more of them nominating (due to their Sasquan memberships from last year giving them nominating rights) than voting. Camestros Felapton estimates that there are 160 hardcore rabid puppies as well as some sad puppies willing to nominate/vote for obvious troll nominations due to still being pissed off about losing last year. Camestros Felapton also reads Vox Day’s blog, so you don’t have to, and points out that the post Hugo week was not a very good one for Vox Day.

Charon Dunn offers her take on the 2016 Hugo awards and also points out that Hugo voters had no problems with generally popular “human shields” that were on the rabid puppy slate, they simply do not like having puppy picks of limited appeal foisted upon them.

At Bitter Empire, Lyda Morehouse offers her take on the 2016 Hugo Awards and points out that Hugo voters are well able to distinguish between human shields and puppy poo (though there were some edge cases, as discussed above). Lyda Morehouse also shares a photo of Zoe Quinn’s awesome unicorn shoes and reminds everybody that love is real.

Talking of which, at LitHub M. Sophia Newman recounts how reporting about the Hugo drama and learning about Chuck Tingle helped her overcome a bad case of writer’s block. Because love is real.

At Girly Geek Chic, Trimid Dew Lanns shares her experiences as a first time WorldCon attendee. She also goes briefly into the Hugo drama and describes how the ongoing drama left her wary of attending WorldCon, especially since the puppy campaigns and the resulting harrassment was overwhelmingly aimed at women and writers of colour. However, in the end, the puppies were beaten, women and writers of colour won and Trimid Dew Lanns had a great time at WorldCon. Because love is real.

On the other hand, writer/artist M.C.A. Hogarth, who is a conservative Catholic, but not a puppy of either stripe, did not have such a good time at WorldCon, since she experienced microaggressions targeted at religious people and conservatives. Which is not cool.

If even non-puppy conservatives feel microaggressed against (and I repeat, this is not cool), the same is probably doubly true for actual puppies. And so 2015 puppy-in-chief Brad Torgersen feels compelled to defend M.C.A. Hogarth from the ravening hordes of social justice zeppelins (yes, I know that’s not what the acronym stands for) and predict destruction and doom for the entire genre in his usual hyperbolic style.

Leaving aside the whole “But I can’t keep my political and/or religious beliefs to myself, they’re part of who I am” argument (Of course, you can. Other people manage just fine. And at least over here, it’s always rightwingers who have to spam everybody with their bigoted views – Christmas Eve at the Purple Owl Café was not written in a vacuum, you know?), one thing I find notable about the sad puppy discourse following the 2016 Hugo Awards is the undertone of “You Social Justice Warriors can have the genre and WorldCon and the Hugos. I’m taking my ball and decamping to the Dragon Awards. And BTW, your genre, you cons and awards are doomed, because we are the real fandom.”

For an example of the above, Brian Niemeier, rabid puppy nominee for the Campbell Award, utters dire threats against WorldCon, the Hugos and the SFF community in general and also declares that he never really wanted to win the Campbell Award in the first place, but that finishing under no award (as well as under Pierce Brown and Sebastien de Castell) stung nonetheless. However, Brian Niemeier would very much like to win a Dragon Award (which he claims has Social Justice Warriors terrified), therefore his Dragon nominated book Souldancer is currently free on Amazon (at least it was when he wrote the post), where it gained a higher rank on the free list than The Fifth Season did on the paid list, so the puppies have totally won. Okay, so he has zero idea how bookselling and bestseller lists work, but if it makes him happy…

Brian Niemeier and fellow puppy Declan Finn are nominated for the Dragon Award in the horror category. Now Doris V. Sutherland takes a look at the Hugos and the Dragons Awards and concludes that the puppies don’t much care for the horror genre, probably because puppies prefer what they consider feel-good fiction and thus aren’t the target for horror fiction.

