I have finally dug my way out of the pit of overwork far enough to be able to write a few book reviews. I will be posting them this week. The first is for Roz Kaveney’s latest novel. Reflections is the second in the Rhapsody of Blood series. I reviewed the first, Rituals, here, and you can read my review of the new book here.
Books
Metastasis: The Anthology
Here’s a charity anthology that you might want to consider backing. It is not a Kickstarter project, this one is already published and doing quite well. But it is worth buying because 62.5% of the profits go to cancer research.
The anthology is, of course, all about cancer, and it includes stories by Jay Lake and Candas Jane Dorsey. Editor, Rhonda Parrish writes a bit about it here. I don’t have it in the store, so you’ll need to get it through someone else. The publisher has links.
Talking of Jay, he is currently using his social profile to raise more funds for research through this appeal on You Caring. It is quite close to reaching the funding goal, but it still needs help. I can’t begin to say how much I admire Jay for making such a public event of his fight for life.
And finally, in case you needed any more encouragement, I learned this morning that the fabulous Stella Duffy once again has breast cancer. She’s beaten it once. Here’s hoping she can do so again.
Price Drop on Small Step
Fablecroft have let us know that they are dropping the price of One Small Step, a fine themed anthology featuring many of the best Australian women writers. You can now get it for just £4.99 rather than £6.49.
Two New Books
I added two new books to the store over the weekend. They are as follows:
Trading Rosemary is a novella by Octavia Cade from Masque. It has a very interesting premise — a word in which memories are currency.
12:19 by Michael Infinito is a horror mystery from Must It Up. Breathless stuff.
By the way, talking of the website, some of you may have noticed that digital delivery is now not always available immediately on placing an order. This is a result of changes in the way that Shopify does things. The current delivery service that I’m using isn’t able to cope with this change, so I’m investigating alternatives.
Isles of Glory – Complete
Our good friends at Fablecroft have completed the ebook re-issue of Glenda Larke’s Isles of Glory trilogy. with the final volume, The Tainted. This a a very fine fantasy series. You can get all three books as follows:
I note also that Glenda’s latest series will be launched in March with The Lascar’s Dagger, which is getting fine reviews already (even if there is a cloak on the cover — sorry Gav…).
Long Hidden ToC & Cover
Rose Fox and Daniel José Older have announced the Table of Contents for the Long Hidden anthology. You can see it here. The cover above is by Julie Dillon. I’m really looking forward to this one.
New In The Store
This morning I uploaded three more books from Muse It Up. They are:
- Faizah’s Destiny by Marva Dasef — a YA fantasy using Arabian mythology;
- Fortunatus by James Hartley — short fiction about a magical bag of gold that never empties; and
- Nightmares by Donna Jean McDunn — a dark fantasy ghost story
Today On Ujima: Books & Booze
Well, that was back into harness with a bang. Today was all me all the time on Women’s Outlook.
The first hour was all about books we had read over the holiday period. Several of the team were in on the discussion, and mostly they are not SF readers, and we made room for their choices too. The second half hour, however, was mainly SF-focused. Paulette had been reading The Radleys by Matt Haig, which is a very funny book about a family of suburban vampires determined blend into normal society by restraining their natural urges. I have a few reservations about it, but the central theme of the book is how Mr. & Mrs. Radley have avoided telling their children the truth about their nature, and how this leads to tragedy. That led us into discussing Mortal Fire, by Elizabeth Knox, which also has parents manipulating children at its core, and then to Hild by Nicola Griffith which may be an example of justified parental dishonesty.
You can listen to that first hour here.
The second hour saw us discussing a forthcoming conference about Women & Alcohol. I was quite nervous about this as I had no idea what tack the studio guests would take. I had visions of getting a health fanatic who thought that all alcohol consumption was wrong, or a Daily Malice reader who wanted to force women back into the home and make them financially dependent on their husbands so that they can’t (easily) drink. Thankfully my two guests, Patsy and Sabitha, were very sensible and level-headed and I think we had a good conversation.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
One of the changes we have made this year is that we are going to have more music in the shows. Paulette brought in some music today, but I chose the tracks. I was delighted to be able to play Carole King, Amy Winehouse and Dusty Springfield. For February, which is LGBT History Month, I’m going to be in charge of the music choices. I want to have all LGBT artists. That should be fun. Definitely on the list are Sylvester, Labi Sifre and Tracy Chapman. Oh, and Josephine Baker. Might have some white folks too. Can’t do it without Cyndi Lauper. But suggestions for more LGBT POC musicians would be appreciated. Please remember that we are heavily regulated for language so we can’t play anything sweary.
