Jules Jones's Blog, page 30

Book log July 2013 Part 2 - Hugo novellas

I read four of the novellas on the 2013 Hugo ballot. Two of them in particular I think are worth explicitly recommending: Aliette de Bodard''s "On a Red Station, Drifting", and Brandon Sanderson's "The Emperor's Soul".


43) Aliette de Bodard - On a Red Station, Drifting

Blurb: For generations Prosper Station has thrived under the guidance of its Honoured Ancestress: born of a human womb, the station’s artificial intelligence has offered guidance and protection to its human relatives.

But war has come to the Dai Viet Empire. Prosper’s brightest minds have been called away to defend the Emperor; and a flood of disorientated refugees strain the station’s resources. As deprivations cause the station’s ordinary life to unravel, uncovering old grudges and tearing apart the decimated family, Station Mistress Quyen and the Honoured Ancestress struggle to keep their relatives united and safe. What Quyen does not know is that the Honoured Ancestress herself is faltering, her mind eaten away by a disease that seems to have no cure; and that the future of the station itself might hang in the balance…


A consequences-of-war story set on a space station that's part of a large interstellar empire, one that's descended from an ancient Asian empire back here on Earth. Not an uncommon theme, but what makes this story different is that although it's inspired by a Chinese story, the empire's ancestor is Ancient Vietnam, and it's written by a Franco-Vietnamese.

de Bodard has built a world full of rich detail, and peopled it with strongly drawn characters, most of whom are coping with being the ones left tending the home front. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

More information on the author's own website: http://aliettedebodard.com/bibliography/novels/on-a-red-station-drifting/


http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/on-a-red-station-drifting
Amazon UK
Amazon US

44) Jay Lake -- The Stars Do Not Lie

I finished it, but I found it hard going for personal reasons, and did not like it. Which is a shame, because I like Jay, and I've liked other work of his.

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/the-stars-do-not-lie

45) Nancy Kress - After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

While I enjoyed this one and could see why it made the ballot, I find that a year on I don't remember much about it and don't feel any urge to re-read it, unlike the de Bodard and Sanderson novellas.

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/after-the-fall-before-the-fall-during-the-fall-a-novel

46) Brandon Sanderson -- The Emperor's Soul

Blurb: When Shai is caught replacing the Moon Scepter with her nearly flawless forgery, she must bargain for her life. An assassin has left the Emperor Ashravan without consciousness, a circumstance concealed only by the death of his wife. If the emperor does not emerge after his hundred-day mourning period, the rule of the Heritage Faction will be forfeit and the empire will fall into chaos.

Shai is given an impossible task: to create—to Forge—a new soul for the emperor in less than one hundred days while trapped behind a door sealed in her own blood.


This was absolutely stunning, one of the best things I read all year. I've never read any of Sanderson's work before, but going from this I need to find some more. It's a beautifully constructed story which demonstrates the strength of novella length. The soulstamp magic system is fascinating, and Sanderson's exploration of the philosophical implications about identity makes for a complex story with a great deal of depth. It deservedly won the Hugo. If you like fantasy and you haven't read this yet, check out the excerpt posted at Tor.com: http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/10/the-emperors-soul-excerpt

More information with buy links for various formats in various countries at the author's website:
http://brandonsanderson.com/books/elantris/the-emperors-soul/

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/the-emperor-s-soul-1
Amazon UK
Amazon US
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New market: Tor.com Imprint

For those who haven't already seen it, Tor.com have just announced that they're starting an imprint for speculative fiction novellas, 17,500 words and up. Primarily digital, selected titles taken to print. Open to unsolicited unagented submissions until end of August.

Announcement at http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/05/announcing-torcom-the-imprint

Submission guidelines at http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/05/torcom-imprint-submissions-guidelines

Important points:

We will be considering unsolicited, unagented submissions for the next three months, and will close submissions at the end of August. Any unsolicited submissions after that point will be summarily disregarded. We ARE accepting agented submissions throughout this period.

We have worked hard ensure that our contracts are as streamlined and author-friendly as possible, and will only include rights that can be immediately utilized by the authors. Authors will be offered the option of receiving a traditional advance against net earnings or higher rates with no advance. Royalties for all formats will be based on net publisher receipts with no hidden deductions and will be paid quarterly.