Doris V. Sutherland makes an interesting point here, namely that the puppies don’t much care for overt horror and that works with horror elements that have popped up on the puppy lists/slates (Larry Correia’s novels, Supernatural, Grimm, Brian Niemeier’s and Declan Finn’s books) mostly aren’t actual horror, but merely use classic horror creatures and elements for another purpose.

Sutherland also notes that the two puppy groups seem to be very much stuck in a bubble of their own and completely unaware of what is going on in the wider world of genre. As proof, she offers some tweets from puppy supporters about the Dragon Awards shortlist in the horror category, where they declare that Brian Niemeier and Declan Finn are the only serious contenders in this category, even though their competition includes Alice by Christina Henry, Chapelwood by Cherie Priest, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay and An Unattractive Vampire by Jim McDoniel. Now I’m not a big horror fan, but nonetheless I have heard of Christina Henry, Cherie Priest and Paul Tremblay and enjoyed Cherie Priest’s Maplecroft, the prequel to Chapelwood, a whole lot. Jim McDoniel is the only unknown (to me) quantity in this category, whereas I wouldn’t have heard of Declan Finn and Brian Niemeier at all, if they hadn’t attached themselves to the puppies.

Now, as Doris Sutherland has pointed out, it’s quite possible that the puppies simply aren’t horror fans – with the exception of the borderline horror works of Brian Niemeier and Declan Finn, both of whom seem to write the sort of religiously tinged SFF that puppies seem to enjoy. However, I’ve also noticed a similar ignorance of popular and highly regarded SFF works elsewhere among the puppies. Hence we get Larry Correia first getting Adam Roberts mixed up with Damien Walter and then declaring that he’s never heard of Roberts. We also get rank and file puppies declaring they have never heard of N.K. Jemisin or Ann Leckie or Nnedi Okorafor or Rachel Swirsky. And anyway, they have no idea who is reading that stuff, since the local Barnes & Noble in Dogshit, Nebraska, does not carry those writers. We also get a whole lot of puppies stunned by the inventiveness of the Steampunkish setting of Jim Butcher’s The Aeronaut’s Windlass, since they apparently never have run across Steampunk before. Add to that the misconceptions about classic science fiction that abound among puppies and a narrow view of the golden age that includes Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo, but not Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother” and you get the impression that many of the puppies live in a genre bubble that includes Baen, Castalia House, some indie authors, some selected classics and Jim Butcher. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – reading SFF should be fun and not homework. But if you want to hold forth about the state of the genre, then maybe you should be familiar with the genre and at least know the names of the authors and books being discussed.

Unfortunately, Doris Sutherland’s fine post is somewhat marred by some pointless bashing of urban fantasy and paranormal romance and how they’re just “horror lite”, courtesy of a quote by horror editor Stephen Jones. Now it’s obvious that urban fantasy and paranormal romance are not horror, in spite of using classic horror creatures. But neither are they “horror lite”, instead they are their own subgenre (or rather two related subgenres, for urban fantasy and paranormal romance are not the same thing, even if there is some overlap) under the great big speculative fiction umbrella.

The purpose of horror fiction is – as Doris Sutherland and Stephen Jones point out – to frighten and to disturb. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance, on the other hand, don’t intend to frighten. Instead, the underlying theme seems to be the humanisation of the other. What were once creatures of horror, the ultimate other, become more human to the point of being portrayed as potential romantic partners.

Urban fantasy traditionally does not do well at the big genre awards like the Hugos and the Nebulas, unless written by Neil Gaiman, that is. However, the sad and rabid puppies count several urban fantasy writers among their more outspoken membership and have heaved urban fantasy novels by Jim Butcher and Larry Correia onto the Hugo shortlist. But if the underlying theme of urban fantasy is the humanisation of the other, then the puppies’s championing of the genre seems a bit odd.

