And because it appears to be Caribbean day here, I’ve just published a podcast version of the interview that I did with Nalo Hopkinson for Ujima. It covers most of Nalo’s novels, especially the latest, Sister Mine. We also discuss the state of LGBT rights in the Caribbean.
My apologies for the poor sound quality on my voice during the interview.
I have a new book review online. This one is for Stephanie Saulter’s new book, which I warmly recommend. Don’t take my word for it, though. Juliet McKenna was enthusing on Twitter about the skill necessary to pull a plot together the way that Saulter does here, and she knows far more about plotting than I do.
And take note, America: Saulter’s first novel, Gemsigns, is coming your way in May. Look out for it.
You can read my review of Gemsigns here, and that of Binary here.
Aqueduct Press has sent me three new books for sale. As always with Aqueduct, these look very interesting.
Alien Bootlegger and Other Stories by Rebecca Ore is a collection of feminist SF stories that examines what it means to be alien.
The Stone Boatmen is a fantasy novel by Sarah Tolmie that has a recommendation by Ursula K. Le Guin on the cover.
And the one that is the most interesting to me is New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett. First published in 1889, it is a “sleeper awakes” style of utopian novel. Our heroine finds herself in Ireland in 2472. The country is run by women, but as with most utopias it has aspects to it that will horrify modern day readers. You can learn more about Corbett and her books at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.
And yes, feminist science fiction was being written in 1889. What’s the betting Mrs. Corbett wouldn’t have been on the feature tables in bookstores either?
A review of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion has appeared on LibraryThing. It is by clfisha, who admits to knowing one of the authors very well. Here’s a brief snippet that made me very happy:
I was very taken with mechanical elephants and soul stealing in a story by John Hawkes-Reed, a tale that not only had great characters but also the best opening line, “I was hiding inside my father’s test elephant when they came looking for me.”
You can read the whole thing here.
Ujima Radio chairman, Roger Griffith, has posted on Facebook that the station will be back on air on Monday (March 24th). Thanks are due to The Utilities Warehouse for being willing to work with us to get power restored as quickly as possible, to Mayor George Ferguson for his personal intervention in the case, and of course to all of you lot for asking George for help on our behalf. Well done, people!
Wednesday’s show will be mainly a Women And The Media special. Paulette has arranged for a number of special guests including Christina Zaba, who looks very interesting. For the final half hour, from 13:30 to 14:00, we’ll be joined by Jo Hall and Roz Clarke who will talk about Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion.
Continuing with new material in the bookstore, I have two volumes in a new fantasy series from Italian writer, Roberto Ricci. I haven’t had a chance to read them yet, but Roberto has done a good job with the covers, and judging from his bio his English should be very good indeed. More information on the Red Harlequin series is available from Roberto’s website.
The two books we have are:
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Weird Fiction Review has kindly offered to host a sample story from Kontakt, the anthology of Croatian science fiction that I have published. The story that they have chosen is “The Corridor” by Darko Macan, which is one of my favorites from the book. It is also the winner of the Lapis Histriae, an international short story competition open to writers from Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro. You can read it for free here. And then find many other fine Croatian stories here.
Glenda Larke’s debut fantasy series has been re-published by Fablecroft. The books are currently on offer at my bookstore. You can get all three volumes of the Isles of Glory series for the price of two. Why not take the opportunity to find out why I fell in love with Glenda’s writing back in Emerald City days.
Karen Joy Fowler will be at Foyles in Bristol on Wednesday night promoting the UK release of her new book, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. As a reviewer, I am somewhat reluctant to say that you should not read reviews of a book, but in the case of this one it is absolutely true. Don’t read any reviews, not even mine. Don’t read the jacket blurb, just in case. Just go out any buy it, and come to it free of preconceptions.
Of course if you don’t trust me on that, I have a review here. I have tried hard not to say too much about the book. I have also interviewed Karen for my show on Ujima which should, if all goes well, air on Wednesday lunchtime. However, if today’s meeting doesn’t result in a firm date for us getting back on air then I will podcast the interview tomorrow.
