Tag: Science fiction

GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE FINAL ISSUE: STORY TEASERS ~ PART I

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It was Mike Resnick’s hope in starting Galaxy’s Edge magazine that: “Most of the new stories are by less-well-know (but not less talented) authors.” In keeping with that spirit, our Editor Lezli Robyn filled this final, and extra-large issue ~ Issue Sixty-Two: May 2023 ~ with twenty-two spectacular stories.

This week we’re bringing you a taste, a teaser, an amuse-bouche of the first eleven stories of those stories, and our hope? That you’ll read on and find your next favorite author! ♥

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MOON AND SKY, FEATHER AND STONE
by Rebecca E. Treasure

Rebecca grew up reading in the Rockies and has lived in many places, including Japan & Germany. Rebecca’s short fiction has been published by or is forthcoming from Flame Tree, Zooscape Magazine, Galaxy’s Edge, and others. Fueled by cheese-covered starch and corgi fur, Rebecca is an editor at Apex Magazine and a writing mentor.

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Lora never fit where she was. When the moon bells rang and everyone’s eyes turned glassy, hers stayed dull and hollow. When Mother made blackberry tea, Lora snuck warm goat milk from the bucket. When Father sang the morning song and Ella cried with faith and passion, the music jangled in Lora’s ears.

The closest she’d ever been to belonging was right here, mud squishing between her toes and her little brother’s hand in hers as they prepared to jump.

Lora looked down into Oran’s eyes. “Ready?”

He shared her grin, nodding. They scrambled up the steep granite over the swimming hole, a miniature mountain. Their breathing deepened, drawing in delicate perfume from lilacs surrounding the clearing. Three steps—Lora shortened hers so they leapt together—and they flew.

Lora knew where she’d fit, but it was in a place she’d never been, with people who were not hers …

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THAT SUNDAY ON THE TRAIL WITH THE MEREST BREATH OF SEA
by Beth Cato

Nebula Award-nominated Beth Cato is the author of A Thousand Recipes for Revenge from 47North plus two fantasy series from Harper Voyager. She’s a Hanford, California native now residing in a far distant realm. Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato

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Rosamund had hopes that the family reunion wouldn’t completely suck after her mom told her it’d take place in Cambria, right on the California coast, but as Mom drove up a narrow winding road flanked by squished-tight houses, Rosamund’s enthusiasm withered up like a three-year-old raisin.

“Mom! I can’t even see the ocean!” Rosamund twisted around to look, the seatbelt strap threatening to strangle her.

“You’ll be able to smell the ocean from the camp, I’m sure. Now face forward.”

Rosamund flung herself around. “This is going to be awful. They don’t even like me.”

“Stop that. My family loves you.” Mom glanced at her in the rear-view mirror.

“But they think I’m a freak.”

Mom sighed and didn’t argue. Rosamund glowered out a window that showed only pines as the road dipped and snaked through a small patch of forest. A tall wooden archway, adorned with balloons, announced their arrival at Camp Carraway …

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THE LAND OF PERMUTATIONS
by Tatsiana Zamirovskaya
translated by Julia Meitov Hersey

Tatsiana Zamirovskaya is a writer from Belarus, who moved to Brooklyn in 2015. She writes metaphysical and socially charged fiction about memory, ghosts, hybrid identities, and borders between empires and languages. Tatsiana is the author of 3 short story collections and a novel about digital resurrection, The Deadnet, which was published in 2021 in Moscow, receiving great critical acclaim. She is also a journalist and essayist, writing about art, traumatic memories, dictatorships and dreams.

Born in Moscow, Julia Meitov Hersey moved to Boston at the age of nineteen and has been straddling the two cultures ever since. She spends her days juggling a full-time job and her beloved translation projects. Julia is a recipient of the Rosetta Science Fiction and Fantasy Award for Best Translated Work, long form (2021).

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A terrible rumbling noise woke us up at nine in the morning.

It was the field—our field.

