May 4, 2013

Women to Read: Where to Start Part 2

Women in Genre Month is over, but there are still several fabulous folks I want to highlight. So, as promised – and better late than never – I present part 2 of my list of women whose work I recommend seeking out, and a starting point (or two) to get you, er, started.

Fran Wilde : She connects authors with authors, and authors with readers, while illuminating an often overlooked aspect of worldbuilding through her fantastic Cooking the Books series of interviews: food. We all eat it, many of us love it, but we often take it for granted. Fran’s series of interviews focusing on food in SF/F/H has opened my eyes, and made me look at many works in a new way. For that reason, I recommend starting at her blog, looking up every interview she’s conducted, then proceeding from there to read all her other entries. Once you’re done with that, seek out her story Without in Nature’s Futures series, then keep your eyes peeled because her name will be everywhere soon.

Damien Walters Grintalis: Here is yet another author where I had trouble picking just one story to recommend as a starting point. There are so many works to choose from, all brilliant, and like so many authors on my list, she is just everywhere recently. But since I have to pick something, I’ll go with Dysphonia in D Minor, a story dripping with rich and gorgeous language, and urge you to seek out her other work from there.

Ekaterina Sedia: Another author who likely needs no introduction. I could point to any number of her works as a valid staring point, but I’ll go with The House of Discarded Dreams, a beautiful, hallucinatory novel that managed to simultaneously take me by surprise with its power and solidify my love of the author’s writing.

Maria Dahvana Headley: I’m somewhat ashamed to admit this, but I only discovered her work last year. However one story convinced me to seek out everything she’s written, and that is Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream. Like other works on my list, it hits so many of my fictional sweet spots and it is beautifully written. I couldn’t help but love it.

Elizabeth Bear : Once again, an author who needs no introduction. She’s so prolific, I’m convinced she doesn’t sleep. In terms of a starting point, I can’t help recommending the place I started – Blood and Iron. I stumbled across a review, was intrigued, sought out the book, and it delivered so much more than promised. I was smitten in an instant, subsumed by the use of language, and Elizabeth Bear earned herself a permanent spot on my must-read list from that moment on.

Nnedi Okorafor:  At every turn I found praise for Who Fears Death, which is the novel I recommend as a starting point for her work. It was one of those books that upon finishing it, I despaired over the fact I would never write anything that powerful or important, but rejoiced that such a novel existed in the world. All the praise heaped on it is deserved.

Bogi Takacs: Is another emerging name in fiction – one I strongly suspect you will soon be seeing everywhere. Even so, it’s her non-fiction reviews that first came to my attention, and so I’ll recommend her blog as a starting point. She focuses on under-represented voices in genre fiction, and consistently opens the way for valuable dialogue on racism, sexism, ableism, and other topics in need of discussion.

Genevieve Valentine: Here is another author whose work I picked up after seeing praise for  it at every turn, and where every bit of that praise is deserved. I point you to Mechanique, a novel that swept me away, made me despair of my own writing (again), made me fall in love, and made me hunger for more, in all the best ways.

Livia Llewellyn: I cannot recommend highly enough her short story collection Engines of Desire. And I can’t pick just one story from it to recommend as a starting point. The collection is dark and brutal and brilliant and unflinching. Just go read it, and you’ll understand.

Kelly Link: Her stories are shapeshifters. Every time I re-read one of her works, I question whether I’ve really read it before, or whether I just think I have. It’s rare these days to find an author whose mastered the short story genre, and gained recognition for it without novel to their name. I admire Kelly Link for that, and for her ability to fold a multiplicity of stories into every single story she writes.  As a starting point, I recommend her collection Stranger Things Happen, so you can get a fine sample of what she’s capable of doing.

This is still just a fraction of the incredible work out there. There may be another post coming, but in case I get distracted by something shiny, here are more women you should be reading: Mari Ness, Tori Truslow, Camille Alexa, Rachel Swirsky, Liz Argall, Aliette de Bodard, Nalo Hopkinson, Nicole Cipri, Desirina Boskovich, Cat Rambo, Megan Arkenberg, Kit Reed, Ada Hoffmann, Erin Morgenstern, Lauren Groff, Kelly Eskridge, and Kij Johnson.

