Locus, August 2014
Page 7
Best Young Adult Novel went to The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente. Christopher Barzak accepted. ‘‘I cannot express how much it means to me that Fairyland continues to find people that love it and want to come along with me on the strange journey of these books.’’
Best Fantasy Novel went to The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Gary K. Wolfe once again accepted for Gaiman. ‘‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the only novel I’ve ever written accidentally. I thought I was writing a short story, but it just kept going…. It’s the most personal novel I’ve written. It wouldn’t exist without my family.’’
Liza Groen Trombi, Connie Willis; Liz Argall, Adam Rakunas
The Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel went to Abaddon’s Gate by James S.A. Corey, the pen name of collaborators Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck. James Patrick Kelly accepted, saying, ‘‘This is the third time we’ve been nominated for the Locus Awards and the first time we have been unable to attend their ceremony…. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the community of writers for the work that continues to both deepen the project of speculative fiction and broaden its reach to more readers. Also, to the readers and fans whose passion and enthusiasm carries us forward. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be a part of this conversation.’’
The awards ceremony was followed that evening by a celebration of Lucius Shepard, with Terry Bisson presiding. Bisson’s flight to Seattle was supported by a contributor fund. A roster of public donors is available at
Thanks to Norwescon and Arisia for their support and sponsorship, and to Leslie Howle, Doug & Pat Booze, Suzanne Tompkins and Clarion West, Liz Argall for live-tweeting the awards, Patricia Johnson of Clise Hotels, Duane Wilkins and Art Boulton of University Book Store, and most especially to MC Connie Willis for her continued generosity and efforts on behalf of the Locus Awards.
A selection of photos from the event follows.
–Patrick Wells and Francesca Myman
James Patrick Kelly reading at the Lucius Shepard Celebration; Christopher Barzak, Terry Bisson, Karen Joy Fowler; Rashida Smith, Kate Gentry
Hawai’ian Shirt Contest: Liza Groen Trombi, Connie Willis, David D. Levine, Janka Hobbs, Kathryn Hoppe, Cate R Siguenza, Andrew Siguenza, James Patrick Kelly, Greg Sardo, Chinelo Onwualu, Micaiah Huw Evans, Keffy Kehrli
Locus Awards Winners: Liza Groen Trombi (for Sheila Williams and Arnie Fenner), Gary K. Wolfe (for Neil Gaiman), James Patrick Kelly (for James S.A. Corey), Jason V Brock (for Caitlín R. Kiernan), Rashida Smith (for Ann Leckie), Claire Eddy (for Tor), Sally Harding (for Jeff VanderMeer), Anne Groell (for George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois), Leslie Howle (for Michael Whelan), Christopher Barzak (for Catherynne M. Valente), Eileen Gunn (for Ellen Datlow), Connie Willis
Keffy Kehrli wins the Hawai’ian shirt contest; Cate R & Andrew Siguenza; Kate Everitt, Siobhan Carroll, Randy Henderson
Clarion West Administrators: Micaiah Huw Evans, Caroline Bobanick; Clarion West Board of Directors: Vicki Saunders, Karen Anderson, Nisi Shawl, Tod McCoy, Felicia Gonzalez, Jeffrey Lemkin
Sunni & Jason V Brock, DeeAnn Sole, Curtis Chen, S.T. Joshi, William F. Nolan
T. Elizabeth Edwards & Brent Edwards; Don Glover, Miriah Hetherington; Pat Booze, Art Boulton
Janka Hobbs, Russell Ervin, Seelye Martin; Tod McCoy, Django Wexler; Anne Groell gets a Hawai’ian shirt
Francesca Myman, Keffy Kehrli, Curtis Chen, DeeAnn Sole, Misha Stone
Clarion West: Folly Blaine, Yang-Yang Wang, Julie Steinbacher, Anthony Bell, Ian Muneshwar, Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein, Shannon Fay, Michael Matheson, Christopher Carlson, Adanze Asante; kneeling: Sandra Monica Martins Reis Pinto, Chinelo Onwualu
Ted Chiang, Brooks Peck, James Patrick Kelly, Marc Laidlaw, Christopher Barzak, Karen Joy Fowler, Bob Kruger, Terry Bisson
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Readercon 25 was held July 10-13, 2014 in Burlington MA. Guests of honor were Andrea Hairston and Kit Reed; Mary Shelley was the memorial guest of honor. There were around 760 warm bodies attending, plus the 145 program participants, for a total of 905 attendees. The focus of Readercon is ‘‘imaginative literature’’ – literary science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the unclassifiable works often called ‘‘slipstream.’’ Programming was well attended as always, and on the whole insightful, delving into areas of interest to writers, editors, publishers, critics, and readers.
