Locus, October 2014

by Locus Publications

  Storm Front, Jim Butcher (Buzzy Multimedia)

  The Magician’s Land, Lev Grossman (Penguin Audio)

  A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)

  A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)

  A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)

  The Magicians, Lev Grossman (Penguin Audio)

  Severed Souls, Terry Goodkind (Brilliance)

  Voyager, Diana Gabaldon (Recorded Books)

  Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, Diana Gabaldon (Recorded Books)

  Blood Song, Anthony Ryan (Penguin Audio)

  Jhereg, Steven Brust (Audible)

  Tower Lord, Anthony Ryan (Penguin Audio)

  Hounded, Kevin Hearne (Brilliance)

  The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss (Brilliance)

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  NEW AND NOTABLE

  Daniel Abraham, The Widow’s House (Orbit 8/14) The fourth volume in the Dagger and the Coin fantasy series continues to deftly weave a compelling tapestry of characters and plots, including a Lord Regent whose ambition outstrips his competence, a cult of priests devoted to a spider goddess, a mercenary captain and a banker trying to save the world from disaster… and new revelations about the nearly extinct dragons who long ago created the 13 races of man.

  Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress (Nan A. Talese 9/14) This collection, Atwood’s first since Moral Disorder in 2006, gathers nine stories (six original) that embrace the spirit of folk tales, ‘‘wonder tales,’’ and genre fiction, often with a hint of the macabre – including a woman mistaken for a vampire, a gruesome discovery in a storage unit, an old lady struggling with hallucinations and impending arson, and a near-future tale.

  Darin Bradley, Chimpanzee (Resurrection House 8/14) This dystopic thematic companion to Bradley’s debut novel Noise takes place in an economically devastated near-future. Unemployed professor Benjamin Cade’s education is being literally removed from his mind for failure to pay his student loans, but before he loses everything, he becomes a street teacher and falls in with a group of revolutionaries. ‘‘There’s a revolutionary zeal, and a belief in the power of the mind to effect change in the world, that provides some light in this otherwise bleak dystopia.’’ [Tim Pratt]

  Robin Hobb, Fool’s Assassin (Del Rey 8/14) Hobb returns to the beloved world of the Farseer series after a decade away. This first volume of the new Fitz and the Fool trilogy sees FitzChivalry Farseer interrupted in his peaceful retirement and tempted back to his old life as a roving assassin. ‘‘Where some fantasists specialize in ponderous trilogies with immense casts of characters, elaborately unimaginative worldbuilding, and an overall aura of the ‘medievalesque,’ Hobb distills similar materials into a far more potent brew. However paradoxical it seems, her epics manage to feel intimate.’’ [Faren Miller]

  Kameron Hurley, The Mirror Empire (Angry Robot 7/14) Locus columnist Hurley launches her new Worldbreaker Saga – ‘‘Game of Thrones meets Fringe’’ – in this audacious fantasy, set in a world menaced by invaders from parallel dimensions and populated by semi-sentient killer trees, bear-riding raiders, and witches adept at blood magic. (See our interview with Hurley elsewhere in this issue for more insight into the series.)

  Graham Joyce, The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (Doubleday 8/14) This final published novel by a beloved voice we lost too soon (see elsewhere in this issue for obituary and appreciations) appeared last year in the UK as The Year of the Ladybird. In 1976, teen David Barwise goes to the resort town of Skegness in search of answers about his father, who died 15 years before. ‘‘What begins with the nostalgic glow of a hot 1970s summer ends up grounded by the shadows of real history… shapely and magical.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]

  Nancy Kress, Yesterday’s Kin (Tachyon 8/14) Kress’s fast-moving and idea-packed novella features an alien visitation, a cloud of life-destroying space spores bearing down on Earth, a desperate group of scientists trying to save the world – and a moving tale of family dynamics, too. ‘‘Her ideas, even when somewhat familiar, are as compelling as always… a hard SF writer in the classic mold… she shows us that the form still has a lot of life in it.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]

  New and Notable continues after ad.

  Jay Lake, Last Plane to Heaven (Tor 9/14) The final collection by the late master of the short story, who died of cancer three months before its publication, gathers 32 stories, selected as the best from more than 300 published pieces. Includes a foreword by Lake’s literary hero Gene Wolfe, and an afterword by the author himself, written near the end of his life.