We took off as soon as we heard it, obviously, because it was our field. Everything that happened there was ours, and only ours. That’s where Nielle and I met the brown earthen witch in her mushroom apothecary cap. That’s where, breathless with terror, I summoned the White Dog on the fifth moonrise, and the Dog came, and brought us ten-day-old pups in a basket, just for cuddles. Every day these pups, blind and sweetly hairless like dandelions after a storm, grew thinner, their skin more pink and transparent, until on the tenth day they morphed into a pile of quietly wiggling skin bubbles, and then the White Dog came and took them back into her womb. That’s where Nielle dug a grave for the forest devil and did such a great job that, when the forest devil died, he came and lay in his new grave because he had no other refuge, no other place to go. That’s where we searched for the meat fern flower on a July night, and eventually we found it and put it under Uncle Volodya’s pillow. The next morning he won the lottery—a three-room apartment somewhere on the outskirts of our town. He stays in that apartment drinking day and night, and now we know we should have put that flower under his ex-wife’s pillow, not his. It was our field, our feral, bloody, boggy, alive land, and our hair sat within it, and the amber half moons of our nails, our incantations, and the summer rhymes we composed for Death. (It was Nielle’s idea to write special verses for Death so She would stop by the edge of the field and listen for a moment. The verses were to have these special white spots, flickering agony, arrhythmical Cheyne-Stokes rattle, pools of cloudy morning water in lamb hooves, an attentive stare of a bewitched snipe at sundown—we couldn’t break the spell, but at least we tried.) …

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THE INCONSTANT HEART
by Kary English

Kary English is a Hugo and Astounding finalist whose work has been published by Galaxy’s Edge, The Grantville Gazette, Wordfire Press, Writers of the Future, and Tor Nightfire.

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Once upon a time in the spring of the world, a young man named Edwin set out to seek his fortune. Edwin’s coat was thin and threadbare, and his boots were more patches than leather. His purse held only a few small coins, but his back was strong and his heart was pure, so off he went into the wide world with a pack over one shoulder and his bow over the other. He walked for several days until the fields gave way to wilder lands, and the road dwindled to a dusty track. On the eve of the seventh day, he came across a cottage of wattle and daub nestled against the edge of a dark forest.

Night was falling. A chill wind out of the east sliced through Edwin’s coat like a scythe through wheat. His stomach rumbled, for he’d had nothing to eat or drink but water from a nearby stream. Warm firelight flickered through the cottage window, and when Edwin drew near, he could smell the cottager’s supper cooking inside. Barley stew, he thought, and bannocks baking on the hearth. If Edwin had heard even half the tales about enchanted forests and the misadventures of widow’s sons, he might have turned away from the cottage and slept on the cold ground instead …

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THE WEREWOLF
by Jonathan Lenore Kastin

Jonathan Lenore Kastin (he/they) is a queer, trans writer with an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His short stories can be found in On Spec and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, as well as the anthologies Ab(solutely) Normal, Transmogrify! and Queer Beasties.

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It was late April when Amelia realized that she was a werewolf. She was reading in her room one evening and as the moon came out from behind a cloud it fixed her with a pale, trembling beam of light. She froze at once, sniffed the wind, and took off her skin. Underneath grew a radiant coat of fur and one by one her senses came alive to the night.

The next day she tried to tell her mother.

“I’m a werewolf,” she said, picking leaves out of her golden hair.

Her mother patted her on the head. “That’s nice dear. Maybe Aunt Matilda will make you a costume for Halloween.”

“No,” said Amelia. “I’m a real werewolf. With fur and claws and everything.”

“Well,” said her mother. “As long as you don’t stay out in the woods too late.” She went back to her magazines …

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FRUITING BODIES
by Xauri’EL Zwaan

Xauri’EL Zwaan is a mendicant artist in search of meaning, fame and fortune, or pie (where available). Zie lives and writes in a little hobbit hole in Saskatoon, Canada on Treaty 6 territory with zir life partner and two very lazy cats.

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There was a strange plant in Mrs. Edgerington’s garden.

The plant looked like a tiny clamshell sprouting up out of the ground. It had a smooth surface, glistened with a dull silver sheen, and ended in a sharp knife-like ridge. It didn’t look like anything she had ever seen before. In fact, it hardly looked like a plant at all, though it certainly grew like one. Mrs. Edgerington had her grandson look on the internet to see what it was, but he couldn’t find anything matching the description. He told her she should dig it up and burn it, but Mrs. Edgerington liked weird plants, and she decided to let it grow and see what happened.

The plant slowly got bigger and bigger over the next few months. Neither water nor lack of water affected its rate of growth, nor did shade or sun. It eventually grew to about a foot in height and half a foot in width …

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XI BOX
by T. R. Napper

T. R. Napper is a multi-award winning science fiction author, including the Australian Aurealis twice. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous others, and been translated into Hebrew, German, French, and Vietnamese. Before turning to writing, T. R. Napper was a diplomat and aid worker, delivering humanitarian programs in Southeast Asia for a decade. During this period, he received a commendation from the Government of Laos for his work with the poor. He also was a resident of the Old Quarter in Hanoi for several years, the setting for his debut novel, 36 Streets. These days he has returned to his home country of Australia, where he works as a Dungeon Master, running campaigns for young people with autism for a local charity.