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Theatre: "Orlando" and "The Mousetrap"

Went to two plays in March which I didn't get around to writing up at the time.

"Orlando" was an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending novel, at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. Excellent cast, and some stunning wirework that took full advantage of the Royal's in-the-round format.

"The Mousetrap" was the diamond anniversary touring production of Agatha Christie's venerable play, which was at the Lowry in Salford for a week. Enormous fun, played by an excellent cast. Yes, it's very much a period piece, but that's part of its charm. And knowing the solution, I'd be happy to go and see it again, because a lot of its appeal comes from watching the characters do their thing, not just trying to work out whodunnit and why before the characters do.

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Hachette, Amazon and buy links

Amazon are being thugs again, and this time it's Hachette they're trying to intimidate. (And if you're a reader who's thinking "Yay, go Amazon! Cheaper books for me!" think again. What happens to those cheap prices when Amazon's the only store in town?) So once again I'm torn on whether to put Amazon buy links on my book log; a pertinent question for me since I'm making an effort to catch up with said book log, and there are a couple of items I intend to say "Go forth and buy this" about.

No two ways about it -- Amazon is the most useful link for most people. They've got the biggest market share, they have the most reviews by other people, they sell both print and ebooks. That's also why they have so much power. So do I withhold my minuscule contribution to their coffers and mindshare, when that might reduce the chance of someone thinking, "I'd like that!" and actually following through with a purchase?

Posting the reviews to Amazon is an easier decision. It does make a difference to sales when there are reviews, and I think on balance it does more good than harm to provide Amazon with that content.

But I think I need to make more of an effort to get Kobo links as well, where possible. They're ebook-only, but at least they use an open file format and eschew DRM unless it's requested by the publisher.

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book log July 2013 - part 1

Back to the ever more neglected book log. I'm going to do July 2013 in several parts, because there are a lot of titles, some of which I did or can say something sensible about, and some of which I left too late.

July was Hugo Voting Packet month. I chugged my way through an awful lot of words that were up for a Hugo, and logged the short stories at the time.



3 short stories:

33) Ken Liu - Mono no Aware (Published in the anthology The World is Japanese)

A young Japanese man is sitting in the control room of a generation ship, minding the solar sail. As the story cuts between his present and his memories, the story gradually reveals how and why he came to be there, and why the choice he makes at the end of the story matters so very much. Beautifully written study of loss and survival, and made me want to read the rest of the anthology it appeared in.

34) Aliette de Bodard -- Immersion

A lot of things are stuffed into this short story. Imperialism, whether economic, cultural, or in the recent past nakedly military. Class and money. Identity, and how it ties into the imperialism. The use and abuse of technology. Common themes, but handled deftly, and with a genuine sf slant to them. There's some superb world-building done in a short story word count, and characters whose fate I care about. This one's my pick for the Hugo, although it was a hard choice between this and Ken Lui's story.

35) Kij Johnson -- Mantis Wives

Take praying mantises, give them human intelligence and emotions so that we can identify with them -- and leave them their insect behaviour patterns, described in beautiful language that heightens rather than hides the horror of what's going on.

I can see why this made the Hugo ballot. But it really doesn't work for me. Not voting for this one.


36-40) 5 Hugo novelettes
From the Hugo website:
“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi”, Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)
“In Sea-Salt Tears”, Seanan McGuire (Self-published)
“Fade To White”, Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
“Rat-Catcher”, Seanan McGuire (A Fantasy Medley 2, Subterranean)
“The Boy Who Cast No Shadow”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Postscripts: Unfit For Eden, PS Publications)

All well-written, although they varied in how much I actually enjoyed reading them. I've left it too long and would have to re-read to review.

Two of the novels:

41) Lois McMaster Bujold -- Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

A novel from the Vorkosiverse, with Ivan in the starring role. Funny, romantic and smart, just like Ivan himself.

42) John Scalzi - Redshirts

Very, very meta novel about junior starship crew members who slowly realise that in another universe they're fictional characters, and that what the show writers do to them in that universe bleeds over into theirs. Which is not a good thing if you're a redshirt. It's territory that's been trodden before, even in Star Trek itself, but Scalzi does an impressive job. The main text is a lot of fun, with some thoughtful and moving sections; but it's the codas which really make this book something special.


