Locus, March 2013

by Locus Publications

  IN THIS ISSUE

  March 2013 • Issue 626 • Vol. 70 • No. 3

  46th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner

  Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman

  Interviews

  Isobelle Carmody: Chronicles

  Lavie Tidhar: Stranger Than Pulp

  People and Publishing

  Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Jay Lake, Peter David, Clive Barker, Robert R. McCammon, Janis Ian, Cherie Priest, and many others.

  Main Stories

  2012 Nebula Awards Ballot • 2013 Crawford Award • Macmillian Settles with DoJ • Penguin and Random House Merger Approved • Stoker Preliminary Ballot

  The Data File

  Dragon*Con Responds to Call for Boycott • ALA Awards • SF Collection Donated to SDSU • Bookish Launch • Superman Fans Threaten Boycott • Amazon News • Amazing Stories Launch • Barnes & Noble News • World Conventions News • Awards News • Publishing News • Book News • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights • Audiobooks Received • Publications Received • Catalogs Received

  Locus Looks at Books

  Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois

  F&SF 1-2/13; Asimov’s 1/13; Eclipse Online 1/13; Clarkesworld 1/13.

  Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton

  F&SF 3-4/13; Asimov’s 3/13; Lightspeed 2/13; Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 1/13; Tin House #54; Subterranean Winter ’13; The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, John Joseph Adams, ed.

  Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe

  Sister Mine, Nalo Hopkinson; Prophet of Bones, Ted Kosmatka; Love Is Strange: A Paranormal Romance, Bruce Sterling; Bushman Lives!, Daniel Pinkwater.

  Reviews by Faren Miller

  Blood’s Pride, Evie Manieri; Dreams and Shadows, C. Robert Cargill; The Devil’s Looking Glass, Mark Chadbourn; Short TakeS: The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince, Robin Hobb; Etiquette & Espionage, Gail Carriger.

  Reviews by Russell Letson

  Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison; Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed.

  Reviews by Stefan Dziemianowicz

  Red Moon, Benjamin Percy; NOS4A2, Joe Hill; Motherless Child, Glen Hirshberg; Revenge, Yoko Ogawa.

  Reviews by Divers Hand: Reviews by Karen Burnham, Gwenda Bond, Richard A. Lupoff, and Tim Pratt

  Ancient, Ancient, Kiini Ibura Salaam; Radiant Days, Elizabeth Hand; Hysteria, Megan Miranda; The Complete John Thunstone, Manly Wade Wellman; Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, Jonathan Oliver, ed.

  Commentary

  Cory Doctorow: Ten Years On

  Forthcoming Books

  US Forthcoming Books by Author • US Forthcoming Books by Publisher • UK Forthcoming Books by Author • UK Forthcoming Books by Publisher

  Listings

  Magazines Received: January • Books Received: January • British Books Received: December • Bestsellers

  New and Notable

  Terry Bisson: This Month in History

  Obituaries

  Anne Jordan • Appreciation by Sheila Williams • Antonio Caronia • DEATH NOTED: H.R. Van Dongen

  Editorial Matters

  Home Improvement • Locus Poll & Survey • Fare Thee Well • Visit With TB

  Corrections

  Photo List and Ad List

  Masthead

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  Isobelle Jane Carmody was born June 16, 1958 in Wangeratta Australia. She moved to Melbourne at age five, but grew up mostly in Geelong. She studied journalism at university, and worked as a feature reporter for the Geelong Advertiser before being published as a fiction writer.

  She is best known for her YA SF series the Obernewtyn Chronicles, which includes Obernewtyn (1987), The Farseekers (1990), Ashling (1995), The Keeping Place (2000), and The Stone Key (2008), with concluding volume The Red Queen forthcoming. Her Legendsong fantasy series includes Darkfall (1998), Darksong (2002), and the forthcoming Darkbane, and the Gateway Trilogy is Billy Thunder and the Night Gate (2002; as Night Gate in the US, 2005), The Winter Door (2003), and the forthcoming Firecat’s Dream. The Little Fur series, for younger readers, includes The Legend of Little Fur (2005), A Fox Called Sorrow (2006), A Mystery of Wolves (2007), and A Riddle of Green (2008). Standalone novels include Scatterlings (1991), The Gathering (1993), and Aurealis Award winners Greylands (1997) and Alyzon Whitestarr (2005). She has also contributed to the shared world Quentaris Chronicles, and has written a number of picture books.

