Salon Futura

Congratulations, Tade

~ Cheryl

The winner of the 2019 Arthur C Clark Award was announced last night. I am absolutely delighted that the prize went to Tade Thompson. I’ve been telling people about Rosewater for over 2 years, and of course it won the Nommo in 2017. It was also a Campbell Award finalist in 2017 (that’s the SF novel award, not the new writer one). Sometimes it can take a book a while to break into the big time.

The upside of this is that I have a couple of interviews with Tade in which he talks about the book.

This one is from 2017. The sound quality is a bit poor, but there’s more about Rosewater in it.

This one is from FantasyCon last year.

Joanne Harris at FantasyCon

~ Cheryl

This is another interview I did at FantasyCon last year and subsequently used on Ujima. It is with Joanne Harris who, as she explains, is very much a fantasy writer no matter what bookshops might think.

Joanne and I talked about Norse myths, her new book, The Blue Salt Roads, fan fiction and who might play Loki if her books about him ever get filmed. We also discussed the Child Ballads, a collection of Scottish folk tales which have become a source for some of Joanne’s recent work.

Tade Thompson at FantasyCon

~ Cheryl

I’m trying to make a conscious attempt to catch up on the enormous amount of audio I have stacked up waiting to be published. There are interviews I did at Worldcon in Helsinki that I ran on the radio but still haven’t put online. But before I get to those there are some slightly more up to date pieces that I should run before they become completely stale.

I’m starting with an interview that I did at FantasyCon at the end of last year. Tade Thompson is one of my favorite people to interview because he always has plenty to say, and is always in good humor even when he’s having a rant. This interview covers the success of Rosewater, the scariness of The Murders of Molly Southborne, and what it is like for black writers to live in a post-Black Panther world.

November Fringe Readings

~ Cheryl

Well, this is a little bit late, but treat it as a timely Solstice present. Here is the audio from the November BristolCon Fringe event, with a bonus interview at the end.

It being just past Halloween, November was a horror month at Fringe. Our first reader was Baylea Hart who describes herself as an IT Technician by day, horror writer by night and a reader everywhere in between. She has a BA in creative writing from Bath Spa University and enjoys watching people grow slightly white after reading her stories. Her short story, “Jack in the Box”, won the 2015 Bristol Horror Writing Competition and her film, Behind the Door, won a Top 50 spot in the Bloody Cuts “Who’s There?” competition and has over 500,000 views on YouTube.

Baylea read from her novel, The Log House, which will be available from Unbound very shortly.

Our second reader for November was Jonathan L Howard, who read from his recently published novel, After the End of the World. This is a sequel to the critically acclaimed Carter & Lovecraft. And yes (spolier!), the world did really end in that book. There is a little bit of explanation as to what is going on in the Q&A, but chapter 1 of the new book stands pretty much on its own. The new world that Dan and Emily find themselves in after the destruction of the world we know is rather different. Explaining just how different allows Jonathan to indulge his passion for alternate history.

No tentacled beings from beyond the stars were harmed in the production of this podcast.

As is traditional, I put both of our authors to the question at the end of the evening. We learned that Baylea has the Best Mum in the World, and that horror writers have dreadful habits as children. Jonathan explained some of the background to After the End of the World. And Gareth Powell ask the very difficult question, “Who would win in a fight: Cthulhu or Godzilla?”

As a bonus, because it is Solstice Day today, here from Salon Futura is the interview I did with Jonathan on my radio show at the start of the month. It has a small amount of overlap with the Q&A, but we make up for that in enthusiastic discussion of Nazi-punching.

Fringe takes a break over the holidays, but we will be back in January with the very wonderful Lucy Hounsom.

Tade Thompson Interview

~ Cheryl


As promised last week, I have dug out the interview with Tade Thompson that I did for Ujima and made the whole thing available on Salon Futura. We had a whole pile of issues with the Skype recording on this one so the sound quality is not good, but there is more here than I was able to broadcast on the show.

