Wizard’s Tower

September ChiZine Releases

~ Cheryl

Over in the Wizard’s Tower bookstore we have two new releases from ChiZine Publications.

The first is Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet. I don’t know much about this one, but it appears to be a new take on the issues of being able to foretell the future.

The other books is Briarpatch by Tim Pratt. This isn’t a Marla Mason book, though what it is isn’t at all clear. The Briarpatch of the title is described as, “either the crawlspace of the universe, or a series of ambitious building projects abandoned by god, or a tangle of alternative universes, depending on who you ask.” Anyway, Tim is a friend, a fine writer, and one of the few people who can claim to have won a Hugo when Neil Gaiman was a nominee in the same category. I’m sure it will be a fascinating book.

As Promised…

~ Cheryl

… yet more books.

I added a whole lot more books this afternoon — from ChiZine and Lethe, plus the September magazines. Here are a few highlights.

From ChiZine we have Isles of the Forsaken, a new novel from Carolyn Ives Gilman. I reviewed her feminist SF novel, Halfway Human, in Emerald City and found it fascinating, so I’m interested to see what she has done this time. The book looks like a fantasy, but what do I know. I finished the new Glenda Larke “fantasy” trilogy today and discovered, as I had rather suspected, that it was science fiction all along.

From Lethe we have the 2011 edition of Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories anthology series. These are year’s best books collecting science fiction, fantasy and horror stories about gay men. The 2011 edition includes work by Laird Barron, Richard Bowes and Joel Lane.

As usual we have the September issues of Fantasy and Lightspeed. Fantasy has a Jonathan Lethem story in it, and I love the steampunk version of David’s famous portrait of Napoleon that they have on the cover. Lightspeed features David Brin and Ursula K. Le Guin (I’m guessing those and the Lethem are reprints, but I don’t own them). As usual if you buy both magazines you get 25% off the cover price. And while I’m here, huge congratulations to John Joseph Adams and Christie Yant who got married at Worldcon.

Finally, of course, there is issue #60 of Clarkesworld, about which I shall have a lot more to say this evening.

One small word of warning. While I was uploading this lot I got an email from the hosting service to say that the bookstore site will be offline for about 3 hours from 11:00pm to 2:00am UK time tonight for server maintenance. So if you go there and you can’t see anything, don’t worry, it should be back soon.

More Books

~ Cheryl

I’m finally starting to get through adding August’s new books to the Wizard’s Tower Store. This is lots of computer work, and it is doing my shoulder no good at all. So next up I am off out to buy a small, light wheeled suitcase, because I don’t want to risk a backpack for the trip to London. After that, yet more books, and the September magazines.

But before I go, a quick word about some of what I have added. First up I’d like to highlight Polar City Blues by Katherine Kerr (£2.99). This comment in the blurb caught my eye:

“In some ways Polar City Blues is my tribute to the classic SF I read as a teenager. In other ways, it’s a heavily Revisionist book, where the Hero is female and the Object of Desire is male. Mostly, however, it’s a fast-paced adventure story complete with dead bodies, hookers, drugs, mysterious aliens, and several high-speed chases both on the ground and elsewhere.” — Katharine Kerr

Also I see that the Book View Cafe folks are continuing to do great things with omnibus editions. You can get all four volumes of Jay Caselberg’s Jack Stein stories for just £7.99, and all four volumes of Steven Harper’s Silent Empire series for a mere £4.99. What can I say? Value.

Dark Spires – The Business Post

~ Cheryl

I’m starting to go through the business issues arising from Colin Harvey’s untimely death. The most obvious one is that Dark Spires was a joint venture between Colin and myself. He handled the editing, and I handled the publication. The significance of this is that all of the author contracts are with Colin, not with me. I need to talk to Kate about this, but I’m assuming for now that I’ll need to assume responsibility here.

Gareth has kindly sent me a copy of his author contract. Assuming that they are all the same, I now know what the terms are. As I mentioned last week, the book was just one paper copy away from earning out when Colin died. We’ve had a few ebook sales reported since then, so there should be some payments due at the end of the year. In order to make them, I need contact details for everyone. Most of you I already know, and I’ll be chasing up the others, but if anyone out there has a story in the book and is concerned about the situation please get in touch.