There are so many others, and my brain is sadly inadequate to the task of doing them all justice. So now it’s your turn. Introduce me to someone whose work you love, and tell me where to start reading.

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April 30, 2013

Women to Read: Where to Start

Last week, Kari Sperring launched a wonderful campaign to promote women in the sf/f/h genre(s). This got me thinking about the women I love to read, and what I would recommend as a starting point for people who have never read their work. This is by no means a comprehensive list, a logically organized one, or one with really any kind of rhyme or reason (though I occasionally try to ascribe one). This is simply a list of women in the genre whose work I admire, along with a suggested starting point for discovering their work. Some are established, some are just starting to make a name for themselves. Hopefully folks stumbling across this list will discover something new to love – an author, an editor, a novel, or a story. And hopefully they’ll go on to share that new-found love with the world.

Catherynne M. Valente: There are probably very few people at this point who haven’t read any of her work. She’s insanely prolific and multi-award-winning/nominated at this point. Still, if you haven’t read her work and are looking for a place to start, I recommend The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Why? Not only is the title awesome, but it’s a gorgeously written book for young readers (which can be appreciated by readers of any age) with a female protagonist, which never talks down to its audience.

Ysabeau Wilce: Another established author, but possibly not as well-recognized as Cat Valente. I would recommend starting with Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog. Why? Pretty much ditto all those things I said about Valente’s Fairyland series – defying gender stereotypes, never talking down to its audience, delicious use of language, and a kickass title.

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April 29, 2013

Coincidences in the Sky

Because finding fascinating WWI letters in an antique shop wasn’t enough by itself, we also went on a hot air balloon ride on Saturday. And because even that wasn’t enough, we had an odd experience, you know, above and beyond the fact that we were in a wicker basked being held up by fire and air, a mile above the countryside. First – the balloon ride itself was lovely. The weather was perfect and the views were gorgeous. In addition to cows, horses, sheep, and goats, we also spotted a deer and a fox, and watched a small plane take off from the local airport and fly below us. The pilot even gave us toy plastic parachutes to throw over board. We also spotted a car accident.

We didn’t see the crash occur, but shortly after we took off, we heard sirens. From our vantage point, we could see the lights from the cop cars and the ambulances, and what looked like a car that had run into a wall. We speculated on the nature of the accident. A few people took pictures, including the woman standing next to me (one of the eight strangers sharing the ride with us). She asked me about the zoom on my camera, and whether I could make out any more detail about the accident from my photos. We established her zoom was better, though she still couldn’t see anything.

We drifted on, away from the accident and on to other sights. A few minutes later, the woman beside me receives a phone call. After a moment, stricken, she says, “My mother was hit by a car. That was the accident.”

The pilot made an emergency landing. The ground crew picked the woman up, and helped her get to the hospital. Then the pilot took the rest of us back into the sky.

The rest of the flight was uneventful, though the pilot seemed shaken. We landed in a farmer’s fresh-cut field at the end of the trip, and two of the boys from the family came out to help pack the balloon away, while other family members and neighbors looked on. The ground crew drove us back to the launch site as the sunset, and gave us champagne.

All in all, it was a lovely trip, but also slightly strange. I haven’t seen any news stories about the accident, hopefully that means the woman’s mother is okay. In addition to the two photos below, there’s a whole album here, if you happen to be particularly curious.

Shadow Farm

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April 28, 2013

Fragments of History

I found myself in an antique shop today. There, on one of the shelves, among the bottles and records and books and old postcards was a box marked WWII letters. I picked one up at random, read it, and knew I needed to buy it. I picked up another, read it, and it only made the first letter, the one that had hooked me, all the more intriguing, and all the more heartbreaking (from a certain perspective). I picked up a third letter at random without reading it, and brought them to the cash. Then I sat outside the shop on a bench in the sunlight, and read them again.

First of all, the box was mislabeled. The letters are dated from 1917, so from WWI, not WWII. They are from Ralph H. Arch of the 330th Infantry, stationed at Camp Sherman, sent to Anita Plymire at Grace Hospital in Virginia. Anita, who Ralph repeatedly refers to as his ‘little wife-to-be’ throughout two of of the letters, the two I read second and third, which seem to written earlier than the first one I read.

