GALAXY’S EDGE REVIEW ROUNDUP: NOVEMBER 2022

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
by Richard Chwedyk

Richard Chwedyk sold his first story in 1990, won a Nebula in 2002, and has been active in the field for the past thirty-two years.

In previous columns, I’ve said a lot already about my love for short fiction. I don’t need to repeat myself, but I will (as Joseph Epstein wrote, “A teacher is someone who can never say anything once.”), though in keeping with the subject, I’ll be brief.

Short fiction represents the heartbeat of these forms we love, science fiction and fantasy. It’s not tied down to narrative and stylistic structures publishers believe are compulsory for “saleable” prose. Any subject, any style can be explored with the single proviso that it be interesting.

Even the novels discussed here demonstrate the craft and vision received by working in short forms. Big things may not always come in small packages, but the odds are pretty good that size doesn’t always matter.

~~~

The Year’s Best Fantasy, Volume One
edited by Paula Guran
Pyr
August 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64506-048-2

This volume represents something that we’ve needed for a long time. It was 2009 when the last David G. Hartwell/Kathryn Cramer-edited Year’s Best Fantasy volume came out, and Pyr should be applauded not merely for putting out this volume, but for choosing Paula Guran as its editor. She has wide-ranging tastes and a keen eye for significant work in a field that has grown so large so swiftly. And she has done so in a perfectly manageable format. The book comes in at a comparatively slim 439 pages. Like the Hartwell/Cramer anthologies, it provides a comprehensible overview without overwhelming the reader.

~~~

The Best of James Van Pelt
by James Van Pelt
Fairwood Press
August 2022
ISBN: 978-1-933846-21-7

If you’re a constant reader of magazines, as I am, print or online, James Van Pelt is one of those names you encounter with frequency, and in a good way, because no matter what else may be in that issue’s contents you are assured of at least one good story, well told.
For that very reason we tend to take him for granted. And we shouldn’t.

~~~

Wergen: The Alien Love War
by Mercurio D. Rivera
NewCon Press
November 2021
ISBN: 978-1-914953-01-9

As well as Rivera knows his Wergens, he knows his humans even better. That doesn’t sound like high praise, but it is. Many SF writers who work out alien cultures down to minutiae often have a blind spot for human complexity. Or perhaps they have transferred that complexity into their aliens. Rivera conveys our complex and often contradictory nature with honesty and integrity. This is what science fiction can do at its best, and what Rivera does on every page of this extraordinary volume.

~~~

Forkpoints
by Sheila Finch
Aqueduct Press
June 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61976-218-3

Sheila Finch’s short fiction has always been literate and fascinating. She finds new ways of looking at old SF concepts where she doesn’t invent a few concepts of her own. One of the things I have most appreciated about her Xenolinguistics stories is she makes the struggle to communicate, and to comprehend what’s communicated, into captivating SF.

~~~

1812: The Rivers of War
by Eric Flint
Baen
August 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9197-9

This book arrived a few weeks before I heard of the sad passing of its author. I usually don’t review works by Eric Flint because—what’s there to say? He was fine author of consistent quality. Probably one of the two or three authors most responsible for the popularity of alternative history fiction. If you like that kind of work, you knew of him already. He never let his readers down.

~~~

A City in the North
by Marta Randall
Warner Books
May 1976
ISBN: 978-044694062-3

Let us now praise Marta Randall.
The 1970s by any estimation was a tumultuous era, and preconceptions at every level were being challenged. The setting and characters of A City in the North may not resemble any aspect of that era, but they echo it. The implicit questioning of established norms haunts every page. Nothing here is entirely as it seems.

~~~

The Jigsaw Assasin
by Catherine Asaro
July 2022
Baen
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9196-2

I shouldn’t have to mention a new Catherina Asaro novel because Catherine Asaro fans know where to find her books and know how to get them. But I hadn’t read a Major Bhaajan novel in some time, and I’ve grown fond of her tough, no-nonsense P.I., and all the gritty nuances of Undercity, though the story here is set in Selei City. A series of murders, assassination attempts, plots and foreboding intrigues that could be red herrings or the key to the whole McGonigle—you’ve got it all here. Science fiction or hard-boiled noir decked out in space opera greasepaint? Hey, a physicist can’t help being a physicist, even when she’s writing highly suspenseful SF thrillers.