However, if you look at Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter and Grimnoir novels, they’re not so much about humanising the other, but about shooting the other in the face. Correia himself even says as much in this old post on his blog. Correia’s novels are still classified as urban fantasy, because they feature classic horror monsters living in the modern world. But nonetheless, the feel is quite different from other urban fantasy novels. Coincidentally, this might also be the reason why I bounced hard off the one Larry Correia novel I tried to read, even though I normally like urban fantasy a whole lot. Because the novel did not deliver what I enjoy about the genre. However, it delivers exactly what Correia’s target audience is looking for.

If you look at the works championed by the puppies both sad and rabid, you’ll find quite a few works that might be broadly classified to be about “shooting the other in the face”, whether that other is monsters, aliens or in the case of the 2016 best short story nominee “Seven Kill Tiger”, human beings of a different race. Even the urban fantasy works other than Larry Correia’s championed by the puppies, namely the Dresden Files novels, Supernatural and Grimm, have a higher ratio of killing monsters to otherwise interacting with them (and male protagonists) than other urban fantasy works, even if they also humanise traditionally monstrous beings on occasion. It seems as if in addition to “religious sermonising”, “shooting the other in the face” is a theme that really appeals to puppies of both stripes.

Meanwhile, John C. Wright declares the Hugos, the Nebulas, the SFWA and the entire genre dead, because some stories he dislikes have been nominated for and even won awards. In addition to usual puppy bete noirs such as Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, Rachel Swirsky’s “If you were a dinosaur, my love”, John Chu’s “The water that falls on you from nowhere” and Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s “The day the world turned upside down”, Wright particularly singles out Naomi Kritzer’s story “Cat Pictures, Please”, winner of the 2016 Hugo award for best short story as neither science fiction nor fantasy but “bland, experimental literary works of the type only read by other bland, experimental literary authors”. If Wright is that upset about “Cat Pictures, Please” of all things, I don’t want to imagine his reaction if Charles Tingle’s Space Raptor Butt Invasion had won.

This post by Jo Walton at Tor.com is not a direct reply to Wright and was indeed published a day before his post nor is it about the Hugos, but it nonetheless makes a great contrast, since Jo Walton traces how current SFF responds and relates to older genre works. Here is a quote:

There’s a tremendous continuity within science fiction, where the genre constantly feeds on itself, reinvents itself, and revisits old issues in new ways as times and tech change. It’s fascinating to consider how today’s new stories are all things that could never have been written at any earlier time and simultaneously deeply influenced by everything that has come before. The old work of the genre is the mulch out of which the new work grows. A great deal of science fiction is about the future—a future fleshed out in the present, and built on the bones of the past. Every present moment has a different imagination of the way the future might play out, and that gives us constant novelty. But because many of the issues and tropes of science fiction remain relevant, there is also a constant process of reexamination, a replacement of old answers with new answers to the same questions.

The examples Jo Walton uses to trace the relationship between current and classic science fiction are Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, the Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie, Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer and “Cat Pictures, Please” by Naomi Kritzer.

***

That’s it for the Hugos, so let’s go on to the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award, which went to Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award has occasionally caused controversy, such as when Christopher Priest insulted the entire shortlist or when the shortlist turned out to be all male, though it does not have nearly the same drama potential as the Hugos, probably because it is a juried award.

By comparison, the shortlist for the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award struck me as interesting, but not overly controversial. There was zero overlap with the Hugo or Nebula shortlist in the best novel category, but that’s nothing unusual, since the Clarke Award tends to favour more literary and borderline genre works, whereas the Hugos and Nebulas tend to recognise core genre novels.

Nonetheless, the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist seems to have caused a bit of controversy mostly in the UK. At Everything Is Nice, Martin Petto noted back in May that there seems to be little discussion about and reviews of the 2016 Clarke Award shortlist, partly because a lot of SFF blogs have shut down and partly because everybody was busy arguing about other awards. To remedy that, Martin Petto also offers a round-up of reviews of the 2016 shortlist.

