GALAXY’S EDGE REVIEW ROUNDUP: MAY 2023

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.

GOING OUT IN STYLE

Well, the curtain is coming down, the swan is waiting in the wings, the song is sounding. One phase in the history of GALAXY’S EDGE is coming to a close. It’s time for me to pack up my bindle and find a new train to hop.

Funny thing: I feel like I never really hopped this train in the first place. I’ve been running behind it, or alongside it at best, for most of the journey. Which is not to say that it hasn’t been informative, educational, and even fun.

I was also fortunate enough to acquire this gig at a time when the field, and the publishing world in general, was undergoing fundamental changes.

Or does it always feel that way?

Perhaps, but for some reason this feels different. “Professional” publishing, for the most part, seems to have become more “corporate” than ever, trying harder than ever to manufacture saleable product, which seems, from a corporate perspective, to necessitate more sharply defining categories and genres. Conversely, our authors are producing work that, where it doesn’t defy the old categories, confounds them. Smaller presses and independents are making their own rules, and it’s always been from them that the innovations have come.

At one level, it’s a fascinating time to be reviewing books. Which makes it a little sad to find myself turning in my last column.

And yet, the less time I spend putting together columns, the more time I have to read.

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Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions
edited by A. R. Capetta and
Wade Roush
MITeen Press
October 2022

Why hasn’t someone thought of this before?

Perhaps they have, and I was just not on the mailing list.

While many of us (looking at the mirror now) have lamented the perceived lack of interest in short science fiction by younger readers, and have also noted that much science fiction in the YA market are variations on dystopic themes or heroic fantasy gussied up with zap guns and warp-drive starships, MITeen Press, through the editorial auspices of A. R. Capetta and Wade Roush, have done something about it with this fine collection of ten stories. The hardcover edition premiered last autumn, so I’m late in including it here, but the trade paperback will be coming out next fall, so I’m not exceedingly remiss (this time).

The goals of this anthology seem to be threefold: 1.) familiarize YA readers with the joys of short science fiction; 2.) with the emphasis on science; and 3.) to do so with as much innovation in style and approach as the authors can provide. One of the stories is written as a sequence of text messages. Another is a graphic story. The others, written in more familiar prose styles, are not slouching in exploring the boundaries of narrative form.

Every story here is of a quality that, if it doesn’t command your attention, is worthy of your committed perusal. That being said, the ones I enjoyed most were “The Weight of a Name” by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, Capetta’s own “Extremophiles,” Elizabeth Bear’s “Twin Strangers” and “Melanitis” by Junauda Petrus-Nasah. The graphic story, “The Memory of Soil” by Wendy Xu, is also great in its literal approach to its title. Perhaps because it resonates with the attitude to nature I encountered in Nancy Marie Brown’s book, of which more later.

Would that more of our “big,” i.e. “professional,” publishers would think along these lines. Science fiction in many respects has always been at its strongest in its shortest form. And the move to more digital publishing extinguishes many of the arguments against short fiction getting low sales. This may be a good time to re-emphasize the joys and importance of short fiction to a new generation. In fact, there may never be a better time than now.

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Victory City
by Salman Rushdie
Random House
February 2023

Let me say this at the outset: this is a fantasy novel.

The reason I’m saying that is, apparently, critics and Rushdie fans either can’t say the word, or can’t find the word—fantasy.

There, I’ve said it again.

When a goddess speaks through the mouth of a little girl who is her namesake, it’s fantasy.

When that namesake has a lifespan of 247 years, it’s fantasy.

When an entire city is grown from a bag of magic seeds, it’s fantasy.

When your protagonist can change humans into other animals, it’s fantasy.

And Rushdie, no matter what else he is or what else he does, is a fantasy writer.

Rushdie is a great storyteller, and he first embraced storytelling at a time when the literary currents in which he chose to swim were churning in the opposite direction.

Much of this story is based upon folklore and history—like much fantasy. And, like much contemporary fantasy, he uses folklore and history to explore contemporary themes. It’s not so much that he is doing anything different as he is doing some things better.

The tale of Pampa Kampana, and her founding of the city of Bisnaga, a sort of feminist utopia, and the tale itself—and how the tale is told—is very much at the heart of the novel. The prose is presented as a translation from Sanskrit, and as a reflection of that language, so that its cadences and vocabulary seem of another time as much as its content may reflect ours.

In a way, it is South Asian Tolkien.

Did I say that?

I did. And I mean it.

If you’ve never read Rushdie before, read this one. Just … read it. Forget about the Booker Prizes. Forget about the controversies. Hard as it may be, even try to forget about the fatwa and the more recent horrendous physical attack that nearly took his life. Leave that aside, and just enter the reality, the fabric, of this novel, and allow it to perform its enchantments.

If you’re any reader of fantasy, you’ll find yourself in familiar territory.

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Wraithbound
by Tim Akers
Baen
April 2023

You can check with my editor: I turned this column in very, very late.

I have an excuse. I’ve been waiting for a copy of Wraithbound to arrive. And I’m pleased to say it was worth the wait.

The premise is simple. Young Rae Kelthannis, the son of a “stormbinder” who is stitched to an elemental wind spirit and can command those forces of nature, wants to follow in his father’s footsteps. Hastily, and against his father’s wishes, he attempts the procedure—and botches it. Instead of stitching himself to an air elemental, he is bound to a demonic wraith. The world in which father and son live is already dipping into chaos, and the mayhem picks up from there.

I’ve only recently become familiar with Tim Akers’s work, and I’m highly impressed with the economic precision of his prose and his real gift for keeping the action moving throughout his novels. In Wraithbound I believe he gets even better. My perception may be a bit blurred because for once I’m actually starting with the first book in a fantasy series, but his storytelling skills are impressive. And on a thematic level, this novel demonstrates the kind of clarity and maturity I wish were more evident in other volumes of this sort. I’m anticipating the release of the next volume in this series, especially since this time I won’t have to read it on deadline.

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Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Save the Earth
by Nancy Marie Brown
Pegasus Books
October 2022

I’ve never reviewed a nonfiction book here, at least not that I recall, but this humble meditation that brings together Iceland, its folklore, climate change, particle physics and … J. R. R. Tolkien(!) is very much worth your attention, no matter where your interests lie.

I’ve said, I think, in these very pages (if not, I’m saying it now) that fantasy, like science fiction, is not so much a literary category as it is a way of looking at the world (and Damon Knight said something like it before, so there!). In that way, we might find Tolkien the most important of the topics included in this book. Brown quotes from his seminal essay, “On Fairy-stories” extensively. I’ve always read the essay as a kind of manifesto, not for fantasy itself but for a way of looking at fantasy, and the insights it can provide for how we perceive the world around us. The sentiment is echoed in another book from which Brown quotes, about James M. Barrie. Neuroscientist Rosalind Ridley, in Peter Pan and the Mind of J. M. Barrie, points out that fairies, like paper currency, are things that exist and have value only if everyone agrees they do. There are differences between solid objects and socially constructed ones.

Ridley writes: “There are also occasions when art tells us something that science only recognizes at a later time.”

That’s not news to us. But Brown puts this together with Icelandic beliefs in “hidden folk,” like elves and gnomes and such, and how they are held even by hard-edged rationalistic scientists and intellectuals, and how these beliefs inform their attitude towards the environment. Desolate stretches of the countryside, with nothing visible but ice and stone, are seen as having something akin to a sentience, if not a consciousness. They are “alive.” We might regard our environment differently if we considered it as connected to ourselves, through the hidden folk, and in turn we connected to it. We might make different choices before digging up rocks to build a highway or an oil well.