~~~

Hot Moon
by Alan Smale
Caezik
July 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64710-050-6

I recognized Smale from his shorter fiction (and of that, his early fantasy stories), so I thought I’d dip into it to see what he was doing. The dip kept me reading through the night, to the last page.
This is a highly inventive, brilliantly conceived alternative history where the Apollo program wasn’t shelved after 1972. The U.S. has space stations and bases on the Moon’s surface, and the Soviet Union is still around, making trouble as the story begins in 1979. Smale, whose “day job” is a NASA astronomer, has worked out all the details and hardware with mind-boggling plausibility. All his characters act, feel, and sound real. First-rate hard SF.

~~~

The Serpent
by David Drake
Baen
July 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9198-6

You might not think a melding of Arthurian legend and science fiction could be successfully executed, but this is David Drake, and he pulls it off splendidly (with a little help from Orlando Furioso). He keeps things moving and does so with an economy of language that is in itself a kind of magic, bringing it all in at 246 pages. He’s done it before but, arguably, not as well.

Copyright © 2022 by Richard Chwedyk.

~~~

Find the entire article at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine — where you can read for free until Dec 31st, 2022.

AND

Follow Galaxy’s Edge Magazine at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

Arc Manor Spotlight: Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction: Volume I

We are beyond excited and honored to announce that award-winning author: Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s anthology collection of The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction: Volume I (originally released 2021) won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 2022, and is being rereleased by Arc Manor Books in 2023!

Edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction collects twenty-nine stories by twenty-five writers, which the press describes as “some of the most exciting voices, old and new, from Africa and the diaspora, published in the 2020 year.”

The anthology includes stories from Somto O. Ihezue, Pemi Aguda, Russell Nichols, Tamara Jerée, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Sheree Renée Thomas, Tobias S. Buckell, Inegbenoise O. Osagie, Tobi Ogundiran, Chinelo Onwualu, Moustapha Mbacké Diop, Marian Denise Moore, Michelle Mellon, C.L. Clark, Eugen Bacon, Craig Laurence Gidney, Makena Onjerika, T.L. Huchu, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Derek Lubangakene, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, WC Dunlap, ZZ Claybourne, and Dilman Dila.

~~~

Don’t know who Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is, yet? Well, you will. This week we revisit an interview that Signals From the Edge blogger, Isaac Payne, had with him earlier this year … and since so much has happened since then, head over to Oghenechovwe’s site and catch up on everything new!

Continue reading “Arc Manor Spotlight: Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction: Volume I”

And The Award Goes To …

For the past two years, Galaxy’s Edge magazine and Dragon Con have sponsored an award for new writers, in memorial of the late, great author Mike Resnick.

This past August at Dragon Con in Atlanta, GA, they had the pleasure of announcing the 2022 winner for THE MIKE RESNICK MEMORIAL AWARD for Best Science Fiction Short Story by a New Author:

​WINNER
“What Would You Pay for a Second Chance?”
by Chris Kulp

​FIRST RUNNER-UP
“Seedpod”
by Ellen Parent

SECOND RUNNER-UP
“On the Left”
by Sandra Sigienski

~~~

Chris Kulp

This week we’re shining a spotlight on Chris Kulp, his achievement as this year’s winner of the Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story by a New Author, and his upcoming publication in Galaxy’s Edge magazine.

Chris Kulp was in attendance at DragonCon this year when the announcement was made. He tells us he was honored to be considered among the finalists, but wasn’t expecting to win!

Chris is a professor of physics at Lycoming College. He teaches physics at all levels, and his research focuses on machine learning and modeling complex systems. He has co-authored a textbook and many peer reviewed scientific articles.

His story, “What Would You Pay for a Second Chance?” is his first published fiction story, and is featured in this month’s issue of Galaxy’s Edge magazine, November 2022, Issue 59.

The story is about a woman who receives a terminal diagnosis. The technology exists to have her consciousness uploaded into a robot, but she can’t afford the cost. She signs up for a government program that will pay for the transfer, and in exchange, she must commit to military service. After being sent to the frontlines of a warzone in her new body, she discovers, the battle is not the only threat she faces.

Chris also has an upcoming novel, set for release in early 2023.

Find out more about Chris’s writing and sign up for his newsletter to keep up to date with his progress at his website: chriskulp.com

HUGE CONGRATULATIONS, CHRIS! We look forward to reading your winning story, “What Would You Pay for a Second Chance?”, and to all your future publications and successes!