  Kelly Link & Gavin Grant, eds., Monstrous Affections (Candlewick 9/14) This original ‘‘Anthology of Beastly Tales’’ features 15 delightfully monstrous and romantic tales for teens by M.T. Anderson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, Alice Sola Kim, and more, with an introduction by the editors – featuring a pop quiz!

  Kate Milford, Greenglass House (Clarion 8/14) This endearing middle-grade mystery, with a hint of fantasy and alternate-world strangeness, takes place in the eponymous inn, filled with stained glass and offering welcome to smugglers (among other guests). One night it fills with secretive strangers seeking treasure, and the innkeeper’s adopted son Milo investigates their mysteries while exploring his own history. With charming illustrations by Jaime Zollars.

  Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells & Howard Tayler, Shadows Beneath (Dragonsteel 7/14) This anthology, a miniature master class in short story writing, grew out of the Writing Excuses podcast, hosted by Kowal, Sanderson, Tayler, and Wells. Each host contributed an original story, and those make up the first third of the book. The rest is devoted to transcripts of brainstorming sessions, first drafts, and marked-up versions of the stories to demonstrate the entire writing process from idea generation, to editing, to final draft.

  John Scalzi, Lock In (Tor 8/14) Deeper and more serious than the author’s usual fare, this near-future police procedural is set in a world where a virus causes a small percentage of its victims to be ‘‘locked in’’ – conscious, but unable to move or communicate physically. Victims can use mechanical bodies to move around, or temporarily borrow the bodies of ‘‘integrators’’ – which makes finding out who committed murder even more complicated than it is in our world. ‘‘The most enjoyable robot story I’ve read this year – even though it’s not quite about robots.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]

  Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 9/14) In this final volume in the challenging and bizarre Southern Reach trilogy, one last expedition is sent into the mysterious Area X in search of ultimate answers on a remote island, facing perils both literal and metaphysical. Readers may not find all the explanations they seek, but the journey is sure to leave them changed. ‘‘Acceptance shows just how narrow-minded technophilia can be, compared to an active sense of wonder.’’ [Faren Miller]

  Peter Watts, Echopraxia (Tor 8/14) Watts delivers another ambitious and bleak vision of the future in this loose sequel/companion piece to Blindsight, with ‘‘baseline human’’ biologist Daniel Brüks taken on a journey through the solar system with a vampire and a group of posthuman monks. ‘‘The famously dismal brilliance of Watts’s imagination… at first stuns you with its barrage of smart ideas and cutting-edge research, then disarms you with its grim determinism and unsympathetic, semi-posthuman characters, and ends up, pretty much, by just making you want to crawl under a rock…. SF hard enough to break a tooth on.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]

  Andy Weir, The Martian (Crown 2/14) This debut novel (originally self-published in 2012) is an acclaimed hard-SF thriller about an astronaut from the first manned mission to Mars who finds himself stranded on the red planet after a dust storm leads his crew to evacuate, believing him dead. He uses his ingenuity, engineering prowess, and humor to fight for survival in impossible circumstances… and maybe even arrange his own rescue.

  Ian Whates, ed. Solaris Rising 3 (Solaris 8/1
4) The third New Solaris Book of Science Fiction continues the acclaimed anthology series and features 18 original SF stories by Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Rachel Swirsky, Ian Watson, and more, with an introduction by the editor.

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  THIS MONTH IN HISTORY

  October 3, 2026. Heathrow revolt. King Charles calls for calm as thousands of quarantined travelers storm through exit barricades and stream into London. The airport, once Europe’s busiest, has been on lockdown for 22 days in an effort to slow the spread of the 3bola variant.

  October 19, 2077, Irish artist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Paula Fitzhill dies in Dublin. Her dramatic black & white ‘‘Gaza’’, based on Picasso’s ‘‘Guernica’’, now hangs in the atrium of the United Nations in Jerusalem.

  October 28, 2086. Ms Liberty recall. Silent, surly Tricolor Temps dismantle and crate the statue that once welcomed ‘‘your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’’ to New York harbor. It will be returned to Paris by air.