And the means by which we can see the world this way is through the fantasy of “fairy-stories”—in the widest sense of this term.

I’m presenting this thesis in only the most elementary fashion. The detail to which Brown gives her thoughts are wonderfully lucid and thought-provoking. In a way, it’s what we in the field have always understood, but greatly appreciate its being articulated so beautifully in this book, so that others might see what we’re talking about.

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Observer
by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress
The Story Plant
January 2023

And speaking of consciousness …

Robert Lanza is a brilliant scientist and remarkable thinker, but perhaps the smartest decision he ever made was to collaborate with Nancy Kress when he decided to present some of his farthest-out concepts in novel form. Great scientists do not have an outstanding record in the novel-writing sweepstakes. Kress not only is as fine a professional novelist as is working today, but she has explored some similar themes as Lanza presents here with her own work, most notably genetics and the uploading of consciousness—whatever that is.

Tolkien once said in an interview that at the heart of all great literature is the inevitability of death. What’s at the heart of this novel is to find a way of overriding that certainty. Dr. Caroline Soames-Watkins, whose brilliant career has been derailed by a twitterstorm, is hired by her great-uncle, a Nobel laureate, to work on that very project, with himself as the subject.

The question of surviving natural death often boils down to the question of what actually survives. If you download the memories of a dead person, are you saying a person consists of memories and nothing more? If you can succeed in transferring a neuro-system into some other entity or host, does that mean all that matters is the neuro-system? What is the nature of consciousness, and how much of it is dependent upon the biosystem that houses it? What is the nature of personhood?

Questions like these can be perplexing enough to make a reader want to swear off consciousness forever. And yet Lanza explores them thoroughly in ways that don’t make you think you’ve accidentally dropped LSD. Kress has created characters and settings to house these big ideas in ways that feel perfectly natural and emphasize the tensions and attractions which weave these characters together. This is supposed to be a “novel of ideas,” and yet it doesn’t feel like one, or not “merely” like one. It is a human (even all-too-human) story with all the depth and breadth one looks for in any good novel, and does so with an enviable simplicity of language and structure.

If anything underscores the mysterious complexity of consciousness (and its scary doppelganger, the unconscious), it’s a novel, or any work of art, really.

Which makes, I guess, Observer, the novel itself, its own best argument. And a most convincing one at that.

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High Noon on Proxima B
edited by David Boop
Baen Books
February 2023

Yes, yes, I know. I reviewed David Boop’s previous anthology on this theme, Gunfight on Europa Station, not very long ago. This time, though, I think he’s outdone himself in attracting some fine science fiction with western themes. And I’ll emphasize science fiction, because very often with “genre-bending” stories, the SF gets a little lost. As Boop makes clear in his Foreword, the authors have done their painstaking homework. And the results are evident.

Especially notable are stories by the always-reliable Brenda Cooper and Walter John Williams, not to mention Ken Scholes and Susan R. Matthews. Thea Hutcheson’s “Five Mules for Madame Calypso” took me by surprise; I thought stories about bordello ships were abandoned after Mike Resnick stopped writing them a few decades ago. “Justice and Prosperity” by Milton J. Davis is, frankly, a brilliant evocation of African American themes brought into a new perspective. The story from which the anthology takes its title, “High Noon on Proxima Centauri b,” by Cliff Winning, moves its action swiftly and effectively while juggling seemingly impossible loads of astronomical information with grace.

It’s all fine work.

Often, when editors return to themes like this for a follow-up collection, the results are not unlike “sequel syndrome” with popular films. In this case, Boop gets better, or his authors do. Personally, I wouldn’t tempt the fates with another in this series, but if Boop proves more intrepid than I, and rides the bronco one more time, I’ll be more than willing to slap a twenty-dollar gold piece down on the bar and say, “Hit me again.”

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Fort Privilege
by Kit Reed
Doubleday Books
April 1985

Let us now praise Kit Reed.

I first encountered her work in the pages of F&SF. She wrote the kind of short fiction that I considered “experimental” at the time. Kind of a cosmopolitan Carol Emshwiller, with a touch of Margaret St. Clair and even a little Robert Sheckley. Innovative, sophisticated, witty. I still like her short fiction best, but fans also highly value some of her novels, especially Little Sisters of the Apocalypse.

Her novel, Fort Privilege, has always intrigued me. Critics in the field at the time seemed to pay little attention to it, though it displayed the kind of maturity and stylistic skill they called for. It was like a dish they ordered from the kitchen, then sent back without comment.

Which isn’t an inappropriate metaphor, since the novel is about a contingent of New York City’s super-wealthy, luxuriously ensconced in the fortress-like Parkhurst apartments (modeled on the famous Dakota) on Central Park West while the metropolis becomes an enormous reenactment of Escape from New York. Most of the city’s elite have retreated and, in the world of this novel, there isn’t much between the super-rich and the super-angry “rabble.” Led by the current owner, the Parkhurst residents intend to have at least one more defiant fling—not just interested in fiddling while Rome burns, but adding an entire symphony orchestra doing back flips on roller skates.

I think the novel was not accepted at the time because it didn’t engage in the usual class-struggle stereotypes. The wealthy Parkhurst residents, though far from admirable, are not execrable caricatures of all we hate about the super-rich. The mobs outside, justifiably raging against the inequities and filled with criminal intent, are barely depicted at all. Every critic seemed to have a predetermined notion of how this story should be told, and no regard for the story Reed was telling them. She had a distinct take on the growing disparity between the wealthy and everyone else. It wasn’t that different from the social justice issues the critics were looking for. In fact, in some ways she had taken those issues for granted to focus on other aspects of human behavior under such severe divisions.

Those aspects? Hard to summarize, if I really have a handle on what they are, but they seem to be expressed or alluded to in this passage early on in the novel, from the point of view of Bart, our closest protagonist and one of those not quite “to the manor born”:

 … What if things were as bad as everybody said? The Parkhurst was impregnable. The worse things were outside, the harder you danced. There was a kind of bizarre recklessness about this that pulled him along. They danced before the Battle of Waterloo, he thought; the night before the Sepoy uprising at, he thought it was one of the stations north of Delhi, there was one hell of an officers’ ball. Better have fun tonight; no telling what you would be called upon to do the next day.

We don’t need to see the rioters in Central Park to understand a common thread may run between “them that got” and “them that don’t.” To do so might spawn moral questions that are, in this novel, beside the point. And in these times, when the divisions between the “gots” and the “don’ts” have grown further than could have been imagined in 1985 (at least by many of us), it may be worthwhile to rediscover, or reexplore, this novel by an author of speculative fiction who never went for easy answers.

For which we should be ever grateful to her, and always remember her.

Copyright © 2023 by Richard Chwedyk.

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Find the entire last issue at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine — where you can read for free until June 30, 2023.

AND

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A REVISIT: The Reinvented Anthologies: interview with Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek—(Part 2)

Only a year ago, Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek were hard at work on The Reinvented Heart. Now, with the release of their second anthology The Reinvented Detective looming on the horizon (and it is SO good, ya’ll!), we thought we’d take a little trip back in time and revisit an awesome interview from Isaac E. Payne and the editors of the Reinvented series.

Here is Part 2 of that interview.

Enjoy …

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This is the second part of our exclusive interview with Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek, editors of the new anthology, The Reinvented Heart.

To read the first part of this interview, where we discuss both The Reinvented Heart and the second anthology, The Reinvented Detective, click here.

And if you’ve already read the first part, here’s where we left off…

IP: Here I have a few questions that get into the SFF conversation as a whole.

You’ve both been a part of the SFF community for many years, in multiple different capacities. How would you say the science-fiction and fantasy scene has changed since you first got involved with it?

