Locus, July 2014
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IN THIS ISSUE
July 2014 • Issue 642 • Vol. 73 • No. 1
47th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman
Locus Dinner with Jay Lake at the 2013 Nebula Awards: Francesca Myman, Jay Lake, Liza Groen Trombi, Tim Pratt & Heather Shaw, Nancy Schaadt
Interviews
Jeff VanderMeer: South of Reality
K.W. Jeter: Rockin’ in the Steampunk World
Main Stories
2014 Locus Awards Winners • Locus Poll 2014 • Theroux Wins Campbell, Pinsker Wins Sturgeon • Pomerico Joins Harper Voyager • Source Interlink Folds • Amazon and Hachette Battle Continues
People and Publishing
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Tobias Buckell, Jane Yolen, Hilary Mantel, Nancy Kress, Seanan McGuire, Henry Kuttner, Robert J. Sawyer, and many others
The Data File
New Imprint: Tor.com • Apple Antitrust Case News • Hathi Trust Decision Upheld • 2014 Ditmar Awards Winners • New Penguin Random House Logo • Bookstore News • Martin Kills Fans for Fundraiser • Rowling Against Scottish Independence • Announcements • World Conventions News • Publishing News • 2014 Legend Awards Winners • 2014 Seiun Awards Nominees • 2014 Mythopoeic Awards Finalists • Awards News • Finanacial News • International Rights • Other Rights • Audiobooks Received • Publications Received • Catalogs Received
Special Features
Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Security in Numbers • Spotlight on: Joshua Bilmes, Agent • Spotlight on: Ginger Clark, Agent
Conventions
International Report from Mexico • Wiscon 38 • Nebula Awards Weekend 2014
Locus Looks at Books
Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois
Asimov’s 4-5/14; Asimov’s 6/14; F&SF 5-6/14; Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons, Tom Purdom; The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2, Gordon Van Gelder, ed.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton
Analog 7-8/14, F&SF 5-6/14; Asimov’s 7/14; Lightspeed 6/14; Rogues, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.; Half a King, Joe Abercrombie; All Those Vanished Engines, Paul Park.
Reviews by Faren Miller
Myths, Metaphors, and Science Fiction: Antique Roots of the Literature of the Future, Sheila Finch; The Queen of the Tearling, Erika Johansen; Child of a Hidden Sea, A.M. Dellamonica; Immortal Muse, Stephen Leigh; A Barricade in Hell, Jaime Lee Moyer.
Reviews by Russell Letson
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2, 1948-1988: The Man Who Learned Better, William H. Patterson, Jr.
Reviews by Stefan Dziemianowicz
The Spectral Link, Thomas Ligotti; Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti, Matt Cardin, ed.; The Grimscribe’s Puppets, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., ed.; Wild Fell, Michael Rowe; Turn Down the Lights, Richard Chizmar, ed.; SHORT TAKES: The Slayer of Souls/The Maker of Moons, Robert W. Chambers; The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, Clark Ashton Smith; Chiliad: A Meditation, Clive Barker.
Reviews by Carolyn Cushman
The Nightmare Dilemma, Mindee Arnett; Murder of Crows, Anne Bishop; Mirror Sight, Kristen Britain; Skin Game, Jim Butcher; Midnight Crossroad, Charlaine Harris; Witches in Red, Barb Hendee; Valour and Vanity, Mary Robinette Kowal; Emilie & the Sky World, Martha Wells.
Reviews by Mike Ashley
The Shadow of Mr. Vivian, Peter Berresford Ellis.
Audiobook Reviews by Amy Goldschlager
The End Is Nigh: The Apocalpse Triptych, John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey, eds.; Tor.com: Selected Original Fiction 2008-2012, Anon., ed.; Runner, Patrick Lee; Cress, Mariss Meyer; The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North; Raising Steam, Terry Pratchet; Grasshopper Jungle, Andrew Smith; Influx, Daniel Suarez; Dreams of Gods & Monsters, Laini Taylor; Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer.