In those two earlier letters, Ralph addresses Anita as ‘Darling little Pinkey girl’. He also gives her the pet names of ‘kiddie’ and ‘girlie’. He talks about how much he misses her, how lonely he is, how he can’t wait to marry her. He references the children they will have one day, how much he wants to hold her, and how happy their life together will be when he finally comes home to her. His letters imply they have known each other all their lives, but their romantic relationship before he left for Camp Sherman was a relatively new thing.

And then there is the letter that hooked me. The one I read first. A full transcript of the letter is behind the cut (with original spelling, grammar, etc. in tact).

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April 20, 2013

Announcing Unlikely Issue #5

I’m delighted to announce the ToC (order subject to change) for Issue #5 of the Journal of Unlikely Entomology! The issue will be out in May, and feature:

Ecdysis by Nicole Cipri
Spiders, Centipedes, and Holes by Cat Rambo
The Space Between by Lew Andrada
Silent Drops of Crimson and Gold Rain by Pam Wallace
The Lonely Barricade at Dawn by Jesse William Olson
Jeanette’s Feast by Michelle Ann King
B by Nicola Belte

Thank you to all our contributors, and thank you to everyone who submitted work for consideration. We’re currently reading for Issue #6, which is due out in November, so keep those stories coming!

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April 17, 2013

An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia

For those of you not familiar with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, first, what’s wrong with you? Second, allow me to introduce her by shamelessly stealing the bio from her website.

Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination. Silvia Moreno-Garcia lives in beautiful British Columbia with her family and two cats. She writes speculative fiction (from magic realism to horror). Her short stories have appeared in places such as Fantasy Magazine, The Book of Cthulhu, Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. She is also the publisher of Innsmouth Free Press, a Canadian micro-publishing venture specializing in horror and dark speculative fiction. She has co-edited the anthologies Historical Lovecraft, Future Lovecraft, Candle in the Attic Window and Fungi. The upcoming Dead North will be her first solo anthology.

I have been lucky enough to publish Silvia, be published by her, and share several ToCs with her. I have yet to meet her in person, but I am determined it will happen one day, and there will be poutine involved. In the meantime, she was kind enough to drop by to talk about her first short story collection This Strange Way of Dying, due out in June 2013.

Thank you for dropping by to talk about This Strange Way of Dying. Your list of published stories is quite long. How did you choose which ones to include in the collection? Was there a particular tone you were going for with the selection and order? Were there any you would have liked to include that didn’t feel right, and thus were left out?

I picked a lot more stories than what ended in the final book. I was going for stories that would show my range, but my editor thought the result was a collection that was a bit scattered. My editor suggested two stories that needed to go because the book was too long, then asked me to consider two more for the chopping block. I ended cutting three. What we cut were mostly secondary-world stories. The collection as it is now has a heavy emphasis on Mexican folklore, settings and characters. I think it is a more organic whole than it was with some of the other stories I had originally selected.

Speaking of selection, the title of the collection changed a few times before you finally settled on This Strange Way of Dying. What made you ultimately choose that one over the others? Did the informal polls you conducted over social media play a role in the title selection?

Well, one of the first stories to be cut out was “This Strange Way of Dying” so it became a practical case of naming it after something that was actually in the collection. We had long discussions about the title. I think people on Facebook liked This Strange Way of Dying and Twitter people preferred Driving with Aliens in Tijuana. I joked with the publisher that maybe Facebook people were more suicidal.

Ultimately we went with This Strange Way of Dying because I think it was much harder to come up with a defining cover image for Driving with Aliens in Tijuana. The image we landed upon is a catrina, a Mexican Day of the Dead popular image of a skull-woman which ties perfectly with the story that gives the collection its title.

In addition to your own writing, you’ve also co-edited numerous anthologies and you’re the publisher of Innsmouth Free Press. Aside from the temptation to ask whether you ever have time to sleep…I’m curious about how Innsmouth Free Press came to be. What inspired you to found your own small press?