Year In Review (Part II)
As promised, I have another Year in Review post up. This one is at SF Signal. I actually wrote it before the Aqueduct Press one, but the Signal guys, for whatever reason, delayed putting up the Mind Meld until now. Were I doing it now I would assure you that Elizabeth Knox’s Wake is indeed wonderful, as is her Mortal Fire. Rhapsody of Blood: Reflections by Roz Kaveney and Blood Oranges by Kathleen Tierney (CaitlÃn R. Kiernan) are great fun too.
So many books, so many reviews I do not have time to write.
New From Muse It Up
Our Canadian friends have sent us three new books:
- Broken Bonds is a science fantasy romance by Margaret Fieland;
- Charmed Memories is the second book in Mary Waibel’s YA fantasy series, A Princess of Valendria; and
- The Girl and the Dragon is a children’s fantasy with Christian themes and gender bending (the heroine disguises herself as a boy)
Some Afrofuturism Links
Over the Holidays I finally got around to editing the Afrofuturism special I did on Ujima for podcast. It has two songs in it that needed to be removed for copyright reasons. As you may recall, it features Tade Thompson in the studio, plus interviews recorded at World Fantasy with Bill Campbell, Tobias Buckell and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz.
The podcast mentions two specific books that are available in the bookstore: Mothership, and Adventure Rocketship. I’ve also started tagging books as Afrofuturism if they seem to fit the description. You can find all of them here.
You can listen to the podcast of the show here:
The cover illustrating this post is not from a book in the store, it is something that was sent to me for review, a book called Odysella: Empress Of Nar. If you are looking at it and thinking, “yeah, self-published”, well you are right. However, bear in mind that people of color have much greater difficulty selling books to big publishers than white folks. Also, as this post makes clear, author Shirley Hardy-Leonard has a successful career as a playwright and scriptwriter behind her, so she knows what she’s doing. I’m possibly not the best person to review it, if only because my knowledge of hip-hop could be written many times over on Tim Maughan’s smallest fingernail, but hopefully some of you will take a look. For an actual review, go here.
Finally, via the @BlackSciFi Twitter feed, I discovered this IndieGoGo project to crowdfund a science fiction movie in which black folks get to save the planet. Good luck, Earth Squadron, I hope you get made.
The Year In Prospect
Quite a few people have been doing posts about the books they are looking forward to in 2014, which have mostly served to illustrate how little I have in common with SF&F fandom these days. However, yesterday I got asked what I was looking forward to reading. There has to be something, right? So I had a little trawl around the Internet. Here are some suggestions.
Empress of the Sun, Ian McDonald — Ian is one of the best SF authors around today. OK, so his current series is YA, but that’s no reason not to be reading him.
Red Delicious, Kathleen Tierney — Tierney is a thinly disguised CaitlÃn Kiernan taking the piss out of urban fantasy most magnificently. This book is the sequel to Blood Oranges.
The Gospel of Loki, Joanne Harris — Harris has a huge reputation in mainstream literature and has recently been turning her hand to fantasy. She has done a YA series using Norse mythology. This one is an adult book. And it is about Loki, who these days is fashionably cute and adorable. I want to see what Harris does with the gender-bending aspects of Loki’s story.
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer — I have been a big fan of Jeff’s work since City of Saints and Madmen. This is new stuff. No Ambergris. I am very much looking forward to it.
Islands of Chaldea, Diana Wynne Jones & Ursula Jones — This is the book that Diana had half-finished when she died. It has been completed by her sister, Ursula. These things can be a bit embarrassing, or they can be a delight. I want to know which this will be.
The Galaxy Game, Karen Lord — This is the sequel to last year’s The Best of All Possible Worlds. I have been talking to Karen about bits of it. I’m sure it will be very good.
The Girl with all the Gifts, M.R. Carey — That would be Mike Carey, he of X-Men, The Unwritten and the Felix Castor novels. The idiocies of the bookselling industry have required him to adopt a transparent pseudonym. I’m hearing more positive buzz about this book than anything else due in 2014.