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The first thing Joshua Lee did was whisper his dreams into the Xi Box. Snatching up those fragments running around the plughole of his hippocampus, before they faded from view. Before they could be absorbed into the back fabric of his mind.

After his dreams, he confessed his feelings. His fears, mainly.

The little things, to start with. The Infected woman at work who’d accused Joshua of stealing her lunch. He’d told her no, even though he had; he’d eaten it all, container perched on his lap in a darkened file room. Then the slow-burning fear: he’d fail to pass probation in his new position. Corollary: the already unsustainable mortgage on their two-bedroom apartment burying them.

Then the biggest fear.

Jess would go over. That part of her wanted to become Infected. Like so many others. The simplicity of it, the relief of being able to join the Children of Heaven, though she would never admit it …

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KRISTIN, WITH CAPRICE
by Alan Smale

Alan Smale is the double Sidewise Award-winning author of the Clash of Eagles trilogy, and his shorter fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and numerous other magazines and original anthologies. His latest novel, Hot Moon, came out last year from CAEZIK SF & Fantasy. When he is not busy creating wonderful new stories, he works as an astrophysicist and data archive manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

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He did not ring the bell. Strange enough to have to knock on his own front door, when the key was in his pocket. He heard a strange bleating sound from within, quickly suppressed. Then footsteps, and his heart began to thump a little harder.

Kristin opened the door and stared at him. Her hair was in a bandanna and she wore an old softball tee-shirt. Around her eyes were traces of yesterday’s makeup. House-cleaning, then. Scrubbing away the last of him.

She looked so gorgeous he wanted to cry.

“I came for my things,” he said.

“If you’d called, I could have been out.” She stood aside to let him in. Reluctantly.

“That’s not necessary,” said Paul. “You don’t have to do that. You look great.”

“Yes, it is,” she replied. “Yes, I do. No, I really don’t. Your stuff’s in the spare room.” She walked into the kitchen and he heard the strange squeal again. Perhaps the sound of a sponge against the inside of the oven? …

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THE DREADNOUGHT AGAMEMNON, ON COURSE TO CONQUER THE PEACEFUL MOON OF RE
by Dafydd McKimm

Dafydd McKimm is a speculative short fiction writer whose stories have appeared in publications such as Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, Deep Magic, The Cafe Irreal, and elsewhere. He was born and raised in Wales but now lives in Taipei, Taiwan. You can find him online at www.dafyddmckimm.com

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As when an airship, streaming westward soon after dawn into the city, is silhouetted by the sun and dilates like a pupil as it makes its final approach with the slow, steady pace of massive things;

so the dreadnought Agamemnon, on course to conquer the peaceful moon of Re, awoke;

and as when you descend the gangway and take your first steps along the city’s arabesque of streets, not knowing where you are going, for you’ve never visited this city before and have no friends or place to stay or any idea of how to speak the language that permeates the air like the chatter of strange insects wherever you go, or what you will do now that you’re here, thinking for a moment that perhaps you should go back, back to where you came from and the safety of it, the security of its familiar pathways and customs, the blissful boredom of doing things the way you’ve been told for so long they’re second nature; but no, no, you’ll never go back to that—never—and so you walk on, wandering the city without a destination, not understanding a word, not knowing what food is good to eat or indeed how to ask for it, and even when you do manage to get something onto a plate in front of you, worrying that you might commit some awful impropriety so that those around you, those people who have known this city and the ways of this city from birth, will laugh at you and mock you as stranger, foreigner, and yet finding small comfort in knowing that at least your old life is behind you, that you have shed your past like the pale, translucent skin of a snake and can begin anew here, in this city, which is so beautiful, with its painted houses perched on forested hills and markets full of sweet temptations and patterned fabrics and parks dotted with statues of creatures from myths you’ve never heard of and noisy processions that pop and fizzle and chime with the ring and crash and keening of unfamiliar instruments and temples to so many different gods …

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PABLOVISION
by Deborah L. Davitt

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over fifty journals, including, F&SF, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her novels, poetry collections, and her recent chapbook, From Voyages Unending, please see www.edda-earth.com

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The object of backpacking through Europe in your twenties is to see strange things—or at least to look at the world through new eyes. You only get so many chances to paint old walls and ruined fortresses; to capture the patina of time itself.

