Books

In Flight

~ Cheryl

Airship Shape & Bristol FashionI’ve been stupidly busy over the past couple of days and have therefore been a bad publisher. Thankfully a whole lot of stuff was set up in advance. You can now buy paper copies of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion. Your best bet is currently The Book Depository, who are giving some nice discounts and free shipping.

Paperback (14% off)
Hardcover (27% off)

I hope to have it available through the fine, independent bookstore at Tangent Books in a day or two.

The books are currently available at our store. Other major ebook retailers will follow in due course.

Tiptree Results Announced

~ Cheryl

The winner and honor list for this year’s Tiptree Award have been announced. Details are on their website. It is great to see a book by an Australian writer, published by a UK small press, come out on top. Rupetta was a finalist for the Crawford as well. Definitely worth a look.

The Tiptree honor list is always full of good recommendations. I’m delighted to see Ancillary Justice on this list. The book has now won Best Debut in the Kitschies and an honor list placing in the Tiptree. I am waiting patiently to see if the various male reviewers who went on and on about what a badly written book it is might consider why they felt that way about it. (Not that it is perfect, by any means, but I found some of the reviews mind-boggling.)

Also on the list is Hild by Nicola Griffith which I love to pieces and will be getting a UK edition later in the year.

Eleanor Arnason’s Big Mama Stories is from Aqueduct Press and therefore available in the bookstore.

There’s lots more there that I want to read, but the final thing I want to mention is not readable, it is music. Here’s the Archandroid.

Even if it makes others uncomfortable
I will love who I am

Yeah, the booty don’t lie.

First Airship Review

~ Cheryl

The first review of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion has come in, and I’m pretty pleased about it. You can read it here.

And because we will have paperback editions on sale at the BristolCon Fringe event tonight, it seemed only fair to let the rest of the world get at some copies as well. Ebook editions are now available from the bookstore. Full release through other stores will happen on Thursday.

Kontakt In Stores

~ Cheryl

For those of you who prefer to buy your ebooks from piranhas rather than people, copies of Kontakt, our anthology of Croatian SF, are now available from the usual outlets:

And doubtless all of their other stores around the world too. It should also be in B&N and Kobo.

Airship In The House

~ Cheryl

Airship Shaped & Bristol FashionThis morning three large cartons of Airship Shaped & Bristol Fashion arrived at Jo Hall’s house in Bristol. Any contributors who live close to Jo can make arrangements with her to collect their copies. For other local people, we will have copies on sale at the Fringe event on Monday, which I shall blog about tomorrow.

There are no hardcovers yet, but I’m hopeful that we’ll have a proof of the hardcover for people to look at on Monday. If not it will definitely be at my LGBT Superheroes talk on the following Sunday.

The ebooks are ready and have been going out to reviewers. If you want one, let me know.

And if all goes well with and Amazon everything should go on sale late next week.

I’m still trying to find a venue for a proper launch event, but in the meantime the good folks at BristolCon are looking to do something a bit different. You are all invited to Bristol’s first Airship Ball. There will be food, celebration, cosplay, music and even actual writers performing parts of their work. Tickets here. Extra cheap if you buy a copy of the book.

Airship Ball

We Have Kontakt

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

KontaktI trailed Kontakt yesterday, and wasn’t expecting to put it out for a day or two. However, circumstances have conspired to allow me to make it available today, so I am doing so. I wrote a preface for this book. Here it is in full.

In April 2012 the European Science Fiction Convention (Eurocon) took place in Zagreb. I was lucky enough to be invited as a guest, and thus made my first ever visit to Croatia. The English-speaking world knows that country perhaps best for the magnificent city of Dubrovnik whose mediaeval fortifications were used for King’s Landing in the Game of Thrones TV series. Worldcon regulars may also remember that Zagreb has occasionally bid to run the convention, though we had not seen much of Croatian fandom. I had little idea of what to expect, and was blown away by the friendliness, enthusiasm and organizational skills of the people that I met.