A wonderful congratulations to our other winners also.
Keep your eyes peeled for more stories from these talented new authors!

~~~

What is the Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story by a New Author?

It’s an annual award sponsored by Galaxy’s Edge magazine (Arc Manor Publishing) and Dragon Con in celebration of new authors who have penned a Science Fiction short story.

This award was created to honor author Mike Resnick’s memory and continue on his legacy by spotlighting wonderful new voices in the writing world.

Who was Mike Resnick?

Mike Resnick, along with editing the first seven years of Galaxy’s Edge magazine, was the winner of five Hugos from a record thirty-seven nominations and was, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction. He was the author of over eighty novels, around 300 stories, three screenplays, and the editor of over forty anthologies.

As well as publishing hundreds of books as author and editor, Mike Resnick was known for his “Writer Children”—paying it forward by helping new writers start their careers. When he was not writing, Mike mentored these new authors, and was as dedicated in helping them reach their career milestones as achieving his own.

Submissions for 2023 are now open!

Interested in submitting? Head over to the website and get started HERE.

Submitting is free, open to new authors only, and the judging panel is a star-studded cast, including:
Nancy Kress
Sheree Renée Thomas
Jody Lynn Nye
Lois McMaster Bujold
William B. Fawcett

Finalist Announcement: The five finalists for the 2023 Award will be announced on July 1, 2023.

Award Ceremony: Awards will be handed out during the Dragon Awards ceremony during Dragon Con 2023 to be held in Atlanta from August 31 to September 4. (Specific date of the Award Ceremony night updated once known.)

First Place Prize: The first-place winner will get a trophy, a cash award of $250.00 and have their story bought (at the magazine’s prevailing rate) by Galaxy’s Edge magazine for publication in the magazine.

Runner-up Prizes: The second-place winner will be given a prize of $100 and the third-place winner a prize of $50.

Interview with Author Mica Scotti Kole

An award-winning author, and a regular to the pages of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, writer and editor Mica Scotti Kole gave us the chance to peal back the pages and get a glimpse inside the life of a dreamer, artist, and someone who has followed her dreams straight into a reality …

Continue reading “Interview with Author Mica Scotti Kole”

Arc Manor To Release NFT Ebooks of Robert Heinlein Novel

Ebooks have made reading more widely much more accessible. Don’t have $30 to spend on a brand new hardcover? You can get the ebook for half the price and start reading immediately. 

But, there’s something unsettling about having a whole library of books you can’t see on a shelf. The tactile nature of physical books makes it easier to feel like you have a collection. 

That might be changing soon, as Arc Manor announces they plan to release a set of limited edition ebooks as NFTs. 

Ebooks as NFTs? Is It Possible?

With the rise of NFTs and blockchain technology, we’ve seen some wild things. There have been entire genomes minted on the blockchain, as well as medical and chemical research that’s been funded through the sale of utility NFTs. 

Not to mention the rampant collectible NFTs that made national news, stuff like Bored Apes or Crypto Punks. 

It appears that there’s a broad spectrum of NFTs–some of which sit on the far end of collectibility, with no other value than to exist, where on the opposite side, we have NFTs that have real-world applicability. Is there a middle ground between the two?

That’s where collectible NFT ebooks come in. Books have long been sought after as collectible items, but they also have another purpose, which is obviously to be read. 

Shahid Mahmud, owner of Arc Manor, says “There is a huge market for paper-based book collectibles. Now we have the ability to create a similar market with digital books.”

This comes on the wings of the announcement that Arc Manor has partnered with Curate, a mobile NFT marketplace, to create a line of collectable, sci-fi ebooks. 

Blockchain technology makes it possible for ebooks to have a collectible value, because no two will be the same. While you might not be able to get your NFT ebooks signed on the title page, you can own a rare collectible edition that holds more value than less-rare variants. 

The Pursuit of Pankera

What books will be minted on the blockchain first? Well, Mahmud chose The Pursuit of Pankera by Robert Heinlien as Caezik Crypto’s debut NFT. 

The Pursuit of Pankera was released in 2020, and is the last Robert Heinlien novel to be published, albeit posthumously. The manuscript was rediscovered and lovingly edited by Patrick LoBrutto and the staff at Caezik. 

The Pursuit of Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes is tied tightly to another Heinlein novel, The Number of the Beast. In fact, the first part of the book reads the same as The Number of the Beast, but it quickly deviates from its predecessor, creating a parallel timeline. 

Among the Golden Age sci fi writers, Robert Heinlein was certainly one of the pioneers. His fiction reached wide audiences, and he influenced many of the current science fiction dynamics with his novels. It’s only fitting that he will once again be reaching into new territories as the first NFT ebook. 

The Pursuit of Pankera will be released on Curate’s mobile NFT platform, with 500 unique, numbered cover variations. 

Arc Manor also plans to release two more ebooks as NFTs: Midnight at the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker, and Reboots: Undead Can Dance by Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin

Where To Get These NFT Ebooks

Like we mentioned, Arc Manor has partnered with Curate to make these NFT ebooks possible. You can access Curate on their mobile app or on their desktop version. Creating an account is fast and easy, but you will need a cryptocurrency wallet to purchase any NFTs. 

To learn more about how purchasing NFTs on Curate works–and what currencies you can use–check out their website
And to keep up to date on the NFT ebooks coming from Arc Manor, sign up for their mailing list over at CaezikCrypto.com.

Galaxy’s Edge Interviews Martha Wells

Martha Wells has become a household name, especially among the science fiction and fantasy community. Her books have explored fantastical worlds and the far-flung futures of our own world. She’s won multiple awards for her work, particularly the Murderbot Diaries. Books in the Murderbot Diaries have won Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards!

Jean Marie Ward sat down with Martha Wells to talk about her writing process, fandom, and much more!

If you’d like to read this interview in print, check Issue 56 of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine.

Galaxy’s Edge: You said that you were always a reader. When did you realize you wanted to become a writer?

Martha Wells: Really early on. I remember telling my parents when I was in high school that I wanted to be a writer and them not having much reaction to it. At the time, I think I wanted to major in journalism when I went to the university, because that was the only way I could conceive of being a writer at that point. I didn’t know how you went about being a fiction writer. That’s not something I figured out until I went to Texas A&M and took a writing workshop with Steven Gould and started going to conventions and learning about how you actually do become a fiction writer.

Galaxy’s Edge: You just mentioned conventions, which is a great lead into my next question: What role did fandom and fan fiction play in your journey to publication?

Martha Wells: A huge, huge role, because the reason I picked Texas A&M University was they had a student science fiction and fantasy group. I’m not sure I knew at that point that they also ran conventions. I’d actually been to ArmadilloCon in Austin when I was in high school. I somehow convinced my parents to take me and a friend down there to go to this convention—ArmadilloCon—on Saturday. This was back when it was teeny tiny—the dealer’s room was basically the size of a hotel room. And that really made me want to continue to see conventions.

Also, the friendship and the people I met working on the student convention, AggieCon, were hugely important to me. I’d been reading fanfic for a while. I think I discovered it probably around 1983, I think … no, it was 1980 when Empire Strikes Back came out. So, I’d been reading fanfic for a while already and trying to write … I was first starting to write when I was in high school and college. I worked on fanfic and met a lot of people in fandom through that too. It was hugely important for me.

Galaxy’s Edge: And you ran AggieCon at least one year.

Martha Wells: Yeah, I worked on it for the whole four years I was in college and the last year I [chaired it]. I believe it was 1986. It’s been so long.

Galaxy’s Edge: That’s what it said in Wikipedia.

Martha Wells: Yeah, I was running the convention. And it was great. It was a huge learning experience. It was exhausting and incredibly stressful and anxiety-inducing. But later on, you’re like, Yeah, that was really great.

Galaxy’s Edge: I would imagine it gave you an interesting perspective on conventions and the business of conventions from a writer’s standpoint.

Martha Wells: I think it did. It also let me meet a lot of writers and hear a lot about publishing and a lot of discussions about the technical and creative aspects of writing and how everything worked. That was really important.

Galaxy’s Edge: What influence did your college major, anthropology, have on your first novel, The Element of Fire, and subsequent works?

Martha Wells: I think it’s had an influence on a lot of my work because of the worldbuilding. Being able to look at how cultures develop over time and the things that go wrong, and looking at the material culture of a city or a civilization and trying to take a holistic approach to worldbuilding and all the things that you have to know—even if you don’t put them on the page—about how your city works, your culture works, all those things, that was hugely helpful to me.

Galaxy’s Edge: I imagine, especially when you’re dealing with non-human characters such as those in The Books of the Raksura, that knowing how the pieces fit, sociologically speaking, would be a great help.

Martha Wells: Yeah, and the kind of things the people would have when you’re dealing with an alien character. What kind of culture would create that character? What does that mean? What’s important to them? What kind of material goods would they have? What does where they live look like? What kind of environment would this be happening in? All that kind of stuff.

Galaxy’s Edge: You have incredible worldbuilding in all your series, whether it be Ile-Rien’s early industrial culture, the worlds of the Raksura, and of course, the Murderbot Diaries. Is anthropology the secret to that, or is there something else?

Martha Wells: I think it’s your character point of view, and really thinking, trying basically to run their software on your hardware, and trying to really see things through their eyes and what is important to them, what do they want to do, how has their world shaped them. I think that’s the key.