JB: I think the scene has opened up drastically. For me, this is one of the most interesting times to be an SFF author. You have the opportunity to choose how you want to be published, where you want to be published, whether that’s self-pub, boutique press, small press, or the big five. Being a hybrid author is probably the most economically viable, because not everyone can be a Seanan McGuire or a Diana Gabaldon.

Plus, you’re able to choose your own voice and medium. It can be written work, it can be YouTube videos, you can choose serialized versus full-length, you can do a series of novels, you can do micro-text novels.

I have friends who do all of the above. You can teach, edit, write, or do a combination of all three.

CR: I agree with all of that, and also that sci-fi has become more international. With the Internet connecting us more I’ve read a lot more African, Chinese, and all sorts of different kinds of fiction from beyond American borders.

Clarkesworld is one of the magazines that’s really good about bringing in stuff from translation, and I know Neil has worked very hard at that.

But another thing that’s changed is that there are more psychic resources for writers outside the mainstream. You know there are occasions in our industry where I’ve felt that there’s been a sort of psychic toll that has to be paid. Think of it like “oh, here’s another elderly science fiction writer inviting me to sit in his lap” and I’m just supposed to laugh it off.

It’s kind of political here, I’m sorry, but I think younger writers don’t tolerate that as much as they used to, and I salute them for that.

JB: I think the problems that have always been around in every industry are starting to come to light. I used to be a QA engineer for 13 years, and the problems in that industry cross over into this one too.

Some of the predators are getting smarter, and they’re playing the “I’m woke, or I’m an ally” card.

You know, just thinking about how we’re still having women in gaming panels shows us that we have a long way to go. And it’s taking longer than a lot of people want.

CR: Yeah, that’s very true.

JB: It’s not a perfect transition. Just today I read something about the Harry Potter series involving Kreacher. It was about how people were so accepting of how Harry was literally a slave owner.

CR: Oh yeah, and Dobby too. And Hermione was mocked for standing up for the house elves! I can get quite indignant about this.

JB: As much as we want to get better, we all still have a lot of blind spots. But it’s being shown more often, called out more often. It’s very uncomfortable, but you have to be uncomfortable to change.

I loved that whole series whenever it came out, but the more you dig into it and all your other old favorites, the more you’re like “Oh, my God.”

CR: Yeah, there are a lot of problems. Jo Walton talks about the suck fairy. She says don’t go back to childhood classics lest you find the suck fairy has visited them.

IP: I was thinking about that the other day because I was watching The Wheel of Time on Amazon. And I was thinking about when I read the first couple of books, and as a high schooler, there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t really pick up on.

Thinking about it now, I’m like, “Wow, that’s really old and outdated.”

CR: Well, it’s interesting to me how much gender attitudes have shifted in the last decade. I mean, when I was growing up, the word “trans” wasn’t something that anybody said.

And that’s one of the things I think is really interesting and lovely about our times is that people are aware of non-binary, ace, and all the different relationships that fall outside of the Dick and Jane model. That’s very much what The Reinvented Heart is about.

That’s one of the things science fiction does so well is social reflection, and I think that’s really cool. In the anthology, we have a non-binary story, and we have another story where the character has anxiety about meeting up with the other person in real life.

So, the character goes to the hotel and they knock on the door, but the other person never opens the door because they’re feeling so anxious. At the end of the story, the character gets an email from the other person apologizing, saying, you know “I transgressed, I tried to push you past your boundaries and that wasn’t cool.” And that’s such a different ending than that story has been told with in the past.

One of the modes that drives me particularly crazy with gender stuff, is the cliché that if guys are willing to just keep after her, standing out in the rain with a boombox, that she’ll come around. And that’s present in narratives about women, too, but not in the same way.

It’s one of the things that science fiction does well, is deconstructing that narrative and rewriting it in a more meaningful, respectful way.

IP: Gotcha, I 100% agree with you. I guess then as a follow up to that question, where do you think the SFF community is headed in the near future? Or what do you hope happens in the community in the future?

CR: I would hope that we address a couple of marginalizations that haven’t particularly been addressed before.

And those are disability, neurodiversity, and economic circumstance.

People forget that there is a significant portion of the population that doesn’t have Internet access, isn’t accessing Twitter and all that. I’d love to see science fiction keep pushing to make that a part of the conversation.

JB: This goes along with economics, but I’d like to see more non-American authors have a clear way of getting their stuff in front of American audiences. I lived outside the US during my childhood because my father was in the military, so I learned a lot about other cultures, and that informed me growing up. The world of storytelling is so vast and amazing, I’d like to see some of that reflected in science fiction.  

I saw recently there was a Kickstarter for an RPG about if America had never been colonized, and just seeing that made me want to explore that idea more.

For example, Black Panther, the Marvel movie. The themes that they brought in for that particular movie were so different from what I’d seen before. The mindset is more about what do we owe each other and society instead of what can I do. It’s I vs. we.

I had a conversation last year with Maurice Broaddus, and we were talking about magic. I said that magic should cost you something, because that’s my point of view. And he said that magic should never cost you. You should never be punished for being who you are.

CR: Oh, yeah, that’s good.

JB: That’s one of those points of view that I’m still wrapping my head around.

IP: I think a lot of that goes back to the fact that America is a very capitalist society, and that pervades a lot of our ideas. For a magician, if using magic takes a physical toll on you or something, it’s a transactional relationship. You’re giving your energy for magic, and that’s a capitalist thing.

I guess it goes back to what Cat said about seeing more SFF stuff from a different economic sphere. What would our science fiction look like if our society’s ideals weren’t capitalist, but instead were socialist, or something else?

CR: That’s something I see a lot of writers grappling with today. Our mutual friend, PJ Manney, worked with a Facebook group called The New Mythos, where they were explicitly trying to talk about how to create new stories. How do you create these new narratives?

I just did a story that’s coming out next April where I tried to challenge the way I thought the story would traditionally go, and make it go in a different direction.

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And that’s all from our chat with Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek. If you’d like to check out The Reinvented Heart anthology, you can purchase it as an ebook or hardcover HERE.

Be sure to check out Cat’s website and Jennifer’s website to keep up to date on their new and upcoming projects!

Thanks to both of them for joining us here at Signals from the Edge!

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A REVISIT: The Reinvented Anthologies: a conversation with Cat Rambo & Jennifer Brozek (Part I)

Only a year ago, Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek were hard at work on The Reinvented Heart. Now, with the release of their second anthology The Reinvented Detective (and it is SO good, ya’ll!) looming on the horizon, we thought we’d take a little trip back in time and revisit an awesome interview from Isaac E. Payne and the editors of the Reinvented series.

Enjoy …

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SFF legends Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek have been hard at work on The Reinvented Heart, an anthology about sci-fi relationships.

We met up with them to discuss the new anthology—available in ebook and hardcover.

Here’s what they had to say:

Isaac Payne: So I only have a couple of questions, and then we can open it up to a conversation afterwards. I guess starting out I want to ask about the The Reinvented Heart anthology. It’s been making some waves out there on the SFF frequencies, and I’m just curious about how you decided to break up the Anthology into three distinct sections. I’m familiar with only a few other anthos that do this, so what was the inspiration behind that idea?

Cat Rambo: I actually talked to Jane Yolan in an interview I did with her about that. You may have noticed the three sections are each prefaced by Jane. And in fact, she read them all on the interview, which was really cute.

Basically, we approached Jane and asked if she’d write something for us, and she said, how about poems? My response was, “sure, you’re Jane Yolan!” and I want something from you.

So, she sent in three poems and I said to Jen, you know, poetry is cheap, right? We’re paying by the line, and it’s not like a 5,000-word story.