One of the best things that the convention did was to put together an anthology of Croatian science fiction and fantasy, translated into English, and gave it away free to all attendees. Sadly that amounted to only a few hundred copies. The book did not go on general sale, so the wider world has been unable to witness the talent on display. Despite that, Zoran Vlahović’s story, “Every Time We Say Goodbye” was shortlisted for the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards, thereby raising interest in Croatian SF. Thankfully the editors, authors and publishers have allowed me to put together this ebook edition to bring their work to a wider market.

Croatia is an amazing country. The writers whose work you will find in this book have all lived under a Communist government as part of the former Yugoslavia. They have all lived through a War of Independence in the 1990s. In the past Croatia was on the Christian frontier holding back the Ottoman Empire, and was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like nearby Transylvania, it has a strong tradition of vampire legends. Now it is part of the European Union, and very much looking to the future. All of this informs the fiction you will read here. I’m delighted to be able to bring it to you.

My thanks go to the editors, Darko Macan and Tatjana Jambrišak; to Petra Bulić and her team at SFera who put on the convention and co-published the book; to all of the authors; and to Mihaela Marija Perković and her family who have looked after me so well on my visits to their country.

And here’s the contents list:

  • Introduction by Darko Macan
  • Bloodhound by Milena Benini
  • Hi-Tech Sex Lib by Dalibor Perković
  • Give Me the Shuttle Key! by Tatjana JambriÅ¡ak
  • The Corridor by Darko Macan
  • The Dead by Aleksandar Žiljak
  • River Fairy by Ivana Delač
  • De Cadenza by Danijel Bogdanović
  • Every Time We Say Goodbye by Zoran Vlahović
  • Avaleon and the Black Feather by Katarina Brbora
  • Time Enough, and Space by Goran Konvični
  • Fingers by Danilo Brozović
  • The Executor by Zoran KruÅ¡var

Great Ship, Great Value

~ Cheryl

The Memory of Sky - Robert ReedI don’t only talk about women writers here, honest. There are plenty of men whose work I read too. One of my favorites is Robert Reed. I reviewed his novel, Marrow, back in 2002 in Emerald City. Reed has written several novels abut the Great Ship since, and now there is a stupidly good bargain available.

The nice folks at Prime have released an omnibus edition contain three whole novels — a grand total of over 235,000 words — in a single volume. And by getting it as an ebook you can avoid eye stain and broken wrists. (Also the paper edition won’t be available for a few more weeks.) So, get over to the bookstore and pick up The Memory of Sky for just £5.99.

Join #TeamSquid Now!

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Team Squid


Yes, it is another one of those anthologies. Women Destroy Lovecraft? Actually I think Howard had quite enough difficulty with women when he was alive. Women Destroy the Cthulhu Mythos, perhaps. Anyway: women, tentacles, what’s not to like? Go back She walks In Shadows on Indiegogo now, please.

This one, of course, came out of some male editor excusing the cockforest of his contents list by claiming that women don’t write Lovecraftian stories. So we have to prove him wrong.

By the way, my story in Airship Shaped and Bristol Fashion is totally Lovecraftian. And it has a lesbian heroine. Because there were lesbians in 19th Century Bristol, some of them quite famous.

New from Prime & Masque

~ Cheryl

I have some new items in the bookstore from Prime and Masque. Here you go, lucky people.

The Bone Whistle by Erzebet YellowBoy — just beyond novella length and priced as such, it has some really good reviews.

The Dark #3 — the latest issue of this new dark fantasy and horror magazine, which is already achieving critical acclaim. This issue includes a story by one of my tips for the Campbell this year, Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

Handsome Devil, edited by Steve Berman — a themed anthology of stories about wickedly handsome men. It includes stories by Liz Hand, Pat Cadigan, Theodora Goss, Tanith Lee and many others.

Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories — a collection from the very talented Adam Troy Castro.

Full Steam Ahead, Mr. Brunel

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Airship Shaped & Bristol FashionSo, it looks like this is finally achieving lift off.

I am hoping that we’ll have paperback copies available at the BristolCon Fringe event on February 17th. The ebooks will probably be in the bookstore before then. There will be hardcovers too. I don’t expect to sell many of them. They are mainly something I’m doing at cost for the benefit of the contributors. But hey, if you want one, we’ll sell them.