There being no new crises for me to deal with (yet) this week, I am getting caught up on adding books to the store. My apologies for the rash of posts that will happen this week. To begin with I have a whole pile of new titles from Muse It Up as follows:
Ã…con, the Finnish/Swedish relaxacon, has announced its Book of the Night, which will be the center of a book-club style discussion as part of the programme (similar to the Book of Honor at Potlatch). The chosen book for Ã…con 7 is The Secret History of Moscow, by Ekaterina Sedia. It is an excellent book. I loved it, and so did Gary Wolfe when he reviewed it for Locus. Neil Gaiman gave it an enthusiastic blurb. I hope that my Finnish and Swedish friends enjoy it as much as I did.
Yesterday I was in Bristol for the official launch of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion at Forbidden Planet. The folks in the store did us proud. They provided a really lovely display of books, and kindly had us sign all of their stock, which was a great experience for the various first-time writers who are in the book.
Thanks also to Andy Bigwood who provided some fine airship-related art for the display. And to the various steampunk fans from Bristol who turned up in full costume and made the day extra-special.
Various photos of the event have made their way online. Inevitably I am doing something embarrassing in all of them. Here are a few.
From left to right the various contributors are: Myfanwy Rodman, Steve Blake, Jonathan L. Howard, Pete Sutton, me (obscuring Ken Shinn & Ian Millsted), Roz Clarke, John Hawkes-Reed, Deborah Walker, Piotr Åšwietlik, Andy Bigwood. Only Christine Morgan (lives in Seattle) and Scott Lewis (at a friend’s wedding) were unable to attend.
Here’s another with a better view of Ken and part of Ian.
Finally here we are busily signing a huge pile of books. There’s a great view of Ian in this one. Also a great view of my back. All you authors who complain about wrist injuries from signings? Mostly you get seats. The wrist pain is nothing to the lower back problems.
I don’t know how many books we sold on the day yet, but I do know that a lot of the stock will be going to London, and from there some of it will be going to other FP stores around the country. All of the FP stock has been defaced, so if you want a copy that doesn’t have my scrawl in it you’ll need to get it from Tangent or from the piranhas.
Via Johanna Sinisalo’s agent comes the excellent news that her novel, Auringon ydin (The Core of the Sun) has been sold in translation to a number of foreign publishers, including Grove Atlantic in the USA. Here’s the blurb:
The Core of the Sun depicts the Finnish Eusistocratic Republic, a kind of North Korea of Europe. Here sex has been turned into a commodity, and women have been bred into two subspecies based on their ability to provide pleasure and bear children.
Feminist science fiction incoming. All dudebros please take cover. Sadly it is not due out until next year.
Update: Niall Harrison reminds me that Sinisalo’s most recent novel, Enkelten verta (Blood of Angels) is already in translation. Amazon UK says it was due on January 1st, but the publishers have said on Twitter that it won’t be out until June (The Book Depository has it right). There’s no blurb for it yet, but I happen to know that it is all about bees.
A new review of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion has been posted at the CultDen website. I’m pleased to see that it is very positive. I particularly liked the last paragraph:
The book does capture the feel and history of Bristol very well, indeed some of the stories feature true historical characters, but this is not a book that should only be read by locals. Bristol is merely the setting, the strength of the writing should appeal to audiences anywhere. At the start I asked “is it any good?â€. Well, yes it is, very good indeed. If you like Steampunk, you’ll love this. If you’ve never read Steampunk, you should give the book a go anyway, I doubt you’ll be disappointed.
So why not give it a try? You can get it from our ebook store, from Tangent Books in Bristol, and from most major bookstores.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, in his cunning disguise of Jonathan Grimwood, made an appearance at the Bath Literary Festival today. Naturally I went along to support him. I am, after all, very fond of The Last Banquet, and I needed to thank him for recommending Archipegalo.