Tade’s novel, Rosewater has just become the first ever winner of the Best Novel prize in the Nommo Awards from the African Speculative Fiction Society. It seems like there should be a lot of renewed interest in the book, and in Tade’s other work, and that therefore I should share this podcast with you.

In the interview Tade talks about some of the ideas behind Rosewater, about his now released novella, The Murders of Molly Southbourne, and about writing a ghost story.

Foz Meadows in The Salon

~ Cheryl

Last week I did an interview with Foz Meadows about her recently published novel, An Accident of Stars. As might be expected when you get two ranty feminists with a strong interest in gender together, we had a lot to talk about. In particular I wanted to talk about how Foz manages to do a whole bunch of things I would not normally recommend when writing a trans character and make them work. One of the reasons for this, of course, is that if you create a world in which transphobia doesn’t exist then most of the usual rules go out of the window.

Of course we managed to find lots more topics to discuss as well. In particular Foz sheds some light on her thinking when creating the matriarchal society in the world of her book. Foz also explains how the book is, in part, about the “Susan Problem”, something which all teenage girls who read Narnia will recognize.

Along the way there’s a brief shout out to the wonderful Trudi Canavan, and some words of praise for Seanan McGuire’s wonderful Every Heart a Doorway.

The interview took place over Skype with Foz in Queensland and me in England, so the sound quality isn’t up to studio standards. But hey, video phone call to Australia; we are living in the future.

Cat Valente at Finncon, Two Interviews

~ Cheryl

The latest podcast to go up on Salon Futura is the full version of my interview with Cat Valente from Finncon. As you may recall, I broadcast part of it on Women’s Outlook a while back, but the whole thing is about half an hour long and so I had to trim quite a bit. As is the way with mainstream media, I chose to trim all of the interesting writing and publishing business neepery, but you’ll get all that good stuff here.

The interview covers the whole of Cat’s career from her childhood obsession with fairy tales through her student days in Edinburgh, her early success with The Orphan’s Tales, the amazing phenomenon that is the Fairyland books and her later adult novels such as Deathless and Radiance. There is, inevitably, mention of David Bowie (Cat and I had just done the Bowie & Prince panel). There is also a fair amount of giggling by both parties. My excuse was that I was getting to interview a writer whose work I absolutely adore.

By the way, the nice Finncon people videoed a lot of the panels and have been beavering away editing the material. I have no idea whether the Trans panel or the Bowie & Prince panel will ever end up on the Internet, but I think you are safe from the Cat & Cheryl do karaoke “Starman” thing because that would be a copyright violation.

However, the GoH speeches are available, so if the above is not enough Cat for you here is Johan Anglemark interviewing Cat in the main auditorium. I’m sat down the front taking notes. I don’t think they ever pull the camera back far enough to see me, but they can’t avoid showing the anime dance practice taking place outside. Check it out, it is awesome.

Mike Carey at Waterstones

~ Cheryl

As promised, I have uploaded the other Mike Carey interview to Salon Futura. This is the one that we did at Waterstones in the evening. It is almost an hour long, so we have a lot more time to talk about Fellside. Mike and I go on a little rant about the economics of private prisons. The conversation also touches on films. The Girl with All the Gifts is due for release on September 23rd. Here’s the trailer.

One of the reasons I didn’t want to release this too soon is that Mike would have had to kill me, because during the interview he mentions the possibility of a prequel to The Girl with All the Gifts. That book is now official, so I no longer have to worry.

Inevitably Mike and I talk about the X-Men. Indeed, I suspect that we could have talked about superhero movies all evening had not one or two people been scowling at us from the audience. Obviously I mentioned the Felix Castor novels, which led us on to the idiocies of publisher branding policies. We even managed to mention the Steel Seraglio books, which Mike wrote with his wife, Linda, and daughter, Louise.

The sound quality is rather poor in places, for which my apologies. My little microphone doesn’t cope well with a cavernous shop, and there were all sorts of issues with capturing audience questions. Hopefully it is all listenable.

This event was arranged by the Bristol Festival of Literature. My thanks to Pete Sutton for doing a fine job.

Next week in the Salon I’ll have the full version of my Finncon interview with Cat Valente.