Steles of the Sky, Elizabeth Bear — Bear is one of the GoHs at Finncon this year. This is the final volume in her latest series. I need to have read all three by July. Given what people are saying about the series, I am sure I will enjoy the experience.
The Causal Angel, Hannu Rajaniemi — The other GoH at Finncon will be Hannu. This is the third (and I think final) volume in the Quantum Thief series. I loved the other two, and am looking forward to this one.
Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta — The next big thing from Finland is likely to be this book. It did very well indeed when it was published in Finnish. It was a finalist for the Tähtivaeltaja Award and won Emmi a €16,000 young writer prize. And it has sold in translation to many markets, including English which is the hardest for any non-English book to crack.
Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor — Nnedi’s last adult novel, Who Fears Death, won the World Fantasy Award and was a Nebula nominee. Of course I am looking forward to this.
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin — Nora is another author who is right on the top of her game right now. This should be very good.
Hurricane Fever, Tobias S. Buckell — As per the interview I did with him for Ujima, Tobias is doing more high tech, near future thrillers than SF these days. But he has a strong interest in climate science, which is of particular interest to me, so I try to keep up with what he’s doing.
We Will All Go Down Together, Gemma Files — It sounds like Experimental Film is taking longer to write than Gemma expected, but instead ChiZine will be putting out a fix-up novel of what Gemma called “Toronto Weird” stories. I found the Hexslinger books fascinating, and am interested to see what this is like.
Child Eater, Rachel Pollack — This will be Rachel’s first novel for 12 years. I have no idea what it is about, but previous novels won the Clarke in 1989 and the World Fantasy in 1997 so I have to check this out.
Radiance, Catherynne M. Valente — It’s Cat, and it is science fiction. What more do I have to say?
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie — The sequel to one of my favorite books from 2013.
And finally, Going Gray, Karen Traviss — Yes, you read that right. It is a new non-tie-in novel from Karen Traviss. Am I excited? You bet I am. 🙂
New From Fox Spirit
The busy little British small press, Fox Spirit, has a new anthology available. Shapeshifters is the second book in their Fox Pockets series. Both books feature a lot of talented young writers. In order to encourage you to follow the series, we are offering the first volume, Piracy, in a cut-price bundle with Shapeshifters. What does the fox say? She says, “buy my books, please”.
2013 In The Bookstore
I’ve been busy doing the Wizard’s Tower accounts for December and I thought it might be interesting to take a look at business in the bookstore over the year. Which books were you actually buying? Well, six books in particular stood out. (I’ve left out our own books because they are obviously going to sell well.)
In sixth place is Lori Selke & Djibril al-Ayad’s anthology of stories about the future of identity, Outlaw Bodies.
Equal fourth were Aliette de Bodard’s Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novella, On A Red Station Drifting, and a brand new book, Desirina Boskovich’s anthology of Finnish fiction, It Came from The North.
In third place is the only other book from The Future Fire, Fabio Fernandes & Djibril al-Ayad’s anthology of post-colonial SF, We See A Different Frontier. Gardner Dozois was waxing lyrical about this one in the January Locus.
Second, on the back of a successful promotional campaign, is Tansy Rayner Roberts’ award-winning debut novel, Splashdance Silver. I hope everyone who bought it comes back for the other two books in the series.
And at number one is the magnificent collection by Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath.
It will probably come as no surprise that the publisher who did most business for us in 2013 was Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Cheeky Frawg. Thanks for putting out such great books, folks.
Second and third places in the publisher stakes go to Prime Books and Aqueduct Press respectively. While they didn’t have any stand-out titles, they have an awful lot of very good books. Do check them out.
Coming Soon from WTP
The latter part of last year turned into a total disaster, schedule-wise. If I make any resolutions for 2014 they will all involve not over-committing myself as much in future. That is, of course, easier said than done.
I try not to make promises about when books will be ready until I am pretty certain that they will be ready then. Having said that, I have been doing some work over the Holidays to try to catch up while things are quiet.
Most importantly, the copy for Airship-Shaped & Bristol Fashion has been formatted and is ready to go off to Joe, our book designer, as soon as he’s back from his vacation. It will be a relief to get that one out of the door.