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"Not quite Shakespeare" now available for pre-order

Got home to an email telling me that the UK-themed Dreamspinner anthology "Not quite Shakespeare" is now available for pre-order from their site. I've got a short in the anthology, all about baking bread and what it can lead to. :-) The book is available on both dead trees and live electrons, and will be released on 2 June. I'm assuming that it will eventually show up on the third party distributors as well, but here are the purchase links for the Dreamspinner shop:

ebook - ISBN-13 978-1-63216-020-1
paperback - ISBN-13 978-1-63216-019-5

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wordage

I finished a novelette first draft on Sunday -- some 12400 words, which took exactly a month to write. I sent it off to the alpha reader for comments, and she seems to think that the basic story is good, so on to the revision pass at some point. That's going to include cutting enough words to bring it under 12,000 words, because the story was written for a market with that maximum.

No hurry on doing that, because the submission deadline is some months away. The problem I've got is that there are three other anthologies I'd like to write something for, and they all have deadlines of 1 July. Thank you, muse, for handing me ideas out of deadline order. It looks as if my current output rate of raw draft is 5 to 10 kwords a month on a good month, which means I'm not going to be able to write something for all three. One is 2.5 or 5 kwords, one is 3.5-12 kwords, and one is minimum of 8 kwords, which means that unless I get an attack story, the latter is the one that's not happening. It's also the one where I've pretty much blanked on story ideas. Which is annoying, because it's one I'd really like to write for.

I also need to get back to the novel-length WIP, but I need to do some research for that one and haven't had a chance to do so. Don't think that one's going to be ready for publication this year, which is a shame.

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Not Quite Shakespeare interview

Elin Gregory is interviewing authors with stories in the forthcoming Dreamspinner Press anthology Not Quite Shakespeare – my turn today:

Not Quite Shakespeare – Jules Jones

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Erotica short story now out

And in the excitement of Eastercon, I missed checking on whether this year's Mammoth anthology credit is available for purchase. It appears that the UK edition of The Mammoth Book of Urban Erotic Confessions was released on 17 April, so you can find my m/m/m true confessions story on the shelves (or at Amazon UK) right now. Since it's a true confessions story, it's under a pen name. :-> I'm not actually sure what the etiquette is for this sort of thing, as it's the first time I've had a story in a market for what purport to be true stories. The US edition is due out next month.

I've read a handful of the stories in my trib copy. So far they've been well written, although not all to my taste. One of the reasons they're not all to my taste is that there's quite a variety, so plenty of kinks are catered for. Who knows, some of them may even be true...

I need to go into Waterstones and see if there are any copies on the shelf in there. In general I don't mind being mostly epublished, but it does give me a warm glow to see treeware in a bookshop. Mostly I have to content myself with admiring my friends' books, but occasionally there's a ToC I can call my own.

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Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing

Went to see the final night of the Royal Exchange Manchester's production of "Much Ado About Nothing" at the weekend.

This production puts the play into a (more or less) modern setting, but does so to good purpose. The weary soldiers returning home after a successful battle are in the uniforms of the second world war, and the women waiting to greet them are are likewise dressed for the 1940s. There's a very clear parallel drawn between Shakespeare's original setting, and this more recent demobbing. It also supports the gender-bending of some of the roles. Leonato is now Leonata, the Governor who has stayed at home during the war to manage the home front. Likewise the constables, who are women, and air raid wardens. The story works very well in the post-WWII setting.

The bit that was traditional was the stage setting, in the round and with very little scenery. This is a function of the theatre's design, a theatre in the round set on the main floor of the old Exchange building. The theatre company does some remarkable adaptations to suit playscripts to its unusual space, but this time out they were presenting a play originally written for that context.

And they presented it very well. The audience was rocking with laughter at the funny bits, and rapt at the dramatic bits. And occasionally becoming part of the scenery... It's always slightly dangerous sitting on the edge of the seating area at the Exchange, but this time most of the two front rows got to find out why. They were used first by Benedick and then by Beatrice as cover to eavesdrop on conversations. Since I was sitting on the aisle by one of the doorways I was slightly nervous, but fortunately someone else got handed a constable's tea mug.

All in all, a wonderful evening. With an excellent cast and direction, this was well worth seeing.

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