Mike Carey in the Salon – Part I

~ Cheryl

Fellside
Today on Salon Futura I posted the audio from my interview with Mike Carey on Ujima Women’s Outlook back in May. We were mainly discussing his latest novel, Fellside, but conversation also strayed onto The Girl with All the Gifts and the X-Men.

Mike’s comments are particularly interesting in view of the US Department of Justice’s recent decision to stop using private prisons. Whether the UK will follow suit is very much open to debate.

As I note in the interview, I was also scheduled to interview Mike at Waterstones that evening. I have edited the audio from that and hope to have it online for you later this week. In the meantime, here is Part I.

Cavan Scott in The Salon

~ Cheryl

I have been working on processing some of the interview material that I did for Ujima and has now vanished from the Listen Again service. This week will be mainly about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who, with a bit of Star Wars and The Beano thrown in. I’m starting up with Cavan Scott who does all of those things. Later in the week I’ll bring you Paul Cornell as well.

Here’s Cav. I had the poor man in the studio for a whole hour. With the music, news and ads removed it boils down to about half of that. Among other things we talk about how he came to have the #1 selling book in the whole of the UK.

Leah Moore Interview

~ Cheryl

I have just uploaded the full version of the interview with Leah Moore than I made while I was in Liverpool. In addition to the material that we broadcast on Ujima Radio, this version contains a discussion of the Electricomics venture that she has started with (amongst others) her father and her husband, John Reppion, with the support of the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.

For more information about Electricomics see their website, or follow them on Twitter and Facebook.

The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts is a £7 million fund from Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Nesta to support collaboration between arts projects, technology providers and researchers to explore the potential of increasing audience engagement or find new business models. Separate Digital R&D Fund for the Arts are being run in Wales and in Scotland.

DRD logo

Fringe Special at Word of Mouth

~ Cheryl

Once a year the BristolCon crowd takes over Word of Mouth, a monthly reading series run by Tangent Books and hosted by the Thunderbolt pub. Normally we’d put these readings on the BristolCon Fringe podcast stream, but that has limited capacity and these readings turned out to be quite long, so they are being hosted by Salon Futura instead.

The three readers are Pete Sutton, Joanne Hall and Scott Lewis. In Part 1 Pete’s story is a rare (for him) science fiction piece. Jo reads from her latest novel, The Art of Forgetting: Nomad. And Scott reads the first part of a steampunk horror story that will conclude in Part 2.

In part 2 Joanne Hall reads from a currently unsold novel, The Summer Goddess. Pete Sutton reads a story from a collection he is writing in which each story is inspired by the counting magpies folk song. Scott Lewis reads the rest of the story that he started in Part 1. It goes on a little, but we were all on the edge of our seats and encouraged Scott to read the whole thing rather than leave us wondering.

My thanks to Richard Jones of Tangent for inviting us to read, and to Dave from the Thunderbolt for being a fine host.

Åcon 7 – The Post-Colonial SF Panel

~ Cheryl

Here is the first of my podcasts from Åcon 7. It is a panel about post-colonial SF. The panelists are: Karen Lord, Sari Polvinen, Juha Tupasela & me.

I noted while editing it that I totally derailed Sari’s question about classic SF that counted as post-colonial, for which my apologies.

Tech services at Åcon are provided by Jonas Wissting to whom I am indebted for this recording.

Today On Ujima: Bristol & Slavery, plus Talking Books

~ Cheryl

Today’s show began with good and bad news. The good stuff included Nalo Hopkinson winning the Andre Norton Award for Best YA Novel of 2013 at last weekend’s Nebula Awards ceremony. It also included the really good news that Ahad & Anum Rizvi, the two young Pakistanis whose plight I highlighted last week, have been released from detention and will be having their applications for asylum reconsidered.

The bad news was that today’s programming has been dedicated to our of our regular presenters, DJ Flora, who died from cancer yesterday. She was younger than me. Because she presented a late-night show I hardly ever saw her, but many of the staff at the station were very upset about it. There’s an official tribute to her on the Ujima website.