By the way, while there are a few paper copies left, I don’t have any. Colin had some, which I hope to pick up at some point, and there were a few that went missing at Alt.Fiction that may find their way back to me, but for now the paper edition is temporarily sold out.

Bristol F&SF Group – Colin Harvey Memorial

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The Bristol F&SF Group meets once a month on a Monday evening. The next meeting will be this coming Monday (22nd) at the Shakespeare Tavern on Prince Street. I am reminded from the Facebook Group that Colin was planning to run a promotion to see if he could sell the one more print copy of Dark Spires that we needed to shift to break even on the project. Instead we will be raising a glass in his memory.

If you live in or near Bristol, or just happen to be in the area, we’d be delighted to see you. The meetings are scheduled to start at 8:00pm but people sometimes turn up early to get food. Let me know if you have any questions about getting there.

R.I.P. Colin Harvey

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

I got a phone call yesterday morning from Jo Hall letting me know that Colin Harvey had suffered a massive stroke. We’ve all been keeping our hopes up here in the West Country, but sadly Colin passed away in the night. He will leave a very big hole in the local community.

Colin is best know for the two novels, Winter Song and Damage Time that he published through Angry Robot. He was one of the first people to be published by the company. You can read Marco’s obituary, and comments from other Angry Robot authors, here.

Locally, however, Colin is at least as well known for the work that he did for others. He was one of the driving forces behind the founding of BristolCon. He was always encouraging other writers, and I know he’ll be particularly missed by Gareth L. Powell. Gareth has a novel, The Recollection, out with Solaris this month — his first from a major publisher — and Colin’s absence from the launch event at Forbidden Planet Bristol on the 25th is going to be very obvious to us all.

Colin’s favourite way of encouraging and helping other writers was to edit anthologies. As well as Dark Spires, he did a couple with Swimming Kanagaroo, and was working on one for Aeon. This sort of thing doesn’t make a lot of money, but it does make a lot of people very happy. I’ll always be grateful to Colin for providing me with a fine book to get Wizard’s Tower started, and there will be many writers who will be remembering him for getting their stories into print.

I’ve not yet spoken to Colin’s wife, Kate, over this. Gareth has been our main point of contact. In his brief announcement of Colin’s death, he suggests that any condolences be sent via Colin’s agent, John Berlyne, at Zeno. I know John very well and I’ll be dropping him a note as soon as I have published this post to see what can be done.

Update: John (who has been on his way to Reno) emailed back to say that Zeno only subcontracted UK work on rights and he’s had no contact with Colin’s family. My apologies to John for any embarrassment I may have caused. I shall try to find someone else who can act as a conduit for condolences.

Update 2: Condolences can be passed on via Dindy Robinson at Swimming Kangaroo (see comment below).

I have also been in touch with Bob Nielson at Aeon. I’ll do a proper business post later, but now is not the time.

It is usual in obituaries to talk about the life of the deceased. I didn’t know Colin well enough to do that. But I was fortunate enough to interview him for Salon Futura last year. If you never met Colin, and would like to know more, you can see him talk about his career and writing here.

Introducing Sarah Zettel

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Yes, more books. 🙂

I’ve uploaded another 8 books from Book View Cafe today. Two of them are by Sue Lange (Uncategorized and We, Robots), but with apologies to Sue I’d like to focus on Sarah Zettel here.

Zettel is another example of a woman who has abandoned science fiction to write what publishers think of as “women’s books”. These days she’s doing vampires, and mostly what we have is her four-volume Arthurian fantasy romance series. If that’s your sort of thing, I recommend the omnibus edition, Paths to Camelot, which is much cheaper than buying all four volumes, and being an ebook does not have to be set in minuscule type to make it small enough to carry.

However, we also have one of Zettel’s earlier books, Fool’s War. This is a book that has been on my “to read” pile for a while, though the paper copy is stranded in California. Not only is the book space opera by a woman; the lead character, starship captain Katmer Al Shei, is a devout Muslim. That’s not something you see every day.