We ended up organizing the book according to the three poems, breaking it into three sections—Hearts, Hands, and Mind.

And then as part of The Reinvented Detective, which is the anthology that’s coming out next year, we asked Jane to write us three poems again, this time about themes around detectives.

But the funny thing is that I just did this interview with Jane and she hadn’t known what we’d done with her poems until she got the PDF, and she was just delighted! No one had ever done anything like that with her poems before.

IP: That’s cool! You mentioned The Reinvented Detective which is coming up here next year. Is there anything that you’re going to change about this anthology based on what you learned from The Reinvented Heart?

Jennifer Brozek: Well, since we’re just now going through the hold stories and the on-spec stories, I think it might be a little bit too soon to answer that.

But based on the stories we’re getting, we might spread out the anthology to make it about more than just crime and justice.

We might organize it based on groups of stories, like Art Nouveau or the Old Classic. We got a lot of Poirot and Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as some pastiches.

I’m thinking that when we see all the stories, we’re going to end up breaking them out into groups rather than themes, but that may change.

We haven’t seen all the stories yet!

IP: Just out of curiosity, how many submissions did you receive for The Reinvented Heart? I edited the Triangulation: Extinction anthology and I’m always curious about the numbers for other anthologies.

CR: I want to say around 230?

JB: No, it was closer to 260, and that’s just slush. We had the on-spec stories too, so in total it’s more like 300.

IP: Gotcha, that’s pretty good, all things considered!

JB: Yeah. The Reinvented Heart is my 21st anthology, and The Reinvented Detective is my 22nd.

When I did 99 Tiny Terrors, I got 600 submissions in a month! Or when I do a closed anthology, like The Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods, I cherry-pick every author.

So, the number of submissions really depends on how much it pays and how many people feel they have a chance to get into the anthology. For 99 Tiny Terrors, a lot of new people were willing to send in their stories because it’s flash.

CR: Yeah, flash is fun. Fun and fast.

JB: But when I was working with Apex Magazine as a slush reader, I’d have to read five stories a day just to keep up!

IP: Yeah, for Triangulation: Extinction I think we had around 600 different submissions. That was over the span of four months, but when the submission window closed, I was still doing a lot of reading!

CR: Yeah. Well, I read completely differently than Jenn.

Jenn is very kind of slow and steady, reading five stories a day. Whereas what I will do is take a weekend to—and excuse my language—just f***ing slam through, sometimes at the rate of a hundred or so stories a day.

And I’m reading fast—fast and furious. But I’m making authors really have to prove themselves to me in the first half page or so.

IP: I guess it’s kind of hard as a writer when you don’t know whether or not you’ll be going through that gauntlet.

JB: When I teach and talk about being an editor, I tell everybody to write your stories like you’re going to be read by a slush reader who’s having a terrible day and all they have to do is get through your story so they can go home.

All your story has to do is turn a slush reader’s terrible day into something magical.

CR: Ah, that’s a nice one, that’s good. You know, one of the talking points of the book is that despite having set the word count at 5,000, there’s a novelette in there! I had solicited Justina Robeson for a story, and she kept mailing back saying that it was getting longer and longer.

And finally, we said, sure, send it in. And both Jenn and I read it and knew we had to put it in the anthology because it was so good!

IP: That’s great, it’s always nice to be surprised like that. So, what’s up next for The Reinvented series? After The Reinvented Detective, of course.

CR: We’re still arguing about that, haha. But we’re absolutely going to continue the series; we’d like to do one a year. I really want to do The Reinvented Coin, so my feeling is that if I’m patient and give Jenn her way for the next few, I’ll get to do that one.

JB: I like that one, but I’m interested in doing The Reinvented Fable. Like if you do a version of Little Red Riding Hood, but in the future, in space. We can do a contrast between old and new fables.

But I do like the idea of The Reinvented Coin, or Cat came up with a good one, The Reinvented Alice.

CR: Yeah, The Reinvented Alice or The Reinvented Oz.

JB: It’s Oz but all science fiction, where you pick a pastiche based on the original series.

IP: I do like those ideas. What does The Reinvented Coin entail?

CR: Economics, trade, bartering. 

JB: Anything that fits under that broad category, really. You could be selling memories of loved ones, for example.

CR: But only one story about NFTs, tops.

IP: Have you read the book This Eden by Ed O’Loughlin? It’s like a science fiction noir, espionage story, but at the end the main villain is a cryptocurrency.

CR: Oh, I love that, I’ll have to find that book!

IP: That’s just what The Reinvented Coin reminded me of haha. So, here I have a few questions that get into the SFF conversation as a whole …

#

Join us next week for the second part of this interview with Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek, where they talk about the SFF community as a whole, and the changes coming down the line for the genre.