Listings
Magazines Received: May • Books Received: May • British Books Received: April • Bestsellers
New and Notable
Terry Bisson: This Month in History
Obituaries
Daniel Keyes (1927-2014) • Appreciation by Gary K. Wolfe • Jay Lake (1964-2014) • Appreciations by Lisa Costello, Ken Scholes, Shannon Page, Beth Meacham, Jennifer Jackson, J.A. Pitts, Frank Wu, and Kevin J. Anderson • Jay Lake’s Writers of the Future Acceptance Speech • Other Obituaries: Philippa Maddern
Editorial Matters
Jay Lake • This Issue/Next Issue
Corrections
Photo List and Ad List
Masthead
Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer was born July 7, 1968 in Belfont PA, and grew up in the Fiji Islands (where his parents worked for the Peace Corps), Ithaca NY, and Gainesville FL, where he attended the University of Florida for three years. He went to Clarion in 1992.
VanderMeer’s first story of genre interest was ‘‘So the Dead Walk Slowly’’, appearing when he was in college in 1989. His first book was self-published collection The Book of Frog (1989), and other collections include The Book of Lost Places (1996), Secret Life (2004), Secret Lives (2006), The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories (2007, with Cat Rambo), World Fantasy Award finalist The Third Bear (2010). His novelette The Situation (2009) was a Shirley Jackson Award nominee, and was adapted as a web comic with a script by VanderMeer and art by Eric Orchard. Some of his poetry was collected in Lyric of the Highway Mariner (1991) and The Day Dali Died: Poetry and Clash Fiction (2003).
VanderMeer’s pioneering New Weird series, Ambergris, began with Sturgeon Memorial Award-winning novella Dradin, in Love (1996) and continued with World Fantasy Award winner ‘‘The Transformation of Martin Lake’’ (1998), novellas ‘‘The Strange Case of X’’ (1999) and ‘‘The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris by Duncan Shriek’’ (1999), all collected in City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris (2001; updated with new stories in 2002). Other works in that world include Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and World Fantasy and Nebula Award nominee Finch (2009). He also published World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award nominee Veniss Underground (2003), and a tie-in Predator novel in 2008. His newest fiction project, the Southern Reach trilogy, has garnered impressive commercial and critical attention, including publication in 16 countries and a movie deal from Paramount Pictures. The Southern Reach trilogy began with Annihilation (2014) and continues with Authority (2014) and the forthcoming Acceptance.
VanderMeer has been a prolific editor since the 1980s, when he founded The Ministry of Whimsy Press while still in high school, and in 1989 began publishing ’zine Jabberwocky, which ran for two issues. He co-edited three volumes of the Leviathan anthology series, including the Dick Award nominated and World Fantasy Award-winning third volume (2002, with Forrest Aguirre). He edited anthologies Album Zutique (2003), and Hugo Award finalists The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (2003, with Mark Roberts), and Monstrous Creatures: Explorations of Fantasy Through Essays, Articles and Reviews (2011).
With wife Ann VanderMeer (née Kennedy, married 2002), he worked on the Best American Fantasy anthologies, which published volumes in 2007, 2008, and 2010. They have co-edited numerous anthologies and nonfiction books, including Fast Ships, Black Sails (2008), The New Weird (2008), World Fantasy Award finalist Steampunk (2008), Last Drink Bird Head (2008), Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded (2010), World Fantasy Award nominee The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011), World Fantasy Award winner The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011), Odd? (2011), The Time Traveler’s Almanac (2014)
, and feminist SF anthology Sisters of the Revolution, forthcoming. They co-wrote humorous volume The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (2010), and together run e-book publisher Cheeky Frawg Books and website Weird Fiction Review
VanderMeer’s nonfiction includes essay collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat & Other Nonfiction (2002), Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer (2009), and The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature (2011, with S.J. Chambers), and sequel The Steampunk User’s Manual, with Desirina Boskovich, forthcoming. His latest book of nonfiction is BSFA Award winner and Hugo Award finalist Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (2013). He has taught at Clarion and regularly teaches at the teen workshop Shared Worlds.
