IN THIS ISSUE
April 2013 • Issue 627 • Vol. 70 • No. 4
46th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman
Interviews
Terry Bisson: Personal Alternate History
Libba Bray: Eco-Friendly Fembot Who Survives on the Tears of Teen Girls
People and Publishing
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Alex Bledsoe, Ginjer Buchanan and Carl Sagan, Cherie Priest, Elizabeth Bear, Terry Pratchett, and many others.
Main Stories
Kiernan and Salaam Win Tiptree Awards • 2012 Kitschies Winners • 2013 Philip K. Dick Award Judges • SFWA vs. Hydra • Antitrust Settlement Update • DRM Lawsuit • 2012 Stoker Awards Final Ballot • Riggio Offers to Buy B&N
The Data File
First Sale Doctrine Upheld • Hyperion Selling Backlist • Mythic Delirium Moves Online • Legal News • Awards News • World Conventions News • Contest News • Bookstore News • Publishing News • Announcements • Books Sold Continued • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights • Audiobooks Received • Publications Received • Catalogs Received
Features
2012 British Book Summary
Boskone 2013
San Francisco Writers Conference and 46th International Antiquarian Book Fair
Spotlight on Caniglia, Artist
Spotlight on Ken Liu, Author
Locus Looks at Books
Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois
Asimov’s 2/13; Lightspeed 1/13; Lightspeed 2/13; Eclipse Online 2/13; F&SF 3-4/13.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton
Eclipse Online 2/13; Interzone 1-2/13; Beneath Ceaseless Skies 2/17/13; Strange Horizons 2/13; Apex 2/13; Lightspeed 3/13; Shimmer #16; Cosmos 2-3/13; Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #55; Aurealis #57; Black Gate 2/13; Futuredaze, Hannah Strom-Martin & Erin Underwood, eds.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe
River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay; A Stranger in Olondria (Being the Complete Memoirs of the Mystic, Jevick of Tyom), Sofia Samatar; The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven, Jonathan Strahan, ed.; SHORT TAKE: Benchmarks Continued: The F&SF ‘‘Books’’ Columns, Volume 1, 1975-1982, Algis Budrys.
Reviews by Faren Miller
The Salt God’s Daughter, Ilie Ruby; Thunder Road, Chadwick Ginther; The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker; Short Take: Grail of the Summer Stars, Freda Warrington.
Reviews by Russell Letson
A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, Paul McAuley; GoodBye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, John Varley.
Reviews by Adrienne Martini
Etiquette & Espionage, Gail Carriger; Wool Omnibus, Hugh Howey; NOS4A2, Joe Hill; We are all completely beside ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler.
Short Reviews by Carolyn Cushman
Written in Red, Anne Bishop; Frost Burned, Patricia Briggs; Etiquette & Espionage, Gail Carriger; Deep Down, Deborah Coates; A Turn of Light, Julie E. Czerneda; Undead and Underwater, MaryJanice Davidson; Gameboard of the Gods, Richelle Mead; Midnight Blue-Light Special, Seanan McGuire.
Divers Hands: Reviews by Cecelia Holland, Karen Burnham, Gwenda Bond, and Tim Pratt
River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay; Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow; Level 2, Lenore Appelhans; The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, John Joseph Adams, ed.; Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution and Revolution, Victoria Blake, ed.; Tenth of December, George Saunders.
Locus Listens to Audiobooks by Amy Goldschlager
Red Country, Joe Abercrombie; The Alchemist and The Executioness, Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell; Rip-Off!, Gardner Dozois, ed.; City of Dark Magic, Magnus Flyte; Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone; Devil Said Bang, Richard Kadrey; The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman.