However, the show must go on, and the first hour today was devoted to discussion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and Bristol’s role therein. My main guest in the studio was Dr. Olivette Otele from Bath Spa University who is a well known expert in the history of slavery. Alongside her we welcomed three young people from Cotham School who were with us on a work experience placement. I’m really pleased with how it went. And thanks to Olivette we had some great music. I played Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”, Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit” (one of the most disturbing songs I know) and Louis Armstrong’s “Go Down Moses”. It was great to see the kids’ faces light up with recognition when they heard Satchmo’s voice.

The fourth piece of music was Violin Concerto #9 by Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, played by the Orchestre de Chambre, Bernard Thomas. Saint-Georges is an amazing fellow who really ought to be better known. Those of you setting books in revolutionary France should take note. I also want to see books about Nanny Maroon, one of the other amazing people that Olivette introduced us to.

The discussion includes an appeal to George Ferguson to get Bristol to do more to acknowledge, apologize for, and memorialize the city’s role in the slave trade. You can learn more about the history of Bristol’s involvement in the trade from the M-Shed website.

You can listen to the first hour of the show via Ujima’s Listen Again feature here.

I note that this was the first time I call recall having someone text the studio to tell us how much they were enjoying the show.

The second hour was given over to fiction. I had Jo Hall in the studio to promote her new novel, The Art of Forgetting: Nomad, which is being launched at Forbidden Planet, Bristol on Saturday. That was followed by an interview with Karen Lord that I had recorded during Åcon. I still have the much longer interview that Karen and I did as part of the convention program. I’m hoping to get that edited and on Salon Futura soon.

Jo got music appropriate for epic fantasy. Bat for Lashes was a no-brainer (I played “Horses of the Sun”, because I had played “Horse and I” a few weeks ago and didn’t want to repeat). The other song I chose was “Killer on the Rampage” by Eddy Grant, because I was teasing Jo about the number of people she killed off in the book. (Really, George would be proud. Whole towns massacred.) Jo’s soundtrack for the new book, which we mentioned in the show, is available here.

Karen had asked for jazz, which I was very happy to provide. I’m sorry we didn’t have time to play either track in full. The two tracks were: “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” by the Cannoball Adderley Quintet; and “Stolen Moments” by Oliver Nelson.

Any discussion of SF&F on the show is liable to get into name-dropping of people we know. Jo enthused about Joe Abercrombie. I invoked Juliet McKenna when we got on the question of discoverability of women writers. And Kate Elliott needs to listen to the Karen Lord interview.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

Next week most of the show is being run by Jackie and Judeline, but I will have half an hour with Kevlin Henney talking about flash fiction. Kevlin won the flash competition run by Crimefest last weekend, which pleased me greatly.

ISF #1 Is Coming

~ Cheryl

The next issue of Roberto Mendes’ magazine, International Speculative Fiction, will be released tomorrow (there was an issue #0 in June). I’ve just been flicking through an advance copy and it looks very impressive. There are stories by Joyce Chng (Singapore), Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Philippines) and Marian Truţă (Romania). In the non-fiction department Fábio Fernandes has dug up “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans” by Stanislaw Lem. This is a reprint of a 1975 article from Science Fiction Studies in which Lem opines that Dick is the only American SF writer worth paying attention to. Not that Dick is easy, of course. Lem notes:

Philip Dick does not lead his critics an easy life, since he does not so much play the part of a guide through his phantasmagoric worlds as he gives the impression of one lost in their labyrinth.

But then if he was an easy read he would be so much less worth reading.

Anyway, the magazine will be out tomorrow. It is free. And you can get it here. Plus, lovely cover (by Rafael Mendes).

ISF #1 cover

Requests for Publicity

~ Cheryl

I have been meaning for some time to post a proper review policy on this blog (which would basically say, “No, I will not review your book, don’t waste your time asking.”). The main reason I haven’t done so is that I suspect the requests I get for reviews are mainly from people who have just bought a list of addresses to spam and therefore would not read the policy before approaching me.

Pro tip: if you do buy a list of addresses, check it for duplicates. You may find that the price you paid per address is much higher than you thought. Also the people you email are much less likely to be sympathetic if they get several copies of your request.