It was Paula R. Stiles’ fault. We were chatting about books and publishing. I floated the idea of starting a small press and doing a little magazine. Paula encouraged me instead of stopping me. That’s how she ended as Editor-in-Chief of Innsmouth.

What we wanted to do was to create a small press that focused on stuff that was Weird, Lovecraftian, horror, kind of niche, but that still had high production values. Beautiful covers, interesting themes, dynamic writers, diverse settings and characters.

I wrote a little business plan for the first year and we bought a domain name. Neither of us truly realized how much time and effort it was going to take to get this thing going.

As if all your other projects weren’t enough, you’re also working on a YA novel about vampires set in Mexico. Based on the excerpt you posted on your blog, Young Blood feels almost like a response to modern vampire and paranormal romance tropes, in the tradition of novels such as The Orange Eats Creeps and Blood Oranges, is that something you set out to do, or am I reading into things?

I really like vampires. I do. And vampires have had a strong romantic/erotic undercurrent for many decades. Carmilla is sexy as hell. But she’s also dangerous. I think that some modern vampire treatments have lost some of that danger and some of the more predatory aspects of vampirism in favour of straight romance, taking away the more dangerous aspects. I’ve written several vampire stories and none of them are romantic because I’m interested in other questions these creatures pose rather than the romantic questions.

Young Blood is an expansion of a story I published a few years ago called “A Puddle of Blood.” I started writing it because in Latin American and Caribbean folklore vampirism and witchcraft often go hand in hand (this is also true in a bunch of Medieval European traditions). Some of these vampire-witches feed exclusively on children. That’s what the female vampire of this novel is. She’s a vampire that feeds on young people, hence Young Blood. I think this explained why a vampire might be interested in a teenager. Otherwise, I think it makes little sense for vampires to be hanging out around a high school. But if that’s your food source…

The other thing that bothered me was the high school thing. These vampire victim/lovers are always middle class people in high school or university, etc. The human protagonist of Young Blood is not. He’s a garbage collector. He lives in the streets. He meets the vampire and he’s taken with her. Most people don’t even look at him in the subway, so when she looks, he’s immediately hooked. But she’s a vampire and the member of a drug cartel. She’s not a good person. There are people after her and they’re also bad people, but that doesn’t make her a nice person. She’s exploiting him.
So I wanted to explore this relationship and what it means. I also wanted to set it in Mexico because it seems like vampires never exist in this country. This, mind you, is the second vampire novel I have attempted. The first was called Bullet to the Back of the Head and it was a noir about a woman who tries to solve the murder of her alcoholic vampire cousin. Also set in Mexico City. I loved the first opening line, I didn’t finish it. Some of the characters and ideas ended being borrowed for “A Puddle of Blood” and now Young Blood. I hope I finish Young Blood. I’m terrible about finishing novels.

Are there any other stories, anthologies, or upcoming projects you’d like to talk about?

The first solo anthology I’ve ever edited, Dead North, is out this year. It’s all about Canadian zombie stories. Next year I’m doing an anthology of Canadian urban fantasy for the same publisher.

For my own press, we are working on Sword and Mythos. It’s a heroic fantasy anthology. It should be out before the end of the year. Cross my fingers.

If I finish Young Blood (or don’t dump it) I’m toying with writing something set in 1930s Mexico City. Sort of an expansion of another short story I sold recently called “Men in Blue Overcoats” about a young woman and the titular man in the blue overcoat. He’s a swindler, a liar, a thief. He’s handsome and exciting and maybe he’s the devil, maybe just a con-artist with great looks. They steal a car and go off to the city, where she’s going to find her biological dad, and he’s probably going to try another con job. Or maybe he’s just bent on ruining her and damning her soul to eternal hellfire. Who knows.

Thank you for dropping by, Silvia. I can’t wait to pick up a copy of your collection!

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March 16, 2013

To Jessica, With Love

Jessica Rabbit

I recently joined the fine blogging team at Apex Books. March is Noir Month, which gave me the perfect excuse to extoll the virtues of my favorite femme fatale, Jessica Rabbit. She’s smart, she’s sexy, and she turns Noir tropes on their head. What more could you want? You can find my inaugural post here, and while you’re at it, browse the many other wonderful posts that make up Noir Month including a post on the female writers of Noir fiction by Gary B. Phillips, and Fran Wilde chatting with Gregory Frost and Jon McGoran about the defining features of Noir, to name a few.