Galaxy’s Edge: You’ve mentioned in various interviews that you’re not athletic, yet you create these very complex and brutal fight scenes. In The Murderbot Diaries you literally have multiple points of view in a single character’s head, because Murderbot is pulling in all of these feeds from drones, from artificial intelligences, anything that it can, in real time. So, the reader sees the action from a lot of viewpoints, and they’re all very, very intense. How do you as somebody who has, essentially, one point of view, deal with that? How do you deal with being a relatively peaceable woman who doesn’t go out and commit mayhem, whether in a dojo or in real life? How do you create these battle scenes?

Martha Wells: Well, I watch a lot of TV and movies, and I pay a lot of attention to fight scenes. Actually, when I was younger, I did take tae kwon do, and I did fencing for a little bit. It’s not something I can do anymore, though I try to exercise. When we’re not in a pandemic, I can actually go to the gym and things like that. But again, it’s the character point of view, getting the physicality of the character in your head and what they can and can’t do. Also, the parameters of the fight as you have set them for yourself, like a sword fight or a knife fight. A fistfight is so very different from a fight where the characters are actually armed with some kind of weapon, especially a single-shot weapon or an automatic weapon. Or like Murderbot when it can bring in all these different views of the scene and can use all these different ways to attack whoever is attacking it.

So yeah, just keeping all that straight and, again, really getting into the [character’s] point of view and thinking about that. That’s one of the reasons Murderbot often takes a long time to write. Having to do those multiple viewpoints is really complicated and often takes a long time to put together. Just the logistics of the stories are very different from any other kind of logistics for the other things I’ve written. Even though I mostly write adventure fiction, Murderbot is just so much more complicated in what happens, even though it might not feel that way to the reader. And yeah, watching a lot of TV and movies and watching people … watching fight scenes for years and years, and looking at what people do, and what it’s possible to do. That’s another fun thing about Murderbot: you can have the character do a lot of things that’s not possible for a human to do or even an alien character to do. That’s basically it.

Galaxy’s Edge: And Murderbot can take a lot of damage that an entirely organic being cannot do and remain itself. Speaking of Murderbot and its abilities, you worked in software development for a while. What role did your professional experience in software development play in the creation of The Murderbot Diaries and the development of Murderbot’s personality, abilities, and outlook?

Martha Wells: It played a big role because that was my primary experience with IT when I worked there. A lot of people think that I must know a lot about artificial intelligence. I don’t know anything about real AI. What I know about is the fake AI I invent for my books. But the way Murderbot often solves problems, answers questions, and solves mysteries is usually by manipulating data, which is one of the things I did when I worked for … well, I don’t want to name them. But when I worked in IT. I built databases and wrote programs—in COBOL, that’s how long ago it was—for databases for user interfaces, basically. So Murderbot uses that a lot to solve problems, and that’s the viewpoint I try to look at it from. I think that’s one reason why people think the character feels realistic as a machine intelligence, because it does look at things in terms of: What is the data we have? How can it be manipulated to give us answers?

Galaxy’s Edge: Murderbot and a lot of your characters are outliers and odd persons out. What draws you to characters who are isolated or find themselves in this position?

Martha Wells: I was a really isolated little kid. I probably have some still undiagnosed issues that back then people just didn’t understand or have any concept of. It made me live in my head a lot. I have a sister who’s nine years older than me, so there was usually nobody around my age. Where we lived there were no other kids on our street. There were some nearby, but the way the traffic was and where we lived and everything, it’s not like I could go out and play with kids every day like a lot of people were able to in other neighborhoods. So just feeling very different, always feeling very different and isolated, is just something that I’m still dealing with all my life. I guess you just get it kind of imprinted on your consciousness early, and it’s not something that never leaves you.

Galaxy’s Edge: It’s something we can all relate to. At some point, I don’t care how extroverted you are, you will be alone and say to yourself, What do I do now? Where am I? Who am I? And how do I fit in? How can this square object fit into these round holes that everybody else is fitting in?

Martha Wells: Pretty much so.

Galaxy’s Edge: While we’re still, more or less, on the subject of Murderbot, is there anything that you want people to take away from the series? What do you want them to know about it?

Martha Wells: One of the things I noticed people get wrong a lot—and I think that’s because it gets reprinted in reviews and things—is that Murderbot did not have consciousness before it hacked its governor module somehow. And it’s like no, all the SecUnits are conscious. I was trying to make that clear in Network Effect. They’re all conscious, all the time. It’s just that they’re enslaved. They’re mentally enslaved, and there’s not much they can do that we know without activating the governor module and getting killed, basically. And it is slavery. I’ve also seen reviews try to argue that somehow the humans are nice to them, and it’s not slavery. It’s like no, it absolutely is. It’s intentional. That’s what it is.

