Deborah J. Ross's Blog, page 98

"Nevertheless, She Persisted" Anthology Table of Contents

Book View Cafe's Mindy Klasky has edited an anthology, Nevertheless, She Persisted. Here's the Table of Contents (with my historical fantasy story about Dona Gracia Nasi). Release date is August 8, 2017.

What an amazing lineup!

“Daughter of Necessity” by Marie Brennan
“Sisters” by Leah Cutter
“Unmasking the Ancient Light” by Deborah J. Ross
“Alea Iacta Est” by Marissa Doyle
“How Best to Serve” from A Call to Arms by P.G. Nagle
“After Eden” by Gillian Polack
“Reset” by Sara Stamey
“A Very, Wary Christmas” by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
“Making Love” by Brenda Clough
“Den of Iniquity” by Irene Radford
“Digger Lady” by Amy Sterling Casil
“Tumbling Blocks” by Mindy Klasky
“The Purge” by Jennifer Stevenson
“If It Ain’t Broke” by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
“Chataqua” by Nancy Jane Moore
“Bearing Shadows” by Dave Smeds
“In Search of Laria” by Doranna Durgin
“Tax Season” by Judith Tarr
“Little Faces” by Vonda N. McIntyre

Glory in the Skies

Today's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" is so beautiful, so uplifting to my spirits, I cannot resist posting it here. For all the troubles on our small globe, the universe is an awesome place. Often I need reminding of the scale of things, "this too shall pass," and that there is always beauty and wonder to be found if we but lift our eyes.



About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. ... Its core is dominated by light from cool yellowish stars. Along its grand spiral arms are the blue colors of hotter, young stars mixed with obscuring dust lanes and pinkish star forming regions.

Short Book Reviews: Urban Fantasy Circa 1991

Street Magic, by Michael Reaves, Tor 1991. This isn’t a new book, as you can see by the date. In fact, I believe it’s the first urban fantasy I read, along the lines of “elves in Manhattan.” In this case, the city is San Francisco, but it could be any big, grimy, noisy city that draws runaways, abandoned kids, and the disillusioned. It’s a fairly short book, and by today’s standards quite simple, but in its time, the tropes were sufficiently new to stand on their own without an overly elaborate plot. I tried to step aside from the urban fantasy of the last 15 years and re-read it with fresh eyes. The characters and elements that appealed to me then still do. The ones that didn’t (like the street kid to whom magical creatures are drawn) still don’t; however, what was once annoying I now see as a not-so-successful exploration of a literary shorthand we now take for granted and that has not weathered the years well.

My favorite characters included an elderly woman bookstore owner (of course!) and the photographer who once glimpsed a door into Faerie (at Muir Woods, of all places – where I visited many times as a teen and college age student, hiking in the “back way” from my parents’ house – well, redwood grove and magic do go together, or so I have always thought), botched his chance to step through that door, and now has descended into a haze of alcohol and regret. He’s not a major character and doesn’t drive the plot, but the way he grapples with his yearning to find Faerie again (and this time, seize the chance he missed before) in conflict with living an ordinary, mortal life in an ordinary, mortal world touched me deeply. Isn’t that what we all do – try to balance and integrate the unrealistic, idealistic dreaming and the humdrum, hoping to forge lives that in some way connect and nurture the miraculous?

The verdict: If you haven’t read it, do take a look. It’s a short book and moves right along, and even after all these years has something to offer, especially in the secondary characters. If you missed it and you love urban fantasy, I commend this historical perspective on the genre.

Short Fiction Sales News

I've just sold two pieces of short fiction to exciting projects.

The first, "Unmasking the Ancient Light," is to Nevertheless, She Persisted, an anthology edited by Mindy Klasky, to be released from Book View Cafe on August 8, 2017. It's a reprint from Ancient Enchantresses, (ed. Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch and Martin H. Greenberg, 1995), and is based on the life of Dona Gracia Nasi, whose family fled Spain after the expulsion, ran one of the largest spice trading firms in Europe, set up a Jewish "underground railroad" from Venice, and eventually established one of the first attempts at a Jewish homeland at Tiberias.
The second is an original story, "The Girl from Black Point Rock," to Sword and Sorceress 32, ed. Elisabeth Waters. More about it later.