As for reviews of the 2016 Clarke Award shortlist, I already linked to Abigail Nussbaum’s two part review of the entire shortlist at Strange Horizons in my last post, but here it is again, just in case you missed it.

Abigail Nussbaum declares that in comparison to the (non-puppy) novels on the Hugo shortlist, the Arthur C. Clarke shortlist pales – not because it is bad, but because it is bland. Coincidentally, I thought that this year’s Clarke Award shortlist was one of the more interesting I have seen with two good books/authors, two unknown quantities that sounded interesting, one “not my thing” choice and only one bad book. Ironically, that’s the one that everybody else seems to like.

From couch to moon agrees with Abigail Nussbaum that the 2016 Clarke Award shortlist is baffling and bland and that more interesting novels were overlooked in favour of books she does not care for.

Megan, the blogger behind From couch to moon, and Maureen Kincaid Speller also join Jonah Sutton-Morse at the Cabbages & Kings podcast to discuss the Clarke Award shortlist in two episodes.

At The Spider’s House, Nina Allan also agrees that the 2016 Clarke Award shortlist is bland and that the Clarke Award in general tends “towards a centrist, conservative (not in the political sense but in the literary sense), broadly commercial view of science fiction: familiar tropes, satisfactory plots, median, unfrightening writing”, while more experimental and exicting works are being ignored.

And what are those experimental and exciting works that are being ignored by the Clarke Award jury? Names that come up are both familiar genre authors such as Ann Leckie, Kim Stanley Robinson and Justina Robson as well as borderline genre writers like Anne Charnock or Matthew di Abatua.

Another title that is mentioned by several critics is The Thing Itself, the latest novel by writer/critic Adam Roberts. Adam Roberts himself weighs in to lament that The Thing Itself did not garner as much attention and award nominations as he had hoped. The comparison with Larry Correia’s lament that Hugo voters did not like his novels, which set off the whole sad puppies drama, is striking. Honestly, if you want to lament that your books are not doing as well as you’d like, follow Adam Roberts’ example rather than Larry Correia’s.

I cannot say anything about The Thing Itself, because I haven’t read it. However, Adam Roberts has appeared on my personal Hugo ballot at least once, though for his scholarly rather than his literary work.

We can expect that the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award will continue to be controversial going forward, since the award director Tom Hunter has announced that the Clarke Award will now open up to self-published work, especially since the 2016 nominee The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers was originally self-published.

Ian Sales, himself an indie writer, considers this decision baffling, since the Clarke Award tends towards more literary genre works, whereas the majority of self-published SF novels are “derivative commercial sf, space opera or military science fiction”. Coincidentally, Ian Sales also agrees with most of the bloggers linked above that the 2016 Clarke Award shortlist was lacklustre.

Finally, here is Paul McAuley back in May wondering just what the Arthur C. Clarke Award is for. It’s an interesting post (plus discussion in the comments) that goes into whether a science fiction novel should be judged by the same criteria as literary fiction or whether it should be judged by a different set of criteria.

That’s it for today and hopefully for the 2016 award season. Comments are still off, because talking about Hugos and puppies tends to bring out the trolls and talking about the Clarke Award isn’t exactly safe either, as an unpleasant interaction a few years ago showed.

Send to Kindle

Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for August 2016

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

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

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. We have a whole lot of epic fantasy this month, but also urban fantasy, portal fantasy, space opera, military science fiction, funny science fiction, hard science fiction, post-apocalyptic science fiction, Cyberpunk, paranormal romance, science fiction romance, fantasy romance, young adult fantasy, weird western, vampires, werewolves, witches, wizards, mummies, aliens, sentient spaceships, outlaw swordfighters, gender-swapped musketeers, sky slayers, wild mages, psychedelic coffee 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:

Deviants of Giftborn by Zuri Amarcya:

Better deviant than dead.