Drew took a bus into Spain, figuring he would hike the Pyrenes while the weather remained good; the driver woke him in the gray of dawn and turfed him in a village that Drew’s phone informed him was Santa Pau. His phone further told him that the ancient walls he saw, which captured the dawn’s light so enchantingly, had been built in the thirteenth century.

Enraptured, he set up his easel in an out-of-the-way spot. He had charcoals with him, and he wanted to capture some of the spirit of this place, before he lost this magical moment. Maybe even mix some watercolors, try to catch the evanescent colors on paper so that when he had an opportunity to work on canvas later, it would be easier for his late-dreaming mind to recall what his eyes saw now …

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A FEAST OF MEMORIES
by R.D. Harris

R.D. Harris lives with his family of four in Arizona and works as a biomedical technician by day. He loves the Carolina Tarheels, time with his kids, and SpongeBob. His work has appeared in Little Blue Marble, Terraform[Motherboard], and Galaxy’s Edge magazine.

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We were hidden in his garden, where he wanted to die. The garden in our hollow where he taught me about life and how to be a man.

“Dad,” I said, tears blinding me, “you know where we are?”

His fading cognition and memory broke my heart. My hero and life-long role model couldn’t remember who I was half the time.

Eyes half-open, tired, Dad said, “On the ground,” with a mustered grin.

I couldn’t help but laugh. It was bittersweet, though, as the shimmering caterpillars squirmed from their vegetable meals to my dad’s girth atop the tilled soil. They scaled his body from all sides and froze on his stomach, waiting until it was time.

I cradled his half-bald head and whispered, “We’re in the garden like you wanted.” I kissed his forehead.

“The mimics?” he uttered, eyeing the larvae that patiently waited for him to pass on. Dad’s memory was serving him well. I hoped it would serve the mimics too …

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Last week we posted Mike Resnick’s very first Editor’s Word where he shared some colorful history on science fiction magazines. Now, join us next week when we hear from Mr. Resnick again as he regales us with stories about some of the writers and editors who made up our favorite fiction field.

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GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE: ISSUE 62, MAY 2023—HIGHLIGHTS

Over at Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, the FINAL Issue, #62 has been released! Here are some highlights:

Head over to grab a paper copy of the very last issue of Galaxy’s Edge HERE.

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THE EDITOR’S WORD
by Lezli Robyn

We’ve reached the last publication of Galaxy’s Edge in magazine format, and I have to share that it feels quite bittersweet. After ten years in print, 62 issues on our readers shelves, and a contract spreadsheet that boasts an incredible 692 drabble, flash fiction, short story, novelette, and novella entries, our bi-monthly magazine has published the breadth of science fiction and fantasy (with a generous pinch of horror!) by many of the newest and biggest names in the field.

As a gift for our readers, our last issue features double the fiction, with an impressive 22 stories—not unlike the number of stories an anthology would have! Since we’re converting this magazine into a semi-annual anthology series, I feel that coincidence is both an auspicious end and beginning!

While Jean Marie Ward usually does our interviews, for this last issue I had the pleasure of sitting down with Daniel Abraham in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and interviewing him about his solo writing career and how it diverges and intersects with his collaborative works as one half of James S A Corey, the author of The Expanse series. Our conversation evolved into the most interesting anatomy of a career, and I’ve no doubt that readers will be as drawn in as I was by how unique (and yet incredibly relatable) Daniel’s path to publication and success has been.

Richard Chwedyk lowers the curtain on his Recommended Books column with his usual keen insight and conversational flare, and Alan Smale and L. Penelope return with one last entry to their own columns. The rest of the magazine is overflowing with fiction (including one by the aforementioned Alan Smale!), with stories covering the gamut of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and humor.

This issue opens with the empowering “Moon and Sky, Feather and Stone” novelette by Rebecca E. Treasure, about a young woman who wishes she could literally fly away from the oppressions in her life and join the Sky Maidens. Does she have what it takes to prove her worth—to the Sky Matrons and herself? In Marissa Tian’s “The Woman at the Lake,” Kang is put through the most profound trial of his life when he stops to help a woman trapped by vines. This breathtakingly haunting tale shines an eerie light on historic inequality of the sexes, and the promises that bind us.

Equally evocative is Deborah L. Davitt’s “Pablovision,” about the magical consequences one man’s artistic vision has on the inhabitants of Santa Pau, Spain, and another’s desire to reverse it. Auston Habershaw’s “Planned Obsolescence” will also delight readers with its completely alien cast of characters. What is an assassin to do when his client refuses to pay for services rendered on a new frontier world where the native species are gigantic arachnids?