It is good to see some of “our” people getting invitations to more mainstream events, but I do wish that literary festivals who choose to invite science fiction and fantasy authors to speak would provider interviewers who show them a little more respect. Jon was interviewed by a chap called John Walsh, who is apparently a restaurant critic. He began by reeling off a list of Jon’s career achievements, including noting that he had been a Guest of Honour at numerous “horrible” science fiction conventions, and then congratulated Jon on making the jump to writing “literature”. When it came time to go to the audience, I asked Jon a question deliberately designed to allow him to show that much of his science fiction and The Last Banquet shared key political themes. I hope that helped.
I wish they had talked more about the Corsican Republic which, to my mind, is one of the most fascinating parts of the book. Sadly Mr. Walsh was much more interested in that fact that Jon had been a nominee in the Bad Sex Awards (for a passage that pretty obviously wasn’t intended to be erotic). Still, it did give rise to the best exchange of the event, which went something like this:
Walsh: “So how does one go about writing a good sex scene”?
Jon: “Well it helps if you like having sex.”
I’d like to say that I came home to a delicious meal of seared coypu served with a locust and mealworm salad, but actually all I had was a microwaved plate of yesterday’s curry. Sorry.
No, this is nothing about Worldcon, or the Hugos, or bookstores, honest.
LGBT History Month is over, but it is now Women’s History Month (all over the world, I believe). In recognition of this, Fablecroft is running a crowdfunding campaign for an anthology called Cranky Ladies of History. It is running on Pozzible, an Australian version of Kickstarter. The book will be edited by Tehani Wessely (Fablecroft’s owner) and Tansy Rayner Roberts (of Galactic Suburbia fame). A number of very prominent women writers have offered to submit, though it seems like they don’t have any firm acceptances yet.
If you wish to back the project, you can do so here.
The first half hour of today’s show was given over to a local writer whose debut novel has been released today to much fanfare. Someone Else’s Skin by Sarah Hilary is widely tipped to be one of the hottest properties in UK crime fiction this year. I’m not surprised. It is a very powerful book, and of particular interest to Women’s Outlook as a major theme of the book is violence against women. My thanks to Sian Norris for reminding me about the Counting Dead Women project so I could bring to light the dreadful statistics of murders of women by their husbands/boyfriends/families in the UK.
For those of you saying, “I don’t do crime novels”, I note that an awful lot of SF&F is actually crime fiction of one sort or another. Also Sarah’s book, while definitely a police procedural, is not a mystery. As I say in the interview, it has definite similarities to a horror novel. It sure scared me anyway.
Sarah is having a launch party at Foyles on Friday. I’ll be there, as will Nikesh Shukla, Tania Herschman and doubtless a whole load of other Bristol literary folks.
The second half hour is all about free schools and academies, and the creeping privatization of the British education system. My guest was Christine Townsend, a well known local activist. My producer, Paulette, who is an ex-teacher herself, also joined us. Half an hour wasn’t nearly long enough. I’m sure we’ll have Christine back again soon.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
For the third half hour I handed control over to Judeline for the “Lighter Look At Life” segment and for “Woman of the Week”, who this week was our new intern, Ingrid Hoxha. Her family emigrated here from Albania when she was young. Amongst other things, we allow Ingrid to make it clear that she is not related to That Man.
Finally I took the reins again for a brief round-up of LGBT History Month. I got to ask some of the team what they had learned during February, and Paulette made me blush.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
As with the rest of the month, the music has been all LGBT-related. This week I played Tracy Chapman, Soft Cell, Goldman (feat. Smiler), Queen Latifah, Dusty Springfield, Lucy Ray and Bronski Beat. The final song is one that is very important to me. I was delighted to be able to thank Lou Reed live on the radio. I’m sure he’s listening, somewhere.
There will be a launch event for Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion at the Bristol Forbidden Plant store on Saturday, March 8th from 1:00pm. Most of the contributors should be there to sign books. I do have apologies from Christine Morgan who lives in Seattle, and Scott Lewis has the sort of job that can take him away at a moment’s notice, but huge thanks are due to Stephen Blake and Deborah Walker for coming in from Penzance and London respectively.