The VanderMeers live in Tallahassee FL.
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‘‘Ideas creep in from all over the place, but for the Southern Reach there was a central dream that I had (which is the same way that almost all of my books have come about): I was dreaming of walking down a tunnel and seeing living words on the wall, and then eventually I realized I was going to see whatever was writing them… and I woke up. I remember distinctly that some part of my brain was saying, ‘If you see it, you’re never going to write the books.’ So I went back to sleep, and then in the morning I had pretty much the whole story in my head.
‘‘I had wanted to write about north Florida, and what came out of that desire through the dream is an idea about an expedition into an area that’s been cut off from the rest of civilization for 30 years, at the point of the first book, Annihilation. A secret government agency, the Southern Reach, has been sending expeditions into this ‘Area X’ to try to figure out what’s going on in there, but pretty much every expedition has come apart at the seams, and they haven’t found out what’s happening.
‘‘The only times I’ve been in a situation close to the one in Annihilation is when I’ve gotten lost while hiking with people. If I try to hail a cab, I’m a nervous wreck after about 15 minutes of standing in the street, but if I get lost in the woods, I’m not particularly bothered. Other people are. I remember getting lost in the woods with someone, and I realized I was never going to hike with this person again because they almost got us in serious trouble just by panicking. In the modern world, you don’t get lost that often. When I’m hiking, it’s not that I try to get lost, but when it happens it almost feels like a privilege or a blessing, a reminder of something we don’t experience that often.
‘‘The setting of the Southern Reach trilogy is basically the 14-mile hiking trail that I do out at St. Marks Wildlife Refuge. Somebody I told the plot of Annihilation to said there were much stranger things going on at St. Marks than I knew, and my novel was not very proactive in that department at all! The expedition in my book gets charged by a wild boar: that actually happened to me out there. So did seeing dolphins in the freshwater canals. All these things make the setting of the series very personal to me, and meant that I didn’t really have to think much about it, so that allowed me to relax into the situation.
‘‘The fact that Annihilation is set in the real world makes a big difference. A reader who might not pick up a literary fantasy set in an imaginary world is more likely to pick up something about a strange expedition in our world. It’s still basically the real world (as becomes more clear in the second book), but I think the main thing is, from the genre looking out, it may not look like as much of a shift in what I write as it does from outside the genre looking in. If you’re writing imaginary-world fantasy on a more literary (or even experimental) side, you’re in this position where you have to get readers from both mainstream and genre, but you’re not drawing from the core of either.
‘‘The other important thing is, the second book (Authority) pivots, and I think after people read it they’ll see Annihilation in a very different way. Authority takes up with the new director of the Southern Reach, the agency that’s sending the expeditions to Area X, so that’s more an expedition into the Southern Reach as an organization than into Area X.
‘‘Although you get names in the second book, in Annihilation, there’s an actual, practical reason why the characters don’t use names. On the early expeditions, people referred to each other by their names, thinking in terms of personal connections (as opposed to their functions or jobs), and using supposedly sophisticated modern communications devices like satellite phones. That only made things worse, as if those connections allowed whatever was lurking in Area X more of an entry point to mess with human minds.
‘‘As a writer, I rebel at the idea that names, or physical descriptions of characters, necessarily give us any useful information. I chose not to use physical descriptions in this series, because I thought that would create an interesting effect when the characters have to be judged just by what they say and do, and what their interactions are – that’s the core of what people are, anyway. This is not a bunch of white women going out on an expedition, but you don’t know that until the second book, so it will be interesting to find out what assumptions readers have made about the characters.