In addition I have Apocalypse Array, the final volume of Lyda Morehouse’s AngeLINK series, assembled and ready for corrections. That takes a while as there will be a huge number of scanning errors to fix, but progress has been made.
I’ve spent time yesterday and working on another book project that I’m very excited about, but can’t tell you about yet.
There will, of course, be more books from Juliet McKenna, but she’s still in the midst of family Christmas so I need to wait for her to surface before I can promise anything.
And then there’s the more speculative stuff, that I really should do something about, especially as I was talking to people about both books at World Fantasy. Less blogging, more work.
A Note On Sales
This is the time of year when most online stores are pestering you endlessly about the sales they have running. You maybe wondering why I am not doing this. Well partly it is because I suspect you are as fed up of sales-mania as I am. The main reason, however, is that I let the publishers set prices in the store. That’s because of Amazon and their price-matching policies. They like to be the cheapest store around. If they were to notice me running a sale, they would probably drop their prices to match, and they might not bother to put them back up again. As they have no control over what price Amazon sells their books at, publishers worry about this sort of thing, so I only drop prices when they ask me to.
That reminds me, however, that we do have Tansy Rayner Roberts’ award-winning debut novel, Splashdance Siver, available very cheaply until the end of the year. If you’d like to take this opportunity to sample the first volume of the Mocklore Chronicles, you have only a few days left.
Well Done, The Future Fire
One of the main goals of any small press is to get the fiction you publish recognized alongside work published by the bigger companies. As small presses often do anthologies, one of the ways that they can do this is to have stories from those books chosen for Best of the Year collections. Gardner Dozois has recently released details of his Best of the Year collection for 2013. The cover features one of my favorite pieces of Jim Burns artwork, but what really caught my eye was the fact that two of the stories in it came from We See A Different Frontier, an anthology of post-colonial SF from The Future Fire, edited by Fabio Fernandes & Djibril al-Ayad. Well done chaps!
Those stories are:
- “A Heap of Broken Images” by Sunny Moraine
- “Fleet” by Sandra McDonald
Oh yeah, that’s one author who uses non-binary pronouns, and one who is famous for stories about a trans woman. *Fist pump!*
New From Terrae Motus
Sharon Kae Raemer has sent us the second and third books in her Schattenreich series. This far we have:
Get Your Messiah Here
Yes folks, other people might have to wait until the 25th for their messiah to be born, but we have one right now. I am talking, of course, about Messiah Node, the third novel in Lyda Morehouse’s legendary AngeLINK series, which I am honored to be reprinting. I don’t want to say too much about the book, because you should all be reading Archangel Protocol and Fallen Host first. However, there is a blurb for the book, so you’ll know that Mouse, Page and the Archangel Michael are all involved. Also Satan and his newly discovered Antichrist, Emmaline McNaughton, are busy bringing about the Apocalypse. There is an actual messiah too. Elijah turns up to make it official. She is Michael and Deirdre’s daughter, Amariah. That’s not going to go down well with the churches.
The book will be available through the usual outlets in due course, though as they are now all terrified about accidentally selling porn as well as accidentally selling pirated material they are getting more serious about checking new titles and at this time of year they may be quite slow doing it. In the meantime, the book is of course available from your friendly, neighborhood ebook store.
Santa Delivers: Fiction From The North
Santa lives near the North pole, right? In fact he lives in Far North Finland. You can go and visit him there, if you are so inclined. Therefore I assume that the jolly fellow who has just delivered a fabulous anthology to my bookstore is not Jeff VanderMeer in a fake beard and a fur-lined red suit, but Santa himself. Who better to spread Finnish culture to the world?
Thus we have, It Came From The North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction, edited by Desirina Boskovich. It is a reprint anthology, and some of the material may be familiar to you. Johanna Sinisalo has contributed an excerpt from her novel, Not Before Sundown (Troll); “Elegy for a Young Elk” by Hannu Rajaniemi was in Subterranean; and “Watcher†by Leena Likitalo was in Weird Tales. If you are a serious Finnophile you may even have books like The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy and various English-language special editions of magazines put out by Finnish fandom. However, I’m prepared to bet that there will be material in this book that is new to you because there is material in it that is new to me.
It is excellent value, and will introduce you to a whole lot of fine writers that you have never been able to read before.