Raised among hostile, violent beggars, Nemma longs for the safety of her family and a better quality of life. She uses trickery and brute force to survive, but living among the desperate has its risks. When she inadvertently kills two powerful magiens, with a power she didn’t realize she had, she is forced to flee and seek help. This sets in motion a chase that will have a fatal end for her if she is unable to escape the all-powerful Sovereign Order.

Ambitious merchant, Clisantha, manipulates others to work her way up the social hierarchy in Torak City. She uses her illegal powers to preserve her status, scrutinize her devious Lord stepfather and meddle with a mysterious magien. However, when hidden memories of her long-deceased father resurface, she becomes absorbed in the mystery surrounding his death, forcing her to put herself, her beliefs and everything she has strived for at risk.

Nemma and Clisantha’s lives collide and revolve as they fall deeper into the secrets of their past, revealing a truth far more devastating than they could ever have imagined.

Deviants of Giftborn is the first installment of The Etherya Series, a thrilling epic fantasy saga exploring the cost of consequence, justice and power. If you like compelling action, determined heroines, and magical societies, Zuri Amarcya’s adventurous and enchanting tale is perfect for you.

After the Pretty Pox: The Attic by August Ansel:

“It’s worse than that. God will ignore us entirely.”

A searing act of bioterrorism. A catastrophic plague they call the Pretty Pox.

Most of the human race is dead, and for two years Arie McInnes has been alone, riding out the aftermath of the Pretty Pox, waiting for her own inevitable end.

Hidden in the attic of her ruined home, Arie survives by wit and skill, ritual and habit. Convinced that humans are a dangerous fluke, a problematic species best allowed to expire, she chooses solitude…even in matters of life and death.

Arie’s precarious world is upended when her youngest brother – a man she’s never met – appears out of nowhere with a badly injured woman. Their presence in the attic draws the attention of a dark watcher in the woods, and Arie is forced to choose between the narrow beliefs that have sustained her and the stubborn instinct to love and protect.

In Book One of August Ansel’s captivating new post-apocalyptic series, After the Pretty Pox casts an unwavering eye on what it means to be human in a world where nature has the upper hand, and the only rules left to live by – for good or ill – are the ones written on our hearts.

Wild Mage by Joseph J. Bailey:

Heaven has fallen.

The legions of Chaos have overrun the world.

Uërth is in ruins.

With the Heavenly Host’s fall, Angel Swords rained from the heavens, littering the world in what was.

Only the most honorable and purest of heart are able to take up the Angel Swords and wield them against the throngs of Chaos. These mighty Empyrean Knights are all that stands between Uërth and annihilation.

Maeraeth is neither a hero nor a great warrior. Nor does he wish to become an Empyrean Knight.

He just wants to be left alone with his studies.

And not be killed by demons.

But, with the destruction of the Chaos Gate, Uërth may have a chance at redemption.

If the hordes of Chaos can be contained and if no more portals to the Abyss are created.

Maeraeth’s teacher, Master Nomba, has other plans for him. Plans that involve both containing demons and preventing their arrival.

So much for his studies.

And not being killed by demons.

Roko’s Labyrinth by Michael Blackburn:

The world is dying.

And Nick Rose watches from the sidelines.

With an enhanced mind and born to the ruling class – The Board – Nick spends his days hacking AI. Tasked with eradicating the bots created by Roko Kasun, the long-dead architect of the Artificial Intelligence that’s crippling the planet, Nick takes refuge behind his keyboard. He’s no hero.

The Board had been severing ties with the rest of mankind, retreating to safety, unplugging and conceding the fate of the world, or so Nick had thought. Now, a summons from Leadership draws Nick into the very real disaster-zone on a last, desperate mission to save everything, and he’ll need to trust the most unlikely ally of all: Roko himself.

In the machine, evil never dies – fortunately, neither do heroes.