Readercon GoHs: Andrea Hairston, Kit Reed; David A. Kyle, Crystal Huff; James Morrow, Michael Dirda, John Clute, Gary K. Wolfe
The con was held in the usual hotel, the Boston Marriott Burlington Hotel, in Massachusetts, with weather proving to be strangely mild instead of its normal mid-summer humidity. The newly renovated hotel was spacious and open and adorned with a gas fire wall and a water wall. There was a good amount of gathering space, clever booth-like tables in the bar area, and several lounge nooks, but the open plan and hard surfaces led to an overly noisy atmosphere throughout the ground floor. This was exacerbated by live music every night, as well as a Saturday night ‘80s dance party, which precluded conversation in the bar for most of the evening. The available dining options felt greatly reduced from the days of having both the pub and Summer Winter, with only Chopps, the new restaurant, in place, though there were a number of new restaurants in the surrounding area.
Cameron McClure, Jennifer Jackson, Michael Curry; Brian Scott Staveley, Max Gladstone, Stephanie Neely
Programming featured over 100 hours of sessions with 146 program participants. The program guide listed 232 items: 89 solo and group author readings; 89 panels (with several book clubs) including 10 solo talks; 80 group panels; 18 kaffeeklatsches; 15 autographing sessions; three workshops; two guest of honor interviews (Andrea Hairston by Mikki Kendall, and Kit Reed by Gary K. Wolfe); the Shirley Jackson Awards; the Meet the Pros(e) Party; and the Most Readerconnish Miscellany show with MCs Carl Engle-Laird and Ada Palmer. The show raised over $1,000 in donations to be funneled to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and Operation Hammond. The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for an under-recognized author was presented by John Clute (standing in for Barry Malzberg) and went to Mildred Klinger. In addition to the official con events, there were a number of room parties, as well as a few book launches and celebrations held on the ground floor, including one for James Morrow’s latest novella The Madonna and the Starship and another for the Long Hidden anthology.
Joe Berlant, Paul Park, Deborah Brothers; Ben Loory, Robert Levy, Christopher Cevasco
As always, there were a large number of notable professionals in attendance, including Ellen Datlow, Samuel Delany, Junot Diaz, Michael Dirda, Greer Gilman, Theodora Goss, Elizabeth Hand & John Clute, Daryl Gregory, Eileen Gunn, Maria Dahvana Headley, Glen Hirschberg, Kameron Hurley, James Patrick Kelly, John Langan, Ben Loory, James Morrow, Paul Park, Mary Rickert, Sofia Samatar, Peter Straub, Michael Swanwick, and many more. Attending publishers included David G. Hartwell, Liz Gorinsky, Marco Palmieri, and Paul Stevens of Tor; Sheila Williams of Asimov’s; Gordon Van Gelder & Barbara Norton of F&SF; Kelly Link & Gavin Grant of Small Beer Books; Sean Wallace of Prime Books; Neil Clarke and Kate Baker of Clarkesworld; Jacob Weisman of Tachyon; Brett Savory of Chizine, etc. Locus was represented by Liza Groen Trombi and Gary K. Wolfe.
Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman, Cameron Robertson; Gordon Van Gelder, Warren Lapine; Sheila Williams, Paul Stevens; Jess Nevins, Liz Argall
The book room, comprising booksellers, publishers, and related organizations, seemed less crowded than usual, with attendees l
ooking through the collectible books and new titles from independent presses. There were 27 dealers on hand, including a number of small and independent presses. On Saturday, the Massachusetts General Hospital Bloodmobile supplied its services to Readercon for the Heinlein Society Blood Drive.
Readercon 26 is scheduled for July 9-12, 2015 at the Boston Marriott Burlington Hotel in Burlington MA. Guests of honor will be Nicola Griffith and Gary K. Wolfe, and Joanna Russ as the memorial guest of honor. Richard Duffy, Crystal Huff, Stefan Krzywicki, Kim Riek, and Emily Wagner make up the current board of directors. For more information about past years and next year’s events, see:
A selection of photos from the convention follows.