And for those of you who, like me, obsessively watched and re-watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit as a kid, and who have an undying love for Jessica, Roger, and Eddie, dare I mention that The 25th Anniversary Edition of Who Framed Roger Rabbit will be available in just a few days? Yeah, it makes me feel old, but nonetheless I’m eagerly awaiting my copy and the chance to reacquaint myself with some old friends.

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March 13, 2013

Rape, Realsim, and the Unquestioned Narrative

Sophia McDougall wrote a brilliant post about rape in fiction and the realism argument. It eloquently gets at the heart of so many problems with rape as a narrative device (because, honestly, nine times out of ten, it is used as a convenient device, so let’s call it what it is) and I strongly encourage everyone to read it. One of the points implicitly and explicitly explored in her post is the idea of the unquestioned rape narrative. There have been many words written about the subject, but it’s worth looking at every time. As McDougall points out, it’s a common trope to have female characters raped or threatened with rape, and to then have that rape/attempted rape glossed over and never become an integral part of the narrative. So why put it there in the first place? Similarly she brings up the fact (and others have done this as well) that if a female character isn’t raped or in danger of being raped, then the narrative isn’t authentic or realistic.

So, not only has rape become an accepted part of the cultural narrative for women, in some cases it has become the expected narrative, the only valid narrative. Think about that for a minute. There are countless other stories to tell. Why do we keep coming back to this one? Is this the mythology we really want to ingrain in our culture, telling it over and over until it becomes the equivalent of the hero’s journey? Is this what we want young women and men to aspire to, to expect, until shrug their shoulders and say that’s just the way life is?

That’s not to say rape should never be written about, but it should never be written about unquestioningly, as if it is par for the course and a perfectly acceptable thing. If you’re on an epic journey, of course rape is part of your past or future. If you’re a kick ass action hero and the baddie has you pinned, of course you will be threatened with rape. Unless you’re male.

Which is another brilliant part of McDougall’s article, unpacking the ‘realism argument’ for the inclusion of rape in fiction, and applying it to individuals who easily find themselves in as many or more dangerous situations as the majority of heroines – James Bond and Batman. Whereas I can actually think of a few situations outside of the movies where Batman has been forced into sexual situations against his will by use of drugs and where verbal threats of a suggestive nature have been used against him, this has not been the case with James Bond. Until the most recent movie.

One of the first things I remarked on after seeing Skyfall was that I appreciated the fact that a male hero was finally subjected to the same kind of treatment a female hero in the same situation would have been. Not that I advocate threatened rape against anyone, but I hoped it would highlight the double-standard and open a dialog. But in the weeks following, I saw people repeatedly misunderstanding the torture scene, referring to Silva as gay or bisexual, calling the scene a seduction, and a host of other things that missed the point by a mile. Sexuality, sex, attraction, and desire have nothing to do with it. The entire scene from the moment Silva descends in the elevator is about a former agent trying to get inside the head of a current agent using every trick in the book to try to break him. Simple, right?

If the scene had been between Silva and Eve, no one would have batted an eye. More than that, there’s a good chance the scene would have been played for erotic value, shot much like a sex scene, or at least the prelude to one, focusing on Eve’s body for the audience’s titillation and implying a sense of harmlessness and pleasure to the actions on screen. All of which speaks to a deeper and far more troubling problem – the fact that some people still don’t seem to grasp that rape and sex are not the same thing. They are not points on a sliding scale where one is simply more extreme than the other. Rape is an act of violence; it has nothing to do with sexuality.

This comes back to the problem of unquestioned narratives and assumptions. It’s why we’re still having discussions about ‘legitimate rape’, the responsibility of the victim to prevent rape from happening, and why certain senators reportedly smirked and laughed at the comparison between rape and forced transvaginal ultrasounds. Because rape isn’t consistently treated as an act of violence. It’s equated with sex, and sex is fun and a little bit naughty; it’s okay to laugh about nervously, and it’s fine not to consider it part of polite conversation and therefore not address it all. And this kind of attitude frequently goes unquestioned.