Listings
Magazines Received: February • Books Received: February • British Books Received: January • Bestsellers
New and Notable
Terry Bisson: This Month in History
Obituaries
Angel Arango • Appreciation by Grania Davis • Daniel Pearlman • Appreciation by Paul Di Filipppo • Richard E. Geis • Appreciation by Elton Elliott • David B. Silva • Appreciation by Paul F. Olson • Jan Howard Finder
Editorial Matters
Home and Abroad • Hugo Ballot • Locus Awards • Next Issue
Corrections
Photo List and Ad List
Masthead
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Terry Ballantine Bisson was born February 12, 1942 in Kentucky. After attending Grinnell College in Iowa from 1960-62, and batting around LA and NY, he received a BA from the University of Louisville in 1964. In 1962, he married Deirde Holst, mother of his two sons and daughter; they divorced in 1966. From 1966-70 he lived in New York with second wife Mary Corey, scripting comics and saucer tales for tabloids and serving as editor of Web of Horror and True Intimate Confessions. He left the city to join the Red Rockers commune in the Colorado mountains (world’s largest hippy-built geodesic dome!) and other communes in the West and South while working as an auto mechanic. He returned to New York in 1976, serving as an editor and copy chief at Berkley and Ace until 1985, when he became a full-time writer. Meanwhile he was active in the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee with his current wife Judy Jensen (with whom he raised another son and two daughters). In the mid-’90s he was a consultant at HarperCollins and Avon, and taught in the writing program at The New School in New York and at Clarion and Odyssey. He and Jensen moved to the Bay Area in 2002, where he edits the ‘‘Outspoken Authors’’ series for PM Press, and hosts the SF in SF reading series.
First novel Wyrldmaker appeared in 1981, followed by World Fantasy finalist Talking Man (1986) and Fire on the Mountain (1988). Other novels include Voyage to the Red Planet (1990), Pirates of the Universe (1990), The Pickup Artist (2001), and Any Day Now (2012). He completed the late Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997), and has co-written YA novels with Stephanie Spinner, written children’s books about NASCAR racing as ‘‘T.B. Calhoun,’’ produced numerous film and TV novelizations and media tie-ins, and written nonfiction titles, notably On A Move: The Story of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2001).
Bisson rose to prominence in the SF field with Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning story ‘‘Bears Discover Fire’’ (1990). Other notable short stories include Hugo finalists ‘‘Press Ann’’ (1991), ‘‘The Shadow Knows’’ (1993), ‘‘Dead Man’s Curve’’ (1994), ‘‘Get Me to the Church on Time’’ (1998); Nebula Award nominees ‘‘They’re Made out of Meat’’ (1991) and ‘‘Necronauts’’ (1995); Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula Award finalist ‘‘England Underway’’ (1993); Nebula Award winner and Hugo and Sturgeon finalist ‘‘macs’’ (1999); and novellas Dear Abbey (2003) and Planet of Mystery (2008). His short fiction has been collected in Bears Discover Fire (1993), In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories (2000), Numbers Don’t Lie (2003), Greetings & Other Stories (2005), Billy’s Book (2009), and TVA Baby (2011). The Left Left Behind (2009) includes the title story, a play, and an interview and autobiography.
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‘‘People used to say to me, ‘You were involved in the ’60s, the counterculture, the commune scene, the anti-war movement, the New Left and all that. You should write something about it.’ My answer was, ‘Me and a million others. Plus everybody knows how it all turned out, so what’s the point?’ Then one day I thought: What if it turned out differently? Any Day Now is definitely a science fiction novel, an alternate history, even though it’s more about political than
technological change. The only device in the book is the geodesic dome. It’s set in 1968, the ‘hinge of the ’60s,’ you might say (though the ’60s really started in the ’50s, the breaking wave of the postwar boom), and the ‘hinge’ of the novel is a disputed presidential succession. The idea was actually swiped from Philip Roth, who apparently never knew The Plot Against America was alternate history. He thought he invented the form!
‘‘Any Day Now started as an alternate history, and then took on a little more weight for me personally as the back story developed, since the protagonist (the Dorothy, if you will) starts in small-town middle America, then scoots off to college, veers through boho New York, then lands in the hippy Southwest. He’s part of the whole ’60s mix of radical politics and counterculture. I began to feel that this was the book I should write, the more personal story I usually manage to avoid. At the same time I realized it was sort of paradigmatic, not really my own story but a common, archetypal story, not just of that era but in all of Western literature: the kid goes from the boonies to the metropolis (Paris, London, New York) and flies or flops or whatever. But mostly it’s the story of a whole generation of young people. Where did 1968 come from? I got there on the same train as 150,000 others and I described the ride.