  October 29, 2112. Triple disaster. The sudden reversal of the Earth’s geomagnetic field turns tragic as three Aeroflot 797s are downed, one by ball lightning and two by a mile-high mass of confused migratory birds.

  –Terry Bisson

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  KIRBY McCAULEY (1941-2014)

  Kirby McCauley (1987)

  Agent and editor KIRBY McCAULEY, 72, died in August 30, 2014 of renal failure due to diabetes.

  McAuley was born September 11, 1941 in Minnesota, and attended the University of Minnesota. He became a literary agent in the 1970s, and soon built one of the most successful agencies in the business, representing authors including Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, and Roger Zelazny. In the mid-’80s he suffered from personal problems and lost some high-profile clients, though others (like Martin) remained. His sister Kay McCauley later joined his Pimlico Agency and helped revitalize the business, which still represents many authors and estates.

  McCauley helped found the World Fantasy Convention in 1975, chairing the first convention in Providence RI, serving on the board for several years, and helping to create the World Fantasy Awards. He was also a respected anthology editor, creating reprint anthology Night Chills (1975) and World Fantasy Award-winning original anthologies Frights (1976) and Dark Forces (1980), the latter still considered a landmark work. He received a special convention award from the World Fantasy Convention in 1979.

  KIRBY by George R.R. Martin

  I don’t recall when or where I first met Kirby McCauley. It was forty years ago at least, at some convention, probably on the east coast… a Lunacon or a Philcon, perhaps, or maybe at the Nebula Banquet. I went to a lot of cons in those days, when I could afford it. So did Kirby. I was a young writer, still years away from tackling my first novel, but selling short stories, and losing Hugos and Nebulas. Kirby was a young agent, fresh from Minnesota, newly come to New York City, still building up his client list. All the established names in the field were signed with established agents, with Henry Morrison and Scott Meredith and Virginia Kidd and the like, so Kirby reached out to the kids (well, we were in our twenties, mostly, but we sure seem like kids when I look back) just starting out, recruiting promising young talent from the ranks of the unagented young dreamers who still did cartwheels when they sold a story to Ted White at Amazing for a penny a word (on publication).

  Writers like me.

  Kirby was good-looking, fast-talking, charming… and he was there with us in the con suite. The established agents of the day never came to cons. Kirby came to all of them. You’d find him in room parties, laughing, joking, flirting with the pretty girls, staying up till dawn… and talking about books and stories and writers. He was not your father’s agent, not a beefsteak-and-martini lunch kind of agent, not a three-piece suit kind of agent. He was jeans and a smile and a beer in his hand. He was One of Us. He was a fan. He knew SF, fantasy, horror. Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, he knew more about all of them than you did. Mystery writers too.

  It was maybe our third or fourth meeting when he asked me (at a party) if I had representation. I did… but only in Germany. (I had taken on another start-up, a small German agency called UTOPROP, the year before, to sell translation rights to my short stories in West Germany). I didn’t need representation, I told Kirby. I had no plans to write a novel, and you didn’t need an agent to sell short stories. And I’d sold two books on my own, an anthology and a collection. One of these years, I knew, I would write a novel, and that’s when I would need an agent… but when the time came, I figured I’d be well enough known to get one of those big established agencies, not some guy my own age whose list was made up mostly of writers even newer and greener than I was. So I said, ‘‘thanks, but no thanks.’’

  But Kirby did not give up. He asked me again, at the next con. He read my stories in Analog and Amazing and F&SF, and wrote me about them, suggesting clever ways they could packaged into collections or expanded into novels. When Lisa Tuttle and I published our novella ‘‘The Storms of Windhaven’’ in Analog, he was the first to see the novel in it, and wrote to say how much he’d like to sell it. Persistance and enthusiasm will win a writer’s heart every time. He wore me down. (And those big, well-established agents still had yet to notice my existance). Finally… I don’t recall just when… I agreed to let Kirby McCauley represent me, everywhere but in Germany.

  That was the best decision I ever made.

  Kirby McCauley (1981)

  Little did I know, but I’d just hitched my fledging career to a star. I’d bought Apple at a penny a share. I’d won the bloody lottery. I might have had a career anyway, sure…. I am nothing if not a writer. I would have written my stories and published (eventually) my novels, but the success that I enjoy today is built in large part on the foundations that Kirby laid for me back in the ’70s and ’80s.