Short Book Review: A Post-Apocalyptic Midwife

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (The Road to Nowhere, Book 1) by Meg Elison, 47North. Just as I finished reading this book, I listened to a radio program on the role of dystopic literature in today’s political landscape. The books referenced were generally those so well known they had been made into films ( The Hunger Games, Divergence, The Handmaid’s Tale). The context was one of social commentary and political warning. Meg Elison’s Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, although depicting a future as grim as the others, focuses instead of a human story. There’s no explanation for the plague that wipes out most of humankind, or why most men turn into rapists bent on enslaving women; that’s not the heart of the story. Via alternating journal entries and narrative sections, an unnamed woman – a nurse midwife working in a hospital -- chronicles her own personal journey through a landscape of dead people and dying cities, caught between the desolation of being utterly alone and the peril posed by the few other survivors. As she survives one crisis after another, she gains in wisdom and insight. No matter how lonely she is, she refuses to sacrifice her hard-won independence – both of body and of spirit. The writing is clear and lucid, its simplicity a perfect vehicle for the power of the emotional arc. In the end, the seeds of trust and kindness only partly glimpsed at the beginning of her harrowing tale come to fruition in a thoroughly satisfying way.

Tuesday Cat Blog

This is Gayatri, She Who Sings. Also known as The Pirate Queen because one of my eyes was severely damaged when I was young. I don't see why Shakir should have all the fun. Don't get me wrong, he's a fine fellow, especially when he isn't smacking me. Here we are in our salad days (before my surgery to remove my eye).



Having only one eye has never slowed me down. Even at the august age of 10, I zoom around the house and up the climbing tree. I am also a Fearsome Hunter. Some years ago, my humans allowed me out in the garden. I rewarded them by depositing a reptile or small mammal (killed, of course) on the back porch. The ungrateful monkeys wouldn't let me out after that.

And here I am on Mom's shoulder, checking out the new dog. This was a couple of years ago and, after a period of suitably abject worship, the dog went over the rainbow bridge. You would think that made my life perfect, purrrfect, but oh no...



My most recent adventure was both painful and humiliating. I developed an abscess of my anal glands. Sooo embarrassing. The vet, who is otherwise a perfectly civilized human, did Terrible Things to my rear end. Now there is a draining hole, which my humans squirt with betadine and smear with honey (medicinal, they insist) a couple of times a day. That's all right because they also dose me with nice pain meds. Here I am in the Cone of Shame (to prevent me from licking, which is the Obvious Thing to do with wounds). At least I can sit on my bottom again!

Rebecca Fox on "Where You're Planted " in MASQUES OF DARKOVER

In the spirit of a masqued revel, here is a gala presentation of tales set in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of the Bloody Sun. Some of these stories are humorous, others dark, some gritty, and others whimsical or romantic, but all reflect the richness and breadth of adventures to be found on Darkover.

Here I chat with the marvelous authors who have enriched the world of Darkover with their creative vision.
Masques of Darkover was released May 2, 2017 and is now available for at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and Kobo.

Rebecca (“Becky”) started writing stories when she was seven years old and hasn’t stopped since. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky with three parrots, a chestnut mare, and a Jack Russell terrier who is not-so-secretly an evil canine genius, but no flamingos, pink or otherwise. In her other life, she’s a professional biologist with an interest in bird behavior. 

Deborah J. Ross: What was your introduction to Darkover?
Rebecca Fox: I was somewhere around fourteen years old, and away at a science camp aimed at aspiring astronomers. I was roommates with a girl with whom I’d become pretty much instant friends, and one of the things she’d brought with her was an entire pile of books (see above: nerdy teenagers). She was kind enough to loan me two of them, since I’d been a little short-sighted in the reading material department, and hadn’t brought along any of my own. One of the books was Magic’s Pawn by Mercedes Lackey; the other was Hawkmistress! I devoured both within a couple of days, since I apparently didn’t believe in sleeping at that time in my life. The loan of those two books must have been some sort of omen, because while I didn’t in fact become an astronomer (having been seduced by biology instead), I have since written stories for both Valdemar and Darkover anthologies. 