And keep an eye out for the upcoming announcement of The Reinvented Detective release!

~~~

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GALAXY’S EDGE REVIEW ROUNDUP: MARCH 2023

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.

MOVING OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE

The other day I was writing up a lecture for an asynchronous class on science fiction writing I’m supposed to be putting together. I brought up the subject of how there’s a wide variety of reading in the field these days, some but not all of it divided along generational lines. Mostly, though, it’s a matter that readers often find one kind of SF that appeals to them, but don’t venture much further from that little corner of work they like. So I recommended to aspiring writers to read as much SF as they can manage, and to read as much outside of their “comfort zone.” See what the folks on the other end of the field are doing. Good or bad, you’ll learn something you can apply to your own writing.

Good advice, I thought. And like much of the good advice I hand out, I wasn’t following it.

Teacher, teach thyself first.

So, most of the entries in this column will be of books and authors who aren’t my “go to” choices.

And what I found was that I can be right even when I don’t know what I’m talking about.

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The Genesis of Misery
by Neon Yang
Tor
September 2022

This may sound like a negative review, but it’s not. Yang does a lot of things that get on my nerves. They use the sort of present tense narration that’s become quite fashionable, but they handle it effectively and consistently. The dialog is also fashionably snarky and always looking to make little zingers that will end up in someone’s next news feed.

I let those little irritations go because at the heart of this novel is an interesting theme. A kind of “Joan of Arc” situation with their Misery Nomaki protagonist, but not in any traditional, or even nontraditional, way I’ve seen before.

The neat thing about it was that it erased the usual sense of inevitability that accompanies such a classic mythos and its variations. It kept me reading with great anticipation of where Yang would take the story.

Way out of my comfort zone, but I’m glad I read it. I suspect I’ll be reading more books written in this kind of voice. If it’s where we’re going, I don’t want to be left behind.

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Leech
by Hiron Ennes
Tordotcom
September 2022

Reading about parasites and viruses and weird microbial entities is something of a horror story all in its own way. It can be appalling, disgusting and, ultimately, compelling. What is that phrase again from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? “The fascination of the abomination.”

Pair this with a gothic setting and a cast of characters from a surrealist Bruno Schulz novel, and you might have something like Hiron Ennes’s Leech. It’s not the sort of novel I would usually choose to read—not in my “comfort zone,” surely—but I’m grateful I did. It adds whole new meanings, in fact, to “comfort zone,” and then smashes them to pieces and buries them in quicklime in the deepest cellar of an ancient fortress.

It begins with our narrator/protagonist, enroute to the Château de Verdira, home of the Interprovincial Medical Institute, in the far north of an unnamed country. The doctor of the chateau’s baron has died, and the narrator is to become his replacement. The last leg of the journey is on a worn-out sled:

The ride is unpleasant, but it is not long. In a few minutes an orchard of smokestacks appears beyond the treetop, ringed by the slanted tin roofs of miners’ homes. The pines part, ushering us down a corridor of crooked stone buildings braced with ice. We wind through the snowy streets, past half-buried warehouses, past belching chimneys and pumping turbines that denied sleep even in the dead of winter, and up the slope of a looming hillside. At its crest, we cough to a halt before a wrought-iron gate. Two men emerge from a crumbling guards’ hut, one wielding a shovel and the other a rifle. They exchange a few words, then force the gate open on hinges rigid with cold. The taller one waves us in, gun dangling from his shoulder like a broken limb, and we sputter onto the unkempt, frozen grounds … 

The institute is allegedly devoted to training doctors and guarding humanity from a bevy of microbial threats that have already jeopardized their existence on this world. Unfortunately, one of the many bodies the institute has kept for many purposes—research and otherwise—has disappeared. Our narrator has to discover what has happened to the body. And that’s for starters.

There is much of Mary Shelley here, not only Frankenstein but The Last Man. Along with the surreal influences added to a landscape designed by Mervyn Peake, I’m reminded a lot of the Brontës. It reminds me of a time when I had my advanced science fiction writing students read Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” (a story partly inspired by her reading about botflies before taking a trip to Peru). One of my students described it as a love story, in fact, as a version of Jane Eyre. And, by golly, my student was right. Similarly, Leech is a novel gazing down from the precipice of Romanticism, the great carpet of the world below looking distant and tiny—but familiar—as if fixed to a microscope’s slide.

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Haunted by the Past
by Simon R. Green
Baen
December 2022

In my junior high days, not only did I have a weakness for books about the occult and psychic investigators (or whoever passed as them then), but I enjoyed tales about detectives like Algernon Blackwood’s Dr. John Silence and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin. When I hit full adolescence, I wrote my own parodies of a hard-boiled psychic private eye named Ed Migraine. By the time Anita Blake and Dirk Gently came by, I had moved on to what I thought were greater things. Harry Dresden may have hung out in Chicago, his books felt like someone trying to swat flies with a Howitzer. Not my thing.

Recently, though, I’ve been feeling nostalgic for Ed Migraine, so I picked up the latest in Simon R. Green’s Ishmael Jones series. Jones and his companion, Penny Belcourt, seemed more my speed than Harry Dresden.

This latest adventure has them at Glenbury Hall, where an associate of theirs has disappeared. It’s supposed to be the most haunted place in England, reminding me of the historic Borley Rectory. It’s loaded with strange, creepy, scary stuff, which suits me fine. Ishmael and Penny are experienced enough with this stuff to keep their wits and wittiness about them.

Nevertheless, things get stranger and stranger until they seem to be on the verge of a very science-fictional spatial-temporal paradox.

Or at least so it seems.

For me, as a reader, it feels like the farther you travel, the closer you get to home.

In books like this, the “detective” part has to be as strong, if not stronger, than the “occult” part. It works for me in Haunted by the Past. Readers more familiar with this subgenre may not be as impressed, but Green’s prose is efficient without being utilitarian. And it’s of a good length (283 pages) to keep things moving and engaging.

I’m not quite ready to leap back into occult mystery stories, but I’m sorely tempted to pick up some more books in this series and perhaps reacquaint myself with what intrigued me about ghosts, poltergeists and suchlike in the first place.

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The Scarab Mission
by James L. Cambias
Baen
January 2023

In all honesty, James L. Cambias is definitely not outside my comfort zone, though I must confess that I was about to throw in the towel on any more novels about scavenger ships. Every other SF novel with a spacefaring setting published today has to have a crew of scavengers, it seems.

The last novel of his I read, Arkad’s World, really impressed me, and I’ve always enjoyed his short fiction. So, even though this is the second book in a series, and it contains a derelict colony, which is another thing I’ve seen quite enough of recently, I thought I’d give it a try.

The plot is a suitably tangled web, in a good way, and the concept of the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium is quite engaging, but what took my attention especially were the characters. Solana Sina, the scarab (Cambias loses no time in explaining what a scarab is) who can’t bear to look at human faces; Atmin, a raven; Utsuro, a cyborg; and … a dinosaur!

I am always a sucker for a good dinosaur:

Pera was big—probably two hundred kilos—but she looked lean and swift rather than bulky. The word predatory came to mind. Her long tail coiled securely around the post of the seat she was sitting on, with her massive legs tucked in on either side. She wore a simple dark skinsuit with lots of pockets, and had gloves on her feet with openings for her huge hooked claws—which were coated in blue enamel. Her skin was dark gold and the crest of feathers on her head was brilliant blue, matching her eyes. More blue feathers ran along the other edge of each bare forearm.

The ship they’re on, Yanai, is also a character.The most intriguing character for me makes a late appearance: an AI spider named Daslakh. Apparently, Daslakh’s role in the preceding novel, The Godel Operation, was much greater, so I’ll have to go back and check that one out. Daslakh is wise, sneaky and enigmatic, and great fun to read about.

Of course there’s intrigue, pirates, human (and non-human) trafficking, plenty of suspense and all sorts of things to keep the story moving. It’s not just great fun but thoughtful fun. And it all comes in at lean, mean and super-clean 266 pages. I’m sold. Cambias can write about wriggling space jelly, I’d venture, and it would still be in my comfort zone.

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Chicks in Tank Tops
edited by Jason Cordova
Baen
January 2023

It wasn’t too many years ago when it seemed that every new release in the SF book section featured an attractive female in an impractically skimpy, skin-tight outfit brandishing a weapon at least twice her size. What made me most uncomfortable about the covers wasn’t so much the imagery and symbolism (a topic for a much longer essay), but that the imagery and symbolism had become so pervasive. The sameness of it all almost (but not quite) made me yearn for the old days of gothic romances, when rack after rack was filled with book covers featuring wispy women in negligees looking over their shoulders with fearful expressions while in the background loomed old scary mansions, or even castles, with a light in a single window.

We returned to one of the great unwritten rules of publishing: when something hits it big, keep copying it and copying it until you can barely give the books away (reminding me of even older days when a detergent company, I kid you not, put a Harlequin Romance in every box they sold). Repetition is the sincerest form of desperation.

It was about 1995 that Baen published the first Chicks in Chainmail anthology, edited by the irrepressible Esther M. Friesner. It was a takeoff on the sword and sorcery books, the covers of which featured attractive females in impractically skimpy outfits, brandishing swords at least twice their size. Some great new ideas go back a long way.

Back then, I didn’t board the Chicks in Chainmail bus, or the bus didn’t stop for me. I may have appreciated the self-parody of a form which in some respects had already become parodic, but at the time I was striving for a more “serious” side to SFF and didn’t have the patience for amusing takes on women in sword and sorcery.

In other words, I was being a snob.

A number of follow-up anthologies came out until about 2004, with a return volume, Chicks and Balances, in 2015. After that, I thought the coast was clear.

I was wrong.

Chicks in Tank Tops hopes (or threatens) to do with women in military SF what Chicks in Chainmail did for women in sword and sorcery. In the ensuing years I have lost at least some of my snobbiness, as well as more willing to search for good short fiction wherever I can find it. My timing, for once, is spot on.

The stories included herein are quite smart and sophisticated. The entry by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller dually reminded me of how long it’s been since I’ve read anything by them and how good they can be. There are works here by the always reliable Jody Lynn Nye, David Drake (two stories!) and Esther M. Friesner herself. What impressed me as much if not more were the stories by authors with whom I’m less familiar, like A. C. Haskins, Joelle Presby, G. Scott Huggins and Marisa Wolf. Regular readers of military SF may be more familiar with these names, but I’m a stranger in town.

The overall quality of the work here is impressive. It may not make me a fan of military SF, no matter who or what is on the cover, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for these authors’ works from here on.

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Walk to the End of the World
by Suzy McKee Charnas
Ballantine
February 1974

Let us now praise Suzy McKee Charnas.

The sad news is that she recently passed away, in fact just as I was readying to complete this column. I might have waited for a later column, but I didn’t want to allow this opportunity to pass. One never knows these days who we might lose in the coming months. I also wanted to note this novel in contrast to Chicks in Tank Tops. It helps underscore the distance we’ve come in the portrayal of women in American science fiction.

Charnas’s effect on feminist science fiction has been, in my opinion, overlooked for quite a while. It can be argued, and quite successfully, that her second novel, Motherlines, was more influential in feminist SF circles, but looking back on these novels, and the “Holdfast Chronicles” in its entirety, without Walk to the End of the World, there would be no Motherlines, or The Furies, or The Conqueror’s Child.

I mean that in more than a chronological sense. Motherlines is one of those novels that describe how an alternative society can be formed. Walk to the End of the World describes why it’s formed, and does so with sincere urgency.

Walk takes us to a postapocalyptic world where women are subjugated in the most horrific ways. Her depiction of this world is uncompromising, unsparing. Contemporary readers will need a multitude of trigger warnings.

Holdfast is a brutal, unforgiving world, ruled by some of the most misogynistic, sadistic males you’ll find in all of literature. We learn more about this world than we’d care to, but we need to. It’s not necessarily supposed to be a reflection of “our” world, but it depicts what our world can feel like if you occupy the bottom rungs, and what it can become if we’re not careful. Our central protagonist, Alldera, takes a long time coming to the foreground, but when she and her few allies do, she provides the ray of hope we’ve been looking for. Not a bright hope, but enough.

That’s the point.

The pace is akin to a slow, relentless drumbeat. She refuses to spare the reader’s sensitivities. It’s a first novel and has those flaws of many first novels, especially her reliance on many lengthy expositional passages. Charnas pulls it off because she’s writing with her nerves and her heart.

That’s what keeps it compelling. Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin, working at the same time, are intellectual and clever and stylistically brilliant. Charnas is like pure id. Her primal voice and unflinching eye are what still speak to us after a half century and will keep speaking to us for many years to come.

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Redspace Rising
by Brian Trent
Flame Tree Press
September 2022

Definitely in my comfort zone and very much worth reading. Just when you thought tales taking place within our solar system have pretty much exhausted the technological possibilities, someone like Brian Trent comes along and reimagines everything.

The suspense and action here come from notion that war criminals from a recent interplanetary melee have escaped arrest by housing themselves in genetically 3-D printed versions of other humans. Hal Clement and Philip K. Dick can both eat their hearts out. This is the second book in a series but it took me no longer than the first chapter to get up to speed. Trent is an experienced prose juggler and gives this whole tale a marvelous sense of urgency.

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The Best of Edward M. Lerner
by Edward M. Lerner
ReAnimus Press
May 2022

Allow me to squeeze one more in. I’ve had to cut it for the last two columns. Lerner is one of the wittiest and most thoughtful of recent Analog regulars, and this collection provides a fine overview of his output. My one added observation is that the title is somewhat premature. “Best of” collections are supposed to be a sort of authoritative summary of authors who are wrapping up, unofficially, their authorial careers (relax, James Van Pelt, I don’t mean you, either). Not only do I think Lerner has a few more good novellas in him, this volume also misses a couple that to my mind should rate inclusion. For the time being, though, this will do nicely.

Copyright © 2023 by Richard Chwedyk.