Full details are available on the Forbidden Planet website. Right now it only mentions the hardcover for pre-order, but I’m assuming they’ll have paperbacks too.
You are, of course, all invited.
Last week I promised you that you would be able to buy paper copies of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion without feeding the piranhas. You should, of course, be able to order it from any decent bookshop. However, you can now also order the paperback from our good friends at Tangent Books.
Tangent is a small press based in Bristol and selling mainly local-themed books. They have some excellent material on Banksy, and are also the paper publisher for Adventure Rocketship.
Right now they only have the paperback in stock, because that’s all we have. A couple of cartons of the hardcovers are on order, and once we have them Tangent will put it on sale.
Negotiations are underway for an independent source for the book in the USA.
Yesterday evening I was in Bath to see Joanne Harris at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. She was on tour with her new book, The Gospel of Loki. I’m a sucker for Norse mythology, so of course I am interested in the book, but I came away thinking that I had just met an old friend. Let me explain.
These days everyone and her sister is a science fiction and fantasy fan. We all watch the Marvel movies, we all follow Game of Thrones on TV. You can’t go anywhere without finding fellow geeks. However, a lot of those people have come fairly recently to geekdom. Many of you lot, on the other hand, have been reading SF&F for decades. There’s a term used amongst established fandom reserved for people we thought might be outsiders but turn out to be just like us, people whose life stories and attitudes are instantly familiar. We say that they are “one of us”. I guess it dates back to the days of fandom as a ghetto.
Well people, she might have had a No.1 best selling mainstream novel, but Joanne Harris is most definitely “one of us”. She regaled us with stories of reading her way through the children’s section of her local library so many times that the librarian reluctantly gave her a ticket for adult books. She talked enthusiastically about her love of mythology and fairy tales. She spoke scathingly of people in the publishing industry who think that fantasy is only for “immature” readers.
Here’s an interesting thing. If I closed my eyes and just listened to her talk about writing, and about fantasy, it could have been Neil Gaiman speaking. It was uncanny the way that Joanne appeared to be channeling Neil. I was not surprised to discover that they have become fast friends recently. Joanne is worried that she is developing Neil Hair, which is quite scary.
Some of the audience were clearly fans of her mainstream fiction. She fielded several questions about her having “changed genre”. Her response was that she’s still writing exactly the same books, just about different people with different amounts of magic in them. The first book she ever wrote was fantasy (recently reworked and packed as a YA novel), and she has been writing fantasy ever since.
I had noticed that for the new book Joanne has acquired a middle initial: M. I asked her if it stood for Menzies. She responded that actually it stood for Michelle, which is her middle name, and that she was using it as a signal to book buyers. She went on to add that she had always admired the way that Iain Banks had maintained two superficially separate careers. Perfect answer.
Of course there were questions about Loki. Someone else asked about Sleipnir so I didn’t have to. The horse story is in the book. Joanne said she had been happy to have been contacted by a young trans person who found Loki’s gender ambiguity empowering. Another tick in the win column.
Look folks, I haven’t read this book yet. However, I am certain that Joanne Harris can write. Number 1 best seller, remember. I am also absolutely certain that she knows her Norse myths inside out, and that she approaches myth in a similar way to other writers whose work I admire. So I am pretty sure that I am going to love The Gospel of Loki, and that most of you will too.
Then, of course, Joanne will get added to that long list of fabulous women fantasy writers who get overlooked when lists of great names in the field are drawn up. And because she is very good at feminist arguments too (see this from today for an example) she is going to become one of our best allies in that particular fight.
All in all, it was an excellent evening. I know you couldn’t all be there, and some of you might be quite jealous by now (hi Martha!). But you can get a partial sense of the evening because the Bookshop Band has posted a recording of the song they wrote for the event. It’s a bit rough, being the first time they had performed it (inevitable when you write songs especially for book readings), and I guess they actually mean it to be called “Rooting for Loki”, but they are lovely people and very talented.
PS: Thor: The Dark World is out on DVD and Blu Ray on Monday. Squee!