DJR: What about the world drew you in?
RF: Honestly, I’ve always been a sucker for animal stories and for plucky teenage heroines with a penchant for giving the finger to the established social order. Hawkmistress! was essentially the perfect gateway drug. As a teenager in the early ‘90s, I came for Romilly and her hawks and stayed for the magic (well, matrix sciences; same difference) and adventure. These days, as a professional academic with a taste for Le Carre, I’m in it for the politics, the culture clash between Terra and Darkover, and the tales of peripatetic scholars. Funny how tastes change over the years. Books in the vein of The Bloody Sun, which bored me to tears as a teenager
DJR: What do you see as the future of Darkover? How has its readership changed over the decades? What book would you recommend for someone new to Darkover?
RF: I think there are still lots of stories to be told about Darkover, since it’s not as though we’ve really dispensed with any of the issues Marion dealt with so eloquently in her novels. We’ve admittedly made progress in some areas, like women’s rights, but these days we humans here on Earth have the ability to make some pretty terrifying changes in the natural world, via techniques like gene drive, that put me rather in mind of some of the weapons from the Ages of Chaos.
As far as readership goes, of course new readers are going to keep finding the series just as my friends and I did as teenagers twenty-odd years ago. I teach at the college level, and I can tell you that despite all the dire talk about smartphones ruining the world, my students still love to read and have an appreciation for actual books. If anything, they’re more sf-mad than my generation was in the ‘90s, thanks to Harry Potter and The Hunger Games and all the Marvel movies.
As far as recommendations, I’d want to know a reader’s tastes, since there are as many kinds of Darkover stories as there are readers. Adventure stories like City of Sorcery, tragedies like Stormqueen!, sword and planet tales like The Sword of Aldones, which appeal to this girl’s retro-sf loving heart, political stories, love stories, et cetera, et cetra. That’s one of the best things about the series

DJR” What inspired your story in Masques of Darkover?
RF: I still vividly remember picking up Leroni of Darkover from the bookstore down the street and discovering, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, that it was possible for other people to write Darkover stories. And I also vividly remember – as the sort of teenage girl who enjoyed scrawling dreadful melodramatic fantasy stories in spiral-bound notebooks – just how badly I wanted to be one of those other people. I honestly never imagined I’d actually get to do it.
“Where You’re Planted” is a story for that teenage girl: the kind of story she loved reading, and the kind of story she’d have wanted to write. It’s a story about finding your gifts, finding home, and finding your family, not necessarily in that order. And as I’ve recently been wallowing happily in the very early Darkover novels, it’s also a traditional sort of “A Terran walks into the Darkover spaceport…” story. 

DJR: Was writing this story different from a typical writing project? How did you balance writing in someone else’s world and being true to your own creative imagination?
RF: I always find playing in someone else’s sandbox tougher than just digging the sandbox from scratch. There are all sorts of rules to follow and canon you can’t get rid of just because it makes your life inconvenient. Of course, it’s having to follow the rules while creating something new that makes writing in someone else’s world such a fun challenge. My usual strategy is to find arelatively-unexplored corner of the universe that I’m curious about and burrow in. In the case of “Where You’re Planted,” I’d always wondered about the world of the Big Ships and the spacers who are so frequently alluded to in the series, so that’s where I decided to start. (Space opera lover? Guilty as charged, alas…)   

DJR: Is there another Darkover story you would particularly like to write?
RF: Several! I’d love to tell the story of Cat’s parents, Jameson MacRorie and Miralys Ridenow (with a likely title of “The Short Inglorious War”), and I would also love to write about some of the Terranan scientists who came to Darkover, and what they found when they got there.

DJR: What have you written recently?
RF: Nothing much anyone reading this interview would be interested in – for my “day job,” I’m an associate professor of biology at a private college. In addition to teaching, I do field research in ecophysiology and bird behavior, and at the moment I’m up to my eyeballs in jargon-filled scientific manuscripts I need to finish and submit to various professional journals.

DJR: What lies ahead for you?
RF: I have a couple of short stories in the works for other anthologies that should be out within the year.  I’m also busy with the manuscript for a fantasy novel that can probably best be described as early John Le Carre meets Grimm’s fairy tales, and which was tangentially inspired by (of all things) the incredibly bizarre music video for the Ylvis song “What Does the Fox Say?”.

DJR: Anything else you’d like our readers to know about you, Darkover, or life in general?
RF: I’m really terrible at talking about me, me, and also me, so I think I’ll stop here before I hurt myself.