‘‘I got a little infatuated with the story. A reader from Kentucky sent me a letter saying, ‘Were you writing a memoir, and just got bored with it and made it into science fiction?’ That’s not how it started, but it was personal – not only in terms of events, but in the politics.
‘‘I’m told that Any Day Now doesn’t read like science fiction. I guess that’s by design. It’s an alternate history from the beginning of the book, almost, though a lot of people don’t notice the ‘little’ stuff: James Dean doesn’t die, Edmund Hillary does. Things start to pick up when Collins steps out onto the moon. The central image in the book is not the contested election, so much as the UN intervention later on. That utopian collapse of the USA was what I was playing with. I did alternate history with some of the same politics once before, in a book called Fire on the Mountain, about what might have happened if John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry had succeeded – a sort of breaking down of Manifest Destiny.
‘‘I’m a pretty lean (some would say stingy) writer, and I indulged that tendency in Any Day Now by leaving out all the connective tissue. I was bored with the architecture of the novel. I tried doing something a little different, formally: write scenes without setting them up, and don’t describe the characters.(All us hippies looked pretty much alike anyway.) In many ways, it’s very conventional – the timeline is totally straight, there are no flashbacks, and I don’t play with point of view. So it’s a deeply conventional book, as well as somewhat experimental. I hadn’t written a novel in seven or eight years, and I don’t really think of myself as a novelist. I always get in trouble – a little over halfway through, I realize I don’t know what I’m doing, and then I go back and fix it. But I’m pleased with this book, it’s the novel I always wanted to write.
‘‘When you come into science fiction as a writer, in the 1980s like I did – you feel that it’s all been done. So really all you’re doing is playing changes. It’s either satire or commentary on earlier ideas. Generally my short fiction works have been that: science fiction about science fiction. The last three or four SF stories I did were basically satires of traditional SF tropes (Little Shop, Generation Ship, First Contact, etc.) and they didn’t get noticed much. Maybe those familiar old types aren’t so familiar anymore.
‘‘Kim Stanley Robinson is a close friend (in many ways kind of a mentor, even though I’m older than Stan), and we talk about this kind of stuff. It’s very obvious in science fiction, but I think also in the novel in general. It has sort of backed itself into a corner, trying to play changes on itself. I’ve always regarded myself as a literary, rather than a pulp, writer, and thought of myself as very much a modernist – and modernism is the enemy of sentimentality. But I think it’s hard to be any kind of novelist, these days. It’s hard for people to figure out the tone and the attitude and the approach. I think that’s why people like these enormous, lumbering fantasies.
‘‘I don’t read a lot of modern novels. I read historicals or go back and read Victorian stuff. The modern novelists I admire most are what they call ‘women’s mid-list’, where the old rules of fiction are still in play. Writers like Jane Smiley, Cecelia Holland, and Ann Tyler still have that greater level of sincerity and involvement, instead of trying to stay aloof.
‘‘To me, literature is New York, and literature certainly is not self-publishing. (‘Go to New York and be a published writer’ – that was my dream, 50 years ago.) I wanted Any Day Now to be published by a mainstream press, and Overlook (in spite of the name) is that, but I may have overshot a bit. I think I lost touch with the fact that my pivot foot is in science fiction, so the novel didn’t get the attention in SF I hoped it would get.
‘‘I haven’t done any short stories in almost a year. Lately, I’ve been putting out my backlist, five or six novels, all out of print. (I’ve been very slow at this.) I’m putting them out as e-books through Trident Media, my agent. For any of their authors, Trident will publish the backlists, all the work. They send ’em off to India to get scanned, and I’ve been going through the scanned manuscripts. Technology now is great – not a lot of errors.
‘‘I’m doing quite a bit of editing for PM Press, the ‘Outspoken Authors’ series, too. We do two or three books a year, all the same format: a short story or two, a lefty or at least progressive rant, and an extended interview. Science fiction authors only. PM is a small anarchist press in Oakland, and Ramsey Kanaan, the publisher, wanted to get into SF, so I got tagged, since I have a history editing with small lefty presses.