‘‘Also, if instead of using names, you just say ‘the biologist,’ the description of nature kind of closes in. It’s not so much ‘flattening out’ the characters as putting them on the same level as the setting, and hopefully creating a sense of unease. Since the threat seems to be coming out of the natural world, calling Annihilation ‘a Kafkaesque eco-thriller’ (as somebody did) kind of makes sense. Soon enough, a heightened urgency kicks in – it’s not just a bunch of people walking around in the wilderness.
‘‘Sometimes, too, it’s really just remaining true to a specific character’s situation. In Finch, the main character is hiding some secrets, almost trying to hide them from himself, because if he tells anyone, he might be in danger. With the biologist, the main character in Annihilation, it’s more that she’s very reticent. She’s not buying a lot of what the world’s offering! Ultimately, that’s what made her a compelling character for me, and why I think she will be compelling to readers through the second and third books, as they learn more about her. There’s been a lot of conversation in genre forums about portrayals of women, portrayals of gender in general, and subjects related to that. The fact that the characters here are all women – it just happened that way and I didn’t try to change it. You get tons of novels where they’re all just men without comment.
‘‘Having that distance from modern technology, not naming the setting as being Florida – all that helps with making it seem more universal. And by never saying that we’re in a particular place, I can an stay a little bit south or north of our reality. Not quite the same rules apply. But the setting was personal to me, and I want people to appreciate the beauty of that place.
‘‘I read a lot of biology and accounts of naturalists’ expeditions, so much of what I write comes out of the natural world rather than from other pieces of fiction. Sometimes it may look like I’m writing about fungus, but I’m just using it as a catalyst to explore something else. That’s part of the point of the series. Plants use quantum mechanics to aid in photosynthesis, for example. While we’re walking through our gardens, there are all of these complex, sophisticated processes going on that we really don’t understand. From a purely objective point of view, the things that fungi and fruiting bodies are getting up to are really no different. One of the points I’m trying to make in these books is that next to those processes, smart phones look pretty damn dumb – really primitive, clumsy tech.
‘‘The trilogy is basically three complete, self-contained stories about three different characters. Obviously, Annihilation will leave people who want everything answered wanting to read Book Two, but there are also readers and reviewers who have been perfectly satisfied with it as a standalone novel. The second book, Authority, al
lowed me to delve a bit into the small-town South and places like that, without ever naming them, and get their flavor. I’ve been chuckling over a couple of (very positive) reviews of Authority where they say, ‘How the hell can I possibly explain this?’ I think, ‘Have you ever worked for a government agency?’ That bureaucratic element draws on personal experience, since I once had to go to every branch of a particular agency, and those are usually in the most remote areas you can think of. I had a crap-load of adventures throughout my day-job phase, and that stuff eventually came out in these novels. The third book, Acceptance, is divided equally between the Southern Reach and Area X, and has four different viewpoint characters. You find out more about the biologist, and I promise that readers will get answers – the ones they deserve and the ones they’re looking for.
‘‘The other thing that I keep coming up against in my fiction is how people react to something that is inexplicable. We’re living on an alien planet to begin with, because we don’t even know this world that we are, in effect, colonizing, and subjecting to our will all the time. I really, truly believe that in order to survive as a species (and this is a very sciencefictional theory), we need to be able to imagine the world without us in it. This isn’t to say I think the world should be without us in it, but that we have to get beyond the idea that everything is here either to serve us, or that we’re here to be a steward for it. That tends to be the major default position in books that are not really about nature but include nature. They can Disneyify everything to the point where it becomes dangerous, because that view of nature bleeds into their positions on various issues in the real world in ways that are detrimental to trying to find solutions.
‘‘In these books, I did find myself having that conversation through different characters, and trying very hard to make sure that it isn’t solely the unsympathetic characters saying things like, ‘Humanity has to survive, and all this change in nature is bad.’ There was a point when I was thinking, ‘Maybe it is just better if we all go away to some degree, because it really is a bad situation right now.’