~~~

Find the entire article at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine — where you can read for free until April 30, 2023.

AND

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PROJECTS WE LOVE TO LOVE: FANTASY AND FAERIES—A KICKSTARTER TALE

*We’re taking a break from our regularly scheduled program to squee over a new novel/KS project that has just dropped.

BOBBIN AND THE MAGIC THIEF

**With only 11 days of this project left on Kickstarter, we’re going to shout it from the rooftops for the limited time remaining, and we hope you’ll join us in supporting and sharing.

The genre is everything faeries and is classified by the author as children’s/middle-grade. This just means it’s appropriate from about ages 8 and up. However, as a middle-aged reader (far, far away from middle grade!), I can say I’ve read this novel twice and enjoyed it more each time! ♥

The information below is from the author’s KS page … AND there’s even more to be found if you head over THERE now: you can watch the author’s video and meet the characters!

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Bobbin wasn’t like other faeries… music didn’t entrance her.

But was it a secret blessing?

When an opportunistic thief spies a faerie spinning gold, he snatches her, and hatches a plan for his true goal: to steal the enchanting singing voice of the miller’s daughter.

Faced with losing one of the few people who accepts her as she is, Bobbin must face her fears and find the determination to get her back–even if it means breaking faerie law.

And her chance of success may rest in her resistance to the melodic voice.

Set in Rose Valley, our story weaves through farms and fields, haunted forests and ill-managed estates, ancient greed and new friendships.

FROM THE AUTHOR:

In case you haven’t guessed, this story is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin…but told from a very different point of view.

I’ve always loved folk and faerie tales. I also love history and tend to fall down rabbit holes pursuing my latest interest.

In all the things I’ve read, I’ve noticed there are only a handful of popular tales depicting the importance of weaving and spinning as societies developed. That seemed odd to me, since before the industrial revolution of textiles, all cloth was made by hand, whether for clothing, rugs, tapestry, curtains, bed linens, towels, or sails for ships.

That’s a lot of weaving!

I also found few tales of this type with faeries in them; even though fae are often included in tales due to their magical influence. (And who wouldn’t want a little extra help with making all that cloth?)

So, I decided to create retellings of faerie tales that had elements of spinning and weaving. And include faeries.

So who am I and why do I want your money?

I’m a multi-genre indie author and creative. I’ve had short stories published in anthologies of several different genres including historical, romance, high and urban fantasy. I’ve received several Honorable Mentions, including a Silver, from the Writers of the Future contest and am excited to be at the beginnings of a long writing career.

I believe in the charm of the Spindle Faeries I’ve created and want to give this first book of the series the best entry into the world I can. I’ve put a lot into this book: time, vision, money. That included hiring the talents of others such as my wonderful paper cut artist, Kathryn Carr, and my editor, Liz Colter. It also included investing in apps and programs to make it the best I could.

It’s been hard work, but also a labor of love.

Head over to Kickstarter HERE to learn more about this project, the REWARDS, the ADD ONS, and the STRETCH GOALS.

We as authors and publishers know the hours and effort it takes to bring a book to life. This author has worked for years on this, a project borne of love and passion, and we ask that you join us in celebrating this wonderful book; a story of faeries brought to life, a hand-spun tale of friendship, and a journey that takes Bobbin away from home, all the while bringing her closer to those she loves.