Galaxy’s Edge: It’s rather like that line from The Twelve Chairs, My master, Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov. He was a Marshal of the nobility. I loved him. He hardly ever beat us.

Martha Wells: Yeah. Also in Thor: Ragnarok, the prisoners with jobs.

Galaxy’s Edge: That notion seems to be really hard for some people to understand for some reason. Personally, I cannot imagine how you can lack consciousness and still hack your governor module. To me, the question was a non-issue. Since the SecUnits were, for want of a better term, conscious entities, it was obvious this was some kind enslavement.

Martha Wells: It’s a mental gymnastics that people do and it’s just … I don’t know why people don’t want to admit that human beings enslave other human beings and would continue to do that if allowed to. I don’t know why they’re willfully blind on that point. Looking at history, or current affairs, or anything would seem to, you know, get [that point] through to them. But no.

Galaxy’s Edge: You just won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and Best Series. This is just one little cluster in the many, many awards you’ve been nominated for or won throughout your career in science fiction and fantasy. How important are awards for the career of a writer in science fiction, fantasy, or any genre?

Martha Wells: Actually, before Murderbot, I’d only been nominated for a Nebula Award. That was for The Death of the Necromancer, and you know, I didn’t win.

Galaxy’s Edge: You were nominated for the Compton Crook and Crawford Awards for The Element of Fire.

Martha Wells: Yeah, I guess I should say I’ve only been nominated for one major award. I did get nominations of some other minor ones, but only a few really. Before Murderbot, I was pretty much off the radar as far as awards were concerned, which is fine. I never thought I would even have a chance at being on the Hugo ballot, let alone revel in the Hugo long list, let alone, you know, win them. I think it’s kind of hard to say how much impact they have. They do have, I think, a big impact within the genres in how people see you.

I think the impact of the Hugo Awards has changed a lot in the past ten years or so, since more people started to get supporting memberships so they could nominate, and we started having a more diverse ballot that better reflected what people were actually reading and what people were considering was the cutting edge of science fiction and fantasy. So, I think it’s had more impact since then.

I think there is what’s known—especially for the novels—as a bump in sales from just being on something like the Hugo ballot or the Nebula ballot. For me, the biggest impact was validation of 25 years or however many years of work to get to this point. It was a validation of the fact that I didn’t give up when it would have been really easy and probably smart to, at certain points, just go get a different job. So, it was hugely important to me personally, and I think it’s made a big change in how I’m treated just in fandom and the genre.

There are some exceptions, but usually women my age who are still trying to be working writers are not treated very well, either at conventions or in general in the genre, because we’re fading out and so need to not clutter up the landscape by still existing and still writing. It’ll be interesting to see what happens after this. I haven’t seen much …. Because of the pandemic, of course, everything’s just slowed down. So, we’re not gathering at conventions and events and things like that.

But, yeah, most of the impact has been personal, I would think. You kind of can’t measure other ways. The publisher can probably answer a lot more accurately about [the effect on] sales and things like that.

Galaxy’s Edge: Increased sales are good, and validation and recognition are also good. Speaking of good things, in 2021 you signed a six-book contract with Tor, which will include at least three more entries in The Murderbot Diaries. The first announced title in the contract is a second-world fantasy called Witch King. Can you tell us anything about Witch King, and what’s next for Murderbot?

Martha Wells: It is a completely new secondary world fantasy, kind of epic in scope. It’s my take on epic worldbuilding, and I was trying to do something different with it. Hopefully, people will like it. It’s going to come out in 2023. It was originally intended for this year, but it’s gotten pushed back because of everything that was going on. The book was actually finished late last year, but I’m working on the revision right now. Hopefully, everybody will enjoy it.

Galaxy’s Edge: I’m looking forward to it. Human characters or non-human characters?

Martha Wells: A mix of both. Again, it’s a different world from anything I’ve done before, with a mix of kind of humans and magical humans, like demons and other different types. It should be a lot of fun.

Galaxy’s Edge: Cool! Finally, the soapbox question, is there anything you’d like to add? Anything you want to talk about?

Martha Wells: Probably Murderbot, because I am doing another Murderbot novel. I’m writing one right now. I see a lot of people asking about it. It’s about halfway finished. It’s due in the summer, so I should have it done by then. After this novel, there’ll be at least one more novella and a novel, but I’m not sure what order they’re in. They’re going to take place after Network Effect. And in fact, this novella starts up right not very long after the end of Network Effect.

Galaxy’s Edge: Great! We’re all going to be looking forward to that. Thank you very, very much.

Galaxy’s Edge Book Review Roundup: April 2022