The books should be available from both Amazon UK and Amazon US. However, we are looking at having another option for people who want to order the physical book in the UK (my store isn’t really set up to do paper). And if you are in the Bay Area I plan on getting some copies shipped to Kevin that you’ll be able to buy at BASFA.

Here’s some information about the book.

Take a walk around Bristol, and history seeps from the walls. The city can claim more than its fair share of firsts, including the first iron-hulled steamship, the first female doctor, the first chocolate bar and the first use of nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic, the invention of the Plimsoll line, the first undersea telegraph cable, the world’s first test tube baby and the first transplant organ grown from stem cells, and a large share of the world’s first supersonic airliner. Now, from this fertile ground comes an anthology charting other realities and alternate histories, in a collection as rich and varied as the true history of this great British city.

— Gareth L. Powell

Bringing together tales from the light and dark sides of Steampunk. Living ghosts, walking ferns and ingenious androids populate versions of the city at once familiar and peculiar. Above them soar the magnificent men, and women, in their flying machines. Whether they’re seeking release, revenge or adventure, the characters in these stories will draw you down the side-streets of Bristol to the brass and steam filled worlds you never dreamed were there.

Contents

  • Case of the Vapours, by Ken Shinn
  • Brassworth, by Christine Morgan
  • The Lesser Men Have No Language, by Deborah Walker
  • Brass and Bone, by Joanne Hall
  • The Girl with Red Hair, by Myfanwy Rodman
  • Artifice Perdu, by Pete Sutton
  • Miss Butler and the Handlander Process, by John Hawkes-Reed
  • Something In The Water, by Cheryl Morgan
  • The Chronicles of Montague and Dalton: The Hunt for Alleyway Agnes, by Scott Lewis
  • The Sound of Gyroscopes, by Jonathan L. Howard
  • Flight of Daedalus, by Piotr Åšwietlik
  • The Traveller’s Apprentice, by Ian Millsted
  • Lord Craddock: Ascension, by Stephen Blake
  • The Lanterns of Death Affair, by Andy Bigwood

Edited by Roz Clarke & Joanne Hall.

Cover by Andy Bigwood.

Book Review – Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

~ Cheryl

Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeerTwo very fine books are published in the USA today. The first is Redefining Realness by Janet Mock, which I reviewed last week. The other is Annihilation, the first part of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer.

I was lucky enough to get a review copy of Annihilation. Now I want to pester the publishers for copies of the other two volumes, because I need to know. I’m not entirely sure what it is I need to know, because there is still so much left to learn. Jeff might even follow Mike Harrison’s example and not explain anything. That’s OK. But knowing that there are two more books out there that might explain some of it is excruciating.

If you do not want to know (and believe me, if you are human, you were probably not meant to know) then do not read my review, which is here.

Oh, well you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Sanity roll, please.

More from Muse It Up

~ Cheryl

Added to the bookstore today we have:

There’s quite a bit of short fiction there, so its quite cheap. Also I’d like to draw your attention in particular to The King’s Ransom as it has won a bunch of awards and comes with a reading guide for use in schools.

Recommended Reading

~ Cheryl

The Locus Recommended Reading List was published over the weekend. As some of you will know, I am one of many people who have an input to this. I’m very pleased with how things went.

It has been an interesting year. I have read precisely two of the books on the Science Fiction list, though there are another seven I would like to read. I’ve done a bit better in Fantasy, but the fact that I have read five of the nine books on the Debuts list tells you a lot about the focus of my reading. The Collections list is frankly amazing, and almost all down to hard-working small presses.

I’m a bit disappointed that Adventure Rocketship didn’t get a mention. Jonathan Strahan did say on the latest Coode Street that he had lobbied to get Tim Maughan’s “Flight Path Estate” listed, but the competition is intense. Even the folks at Tor.com were a bit disappointed, so I can’t complain. There are plenty of Clarkesworld stories listed, but that is expected these days.

There are a number of books that are listed that I have in the bookstore. Here are some highlights.