*Arc Manor is not affiliated with this novel, author, or Kickstarter project.
**We just love good books ♥

~~~

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SIX MUST-READ SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS BY WOMEN AUTHORS

We wrap up our celebration in March of Women’s History Month with six “must-read” Science Fiction novels by a group of women authors that make us want to stand up and clap and stories that promise to break your heart a little, right before they show you there is hope for us and our future …

Thank you.

Dept. of Speculation meets Black Mirror in this lyrical, speculative debut about a queer mother raising her daughter in an unjust surveillance state

In a United States not so unlike our own, the Department of Balance has adopted a radical new form of law enforcement: rather than incarceration, wrongdoers are given a second (and sometimes, third, fourth, and fifth) shadow as a reminder of their crime—and a warning to those they encounter. Within the Department, corruption and prejudice run rampant, giving rise to an underclass of so-called Shadesters who are disenfranchised, publicly shamed, and deprived of civil rights protections.

Kris is a Shadester and a new mother to a baby born with a second shadow of her own. Grieving the loss of her wife and thoroughly unprepared for the reality of raising a child alone, Kris teeters on the edge of collapse, fumbling in a daze of alcohol, shame, and self-loathing. Yet as the kid grows, Kris finds her footing, raising a child whose irrepressible spark cannot be dampened by the harsh realities of the world. She can’t forget her wife, but with time, she can make a new life for herself and the kid, supported by a community of fellow misfits who defy the Department to lift one another up in solidarity and hope.

With a first-person register reminiscent of the fierce self-disclosure of Sheila Heti and the poetic precision of Ocean Vuong, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a bold debut novel that examines the long shadow of grief, the hard work of parenting, and the power of queer resistance.

A stunning science fiction debut, The Space Between Worlds is both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging

‘My mother used to say I was born reaching, which is true. She also used to say it would get me killed, which it hasn’t. Not yet, anyway.’

Born in the dirt of the wasteland, Cara has fought her entire life just to survive. Now she has done the impossible, and landed herself a comfortable life on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, she’s on a sure path to citizenship and security – on this world, at least.

Of the 380 realities that have been unlocked, Cara is dead in all but 8.

Cara’s parallel selves are exceptionally good at dying – from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun – which makes Cara wary, and valuable. Because while multiverse travel is possible, no one can visit a world in which their counterpart is still alive. And no one has fewer counterparts than Cara.

But then one of her eight doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, and Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined – and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her earth, but the entire multiverse.

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. 

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. 

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his mysterious employers have inadvertently discovered time travel—and are using it to cover up a string of violent crimes

Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family.
 
So begins Jinwoo Chong’s dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic ’80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse.
 
Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers’s delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future

~~~

Winner of the Hugo Award!

It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.

One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered.

But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.

They’re going to need to ask it a lot.

Becky Chambers’s new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?

A science fiction epic for our times and a love letter to our future, The Terraformers will take you on a journey spanning thousands of years and exploring the triumphs, strife, and hope that find us wherever we make our home

Destry’s life is dedicated to terraforming Sask-E. As part of the Environmental Rescue Team, she cares for the planet and its burgeoning eco-systems as her parents and their parents did before her.

But the bright, clean future they’re building comes under threat when Destry discovers a city full of people that shouldn’t exist, hidden inside a massive volcano.

As she uncovers more about their past, Destry begins to question the mission she’s devoted her life to, and must make a choice that will reverberate through Sask-E’s future for generations to come.

~~~

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SIX MUST-READ FANTASY NOVELS BY WOMEN AUTHORS

March is Women’s History Month, and so we find ourselves celebrating the vital role of women throughout history.

For our part, we’re sharing six of the most fabulous and fun “must read” fantasy novels that we’ve come across, all of them written by fierce wordsmiths, moving storytellers, and women that we tip our hat to.

Thank you.

From noted short story writer Nisi Shawl comes a brilliant alternate-history novel set in the Belgian Congo.

What if the African natives developed steam power ahead of their colonial oppressors? What might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier?

Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated.

Shawl’s speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into a marvelous and exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history. Everfair is told from a multiplicity of voices: Africans, Europeans, East Asians, and African Americans in complex relationships with one another, in a compelling range of voices that have historically been silenced. Everfair is not only a beautiful book but an educational and inspiring one that will give the reader new insight into an often-ignored period of history.

If you knew how dark tomorrow would be, what would you do with today?

“This is the magic circus book that I have been looking for all my life.” ―Seanan McGuire, New York Times bestselling author of Every Heart A Doorway

Welcome to the Circus of the Fantasticals.

Ringmaster—Rin, to those who know her best—can jump to different moments in time as easily as her wife, Odette, soars from bar to bar on the trapeze. With the scars of World War I feeling more distant as the years pass, Rin is focusing on the brighter things in life. Like the circus she’s built and the magical misfits and outcasts ? known as Sparks ? who’ve made it their home. Every night, Rin and the Fantasticals enchant a Big Top packed full with audiences who need to see the impossible.

But while the present is bright, threats come at Rin from the past and the future. The future holds an impending war that the Sparks can see barreling toward their Big Top and everyone in it. And Rin’s past creeps closer every day, a malevolent shadow Rin can’t fully escape. It takes the form of another Spark circus, with tents as black as midnight and a ringmaster who rules over his troupe with a dangerous power. Rin’s circus has something he wants, and he won’t stop until it’s his.

Everything casts a shadow. Even the world we live in. And as with every shadow, there is a place where it must touch. A seam, where the shadow meets its source.

Olivia Prior has grown up in Merilance School for Girls, and all she has of her past is her mother’s journal—which seems to unravel into madness. Then, a letter invites Olivia to come home to Gallant. Yet when Olivia arrives, no one is expecting her. But Olivia is not about to leave the first place that feels like home; it doesn’t matter if her cousin Matthew is hostile, or if she sees half-formed ghouls haunting the hallways.

Olivia knows that Gallant is hiding secrets, and she is determined to uncover them. When she crosses a ruined wall at just the right moment, Olivia finds herself in a place that is Gallant—but not. The manor is crumbling, the ghouls are solid, and a mysterious figure rules over all. Now Olivia sees what has unraveled generations of her family, and where her father may have come from.

Olivia has always wanted to belong somewhere, but will she take her place as a Prior, protecting our world against the Master of the House? Or will she take her place beside him?

New York Times–bestselling author V. E. Schwab crafts a vivid and lush novel that grapples with the demons that are often locked behind closed doors. An eerie, stand-alone saga about life, death, and the young woman beckoned by both. Readers of Neil Gaiman, Holly Black, Melissa Albert, and Garth Nixwill quickly lose themselves in this novel with crossover appeal for all ages.

In a fallen kingdom, one girl carries the key to discovering the secrets of her nation’s past—and unleashing the demons that sleep at its heart. An epic fantasy series inspired by the mythology and folklore of ancient China.

Once, Lan had a different name. Now she goes by the one the Elantian colonizers gave her when they invaded her kingdom, killed her mother, and outlawed her people’s magic. She spends her nights as a songgirl in Haak’gong, a city transformed by the conquerors, and her days scavenging for what she can find of the past. Anything to understand the strange mark burned into her arm by her mother in her last act before she died.

The mark is mysterious—an untranslatable Hin character—and no one but Lan can see it. Until the night a boy appears at her teahouse and saves her life.

Zen is a practitioner—one of the fabled magicians of the Last Kingdom. Their magic was rumored to have been drawn from the demons they communed with. Magic believed to be long lost. Now it must be hidden from the Elantians at all costs.

When Zen comes across Lan, he recognizes what she is: a practitioner with a powerful ability hidden in the mark on her arm. He’s never seen anything like it—but he knows that if there are answers, they lie deep in the pine forests and misty mountains of the Last Kingdom, with an order of practitioning masters planning to overthrow the Elantian regime.

Both Lan and Zen have secrets buried deep within—secrets they must hide from others, and secrets that they themselves have yet to discover. Fate has connected them, but their destiny remains unwritten. Both hold the power to liberate their land. And both hold the power to destroy the world. 

Now the battle for the Last Kingdom begins.

A centuries-long peace is shattered in a matriarchal society when a decade passes without a single girl being born in this sweeping epic fantasy that’s perfect for fans of Robin Hobb and Circe.

Five hundred years of peace between queendoms shatters when girls inexplicably stop being born. As the Drought of Girls stretches across a generation, it sets off a cascade of political and personal consequences across all five queendoms of the known world, throwing long-standing alliances into disarray as each queendom begins to turn on each other—and new threats to each nation rise from within.

Uniting the stories of women from across the queendoms, this propulsive, gripping epic fantasy follows a warrior queen who must rise from childbirth bed to fight for her life and her throne, a healer in hiding desperate to protect the secret of her daughter’s explosive power, a queen whose desperation to retain control leads her to risk using the darkest magic, a near-immortal sorcerer demigod powerful enough to remake the world for her own ends—and the generation of lastborn girls, the ones born just before the Drought, who must bear the hopes and traditions of their nations if the queendoms are to survive.

From the breakout SFF superstar author of Murderbot comes a remarkable story of power and friendship, of trust and betrayal, and of the families we choose.

“I didn’t know you were a … demon.”
“You idiot. I’m the demon.”
—Kai’s having a long day in Martha Wells’s
Witch King

After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well.

But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence?

Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.

He’s not going to like the answers.

Witch King is Martha Wells’s first new fantasy in over a decade, drawing together her signature ability to create characters we adore and identify with, alongside breathtaking action and adventure, and the wit and charm we’ve come to expect from one of the leading writers of her generation.