In the March/April 2022 issue of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine (which you can read or buy here), there are stories by Harry Turtledove, Mike Resnick, Tai Yi, Torion Oey, Katharine Kerr, and more. Plus, Jean Marie Ward finishes up Part 2 of her interview with John Scalzi, talking about his new book, The Kaiju Preservation Society.

And as always, we have a selection of insightful science fiction and fantasy book reviews from Robert Chwedyk.

In this issue, he takes a look at:

  • Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus
  • Star Eater by Kerstin Hall
  • Destroyer of Light by Jennifer Marie Brissett
  • The Reinvented Heart edited by Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek

Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus

I’ve been waiting for this book for a while. I’m familiar with some of Broaddus’s other writings and was excited to see what he would do with a now-familiar form like a science fiction epic trilogy. I am not disappointed.

The beginning has the now-common lists of characters and time line that you’re going to skip back to later but you have no time for now. You want to see how the novel opens and if it will compel you to keep reading until you reach the final page:

Your name is Leah Adisa. For now.

Choosing a name for yourself is not something to be entered into lightly. It is a promise you make to the universe. Or it to you. A name is the story of yourself you present to the world, a label to define you. That is the entire point of the Naming Ceremony: you are finally of age to interpret yourself and into the Muungano community as a full free member.

The paragraphs that follow continue to orient you to a world you’ve not encountered in a novel before: the African-based hegemony (of sorts) of the Muungano people, which extends from Earth to Titan, and a little further to a mining colony named Oyigiyigi. We may be familiar with spacefaring empires extending to the outer planets, but we’ve usually seen them from a Western perspective, a sort of continuation of “American” middle-class culture, or how Octavia Butler once put it, “The same as now, only more so.” In this novel, we’re not just discovering new worlds but old worlds seen in new ways, from a new perspective. We’re discovering what, for we readers, is a whole new culture.

It’s not as if this hasn’t been attempted before, but Broaddus seems to have found the right angle or point of view from which to address we readers that neither frustrates us with opaque “strangeness” or presumes we are simpletons who need every little detail explained. The result is a clarity of narrative that is truly splendid.

sweep of stars

And that narrative is…complex. To say the least. You expect that in a trilogy. But that same angle or point of view, or better still, that voice, never leaves you confused as it shifts from setting to setting and person to person.

And I was intensely impressed with Broaddus’s focus upon his people. He has great insight into human concerns, their desires and needs, how they express them and how they attempt to conceal them. Some authors of this sort of work become so overwhelmed by their own world building, they can only manage to “populate” their novels. With Sweep of Stars, one gets the feeling this story began with the people. The world came later, or simultaneously, so the human scale is never lost.

Sweep of Stars exercises the best traditions of science fiction while providing new perspectives and redefining the expectations we place upon such works. Some readers may find it rough going, but I encourage them to stay with it. On rare occasions, even for science fiction readers, one encounters a book that truly changes the way one sees the world, yesterday, today and most certainly tomorrow. I believe this is one of them.

Star Eater by Kerstin Hall

Fantasy readers, I can guarantee you have never read a novel like this. I can extend that guarantee to everyone else who may be curious. The borders between fantasy, science fiction, and horror are here either discarded or ignored. And to you aspiring writers out there: remember all those things your esteemed writing teachers said you can never get away with? Well, Kerstin Hall gets away with most of them. Honestly, I don’t know how. I suspect she does it through a modicum of chutzpah and a great deal of skill.

Something about this novel reminded me of one of those profound pronouncements Marlow makes in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”: about “The fascination of the abomination.” But not in a bad way. I will add, though, that some other reviewers have added trigger warnings to their comments, and they can be justified. There are some really rough scenes in here. Be warned.

star eater

But…what can be expected from a novel where, if someone were to ask you what it was about, you’d say something like, “Well, it takes place in a city that’s elevated over the world, because on the surface all the men have become zombies. In the city, there’s a sisterhood that acquires magic through cannibalism, and once they have it the magic is manifested in lace. Literally, lace. And that’s just the background for some really Machiavellian intrigue.”

And if this someone asks you further, “Well, who are the good guys?” you will most likely answer, “Well, I’m still trying to figure that out.”

The thing is, you’re still fascinated by these people, either because they have real human facets that accompany these atrocious activities, or because you keep turning pages, muttering to yourself, “They can’t possibly get away with that! Can they?”

They can, with Kerstin Hall telling the tale, and doing so with masterful precision.

Destroyer of Light by Jennifer Marie Brissett

As with Kerstin Hall’s novel, readers should take note that there’s some strong stuff here.