‘‘The first book I published in the series was actually my own, The Left Left Behind, which was a satire of the Left Behind series – Christian novels about the Rapture, (which are, by the way, probably the best selling fantasy books in America today). Then I did The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson. Of course Stan is a big name. That’s what Ramsey wanted: identifiable big names in science fiction. The third book I did was by Eleanor Arnason, who is not a big name (she’s more like me) but a heavyweight writer. Huge names like Le Guin or Moorcock were easy to work with. Ursula was great, and Moorcock was just a sweetheart, very generous with his time. I put the material together, and I also do the interviews. With Le Guin, I would ask a long question and get a short answer, but it was great! With Moorcock, all I had to do was ask a very short question, and I’d get a long, beautiful answer.
‘‘For a lot of fiction writers, at least for me, editing is almost as bad as teaching. It cuts into your imaginative time. (That’s why I haven’t done a lot of short stories.) But it’s been a fun project and one that I’m proud of.
‘‘SF in SF, the reading series I host and help organize in San Francisco, is a fun operation too. At KGB, we had this great reading scene in NY in a bar. Once the readers start, everyone shuts up. Karen Williams contacted me about starting something similar here, and we struggled for a while, looking for a good venue. When it started, I would book most of the acts, because I know people in science fiction. Rina Weisman books them now and I get to just show up! I don’t read a lot of science fiction, and I certainly don’t read a lot of fantasy, but that’s what we get now, mostly. (I’d never heard of Patrick Rothfuss, but he’s huge! All these people showed up for his event, though there was no marketing machine with him.) Right now, I don’t have to do anything for the reading series except show up, introduce the readers, and lead the discussion after. That’s easy, since writers love to talk.
‘‘I’ve also been working on movies. A fool’s errand, but hey. Two guys in Brooklyn have optioned ‘The Hole in the Hole’, a junkyard-on-the-moon story that’s about 20 years old. ‘Necronauts’, my first Playboy story, got optioned by the guys who did Reanimator, but that’s gone on for about four years and they can’t get any tr
action. I’ve written a few independent screenplays where I get paid, but not Hollywood (WGA) money. I did a screenplay about Paul Robeson that looks like it’s going to get made next year. To see your name in Variety is a thrill. (Variety is the Locus of Hollywood.) Have we mentioned comics? I’m also doing a script for a graphic novel version of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. And hoping it finds a home. If all this sounds like fun, well, it is. Writers chase lots of dreams – like fame, fortune, immortality – that may or may not come true. But what you do get if you’re lucky, like me, is a life in literature. And that’s a great privilege.’’
–Terry Bisson
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Martha Elizabeth Bray was born March 11, 1964 in Montgomery AL, and grew up in Texas. She studied theater at the University of Texas at Austin, graduating in 1988. At age 26 she moved to New York, where she wrote plays (three of which were produced), worked in book publicity and advertising, and wrote three pseudonymous novels for a book packager. She met her husband, literary agent Barry Goldblatt, during her first year in the city, and they eloped two years later to Florence Italy. They have a teenage son.
Bray’s first novel, historical fantasy A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), began the Gemma Doyle trilogy, which also includes Rebel Angels (2005) and The Sweet Far Thing (2007). Her other novels include Going Bovine (2009), about a boy with Mad Cow disease who goes on a mythic journey, and Beauty Queens (2011), about teen beauty pageant queens stranded on an island. Her latest novel is 1920s-era fantasy The Diviners (2012); a sequel is forthcoming.
She lives in Brooklyn NY with her family.
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‘‘I wrote The Diviners because I wanted to write another series, something historical, but also supernatural. I’m a huge horror fan. That was my reading of choice when I was young – I read everything from horror comics to Stephen King and Shirley Jackson. I love history, too, and I wanted to dive into the 1920s era. That period seems to me as if it came out of central casting. I’m a fan of Gatsby. You’ve got The Zigfield Follies, bathtub gin, the Harlem Renaissance, organized crime, and women just getting the vote.
Locus, April 2013 Page 1