Fall of the Western Kings by J. Drew Brumbaugh:

Gant is a commoner, forbidden from learning swordsmanship. He trains in spite of the law and ends up branded an outlaw. However fate intervenes while Gant is on the run and soon he is embroiled in an odyssey with forces of darkness that can only be vanquished with help from his friends, not all of whom are human. An epic that delivers the best in the tradition of classic fantasy.

 

 

Dreaming of the Stars by Cora Buhlert:

Even in a galaxy torn apart by war, the young still have dreams.

On Rajipuri, a poor planet in the Empire of Worlds, Anjali Patel and her two younger sisters look up at the stars and dream of escaping the limitations of a traditional and rigidly stratified society.

At the same time, in a camp for war orphans in the Republic of United Planets, Mikhail Grikov also looks up at the stars and dreams of escaping a life of pain and abuse.

One day in the far future, they will meet and change the galaxy. But for now, they’re merely dreaming of the stars…

This is a prequel novelette of 8500 words or approx. 29 print pages to the “In Love and War” series, but may be read as a standalone.

Lost Wolf by Stacy Claflin:

She’s hiding a dark secret. It already killed her once.

Victoria can’t wait to start college, but there’s a hitch—she can’t remember anything before arriving on campus. Her memories finally spark when she sees her ruggedly handsome math professor, but she senses something terrible happened. The shock on his face affirms her fears.

Toby is an alpha wolf who never thought he’d see his true love again—not after she died in his arms. Nothing could have prepared him for her walking into his class. But to his dismay, not only has she forgotten the past, she doesn’t even know who she is.

He’s determined to do whatever it takes to restore what they’ve lost. Can Toby help Victoria recover her memories, or will he lose her forever?

USA Today bestselling author, Stacy Claflin, brings you Lost Wolf, the first book in the Curse of the Moon series. It’s a paranormal romantic suspense saga that features gripping supernatural drama, surprising twists, dynamic characters, and heart-pounding romance.

The Sky Slayer by Joel Cornah:

All who kill a pterosaur are cursed. But Rob Sardan went a step further – he killed their King.

To break the curse he must escape a prison of ice and crystal, south of south, beyond all hope. With a ragtag team of former pirates, a failed thief and a strategist who cannot be trusted, they seek a ship that can sail on a sea of fire.

They must cross the grinding ice, challenge an empire, and face the dread pirate Skagra before she unleashes the Crown of Black Glass. But above all, Rob must face the ghosts of what he has become…

King Killer. Sword-breaker. Sky Slayer.

‘Glory is like a circle in the water which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, till, by broad spreading, it disperse to naught’.

Bite the Hand that Feeds by Lucy Eldritch:

The leader of the new breed, Robert James, is missing. The few remaining vampires are being picked off, one by one.

Vampiress Elaine Sullivan is keeping her head down, working as a barmaid and trying not to attract attention. Until, that is, she falls for a man who claims he can cure her vampirism. It’s her only hope for survival and she grabs it. The trouble is: he lied.

‘Bite The Hand That Feeds’ is the follow-up to ‘The Young Vampire’s Survival Guide’ and the second in the ‘New Breed Vampires’ book series. Written in British English, it can be read as a standalone novel. This new adult horror book contains bloody violence, swearing, lashings of vampires, paranormal strangeness, sex and other good times.

The Bloody Frontier by Jim Johnson:

The first three books in the Pistols and Pyramids series (an ancient Egyptian-themed spaghetti western with magic and mummies), now available in one collection at a great price!

Kekhmet, the empire of the Two Lands, is a faded shadow of its former glory. Once the shining jewel of the world, the empire has been split apart by the invasion of foul Hesso marauders and the depredations of corrupt governors. The gods and goddesses of Kekhmet are all but silent, and the people struggle to find hope in their hardscrabble lives.

RANGER OF MAYAT: When Tjety, an exiled Ranger of the goddess Mayat, discovers a ransacked fishing village along the lawless northern frontier, he marshals his training and divine hekau magic to hunt down the vicious cultists responsible for the attack. But can he find them before their prisoners are twisted into mindless slaves serving a ruthless necromancer bent on shattering the tenuous balance between order and chaos?