Aspects of this story will strike you as familiar, and I’m not referring to its reimagining of the Persephone myth. Aliens boot us off our planet, genetically modify us and relocate us to a world called Eleusis, where things go “not as planned” from the get-go. There are three habitable areas of the planet, named Day, Dusk and Night. Resources, material and intellectual, and some things more, are not equally distributed. And often, this situation, rather than encouraging cooperation, spawns greed and violence.

destroyer of light

We may have read versions of this kind of thing before (suddenly, I’m remembering a Bradbury story called “Frost and Fire”), but not in this way. The central character, Cora, is sympathetic enough, as you might expect, but also enigmatic, but not in any bad way. She is, after all, Persephone, and everything we encounter on Eleusis is a little bent, a little twisted, like what we might encounter through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass if it were being held by James Tiptree Jr. I’m not saying Brissett writes like Tiptree, but her vision shares that same uncompromising intensity.

When you’re dealing with myths, it’s difficult to be otherwise. To paraphrase R. A. Lafferty, the myths aren’t inside us; we are inside them, struggling to get out.

You won’t “get” this book on a first read. It will haunt you, though. And that’s likely one of the things in Destroyer of Light that goes exactly as planned, by Brissett.

The Reinvented Heart edited by Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek

Last November, when I went to Windycon, my first “in person” convention in what seemed like ages, I very often heard a word that I really hadn’t encountered much at conventions heretofore: “Romance.”

And that word being used in the denotation of a literary category: those books in the store with the label “Romance” on the spine. Many of us in fandom made fun of those books. We believed them all to have been built on a steadfast, indestructible narrative skeleton: young woman of modest means falls in love with a handsome young man of higher social status, or some other condition which seems to doom their relationship, though the young man reciprocates her feelings. Whatever, their hardships are overcome by the last page and the beautiful couple prepare for a lifetime of happiness. Thousands of novels were built on that skeleton, and billions of copies of those novels were sold. They were reliable. And predictable. And we made fun of them. Their fungible structure seemed a polar opposite of what science fiction was all about. They were allegedly more predictable than Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, or Tom Swift.

the reinvented heart

But the picture was never quite that simple. At least a couple of new generations of readers have grown up since we callow old fogies sniffed at the romance market. Many new science fiction readers began by reading romance novels, then switched over to several of the many “cross-genre” variations, like romances set in fantasy worlds or science-fictional universes. Not to mention the explosion of romances catering to a number of diverse, non-traditional audiences. And many of the newer writers in our field not only got their start in the romance market, but they maintain a presence in that genre while doing other work in ours.

All of that is to say that we should no longer be surprised at having romance fiction discussed at SF cons. It’s here. Get used to it.

And frankly, I’m not really sure if the preceding tangent of mine has any relevance to the brilliant anthology edited by Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek, The Reinvented Heart, but I started there, so be it.

The marvelous thing about this anthology is that it left me far removed from the simple definitions of what we’re talking about when we talk about “relationships,” romantic or otherwise.

In her foreword, Rambo quotes the call to authors she made for this book:

Science fiction often thinks about the technology without considering the ways social structures will change as tech changes—or not. What will relationships look like in the future when we have complications like clones, uploaded intelligences, artificial brains, or body augmentation? What happens when emotions like love and friendship span vast distances—in space, in time, and in the heart? And as we acknowledge differences in gender in a way we never have before, what stories are finally given the space in which to emerge?

Any sort of devoted reader of science fiction will no doubt immediately recall any number of stories—by Octavia Butler, or Sturgeon, or Delany, or Sheckley, or Le Guin, or Tiptree, to name just a few—that already address what Rambo and Brozek were looking for, but you’ll have to admit that those gems are rare—exquisite, but rare.

The marvelous thing about this anthology is how successful the editors were in their search to increase this number. This is all fine work, written with great skill, great intelligence, great wit and, perhaps most of all, a discerning and sympathetic eye for the way change can seem at once surprising and inevitable in this world (and any other world you choose to imagine). My favorites, not necessarily the best, works are by Rosemary Claire Smith, Lyda Morehouse, Naomi Kritzer, Fran Wilde, Lauren Ring, Sam Fleming, Xander Odell and Devin Miller. The three sections: “Hearts,” “Hands” and “Minds” are prefaced with poems by Jane Yolen. One need say no more.

Full disclosure: yes, it’s published by Caezik, but I would have grabbed up this anthology no matter who published it. Dozens of themed anthologies come out every year. This one is significantly a keeper.

If you’d like to read more of the great content that’s gone into the March/April issue of Galaxy’s Edge, you can find an issue at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.