Short Book Reviews: A Richly Depicted World

The Unquiet Land, by Sharon Shinn, (Ace)
Although I had heard the author’s name, I had not read any of her work. It’s always a risk picking up a book in the middle of a series; much of the time, you get either huge chunks of expository backstory or you are lost by references to the same. Shinn skillfully draws the reader into her rich, intricate world, filled with marvelously depicted characters and even more nuanced relationships. This world is one of small island states, each with its own unique and sometimes bizarre culture. Although there is definitely a story “off the pages,” it’s not at all necessary to have started at the beginning to fully enjoy this one.

Leah has returned to the city of her birth after a period of exile, political intrigue, and a relationship that might develop into a romance. In between getting to know the young daughter she left behind, figuring out her place and what she wants for her future, she crosses paths with travelers from another island state, strangers whose political ambitions and utter amorality threaten everyone she holds dear. Although the story has plenty of suspense and dramatic movement, what stood out for me was the emphasis on relationships – new ones, old ones, those laden with regret and those inspiring hope. The sheer number of characters and the system of magic, the religious blessings and traditions, all these elements might have seemed overwhelming in the hands of a less competent writer, but Shinn weaves them all together to bring dimensionality and emotional resonance to every aspect of Leah’s world. 

A Special Sale Price on JAYDIUM

This month's specials at Book View Cafe include Jaydium for just $0.95. DRM-free, multiple formats (there's an audiobook, too, but it's not on special.)
Here's the newsletter for more offerings.


Hungry for “a wild and woolly journey through time and space,” some really cool aliens, and a touch of romance?Far in the future, an interplanetary civil conflict has ground to an uneasy halt, leaving its human victims bitter and desperate: Kithri, the daughter of a scientist, abandoned on a desolate mining planet with no hope to use her talents, and Eril, shell-shocked pilot, finding adapting to peace more difficult than he dreamed. A freak accident sends them back to a time when their desert world was lush and green, when an alien civilization stands on the brink of a war of total destruction. Unexpectedly linked with Lennart, a spaceman from an earlier era in galactic history, and Brianna, an anthropologist from an alternate universe, they must choose to remain outside the conflict or to stand up for what they believe, even at the cost of never getting home again?
REVIEWS“A wild and woolly journey through time and space that contains enough imagination and plotting for an entire shelf of books.”— Don D’Ammassa in SCIENCE FICTION CHRONICLE“Beautifully executed . . . marks Wheeler as a stellar new talent.”— Catherine Asaro in MINDSPARKS“There is an emphasis on the quest for peace that is unusual when so many novels focus on the quest for dominance and victory.”— Tom Easton in ANALOG“JAYDIUM sweeps the reader into a well-designed world populated with realistic people . . . a fast-paced and fun read.”— Mary Rosenblum“Excellent hard science-fiction!”— Marion Zimmer Bradley

Robin Wayne Bailey on "The Mountains of Light" in MASQUES OF DARKOVER

In the spirit of a masqued revel, here is a gala presentation of tales set in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of the Bloody Sun. Some of these stories are humorous, others dark, some gritty, and others whimsical or romantic, but all reflect the richness and breadth of adventures to be found on Darkover.

Masques of Darkover will be released May 2, 2017 and is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and Kobo. The print edition will be on sale on the release date.


Robin Wayne Bailey is the author of numerous novels, including the Dragonkin trilogy and the Frost
series, as well as Shadowdance and the Fritz Leiber-inspired Swords Against the Shadowland. His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies with numerous appearances in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword And Sorceress series and Deborah J. Ross's Lace And Blade volumes. Some of his stories have been collected in two volumes, Turn Left to Tomorrow and The Fantastikon, from Yard Dog Books. He's a former two-term president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and a founder of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He's the co-editor, along with Bryan Thomas Schmidt, of Little Green Men--Attack!

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover. What about the world drew you in?

In the spirit of a masqued revel, here is a gala presentation of tales set in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of the Bloody Sun. Some of these stories are humorous, others dark, some gritty, and others whimsical or romantic, but all reflect the richness and breadth of adventures to be found on Darkover.