FLIGHT TO THE FORT: Tjety, an exiled Ranger of Mayat, and Ruia, a young fisherman’s daughter, team up to guide the survivors of a bandit attack through the dangerous and rugged Kekhmet frontier. Can they reach the safety of Fort Sekhmet before foul cultists and their horrible mummified creatures can capture them?

HOUSE OF THE HEALER: After surviving a brutal cultist attack on her village, Ruia led the other survivors to the safety of Fort Sekhmet with the help of Tjety, a Ranger of Mayat. With Tjety’s life now hanging in the balance, can Ruia gather enough help and learn to use her newfound hekau magic to heal Tjety before the forces of darkness close in and snuff out all hope?

That Day in the Desert by Carol Holland March:

A romantic fantasy of love spanning worlds

The First Storyteller Tale: Through the Portal

If Larreta is your destiny, you will find it.

Valerie finds herself on Larreta, but it looks so much like California, she doesn’t believe she has entered a new world. Leo knows his chance for love has come and gone, but when he meets Valerie, the beautiful newcomer makes him wonder if there are second chances.

As the Storyteller begins her tales of the dreamwalkers of Larreta, Valerie and Leo are thrown together to forge their destinies on what looks like a perfect world. But as Valerie learns about Larreta, she discovers not everything is as it seems.

That Day in the Desert is the first tale of the dreamwalkers of Larreta, a romantic fantasy that spans worlds and time, an adventure of eternal beings who must overcome the legacy of their journey into the human world so they can reclaim their heritage.

Lizzie in the Land Beyond by Susan McDonough-Wachtman:

Lizzie is a teenager, an AP student, and a singer of folk songs. She wakes one day in a strange world. The women who revive her tell her they have summoned her to help them understand the aliens who have landed on their shores. They also tell her she can never go home because they scooped her up when she was about to die. Captured by witches, kidnapped by a dwarf, enraptured by river sprites — Will Lizzie ever find her way home?

A beautiful mixture of sorcery, mythical beasts, and aliens, Lizzie in the Land Beyond is a fantastic read from beginning to end. I love the characters, the voice of Lizzie and her bumbling youthful arrogance, the larger than life Adeline, and curmudgeonly Sculdar, and the strong and silent Osric. — Cynthia Varady on Goodreads

Red Horizon by Salvador Mercer:

The truth of discovery is on mankind’s horizon, a Red Horizon.

For nearly two long years, the world’s superpowers have mobilized their people and resources in preparation for the next discovery, Mars.

The race against one another pales in comparison to the inherent dangers of travelling through the vastness of the cosmos, going where mankind has never gone before. Facing the hostile and challenging environment of space, and nations ready to do anything it takes to win, Richard, ‘Rock’ Crandon pulls his team together in an attempt to reach the alien technology on the red planet first, and discover the intent behind the alien species.

Will mankind tear itself apart in the name of discovery, or will the truth reveal something more sinister, the true intent of the aliens?

The Harvest Moon by David Neth:

A legacy of magic and danger.

All Danielle Bowen wants is a normal life: white picket fence, kids in the nursery, and peace and quiet with her husband Simon. But she can’t escape the fate her family has wrought for her. Born into a tradition of witchcraft, she has also inherited a deadly enemy: Toxanna, a dark witch who will stop at nothing to destroy the last of the Bowen line.

But will Danielle’s powers be enough to save her family—or even herself? And when Toxanna sets her sights on Holly, Danielle’s only daughter, will anyone have the strength to rescue the newly fledged witch? The darkness is closing around the last of the Bowens. In a world of wizards and powerful demons, how can one family of witches survive?