If a dash of humor with your dark fantasy is more your cup of (possibly poisoned) tea, then go no further than “Carrion” by Storm Humbert. To avoid spoilers, I can’t say too much, but let’s just say this story is a testament to perseverance. If you are wanting a splash of romance with your science fiction, you’ll be thoroughly enchanted by Stewart C Baker’s “Six Ways to Get Past the Shadow Shogun’s Goons, and One Thing to Do When You Get There,” which depicts the delightfully flirtatious conversation between two warriors while they’re being repeatedly attacked by the Shogun’s many goons.

While I would love to talk about the rest of the stories, this editorial can only be so long.

I can’t help but feel that saying farewell to the magazine is to finally say goodbye to Mike Resnick, my mentor, my good friend. In a way, taking over editing Galaxy’s Edge from him had kept a big part of him alive for me. (Apparently, the magazine is finding it equally difficult to part ways, because when I was finalizing this typeset it inexplicably glitched and deleted hours worth of work, clearly wanting us to spend more time together.)

Although I’m sad to see the magazine end, it’s only happening because we’re converting Galaxy’s Edge into an anthology series that will enable us to reach even more readers in brick-and-mortar bookstores. I’m happy and excited to see where this change takes us, and while I invite you all on this new journey with us, I also want to acknowledge the two most important people to have worked on this magazine: Shahid Mahmud and Mike Resnick. Without Shahid to fund and support this crazy venture, and Mike’s passion for helping new writers, this wonderful, decade-long market for authors would have never existed.

And, because of them both, I know the Galaxy’s Edge anthology series and The Mike Resnick Memorial Award will continue the legacy of “paying it forward” to the next generation of writers and readers.

Editor, signing off.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR ISSUE 62

MOON AND SKY, FEATHER AND STONE by Rebecca E. Treasure
THAT SUNDAY ON THE TRAIL WITH THE MEREST BREATH OF SEA by Beth Cato
THE LAND OF PERMUTATIONS by Tatsiana Zamirovskaya, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey
THE INCONSTANT HEART by Kary English
THE WEREWOLF by Jonathan Lenore Kastin
FRUITING BODIES by Xauri’EL Zwaan
XI BOX by T. R. Napper
KRISTIN, WITH CAPRICE by Alan Smale
THE DREADNOUGHT AGAMEMNON, ON COURSE TO CONQUER THE PEACEFUL MOON OF RE by Dafydd McKimm
PABLOVISION by Deborah L. Davitt
A FEAST OF MEMORIES by R.D. Harris
FIVE STAGES OF WHEN THE STARS WENT OUT by Samantha Murray
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE by Auston Habershaw
PROBABLY THE MOST AMAZING KISS EVER by Robert P. Switzer
MERCY by Stephen Lawson
THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN by Mike Resnick
THE BLEEDING MOON by Monte Lin
SLOW BLOW CIRCUIT by Lisa Short
SIX WAYS TO GET PAST THE SHADOW SHOGUN’S GOONS, AND ONE THING TO DO WHEN YOU GET THERE by Stewart C Baker
CARRION by Storm Humbert
THE WOMAN OF THE LAKE by Marissa Tian
YANG FENG PRESENTS—THE BLACK ZONE: MURDER IN THE LOCKED ROOM by Fu Qiang, translation by Roy Gilham

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FROM WORKSHOP STORIES TO ROLE-PLAYING YOUR WAY INTO SUCCESS: GALAXY’S EDGE INTERVIEWS DANIEL ABRAHAM
by Lezli Robyn

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Daniel in a gorgeous casita in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to discuss his career before we headed out to dinner with friends. Not only was there a lot of laughter and warmth—and fun random side tangents to our conversation that won’t make this interview (sorry!)—but I was reminded anew how one seemingly small event can really change a person’s life. Daniel’s down-to-earth attitude about his own career really gave me a window into someone who seemingly applies himself to everything with an almost casual ease belying his boundless talent and dedication. It makes this a very inspiring conversation for new authors when they realize that many of the early steps needed to create bestselling novels and successful TV shows are both relatable and achievable—if the stars also align the right way.

Galaxy’s Edge: Your first short story publication, “Mixing Rebecca,” was in 1996.

Daniel Abraham: It was!

GE: How did your career start? What made you write that story?

DA: I had been getting rejection slips. Everyone collects their rejection slips—I was in that phase of my career. The editor of The Silver Web had turned down one of my earlier stories, but with a personalized rejection letter and some commentary, and she had mentioned that she was putting together a music episode specifically of The Silver Web. And so I was thinking, “Okay, I’ll write a weird music story,” and that was “Mixing Rebecca.” That story was done to order, with a particular audience in mind, and with the encouragement of Ann Kennedy, who has since become Ann VanderMeer. So Ann VanderMeer is the person who bought my first short story.