~~~

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GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE: ISSUE 61, MARCH 2023—HIGHLIGHTS

Over at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, the Penultimate Issue #61 has been released this month. Here are some highlights:

Continue reading “GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE: ISSUE 61, MARCH 2023—HIGHLIGHTS”

GALAXY’S EDGE REVIEW ROUNDUP: JANUARY 2023

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.

BENDING, BLENDING, AND NEVERENDING

Station Eternity
by Mur Lafferty
Ace
October 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-09811-0

Mallory Viridian, P.I., has moved to a self-aware, alien space station because she happens to be too good at her job of solving murders. Her problem is the collateral damage that comes with her success: people close to her keep getting killed. She sees it as a jinx which she might only beat by living in an alien environment. But more humans arrive at the station, and more murders occur. What’s a private eye to do?

~~

The Terraformers
by Annalee Newitz
Tor
January 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-22801-7

I’ve been fascinated with the notion of terraforming since I first encountered it as a very young SF reader. Newitz seems to share that fascination at a number of levels: the reasons for doing it, the practical approaches to accomplishing such a task, and the questions more recently bounced around concerning the ethical nature of terraforming: if we make a planet more “earthlike,” do we mess with the natural ecology of the planet we propose to transform? Or even the natural ecology of space itself? We might declare a proposed planet lifeless or barren, but is it? By what standards do we measure the suitability of a planet to be terraformed? There is a great quote from a made-up environmental rescue team handbook used as an epigram: “Rivers might turn out to be people. Don’t make any assumptions.”

And these questions are very much at the heart of the novel, explored mostly from the perspective of Newitz’s protagonist, Destry. Her family has overseen the terraforming of the planet Sask-E for generations, and the responsibility has now fallen upon her. At a crucial moment, it is discovered that a volcano contains more than the usual exogeological “stuff”: a whole city—a populated city, too.

~~

The Daughter of Dr. Moreau
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Del Rey
July 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35533-6

I will not pretend that I “understand” this miraculous novel—not yet at least. But I may pay it what Vladimir Nabokov considered the highest compliment any reader can give any novel: I was­—am—enchanted by it.

In no way is it a sequel or follow-up or updating, or even a retelling, of that darkest of H. G. Wells’s scientific fables, The Island of Dr. Moreau. The skeleton of the novel is there, moved to a different place and time. An eccentric scientist is conducting research on an estate in the secluded jungles, aided by an overseer named Montgomery Laughton. Moreau’s daughter, Carlota, also lives there. Moreau thinks the isolation is good for her nerves, though the evidence argues otherwise. Along with some servants and a couple of occasional visitors, the only other occupants of the estate are the “hybrids.”

~~

Deathless Gods
by P. C. Hodgell
Baen
October 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9216-7

And in her latest novel, Deathless Gods, you can find yourself recognizing contemporary concerns and attitudes in the midst of a world that otherwise seems so far away from our own, yet does so without conceding to giving characters contemporary idioms or attitudes.

The plot, as usual, is too dense to be summarized here with any justice, but be assured that Hodgell’s storytelling skills will keep you from becoming lost.

~~

Penric’s Labors
by Lois McMaster Bujold
Baen
November 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9224-2

This book, however, seems a good place to start for uninitiated fantasy readers (science fiction readers will need to look elsewhere). Besides, it’s not a novel, but three novellas, and they’re not tied together like the old “fixups” of days of yore. I love novellas, and these especially.

This is the third collection (if I’m counting correctly) devoted to the sorcerer Learned Penric and his temple demon Desdemona. Penric may be no Miles Vorkosigan (but then who is?) but he is an affable, compelling, and fully engaging character. He doesn’t hold a candle to Desdemona, though. The interplay between them would make enjoyable reading enough, but Bujold has engineered these three novellas with more than requisite thrills and wit. Each novella builds on the previous one to expand upon our understanding and appreciation of “Pen and Des” and their world. I can only imagine new readers becoming thoroughly captivated with her storytelling here.

~~

Gunfight on Europa Station
edited by David Boop
Baen
November 2022 (mass market; fp November 2021)
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9227-3

David Boop has gathered some fine work here. Funny, exciting, suspenseful, meditative—a great variety of styles and content. All good stuff. I’m especially fond of Boop’s own contribution, “Last Stand at Europa Station A,” and the stories by Elizabeth Moon, Jane Lindskold, Alan Dean Foster, Martin L. Shoemaker, and Alex Shvartsman. Also of note, as a special favorite, is the collaboration by Cat Rambo and J. R. Martin, “Riders of the Endless Void.”

There’s something here for everyone.

Except my mom.

~~

Sword and Planet
edited by Christopher Ruocchio
Baen
September 2022 (mass market; first printing December 2021)
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9214-3

I started teaching a science fiction litf class last fall. Better late than never. One of the things I’ve discovered is that a significant contingent of my students believe that the term “science fiction” is indistinguishable, nay synonymous, with “space opera.” It has been my goal all term to disabuse them of this erroneous simplification.

However, if they’re going to read space opera, or a brand of it that resembles heroic fantasy with warp drives, and a copy of the David Hartwell- Kathryn Cramer-edited The Space Opera Renaissance isn’t handy, they can do worse than to dig into this compact and absorbing collection of original stories.

Yes, they are mashups of science and magic, but more often than not the science comes out on top, and in a satisfying (and often witty) way.

~~

The Dabare Snake Launcher
by Joelle Presby
Baen
November 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9225-9

Joelle Presby’s novel is about the construction and initial operation of the first space elevator, and it’s located in west Africa. “Dabarre,” we are told at the outset, is a Fulani term that means a piece of machinery fashioned from repurposed parts that either works perfectly—or not at all. So, some sense of the “stakes” is pretty clear as well. The voice and structure of the novel are fairly traditional, but it has a great cast of characters and is an exciting story, filled with all the wit and neat ideas we love to find in good science fiction. This novel left me feeling very optimistic. If not for the planet, then for the form of literature we love so much.

Copyright © 2022 by Richard Chwedyk.

~~~

Find the entire article at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine — where you can read for free until February 28th, 2023.

AND

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HOLIDAY READS: 5 SPECULATIVE BOOKS TO KICK OFF THE SEASON

Tis the Season here at Signals From the Edge, and since it’s the start of December (and several holiday celebrations), we figured what better to go with those twinkling lights than a few books full of wonder and speculation. So grab a gingerbread cookie or two, toss some marshmallows in your hot cocoa, wrap yourself up in your favorite blanket, and prepare to dive in …

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