And talking about pro tips, if you are a reputable organization in the publishing business, you really shouldn’t be sending out email to online magazines asking them to run free advertising for you when those magazines have advertising rates posted on their sites. And if you are targeting fiction magazines you should probably check that you do actually approach fiction magazines and not others. I’m not naming names because this appears to have been an action by an over-zealous intern, but interns do need to be watched.

Salon Futura #9

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well, that’s the last one for a while. I shall continue looking for ways to fund the magazine but, as I said in the editorial, I’m absolutely committed to getting people paid for good writing, and good art. If people are not prepared to pay for the magazine then there is no point in producing it.

Having said that, we have some great content in this issue. Alex Preston of the New Statesman weighs in on the fantasy and nihilism debate. Sam Jordison reviews one of this year’s Orange Prize nominees. And Karen dives into Jonathan Strahan’s latest anthology. I look at books by Daniel Abraham, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Lyda Morehouse. There are interviews with Liz Williams and John Clute.

This month’s Salon features John Picacio, Irene Gallo and Joe Monti talking about book covers. Joe is a former buyer for Barnes & Noble, one of those people who supposedly bullies publishers into putting particular types of covers on books. You may also want to read this blog post by Lavie Tidhar which is very relevant to the discussion.

I should note that this final issue has allowed me to do something I have wanted to do for a long time: publish something with a John Picacio cover. And that too is part of the Salon discussion, because John has given me an early draft of a cover that was rejected by the publishers.

I haven’t given up on Salon Futura yet, but clearly I have work to do if I’m going to make it a going concern. At least I have learned a few things in the past 9 months, so if I can re-start it I should do a little better.

Travel: Slows the Mind

~ Cheryl

Yeah, I know, travel is supposed to be good for the mind, but I’m getting old.

So I had a great time in London last night with China and various other friends, and a very productive meeting at 8:00am this morning, which involved getting up at 6:00am. Combine that with lots of time on trains, and I was pretty much wiped when I got back home. Then I had lots of email to attend to.

I am finally getting started on finishing Salon Futura #9, and there’s not much left to do, but it will be tomorrow morning before it goes live.

Things May Happen

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Or they may not. It is one of those times when I spend hours in meetings and writing emails and at some point something might get the status of Sekrit Projekt, or I might shrug and put the thinking cap back on.

What I can say is that there is a lot going on. And as a partial consequence of that Salon Futura #9 will probably go online a day or two late. I have to be in London on Monday/Tuesday, and I don’t want to put it live just before I leave because if I do that there will inevitably be problems that I won’t be able to fix for 2 days.

More on the SF Threat

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There have been a few follow-ups on that Guardian article I linked to yesterday, the best of which is by Nick Harkaway who is thoroughly unimpressed by the al-Qaida = The Foundation argument. Indeed he argues that it is more or less a tautology because science fiction is the only fiction that deals with the modern world, so there is no other fiction that political visionaries could look to:

Since mainstream literature is apparently defined by not looking forward – literary fiction and its fellows in the UK seem to be determined to avoid discussions of hard and soft technology, to the point of becoming a fiction of the recent-yet-curiously-extended-past, as if we’d never developed the cellphone or cracked the human genome – SF is the only place where possible futures are discussed.

Nick has more to say on that subject in the interview he did with me for Salon Futura.

Meanwhile Mark Charan Newton eschews the satire and makes a more direct science-fictional link to the way the British government has been behaving.

For those of you in the US, Lynne Kiesling is once again complaining about the vast cost of the TSA’s security theatre program, and the lack of any sort of cost-benefit analysis of the work that they do.

There was a fair amount of hope on Twitter yesterday that OBL’s death might result in a cessation, or at least lessening in intensity, of the “war on terror”, but the very next article in my RSS feeds after Lynne’s was this one. Yes folks, the reaction of governments has not been, “the bad guy is dead, we can all relax now,” but rather, “OMG, we’ve just poked a hornet’s nest, we need lots more invasive security measures to keep us safe!”

Really, is anyone surprised?