Bound

(Exclusive to the Deluxe Edition of The Harvest Moon)

Orphaned by the shocking murder of both his parents, thirteen-year-old Drew must conceal his magical powers as he navigates the foster care system. But it might be easier for a young wizard to control his cracking voice than his magic. When one of Drew’s spells attracts the attention of a local coven called the Fire Wizards, Drew sees his chance to solve the mystery of who killed his parents with the coven’s help.

There’s just one catch: once you enter the coven, you’re bound for life. And the more involved Drew becomes with the Fire Wizards, the faster his façade of safety crumbles. Can he find justice for his parents without binding himself to a world of magical peril?

Venturi by Annie Nicholas:

I grew up in space.

Never been on a planet, let alone an alien one.

We crashed—I crashed—our ship on a huge green world.

Communications were down, the ship was broken in two, the crew mostly injured, and there were things out there. Animals with razor sharp teeth.

The emergency beacon lay on the other side of the jungle, our only way to call home, and I drew the short straw.

I was doomed before I ever stepped out of the airlock.

But we weren’t alone…

Part one of a serial about a human traveler, her alien mate (not that she knows that yet), and an adventure through which he’s determined to keep her alive, and safe, and entirely his.

Warning: hot aliens, short serial, cliffhanger.

Musketeer Space by Tansy Rayner Roberts:

“I haven’t got a blade. I haven’t got a ship. I washed out of the Musketeers. If this is your idea of honour, put down the swords and I’ll take you on with my bare hands.”

Dana D’Artagnan longs for a life of adventure as a Musketeer pilot in the Royal Fleet on Paris Satellite. When her dream crashes and burns, she gains a friendship she never expected, with three of the city’s most infamous sword-fighting scoundrels: the Musketeers known as Athos, Porthos and Aramis.

Even as a mecha grunt, Dana has a knack for getting into trouble. She pushes her way into a dangerous political conspiracy involving royal scandals, disguised spaceships, a tailor who keeps getting himself kidnapped, and a seductive spy with far too many secrets.

With the Solar System on the brink of war, Dana is given a chance to prove herself once and for all. But is it worth becoming a Musketeer if she has to sacrifice her friends along the way?

MUSKETEER SPACE is a gender-swapped, thoroughly bisexual space opera retelling of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel The Three Musketeers.

Liberty by Alasdair Shaw:

Struggling with newfound sentience and desperately trying to repair itself, The Indescribable Joy of Destruction is a ship trying to find a new home. In a galaxy torn apart by generations of civil war, that isn’t an easy task. Tired of being used as a killing machine, it has a huge decision to make: hide and save itself, or help other artificial intelligences achieve freedom. Unable to make the decision alone, it revives the sole human aboard – the enemy officer who crippled it.

 

Uncommon Life: The Minerva Lee Story by T.S. Paul:

Minerva Lee is her planets greatest living commander. From her command chair on board Freedom Station She rules the space above her planet. But it wasn’t always like this. She once wanted a different life, a life more simple. It was all ripped away from her and she had to chose another. Read how Athena Lee’s older sister fought battles that captured the hearts and minds of an entire planet.

 

 

Of Bots and Beans by Colin Spindler:

Colin Spindler’s CULT Group Coffee Sequence is a mystical space yarn for lovers of psychedelic science fiction.

CULT Group, a corporate entity shrouded in mystery and connected somehow to humans’ colonization of Mars, is promising the impossible. It claims that the human mind can be separated from the body via a strange VR-like process called Sequencing. If CULT Group’s claims check out, then human beings might just be able to cheat death.

Could disembodied immortality be at last within humanity’s grasp? Or is CULT Group full of beans? The mysterious Participant sets out to investigate.

Of Bots and Beans introduces readers to the reclusive actress Dame Saffron Von Scruplescotch, the fumbling Director Jerubimbo Gripebagger, the mysterious Participant, the eccentric ideas of Sir Francis Buildobare, and the ever-present metamorphic nanobiotech bots crawling all over everything.

Send to Kindle