GE: That’s a wonderful first step in your career.

DA: It was, you know. And the weird thing about “Mixing Rebecca”: I got a very strange reaction to it from a particular person. The story is about a sound engineer who overcomes her shyness by sampling somebody and mixing the song of their life. So that’s how she’s overcoming anxiety. And the woman who she’s mixing is named Rebecca. Several months after it got published, I got this email from a guy who was a sound engineer who had just finished an album called Rebecca Remix. His name is Daniel Abraham.

GE: Are you serious?

DA: I’m completely serious …

TO READ THE REST OF THIS INTERVIEW — HEAD OVER TO GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE

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RECOMMENDED BOOKS
by Richard Chwedyk

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.

TO READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN — HEAD OVER TO GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE

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TURNING POINTS
by Alan Smale

THE MONGOL HORDE

The Mongol steppe of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century was a brutal landscape, rife with violence. The young Temujin could have died in any one of a dozen ways, or a hundred. He was taken prisoner and even enslaved several times in his adolescence and young adulthood, and might well have lived out his life in quiet captivity, assuming he escaped death at the hands of his brothers or other local chieftains. Instead, Temujin grew up to become a cunning and charismatic warlord who conquered and united the disparate tribes of Mongolia, and then—as Chinggis Khan—led a series of brilliant, notorious, and bloody military campaigns abroad, conquering much of what we know today as China and lands west throughout Asia. At the time of his death in 1227 AD the Mongol Khan’s empire spanned four and a half million square miles, from the Caspian Sea to the Sea of Japan. His direct descendants continued to conquer and assimilate for the rest of the thirteenth century, doubling the size of this empire and transforming Eurasia forever.

This was surely one of the biggest turning points in Old World history. Or perhaps more accurately, a sheaf of turning points that played out differently in each of the various countries and territories affected, and in multiple ways.

It was also completely unpredictable. No one living at the turn of the thirteenth century could have had the slightest inkling of the calamities and transformations that were on their way.

All set in motion by one man …

TO READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN — HEAD OVER TO GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE

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LONGHAND
by L. Penelope

USING MYTHOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN YOUR WORLDBUILDING

Fantasy readers love nothing more than to sink, eyeballs first, into an immersive, well-crafted story world and live there for a while experiencing all the adventures and heartbreaks, the highs and lows of a fictional character. Worldbuilding is critical in bringing these imagined worlds to life. Carefully crafting an immersive setting requires considering the development and impact of everything from art to fashion, language, culture, geography, biology, and economics. Virtually every field of study or inquiry in our lives can be reflected in a fantasy world.

But even as authors allow our creativity to take us into far-flung invented lands, we still need to ensure our readers are grounded with familiar touch points. One tried and true way to do this is to base the imagined and fantastical on elements of the real world. Cultural storytelling practices such as myths and legends are significant fodder for fantasy worldbuilding.

The ability to tell stories is part of what makes us human. As we evolved, we told one another tales of magic and wonder, of gods and monsters and magical creatures, so it’s little wonder that we’re fascinated with these topics to this day. Myths are generally stories told to explain the world around us. Folklore often helps to acculturate us to our society. Legends purport to be historical accounts of inspiring or noteworthy figures or events, while fairytales make the fanciful come alive close to home. Together, they offer endless raw material for crafting intricate histories, identities, and cultures.

But how do we go about incorporating these kinds of tales from the real world into our invented ones? The first step is to carefully select your source of inspiration. Start with the stories passed down in your own family, or search your own regional folklore, religion, ethnicity, and culture …

TO READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN — HEAD OVER TO GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE

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

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 …

~~~

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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The Reinvented Anthologies: a conversation with Cat Rambo & Jennifer Brozek (revisited)

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 …

~~~

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 …

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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.

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

AND

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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 …

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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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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” →

CROP CIRCLES: MYTH & MYSTERY

For those who believe, no evidence is necessary.
For those who do not, none will suffice.

—Stuart Chase

Massive, geometrical, elaborate, controversial … all these words have been used to describe the phenomena of Crop Circles. Strange designs pressed into crop fields, they range from simple circles to elaborate pictograms, some of which extend up to thousands of feet and acres of land.