Also the book has a landscape cover (by Donato). I’ve not yet checked it on the iPad to see how it looks, but hey, why not? Ebooks are not constrained by physical shape, after all.

Building a Better Bookstore

~ Cheryl ~ 13 Comments

I am almost caught up with all of the backlog that built up over June and July, so I should soon be able to start thinking about how to improve the Wizard’s Tower bookstore. Top of my list is to add automatic downloads to Kindle and Ibis, because convenience seems to trump just about everything else where customers are concerned, but there must be other things I can do as well.

Gary and Jonathan were talking about one of the problems in the latest Coode Street podcast. If you go to Amazon and ask for SF&F books there are apparently more than 72,000 to choose from. Many of those are going to be spam books. Those that Amazon promotes will be promoted because their publisher has paid to have them promoted. So how do you know what to buy?

Today Foyles posted the results of a Twitter survey on what people want from a bricks and mortar bookstore. Smell is going to be a bit difficult to reproduce, but what about some of the other things? Could they be done online?

So, over too you lot. What would you like to see me do with the store?

Clarkesworld #59

~ Cheryl

Hello, it is August. New month, new magazines. What do we have for you this time?

Leading off we have “Conservation of Shadows” by Yoon Ha Lee, which on a quick look appears to be a re-telling of Ishtar’s journey to the underworld. I’m sold already. As always, Kate Baker provides the audio version.

The second story delights me for a different reason. It is a translation, from Chinese (I’m not sure which language, I’ll try to find out). The original is by Chen Qiufan, who has an excellent track record with over 30 stories sold and several available in English. The translation is by Ken Liu. And the story is “The Fish of Lijiang”. The audio for this will be available mid-month.

Jeremy continues his epic, multi-author round table discussion of epic fantasy. In addition he provides an interview with one of my favorite writers, Minister Faust.

In my department we have “Inconstant Constants” by my good friend Karen Burnham who holds out the tantalizing possibility that some of the fundamental constants of physics might not be so constant after all. It is a very controversial issue in cosmology, but magnificently science-fictional (and Karen points us at a few examples of it being used that way).

By the way, one of the objections to the idea of changing constants is that one current set of data seems to suggest that the Earth is the center of the universe. That’s a daft idea, of course. Or is it? Adam Roberts’ story, “Anticopernicus”, which suggests it might be true after all, is selling very well over at the Wizard’s Tower store.

There’s an editorial from Neil that outlines his schedule for Worldcon in Reno. We are, of course, up for the Hugo again, but I shall be very surprised (and rather disappointed) if Locus doesn’t win this year. Miss you, Charles.

On the other hand, I have my fingers crossed for Peter Watts and “The Things”. Peter, of course, can’t travel to Reno. Like me he has been banned from the USA. If he wins, Neil gets to collect the rocket, which will be nice as he missed out on doing so in Melbourne.

Finally our cover for August is “Into the Woods” by Erik Storstein, a Norwegian artist currently studying in Bournemouth. I wonder if I can lure him to BristolCon?

The new Clarkesworld is, of course, available through the Wizard’s Tower store.

Introducing Linda Nagata

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

What were people saying about lack of women SF writers? Well, I’ve just added one to the store. I’m very proud to stock all four volumes of Linda Nagata’s Nanotech Succession:

The Bohr Maker won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

For those of you who hate trilogies, don’t worry, this is an interconnected series of stand-alone novels, not one book cut into pieces.

Also new in the store are Skye Object 3270a, a YA science fiction novel, and The Dread Hammer, a fantasy comedy written by Linda’s alter-ego, Trey Shiels.

Lots More Books

~ Cheryl

A whole bunch of new books came in for the store while I was in Finland. They are now all available for you to buy.

First up, a warm welcome to Adam Roberts. Like many established authors, Adam is looking to sell short fiction direct to his fans. We are delighted to be able to stock his novelette, Anticopernicus. And it is only £0.86.

On the subject of short fiction, Lethe has sent us Wagers of Gold Mountain, a short story by Steve Berman set in gold rush era San Francisco. It’s only £0.60.