  The young, fast-talking guy from Minnesota became, for a good ten years or more, the Best Agent in the World.

  His stable, in the beginning, was made up almost entirely of young punks like me, and the estates of dead writers, some of them on the verge of being forgotten. But Kirby loved the classic stuff, and somehow, with his relentless hustling, got a lot of their books into print. For the newcomers, he did even better. Back in 1974 and 1975, the standard advance for a first novel was $3,000. A few of my contemporaries (not agented by Kirby) got half that. If you had won an award, and had a good agent, maybe you’d get $4,000. I won a Hugo Award for ‘‘A Song for Lya’’ in 1975, so I was dreaming big when I finally wrote my first novel, After the Festival (published as Dying of the Light). ‘‘See if you can get me $5,000,’’ I said to Kirby when I gave him the manuscript, thinking I’d made an outrageous demand. He laughed. ‘‘I think we can do better than that,’’ he said. He got half a dozen publishers bidding on the book, and in the end I collected more than ten times the standard advance for a first novel.

  He did even better when Lisa Tuttle and I finally wrote that Windhaven novel. And a few years later, when I wrote my historical horror novel Fevre Dream, he knew at once that it should not be published as a genre title, and deftly moved it to another imprint at the same publisher, while keeping both my old and new editors happy, and getting me my biggest advance to date. With The Armageddon Rag, a few years later, he raised the bar still higher and suddenly I was drawing down six figures.

  I was by no means his biggest success story, either. He did as well or better for a dozen other young writers on his list… and one of them, this guy from Maine named Stephen King, did better than all of us together. It is probably an exaggeration to say that Kirby McCauley was entirely responsible for the huge SF boom of the late 1970s and the horror boom of the early 1980s… but he sure as hell helped. He was one of the first to see what was happening, and to take advantage of it for his clients. Kirby revolutionized agenting in SF and fantasy and horror. At a party there was no on
e more genial or friendly, more fun to share a beer with… but editors and publishers soon learned to fear his skill as a negotiator. He would not take no for an answer. And he would not take peanuts for a book, either.

  The older, established, three-piece suit agents were soon scrambling to keep up with him. Meanwhile, their clients were leaving them, moving over to Kirby in droves. And who could blame them? Snot-nosed punks like me were drawing down advances ten and twenty times as large as writers who had been publishing for decades, because we had the good fortune to be agented by Kirby McCauley.

  Through all of this, Kirby remained a fan as well. He had always loved horror and fantasy, and in 1975 he teamed with several other leading fans, editors, and booksellers to found the World Fantasy Convention, as an alternative to the long-running World Science Fiction Convention. The first one, in Providence RI, he chaired, and remained on the board for years to follow. He helped to establish the World Fantasy Awards, the ‘‘Howards’’ or ‘‘Howies,’’ given annually by a panel of judges to the year’s best fantasy and horror.

  He was also an editor and anthologist. Dark Forces, his landmark horror anthology, remains to this day perhaps the greatest single horror volume ever published, and was recently reissued in a 26th Anniversary Edition.

  Kirby McCauley, Kay McCauley (1987)

  Things started to go wrong for Kirby around 1985 or so, though. Too many clients had signed on, maybe. Kirby was nothing if not loyal, and stayed with the clients he had started out with long after any other agent would have cut loose the ones who had not made it. So his stable got bigger and bigger. He hired assistants, brought in other agents to help, but he was never good at delegating… and besides, none of us wanted to be assigned to a sub-agent, we wanted Kirby. There were other problems. An excess of success, maybe. I was off in Hollywood by that time, working in television in the aftermath of the commercial failure of The Armageddon Rag (even Kirby had not been able to place my proposed fifth novel, Black and White and Red All Over, though he tried his damndest, with the same persistance that he had shown when he tried to sign me), so I wasn’t privy to much of what went on… but all of a sudden clients were leaving the agency, instead of signing on. BIG clients. Some of the agents Kirby had brought in to help left as well, taking more clients with them. And Kirby… well, there were personal problems, and they ought to remain personal.