Whether one believes that Crop Circles are associated with UFO activity, are messages from extraterrestrials, or prefers to find solace in the idea that all of these are man-made and nothing more than hoaxes; we think it’s fair to say that we can agree: Crop Circles are real. That is … they really do appear, and the fields of corn and grain are just another canvas on which some stunning pieces of art are created.

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Each summer, the Wiltshire countryside is host to the crop circle phenomenon. The county, with its fields of rape, barley, and wheat, is one of the most active areas for crop circles in the world, particularly around the historical stones of Avebury and Silbury Hill.

A crop circle in a field at Roundway, Wiltshire, created on 29 April, 2009.

The 2009 season began with an unprecedented six formations in April. Michael Glickman, an expert on the phenomena, said: “I’ve seen the odd [crop circle] in rape fields previously but this year I know of 11 giant yellow circles that have appeared this month alone. The crop is tougher and more brittle than corn or barley so it’s mind-boggling to think how the intricate designs have been made.”

A crop circle in a field at Clatford, Wiltshire, created on 4 May, 2009.

The phenomenon peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s, but continues today. An average of 30 crop circles appear each year in the UK, around 80% of them in Wiltshire

Crop Circle in a field at Roundway Hill, Wiltshire, created on 10 May, 2009.

One online alien “fact” site states that 85% percent of the world’s crop circles appear in England near Stonehenge. While we couldn’t find anything to back up that statement, a lot of Crop Circles do appear in England, and many along ley lines and sacred sites.

The circles can take the shape of DNA structures, scorpions, snowflakes, helices, webs, knots and complex geometric patterns.

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As the number of crop circles has grown, so has the mythology surrounding them.

Some invoke the theory of ley lines: mystical seams of spiritual energy that intersect at sacred sites like Avebury and Stonehenge.

More than 10,000 crop circle formations have been documented in over 50 countries.

“Others claim that the circles are created by an extra-terrestrial intelligence attempting to warn humanity about climate change, nuclear war and similar existential threats.”

Some circles are said to have been created by magnetic fields. Prominent crop circle researcher, Colin Andrews, said there’s a possibility that about 20% of designs are created by natural forces. This means that fluctuations in Earth’s natural magnetic forces electrocuted the crops, causing them to collapse and fall into shapes called ‘Fractal Patterns’. Research into this has shown readings of magnetic fields around circle matched the shape of the design.

“One even appeared in May 2020 in the shape of a coronavirus, leading some to speculate that crop circles are trying to give us clues about immunology and Covid-19.”

Orbs of light often appear near crop circles, either directly before or during when the circles appeared. This has led many to believe that the orbs of light are responsible for creating the patterns in the crops. Although, it has been noted that thousands of crop circles appear without lights seen.

Among those who discount the alien hypothesis, a common theory is that human circle makers “tap into” some kind of collective consciousness, perhaps explaining the prevalence in crop circles of universal mathematical patterns that also occur in nature – the fractal branching of snowflakes and blood vessels and spiraling shells

It’s true, many crop circles have outright been proven a hoax (as in man-made and not created by a supernatural force). One of the main methods is the “Bend Test,” as obvious crop circle hoaxes usually have the stems of the crops broken and snapped into place.

The community of seekers who devote their time to researching the paranormal possibilities of crop circles are known as “croppies”.

With other unexplained crop circles, a bend is found to have been made near the plant’s first node—a bend that is caused by extreme heat which then causes the stem to soften and bend rather than break. Although, the source of such intense heat remains a mystery.

Chief among these “croppies” is Monique Klinkenbergh, who established the Crop Circle Exhibition & Information Centre, in the Wiltshire village of Honeystreet.

This tiny hamlet has become an unlikely hub for paranormal research; in addition to the exhibition center, it is home to the Barge Inn, where croppies gather to swap reports of new crop circles and speculate on their origins.

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*fun facts from BBC Travel
*Some of the pictures

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5 SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS BY BLACK AUTHORS

February is well and truly upon us now, and as we hurtle toward spring we wanted to take a moment to pause and realize that: this month represents more than just our march out of the cold toward new growth—February is also Black History Month in the United States.

Black History Month is a time to honor the contributions and legacy of African Americans across U.S. history and society—from activists and civil rights pioneers, to leaders in industry, politics, science, culture and more.

Black History Month 2023 Theme

Since 1976, when American president has designated February as Black History Month, they’ve also endorsed a a specific theme for each year.

The Black History Month theme for 2023 is: “Black Resistance.” Which explores how African Americans have resisted historic and ongoing oppression, in all forms, since the nation’s earliest days. 