Campbellian Anthology 2014

~ Cheryl

Campbellian Anthology 2014Well, here’s a bargain. What to sample the work of many of the candidates for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer? Well now you can. The 2014 Campbellian Anthology contains 860,000 words by 111 authors, and is absolutely free. Authors featured include Dan Kimmel, Helen Marshall, Tim Maughan, E.C. Myers, Ramez Naam, Sofia Samatar, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Bogi Takács and many, many others. It is an ebook, of course, but you couldn’t do something like this any other way. Full details and download links are available here.

Huge thanks to M. David Blake for doing the work to make this happen.

A Philippines Typhoon Charity Anthology

~ Cheryl

Outpouring - Dean Francis AlfarAs generally happens when a major natural disaster strikes, creative people get together to help raise money for the relief effort. Typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan) has been no exception. This book, however, is somewhat different, having been produced in The Philippines, and containing many local writers.

Outpouring is the brainchild of Dean Francis Alfar, and is published by Flipside, the company for whom Charles Tan works. The writers include a few well known names such as Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Ken Scholes, Jeffrey Ford, Jason Erik Lundberg and Dean’s wife, Niki, but most are less well-known and a few are making their debut. However, with Dean in charge I am sure that the quality will be very high. And, of course, all of the proceeds are being donated to help the relief effort, specifically to the Philippine Red Cross.

Talking of which, although PayPal will take their usual cut, Wizard’s Tower Books will pass on 100% of revenue from the book to Flipside.

So there you have it. A chance to sample some fine writers, mostly from far-flung parts of the world, and to help with a charity relief effort as well. The book is only available as an epub, but it should be easily convertible to mobi via Calibre and similar tools.

If you would like to learn more about the speculative fiction scene in The Philippines, I interviewed Dean and Charles for Small Blue Planet.

Book Review: Blood Oranges by Caitlín R Kiernan

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Blood Oranges - Caitlin R. KiernanHere’s another book review for you. Blood Oranges is by Caitlín R Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney for reasons that only the Byzantine world of publishing could come up with. It has vampires, it has werewolves, it has lots of people getting very dead, very messily. It is also very funny, especially if you have read a bit of urban fantasy. Of course it is not for the squeamish, but you knew that when I said it was by Kiernan, right?

You can find the review here.

Book Review: Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

~ Cheryl

Redefining Realness - Janet MockThis is something of a departure for me, because this book is not science fiction or fantasy, it is a trans autobiography. While that may not be of interest to many of you, it is a really good book. I was lucky enough to get an early (and signed!) copy, because I was a backer of this film on Kickstarter (also a biography of an amazing trans woman of color). It is out in the US next week, and in the UK in the middle of March.

My review of Redefining Realness contains a lot of personal references. I hope Janet Mock can forgive me for that, but I can’t really express how I feel about the book without explaining how Janet’s story relates to my own. You can read the review here.

While I was writing the review, two piece of music came to mind. The first is by one of my favorite disco divas, Amanda Lear. It is marginally non-work-safe due to scantily clad boy dancers.

I forgive you for Bryan, Amanda, really I do. I was too young at the time anyway. *sob*

And here is Peter Sarstedt with the song I mention in the review.

Dedicated, as ever, to successful #GirlsLikeUs everywhere.

Update: US folks, Janet will be appearing on Piers Morgan Live tomorrow. I expect the questioning to be every big as inappropriate and disrespectful as Katie Couric’s show with Carmen Carerra and Laverne Cox. And having read Janet’s book I have a pretty clear idea where the conversation will go. Thankfully I have every confidence in Janet’s ability to handle it.

New Titles from Muse It Up

~ Cheryl

I have had a busy morning adding lots of new titles to the store. This is what our friends from Muse It Up have for you:

Me Elsewhere: Talking About Frawgs

~ Cheryl

My good friend Pete Sutton asked me for a guest post for his blog this month. I decided to say a few things about why I love all sorts of books (despite the fact that I publish and sell mainly ebooks). I talk mainly about things done by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, because the combination of Wonderbook and Cheeky Frawg illustrates perfectly why we need both paper and digital. You can read the post in full, and Pete’s thoughts on Wonderbook & Jagannath, here.