–Liza Groen Trombi
Brett Savory & Sandra Kasturi; Mikki Kendall, Chesya Burke, Samuel R. Delany, K. Tempest Bradford
F. Brett Cox, Mary Rickert; Ellen Datlow, James Patrick Kelly; David G. Hartwell, Daryl Gregory
Cecil Castellucci, Sam J. Miller, Shveta Thakrar, John Chu; Sean Wallace, Kate Baker; Liz Gorinsky, Grady Hendrix
Liz Argall, Kip Manley, Gabriel Squailia, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sofia Samatar, Matthew Kressel, Sam J. Miller
Jacob Weisman, Margot Atwell, Zak Zyz, Rina Weisman; Liz Gorinsky, Stephen Segal, Bo Bolander, Marco Palmieri, Valya Lupescu
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GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS
Reach for Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris) June 2014
Asimov’s 7/14
Asimov’s 8/14
I will be very surprised if Reach for Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, doesn’t turn out to be the strongest original SF anthology of 2014. Like its predecessors in this sequence of similarly themed anthologies, Engineering Infinity (2010) and Edge of Infinity (2012), Reach for Infinity is made up entirely of rock-solid core SF stories, most of them very good, some of them among the best stories of the year to date. If you like SF, believe me, you want this one.
Appropriately enough, most of the stories here deal with efforts to expand human society into space, to ‘‘reach for infinity.’’ As Strahan says, the idea of the anthology was to examine ‘‘how science fiction can address tomorrow, how we can respond to science itself, and how we might be able to retain an element of romance and optimism, without sacrificing the kind of realistic assessment our collective future needs from science fiction in the 21st century.’’ In this, I think he succeeds admirably – nothing here is bad, and even the most minor of the stories would probably be the major stories in most other original SF anthologies.
The best stories here are Ian McDonald’s ‘‘The Fifth Dragon’’, which tells a gripping story of love in the face of the harsh realities of life as immigrant workers on the Moon and confronts its characters with a heartbreaking choice, and Peter Watts’s ‘‘Hotshot’’, an extended examination of the age-old debate between determinism and free will that attempts to resolve the question once and for all by plunging its protagonist into the face of the Sun.
Also excellent are Aliette de Bodard’s ‘‘The Dust Queen’’, another in her long series of Xuya stories, taking place in the far-future of an alternate world where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires, this story concerned with the morality and consequences of memory editing; Ellen Klages’s ‘‘Amicae Aeternum’’, as eloquent an argument against setting forth for the stars on a generation ship as I’ve ever seen, and one poignant enough to make me want to yell at the young protagonist to run away and hide until it’s too late to go on board; Greg Egan’s ‘‘Break My Fall’’, a classic rescue-in-space story that features both an extremely ingenious method of crossing the solar system and an equally ingenious method of effecting the rescue itself; Alastair Reynolds’s ‘‘In Babelsberg’’, the tale of a robot/AI, newly returned from deep space, and making a promotional tour on the talk-show circuit, who runs afoul of some unexpected competition; Pat Cadigan’s ‘‘Report Concerning the Presence of Seahorses on Mars’’, which take a sly look at an unusual form of rebellion against Terran authority brewing amongst the colonists of Mars; Kathleen Ann Goonan’s ‘‘Wilder Still, the Stars’’, an account of a woman’s dangerous struggle to rescue artificial people who have been abandoned on the street after their usefulness is past, and who just may turn out to be the key to the future (there’s a hint of Theodore Sturgeon’s ‘‘Baby Is Three’’ here, and unlike the Klages, Goonan paints leaving on a generation ship as a desirable outcome, the way it’s most typically portrayed in science fiction); and Karl Schroeder’s ‘‘Khledyu’’, about a superstructure that could help to alleviate some of the effects of global climate change, but which in the wrong hands has the potential to make things disastrously worse. Reach for Infinity also includes strong stories by Adam Roberts, Karen Lord, Linda Nagata, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Ken Macleod, most of which would have been standouts in weaker company.
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Some good stuff in both the July and August issues of Asimov’s, although July is perhaps the strongest overall. The best stories in July are probably Karl Bunker’s melancholy ‘‘The Woman from the Ocean’’, in which a woman crash-lands back on Earth after a long voyage out to the stars, to find that the human race has changed in subtle but profound ways while she was gone, and Robert Reed’s ‘‘Blood Wedding’’, in which Reed visits territory that George R.R. Martin made famous with his Red Wedding sequence, as guests at a high-profile celebrity wedding in a high-tech future suffer a deadly attack to which they must respond in ways indicative of their various natures, all of which reveal something of the radical changes that have transformed human society. Also good in July is Allen M. Steele’s ‘‘The Legion of Tomorrow’’, examining a fateful meeting between young fans that takes place at the first World Science Fiction Convention in the ’30s, and its ultimate consequences in the present day. For those interested in the early history of science fiction and science fiction fandom, this will be a fascinating exercise in nostalgia; for those who aren’t interested in such, it may be a bit slow – I myself wondered why the Big Revelation couldn’t have been successfully made to the protagonist during her first meeting with the Legion, rather than dragging it out over a period of months. Taking science fiction and science fiction writers as its subject matter, it would be possible to argue that ‘‘The Legion of Tomorrow’’ isn’t really SF itself, as it has no real fantastic element; most SF readers will probably enjoy reading it, though.