Could one think of a more powerful way to Resist and be Heard, than through the written word, and the telling of stories that sing in our hearts? After all—as Edward Bulwer-Lytton so aptly put it—”The pen is mightier than the sword.”

Read on to discover some of these voices, in 5 must-read Science Fiction books from Black authors and editors who continue to pull us into their worlds of magic and adventure.

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Who Fears Death

by Nnedi Okorafor

—An award-winning literary author presents her first foray into supernatural fantasy with a novel of post-apocalyptic Africa.

In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different. She names her daughter Onyesonwu, which means “Who Fears Death?” in an ancient African tongue.

Reared under the tutelage of a mysterious and traditional shaman, Onyesonwu discovers her magical destiny – to end the genocide of her people. The journey to fulfill her destiny will force her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture – and eventually death itself.

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Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from The African Diaspora

Edited by Sheree R. Thomas

—This volume introduces black science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers to the generations of readers who have not had the chance to explore the scope and diversity among African-American writers.

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The City We Became: A Novel

by N.K. Jemisin

—Three-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts her most incredible novel yet, a “glorious” story of culture, identity, magic, and myths in contemporary New York City.

Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city.
Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She’s got five.
But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.

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Africa Risen

Edited by Sheree Renee Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight

—From an award-winning team of editors comes an anthology of thirty-two original stories showcasing the breadth of fantasy and science fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora.

A group of cabinet ministers query a supercomputer containing the minds of the country’s ancestors. A child robot on a dying planet uncovers signs of fragile new life. A descendent of a rain goddess inherits her grandmother’s ability to change her appearance—and perhaps the world.

Created in the legacy of the seminal, award-winning anthology series Dark Matter, Africa Risen celebrates the vibrancy, diversity, and reach of African and Afro-Diasporic SFF and reaffirms that Africa is not rising—it’s already here.

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The Black God’s Drums

by P. Djeli Clark

—Rising science fiction and fantasy star P. Djèlí Clark brings an alternate New Orleans of orisha, airships, and adventure to life in his immersive debut novella The Black God’s Drums.

Creeper, a scrappy young teen, is done living on the streets of New Orleans. Instead, she wants to soar, and her sights are set on securing passage aboard the smuggler airship Midnight Robber. Her ticket: earning Captain Ann-Marie’s trust using a secret about a kidnapped Haitian scientist and a mysterious weapon he calls The Black God’s Drums.

But Creeper keeps another secret close to heart–Oya, the African orisha of the wind and storms, who speaks inside her head and grants her divine powers. And Oya has her own priorities concerning Creeper and Ann-Marie…

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KINDRED: QUESTION THE TIES THAT BIND THROUGH TIME

While this TV show premiered in December, if you haven’t watched yet, then there’s no time like this minute to join us in celebrating Black History Month, and that these long winter days are drawing to a close, by snuggling up on the sofa of an evening and digging into some Sci-Fi TV show drama.

Kindred, Octavia E. Butler’s celebrated and critically acclaimed novel, has been adapted for television by writer and showrunner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. This American Science Fiction TV Mini Series—available to watch on Hulu—at 8 episodes long, is perfectly binge worthy.

From FX/Hulu: Adapted from the celebrated novel Kindred, by Hugo Award-winner Octavia E. Butler, the FX series centers on “Dana James” (Mallori Johnson), a young Black woman and aspiring writer who has uprooted her life of familial obligation and relocated to Los Angeles, ready to claim a future that, for once, feels all her own. But, before she can settle into her new home, she finds herself being violently pulled back and forth in time. She emerges at a nineteenth-century plantation, a place remarkably and intimately linked with Dana and her family. An interracial romance threads through Dana’s past and present, and the clock is ticking as she struggles to confront secrets she never knew ran through her blood, in this genre-breaking exploration of the ties that bind.

Kindred stars Mallori Johnson as “Dana James,” Micah Stock as “Kevin Franklin,” Ryan Kwanten as “Thomas Weylin,” Gayle Rankin as “Margaret Weylin,” Austin Smith as “Luke,” David Alexander Kaplan as “Rufus Weylin,” Sophina Brown as “Sarah” and Sheria Irving as “Olivia.”

Watch the TV show trailer HERE.

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And when you’ve finished the show but still want more … this worthwhile TV show is backed up by an even better novel. (yessss!)

The TV show Kindred is adapted from the celebrated 1979 novel of the same name, written by Hugo Award Winner Octavia E. Butler.

“Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare magical artifact … the novel one returns to, again and again.” —Harlan Ellison

—A Good Morning America 2021 Top Summer Read Pick

The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.

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