The cultural narrative needs to change.

Would a shooting victim be accused of over-reacting? Would they be told their wound wasn’t really all that serious because they knew the shooter? Would it constantly be thrown into question that they were ever even shot at all? Would it be suggested that perhaps if they’d willingly let the bullet into their body, or been nicer to the gun, none of this would have happened? Would they be accused of enjoying being shot and actively seeking someone to shoot them? Would laws be passed by reasonable human beings forcing victims to carry the bullet inside them for nine months before it naturally worked its way out, and then care for that bullet for the rest of their lives? No. So why is rape treated any differently?

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March 7, 2013

Bring Us Your Bugs

Not literally, please. I’m sure they’re lovely and all, but I’d much rather appreciate bugs from a distance, say through the lens of a camera, or through the medium of fiction, than getting up close and personal. Speaking of insect-related fiction brings me to the purpose of this post. There’s just under a month left to send your stories to the Journal of Unlikely Entomology for consideration for Issue #5, which will be published in May. After April 1, we’ll start reading for Issue #6, which is due out in November. Or, if bugs aren’t your thing, we’re still looking for a few more stories for our special one-off Architecture Issue, which we hope to publish in August.

Want to know the secret, surefire way to get us to publish you? Well, there isn’t one. But I can tell you some things I’d personally love to see more of in our slush pile:

Stories from international writers, and stories with non-Western perspectives. We only publish work in English, but we’re more than happy to consider translated pieces.

Stories with a historical setting and stories with a secondary world setting. We don’t get as many of those.

Stories written by and featuring traditionally under-represented individuals, POC, QUILTBAG, neuro-atypical, etc. We want to represent the full spectrum of human experience as it intersects with the insect world.

And while we’re on the subject of diversity, I’d love to see more diversity in the arthropods and insects people write about. We get a lot of stories about bees, ants, spiders, cockroaches, and flies. Send us stories about seventeen year cicadas. Send us stories about treehoppers. Any kind of treehoppers. Brazalian treehoppers. Waxtail hoppers. Seriously, those things are weird looking. See?
Waxtail treehopper
Left: Waxtail Hopper by flickr user ggallice, whose photostream is full of lovely insect photos and well worth checking out. Right: Treehopper Nymph by flickr user cotinis whose photostream is also full of lovely insect photos and is also worth your time.

Send us a story about a caddisfly jeweler. Send us a story about a secret society of giant earthworms in Australia. Let your imaginations run wild!

There are probably other things I would love to see in the slush pile that I haven’t thought of yet, so write it, send it, and make me realize what I’m missing. Send us your best, send us something well-written, send us something we can’t refuse.

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March 5, 2013

Free Shrooms!

It’s Fungi Week at Weird Fiction Review. As a result, my story Where Dead Men Go to Dream, which originally appeared in Innsmouth Free Press’ Fungi anthology is now free to read online.

Because the first taste is always free.

Shroom1

There’s also a fabulous interview with the anthology’s editors, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Orrin Grey. And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a fantastic gallery of mushroom photographs by mycologist Taylor Lockwood.

As it so happens, I’m currently reading Fungi. I encourage you to pick up a copy. It’s a brilliant collection full of stories by incredible authors. I’m not finished yet, but I particularly enjoyed the pieces by Camille Alexa, Andrew Penn Romaine, Kristopher Reisz, Daniel Mills, and Nick Mamatas. As a physical object, the book is also gorgeous. I’ve raved about the cover before, but the layout is lovely, too, and there are fabulous interior illustrations reminiscent of Mike Mignola. I’m truly proud to be a part of the collection.

And aside from all that, mushrooms are wonderful! Why wouldn’t you want to read about them? They’re beautiful, and delicious. Shortly after the anthology emerged, they started invading the end of my street (photographic evidence to the left). There are more photographs, but the interweb doesn’t want me to post them. (That’s not just what the mushrooms want me to say. I swear.) Their fruiting in a timely manner is a good omen, right? Right?

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