  Her story ‘‘The Pumpkin-Eater’’ (1995) was on the Tiptree Award longlist, and Dreamwalker (2001, a graphic novel hybrid illustrated by Steven Woolman) won an Aurealis Award for best YA short story. Some of her short fiction has been collected in Aurealis Award winner Green Monkey Dreams (1996) and Metro Winds (2012).

  Carmody divides her time between living in Australia and Prague in the Czech Republic.

  •

  ‘‘I finished high school and went on to University – the only one in my family that did. I come from a very working-class background. (They used to call me ‘Miss University Student,’ and it was a sneer. Back then, if you went to university, you were almost a traitor to your working-class origins.) I went because I knew that I didn’t want what everyone else did – my mother’s life, my father’s life, the lives of the people around me. I just wanted to get out of it somehow. And it seemed to me the only way you could do that was to be educated. I did run away from home and end up living with my aunt and my grandparents. At home I’d been the eldest of eight children. My dad died in a car crash when I was 14, and that was around the time I started to write. Though in my mind, there is no connection between my dad dying (which was a really huge and awful event) and starting to write (which was also really huge but maybe only in retrospect), common sense says there must have been.

  ‘‘I sometimes wonder if the nuclear holocaust in the Obernewtyn Chronicles isn’t like the death of a parent is in the life of a child. My father’s death was this apocalyptic, life-changing event that just didn’t make sense to me. There was such a lot of toxic fear in the aftermath. My mother was this working-class woman, always afraid that child welfare would come and take some of us away, and I took that in through my pores. Kids live in an atmosphere created by the parents: not just the physical situation that is the result of decisions they make about where to live and their career and how much money there is, but also the world made up of their emotional choices, whether they’re fulfilled or angry or disappointed. She was, in many ways, a frightened woman and a silly woman. Nice, and I love her, but she got pregnant with me at 16. All she wanted to do was to have a lot of babies – when they grew up, she didn’t know what to do with them. My dad wasn’t perfect, but I really loved him. He was smart and pretty creative, but again he was working-class, so there was no real outlet for that creativity. He used to study math for pleasure at night, and he made jewelry. He played a tuba in a military band.

  ‘‘I see both my parents in myself. My mother has a ferocious energy that all of her children inherited, that drive. I didn’t want what she wanted, but in many ways, I was what she had made me. She was in me. I took in her belief that all authority was inimical: random in its choices and not something that you could rationally fight. I felt powerless in that way that all kids feel powerless – that comes through in my writing. But as an adult, I still often feel that sense of powerlessness.

  ‘‘One of the interesting things about making adolescents your main characters is that adolescent readers can experience that state they are in while adult readers can re-experience what they felt when they were adolescents. And age categories are peculiar anyway. I mean, quite young children
often have to take on serious responsibilities, and in those moments are they any less than an adult? You might have a lot of thinking that you can bring to that moment, but maybe it’s all irrelevant – maybe a child will make a clearer decision than an adult. So I certainly felt powerlessness as a kid, but I also felt that I knew what was right and wrong.

  ‘‘Most people remember maybe one or two vivid lessons from school. What really struck me came when we were doing the Manhattan Project, that whole ‘science has to start looking at the consequences of its activities’ part. The discovery of nuclear fission was tremendously exciting, and here were these scientists surrounded by a phalanx of paranoid military types, so there was this comic element. And then the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and those scientists had to stand back and realize soberly that this was the consequence of all the work they had done, and they couldn’t divorce themselves from that. To my mind, that’s the day science got a conscience.

  ‘‘As a kid, it was really powerful stuff to study. The morality of science: that was really interesting for me. I had nightmares as a kid, about being one of the people in Nagasaki when the bombs fell. I had a teacher who was brilliant and made it clear this was a city full of people who were just old, or truly powerless – in jail, in an asylum, in a hospital; a baby in a womb. Even just foot soldiers, doing what they were told. And we learned how it affected the people in the planes, dropping those bombs and causing all the deaths. Nobody knew quite what they were doing, but something happened that was huge and incredibly significant. I suspect that even if you went into the boardroom where people were making these decisions, there were all sorts of random elements involved.

  ‘‘My partner said it was the randomness that was the worst aspect of living under Communism. Nobody even knew what was forbidden! Again, it’s that sense of the dangerous-ness of the confusions of power that interested me. That is something that I still want to explore: the fact that so often there isn’t a criminal mastermind. Bad things accidentally happen; great things accidentally happen. I never have a sense of certainty about anything, because there’s so many elements you can’t predict. The people who scare me are the ones who are really certain about things, who have this sense of destiny, of, ‘I will make this happen, and anything I do along the way is acceptable.’ For them, the end justifies the means. At some point acting, no matter what the consequences, is better than not acting at all. They don’t consider the possibility of random elements that will change things. They can’t imagine that they might be wrong. Besides, I object to anyone who thinks that just because we can do something, we should. We can reinvent the computer every six seconds, but is that a useful thing to do? Maybe we should be doing something else, like figuring out a cure for cancer.

  ‘‘When I started work on what would turn out to be Obernewtyn, the first Chronicle, at age 14, for me it wasn’t a book I was writing for publication; it was a story I was writing for myself. The world in which real books were written may as well have been on Venus. If you’d asked me back then, I probably would have thought authors were all famous dead people! I would write for solace, for comfort, and to work things out.

  ‘‘Being the oldest, I was cleaning up and cooking, making beds and making lunches. It was just strictly survival. And I used to tell stories to my brothers and sisters as a way of keeping control of them. That’s how writing began, as storytelling, and I loved it. I loved acting out things, and directing my siblings to act out bits of the story, like some kind of demonic Steven Spielberg. When I started writing things down, first of all it was just to remember what I was telling them.

  ‘‘Writing things down stopped storytelling being this outward journey to an audience – my brothers and sisters – and became this intensely private activity, I was addicted to it immediately. I was suddenly inside the story. I was a misfit longing to find people like myself without having to change. Elspeth, heroine of the Chronicles, doesn’t have a sense of destiny. All my feelings of uncertainty, my longing to be able to do something important and significant, were poured into her. I couldn’t have articulated that at 14, but looking back now, I can see it.

  ‘‘I think if you look at any writer’s body of work, underneath you can find they’re asking one or two really serious philosophical questions. For me, the big question was, ‘Why do people do the things they do?’ I was wondering, ‘Why did that drunk driver in the car with him kill my dad?’ My dad said, ‘Stop the car,’ and he didn’t stop and ended up killing my dad and a man whose wife was in hospital having a baby. At the time, I didn’t know why I was wounded, but that’s a decisive knowledge now. I was a quiet kid, not nasty or snarky, yet other kids used to beat me up. Why? Wondering about that poured into the Chronicles, as well as a larger question that was just a reflection of the smaller one: ‘Is it possible for human beings to evolve, ethically and morally?’ So that’s what the Obernewtyn Chronicles are trying to work out: if I can believe that human beings can get better.

  ‘‘Obernewtyn came out when I was in my early 20s. I wrote it and rewrote it, but I didn’t think of it for publication even when I became a journalist (for all my desire to be educated, I knew very quickly that I wasn’t an academic). I thought I’d learn all these secrets by being a journalist. How things really worked. You certainly learn a lot that you never put in the paper. But at night I would go home and write Obernewtyn, and I felt a deeper and more profound engagement than with any story I ever did as a journalist. I was a good journalist – I really liked doing it and I was very curious. But, fiction took me deeper, closer to the philosophical truths that I really wanted to grapple with.

  ‘‘One late night I was working, and everyone else in the building had gone home. I was a cadet journalist, back when the teleprinter running out strips of paper was what the Internet does now. (I tore off the fact that John Lennon was killed from that teleprinter in the middle of the night.) You’d file it, or put it on someone’s desk if you knew they were doing research connected to whatever information has come from the teleprinter. When it was boring and no news was coming in, I’d get into the editor’s office, which had the only good typewriter, and use the back of his fat, expensive letterhead paper to write stories for myself. One particular night, I wrote a story and then went and locked up the office. The next day, the editor called me in and said I’d left it on his desk. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to get the sack!’ He said, ‘Did you write this?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Did you ever think of getting it published?’ That was the first time anyone said that to me, though it seemed obvious I should consider it once he did say it!

  ‘‘Within a year, I’d quit my job as a journalist, rewrote Obernewtyn one last time, and sent it off to a publisher. I’d never shown it to anyone, but I wrote myself a long list of publishers’ addresses, taken from the inside of the flyleaf, and sent my manuscript off to the first one on the list, and they accepted it! I’ve never had a rejection slip in my entire life – can you believe it?

  ‘‘I didn’t know I was a children’s writer, but they published it that way. I think I was slightly taken aback, and even offended. Yeah, I started writing it when I was a kid, and the main character was an adolescent, but she was not in an adolescent’s position. I wasn’t writing down to anybody. My feeling is you can’t write to a genre, or write to a category (even an age category). Just write the best story you can, and go from there. It’s up to someone else – a book shop owner, a teacher, a librarian – to categorize stuff. Categories are useful for them, but not for writers.

  ‘‘Now that I’ve written more than a half-dozen of the books in the Obernewtyn Chronicles in between 20 or so other books, some people ask me, ‘Aren’t you bored?’ – working all these years on the same thing. But the really big questions are too interesting to bore you. And they are too big to answer simply and decisively. It is like an unfolding and engrossing dialogue you are having with yourself. There have already been a number of revelations for my characters in the O
bernewtyn Chronicles, which were my revelations as I wrote. One example: the Misfits have all these incredible powers – of course they’re going to win a confrontation they are about to engage in. What else could happen? That was what I intended to happen. But when I was writing, I realized that in every case, the moral questions that arose during the conflict meant they couldn’t do what would be required of them to win. I was astounded to see that I’d invented these complicated characters whose ethics got in the way of them acting as humans would normally act. That seemed fantastic. For me, there’s a constant process of discovery when I write. It’s not possible to be bored. Elspeth is so deeply rooted in my own uncertainties and my own questions that I can no more be bored with her than I am bored with myself. I want to know the answers to these things. So everything continues to be interesting.

  ‘‘There’s some confusion out there because the series has taken me so long to write, and I want people to know that there will be an end to it. The last book is the one I’m writing now, The Red Queen. I’ve got something like 700 pages so far. I really want to stand against the pressure of the publishers breathing down my neck, to finish it as I want. To take the time I need to do that well, but it is a battle. They always start off, ‘But your readers really want the book!’ That’s true – I mean I hope It’s true and the letters and e-mails say that. But the publishers’ desire seems not to be to have the best book, but to have the book finished and ready to go; they think in terms of marketing. Even the angrier readers will calm down and empathise when we start to talk about why the books take the length of time they do to create. Faced with a real person with a real life who writes, they get it. That’s the series they love, and they have to wait until the author finishes it. Whether it’s George R.R. Martin or me or Tolkien, some of us take longer.

  ‘‘Sometimes people accuse me of waiting until my audience grew up, so I would be sure I had an adult audience. That’s a joke, but in fact being a childrens’ or an adolescent author is a great thing. For one, people who read you grow up, and if they like you, they give your books to their children. So kids’ books have a longevity. A few months from now, you can’t remember the book you loved last week. But you will remember the books you loved as a kid, and you will pass them along to your kids. The thing is that kids’ books survive. I am happy about that because I take my series for younger readers, The Legend of Little Fur, no less seriously than books marketed to adults. I respect the characters I write. They’re the receptacles for everything I’m trying to do with that piece of writing. If you have some thin cardboard character, how do you get what you want from it? It would be like an inferior tool. For me, characters have to be deep, multi-faceted, complex.