Also fun in July is Sandra McDonald’s ‘‘Story of Our Lives’’, told in a breezy, entertaining voice, about gag reviews of movies which don’t exist at the time of the review but later actually come into existence, and the effect this seemingly prophetic ability has on a group of friends; M. Bennardo’s ‘‘How Do I Get to Last Summer from Here?’’, a light-hearted story about a wave of involuntary time-travel, not explained but apparently fueled by nostalgia, that sweeps society and causes people to disappear for brief periods into the past; and Alexander Jablokov’s ‘‘The Instructive Tale of the Archeologist and His Wife’’, which investigates the courtship and academic career of an archeologist in what presumably is the distant future of our own world, although one from which all traces of our present and past seems to have been erased. How or why or by whom is never revealed, and since the archeologist himself only has the dimmest of intuitions that this might be the case, it’s somewhat frustrating that no answers to these questions, or even hints about them, are supplied in the course of the story, which makes it all seem a bit, er, academic.
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The most entertaining story in the August Asimov’s is new writer Jay O’ Connell’s ‘‘Of All Possible Worlds’’, a story that has some points of similarity with the Steele story in the July issue, evoking the old days of science fiction history, and even using one-time Analog editor John W. Campbell, Jr. as an (off-screen) character. This one has a much stronger fantastic element, though, as a hapless tenant slowly becomes embroiled
, step by step, in the affairs of his reclusive old landlord, who turns out to be much, much more than the semi-delusional drunken old hoarder he initially seems – a figure who, in fact, rewrites the history of multiple alternate worlds, and is engaged in a struggle to save our own timeline, which the protagonist of course gets dragged into. For anyone knowledgeable about 20th-century pseudoscience, particularly of stuff championed by John W. Campbell, this is a delight, presenting us in due course with Orgone Boxes, Hieronymus Machines, and the Dean Drive – there’s even a scene dealing with an attempt to put the Dean Drive into a submarine to transform it into an instant spaceship, a notion ridiculed in a once well-known satirical fannish song rumored to have been written by Damon Knight. The protagonist, and the story, end up neck-deep in metaphysical realms of the most cosmic sort possible, and it gets a little blurry and hard to follow the action toward the end, but the story is exuberant, energetic, and a lot of fun. Also good in the August issue is new writer Doug C. Souza’s ‘‘Mountain Screamers’’, a straightforward YA story about a young boy helping his scientist grandma (a tough, competent, and no-nonsense old bird, very much a Heinlein character) manage a program to transplant mountain lions to an alien world that’s to serve as a planet-wide nature reserve. Grandma’s hidden agenda in all this is also very Heinleinesque, as is the corrupt bureaucrat who attempts to foil their plans; familiar territory, but well-handled and entertaining.
The rest of the stories in the August issue all seem to either have something to do with animals, like the Souza story, or with artificially created companions. They are two sub-themes that run throughout the issue, but most of them are also less successful than the O’Conell and the Souza. Jeremiah Tolbert’s ‘‘Wet Fur’’ gives us an unconvincing tale about dogs who have somehow been absorbed into some sort of nanotech cloud and who thereafter haunt humans who are about to die as benign canine ghosts, waiting to welcome them into the cloud as well, where, it is implied, they will all play some ghostly game of fetch together. Nick Wolven’s ‘‘Placebo’’ is about a man who, against his better judgment, allows himself to be persuaded to buy an artificially generated pet, with ultimately sad consequences that are easy enough to see coming, similar to the ones in Cat Rambo’s ‘‘All the Pretty Little Mermaids’’ from the March Asimov’s. Sarah Pinsker’s ‘‘The Low Hum of Her’’ is a variant of the golem story, about a girl whose father builds a robot grandmother for her, to replace the real one who died, and the comfort and emotional support it provides her as the family flees the Holocaust and attempts to settle down in a scary New World. This is the best story of the three, although it tries just a little too hard to be poignant. Nancy Kress’s ‘‘Writer’s Block’’, a reprint from my audio anthology Rip-Off! from last year, is a playfully metafictional story about a writer struggling to push through writer’s block who ends up with the ability to write the events of his own personal life. It’s minor Kress, but amusing.