Masques of Darkover will be released May 2, 2017 and is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and Kobo. The print edition will be on sale on the release date.
Robin Wayne Bailey: I first encountered Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover world when I was a teen and, I think, working in a bookstore. I found a DAW publication of Darkover Landfall, read it and loved it. The idea of a spaceship of humans flying off the known star charts and crash-landing on another world, of surviving and building their own culture excited me. I read the next three or four books as quickly as I could get them. Unfortunately, after the publication of Stormqueen, I drifted away from the series. Yet I never parted with those early Darkover books. Later, when I met Marion, she signed them for me, and they have honored places on my bookshelves to this day.


DJR: What do you see as the future of Darkover?

RWB: I see the future of Darkover as wide-open. Marion wrote the world as dynamic, constantly undergoing conflict and change. Nor was she slavish about continuity. I’m deeply enamored of this new anthology series under Deborah Ross’s editorship, not just because I’m a regular contributor, but because she’s allowed me to fuck with some of the concepts. To me, that’s where the fun and the challenge lies. If Marion was alive and still writing Darkover novels, that world would not look the same now as it looked when she left us. She would have changed it in ways we can’t know. On the surface, it might look similar, but it would be different. That certainty informs my entire approach to writing in her world.

DJR: Tell us about your story in Masques of Darkover.

RWB: Each new story I’ve written for Deborah’s anthologies has presented its own challenges. Often, when I agree to write for her, I don’t know what I’m actually going to write about. That was definitely the case this time. So, I took out my copy of The Darkover Concordance and just sat down to browse through it, looking for something that would spark an idea. When I came upon an entry for the Mountains of Light and read its description as an unidentified, possibly mythical, mountain range, I found that spark. How could a mountain range remain hidden from a star-faring culture with satellite and mapping technology? Did such a place exist, and if it did, how could it remain hidden? I knew at once that I wanted to play with that. The Mountains of Light would be a place of mystery, and also of revelations.

At the same time, I wanted this new story to tie subtly back into my previous Darkover stories, tales of growing dissatisfaction with the Comyn class, of budding revolution, of a criminal underbelly operating unseen and unsuspected. Each of my stories stand on their own, but I want to maintain a certain tension and build on the idea that Darkover is a world about to explode. Also, that there are things we think we know about Darkover that we don’t really know. Of all the stories I’ve written for these Darkover anthologies, “The Mountains of Light” is far and away my favorite.


DJR: Was writing this story different from a typical writing project? How did you balance writing in someone else’s world and being true to your own creative imagination?

RWB: I’ve written in other writers’ worlds before. My novel, Swords Against The Shadowland, is set in Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar. My novel, The Lake Of Fire, is set in a world created by Philip Jose Farmer. And of course there have been several novels set in gaming worlds. But my approach is always to tell my own story in those worlds, in my own voice, and in my own way. I can’t be Leiber or Farmer or Bradley, but I can write the best story I can, using their worlds as backdrop, hopefully adding something to it in the process. If I can’t do that, I’m not interested in the project. I’ve turned down offers to write Star Trek novels and Conan novels and similar books because the writer isn’t allowed to add anything new. At the end of the work, the “reset” button is hit and none of it matters. Darkover doesn’t feel that way to me, so I’m having a good time.


DJR: Is there another Darkover story you would particularly like to write?

RWB: Is there room in me for yet another Darkover story? Almost certainly. That canvas is broad, and so much of it still really hasn’t been explored or is just beginning to be explored. It’s fun to see what the editor will let me get away with. However, I don’t have any idea right now what that story would be. It’s too soon, but maybe in a few weeks or a month, I’ll pick up the Concordance again and start browsing the pages. Or maybe one of the writers in this new anthology will spark an idea that I think deserves exploration. Time is everything. And so is timing. They’re not the same thing.


DJR: What lies ahead for you?

RWB: Right now, I’m busy promoting a different anthology, Little Green Men – Attack!, which I’ve edited with Bryan Thomas Schmidt. I’m a regular contributor to Esther Friesner’s famous Chicks In Chainmail series, and I’ve long wanted to do some kind of science fictional equivalent. Little Green
Men – Attack! is just that, a collection of wildly humorous and satirical science fiction from some of the biggest names in the field and some astonishingly brilliant newcomers. There are more short stories coming, as well. I love writing short fiction. And a sudden curve in my writing career has taken me into Hollywood these days – that’s a heady mixture of doubt and excitement all by itself. Oh, and there’s a gorgeous new edition of my novel, Swords Against The Shadowland, coming from Centipede Books.