Also new is issue #6 of Bull Spec magazine, which features an interview with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. Love the cover.

Last but by no means least, we have a whole lot more books from Book View Café. They are:

Happy shopping!

Welcome, Book View Cafe

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Slowly but surely, my little bookstore is growing. In the last few days I have started adding books from Book View Cafe, an authors’ collective that publishes some very fine SF&F writers. Thus far we have books available from Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel and Chris Dolley. There are a lot more to come. There will be some delay while I’m in Finland, but slowly and surely we will get there. In the meantime, happy shopping.

Clarkesworld #58

~ Cheryl

Yes folks, it is new month time again. In issue #58 of Clarkesworld we have a whole lot more reading goodness for you.

Gord Sellar should be well known to you as he’s been a Campbell nominee. His story, “Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika”, might have a French title, but don’t worry, the text is all in English.

An Owomoyela is yet another Clarion West graduate whose work I need to catch up with. “Frozen Voice” is a story about language and oppression.

Jeremy may have taken leave of his senses this month because he’s doing a round table interview featuring no less than 28 different writers of epic fantasy. His guests include Steven Erikson, Trudi Canavan, David Anthony Durham, N. K. Jemisin, Patrick Rothfuss, Juliet McKenna, Brandon Sanderson and many others. Unsurprisingly this is only part one of the resulting article. As in all the best epic fantasy novels, Jeremy includes a dramatis personnae so that you can keep track of all of the characters. I’m hoping he doesn’t intend to do a GRRM, as many of those people are good friends of mine.

For this month I have bought another of Dan Kimmel’s fine explorations of the movie business. This month in “Apocalypse Then” he takes a look at the many different ways Hollywood has imagined that the world will end, and comes to a very perceptive conclusion. This is a good time to remind you that Dan has a book out featuring many such articles, only some of which are from Clarkesworld. How can you resist a book titled Jar Jar Binks Must Die? [buy isbn=”9781617200618″]

Also in this issue, Neil has an editorial in which he vents a bit about the constant push-back you get whenever you mention ebooks. I said many of the same things on panels at Eurocon and Alt.Fiction.

One of the things Neil mentions is the option that Kindle users now have to order a subscription to Clarkesworld. I’m pleased to hear that these are selling well, and very much hope we reach the target of 500 subscribers that we need to finance an additional story each month.

Of course if your ereading device/software supports epub rather than mobi you can buy the new issue from the Wizard’s Tower store. We also have Lightspeed #14 and Fantasy #52, with the usual offer of 25% off if you buy both together.

And finally, this month’s cover is “Valley of Mists” by Peter Mohrbacher, which I love so much I’m reproducing it in full here.

Valley of Mists - Peter Mohrbacher

Two Award Nominees

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

One of the people I got to meet for the first time at Alt.Fiction last weekend was Helen Marshall who is an editor for ChiZine Publications. They are a Canadian small press, and Helen is Canadian, but chance has relocated her to England and hence to conventions.

I’m always pleased to make personal contact with people whose books I sell, but ChiZine is particularly notable right now because the company has two shiny new award nominees.

Firstly The Thief of Broken Toys, a novella by Tim Lebbon, is a finalist in the British Fantasy Awards.

In addition Chimerascope by Douglas Smith is a finalist in the Sunburst Awards (Canada’s answer to the Arthur C. Clarke Award).

I don’t have time to read every book I stock, so I’m always pleased to find that other people have decided the books I am selling are really good.

From Russia With Steam

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I have just put a new book on sale over at the Wizard’s Tower store. It is Heart of Iron, by the very wonderful Ekaterina Sedia. The book is set in a steampunk version of the Russian empire, and features international intrigue, big trains, and a dastardly British secret agent called Dame Florence Nightingale. It sounds an awful lot of fun. It is also only £2.99.

Of course, this being Kathy, there is some serious history and feminism in the book too. She has blogged about some of the background here, here and here.

Those of you less interested in history and feminism can instead salivate over machinery. Or, more specifically, trains. This one is for you, Kevin (art by Marcin Jakubowski).

Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia