IN THIS ISSUE
February 2013 • Issue 625 • Vol. 70 • No. 2
46th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman
Interviews
Catherynne M. Valente: Weird Hybrids
Brian Slattery: Pushing the Form
People and Publishing
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Peter David, Junot Díaz, Seanan McGuire, Robert J. Sawyer, and many others
Main Stories
Penguin Settles with DoJ • 2012 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees • 2012 BSFA Awards Shortlist • Writing Workshop Applications Open • John Kessel, Elf Princess
The Data File
Reclaiming Copyrights • Jay Lake Fundraisers • E-books Up, Print Down (But Not Out) • US Book Sales by Region • Bestsellers of 2012 • PW’s Bestselling Publishers • World SF Travel Fund • Publishing News • Announcements • World Conventions News • Awards News • Bookstore News • Magazine News • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights
2012: The Year In Review
2012: Recommended Reading: Liza Groen Trombi (with Francesca Myman & Heather Shaw), Gary K. Wolfe, Faren Miller, Jonathan Strahan, Russell Letson, Graham Sleight, Adrienne Martini, Carolyn Cushman, Tim Pratt, Karen Burnham, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Amy Goldschlager • 2012 Recommended Reading List • Locus Poll and Survey • 2012 Book Summary • 2012 Magazine Summary
Locus Looks at Books
Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois
Eclipse Online 10/12; Eclipse Online 11/12; Eclipse Online 12/12; Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear; The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where On Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin; The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin; The Best of Joe Haldeman, Joe Haldeman; The Collected Kessel, John Kessel; Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete ‘‘Near Space’’ Stories: Expanded Edition, Allen Steele; At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton
F&SF 1-2/13; Asimov’s 2/13; Analog 3/13; Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/29/12; Beneath Ceaseless Skies 12/13/12; Eclipse 1/13; Lightspeed 1/13; On a Red Station, Drifting, Aliette de Bodard; Gods of Risk, James S.A. Corey.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe
The Best of All Possible Worlds, Karen Lord; Before and Afterlives, Christopher Barzak; Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance: The Parke Family Scrapbook Number IV, Paul Park.
Reviews by Faren Miller
A Face Like Glass, Frances Hardinge; The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, Catherynne M. Valente; Midnight and Mooonshine, Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter; Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille, James Van Pelt; Elsewhens, Melanie Rawn; Short Take: Trinity Rising, Elspeth Cooper.
Reviews by Adrienne Martini
Six-Gun Snow White, Catherynne M. Valente; By Light Alone, Adam Roberts; Seven Wonders, Adam Christopher; The Friday Society, Adrienne Kress.
Short Reviews by Carolyn Cushman
The Peculiar, Stefan Bachman; Iron Hearted Violet, Kelly Barnhill; Vessel, Sarah Beth Durst; Sanctum, Sarah Fine; Son, Lois Lowry; Velveteen vs. the Junior Super-Patriots, Seanan McGuire; Imager’s Battalion, L.E. Modesitt, Jr.; The Sweetest Spell, Suzanne Selfors.
Divers Hand: Reviews by James Bradley, John Clute, Karen Burnham & Gwenda Bond
The Best of All Possible Worlds, Karen Lord; American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, Gary K. Wolfe, ed.; Diverse Energies, Tobias S. Buckell & Joe Monti, eds.; Days of Blood and Starlight, Laini Taylor.
Listings
Magazines Received: December • Books Received: December • British Books Received: November • Bestsellers
New and Notable
Terry Bisson: This Month in History
Obituaries
Steven Utley • Appreciation by Howard Waldrop • Jacques Sedoul • Michael Alexander • Alice S. Clareson • Appreciation by Joe Sanders • Mary Gray • Death Noted: Mike Deckinger
Editorial Matters
Year-end-Review • 2012 • Poll & Survey • Locus Awards • Next Issue
Photo List and Ad List
Masthead
Return to In This Issue listing.
Catherynne Morgan Valente was born May 5, 1979 in Seattle WA, and grew up moving between her parents in Seattle and Sacramento CA. She attended high school in Davis CA, graduating at age 15 and attending UC San Diego, where she took a degree in Classical studies. She attended grad school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, but quit to move overseas. She married in 2002, and lived near Yokohama Japan, where her husband was stationed in the Navy, for just over two years. In 2005 they returned to the US and lived briefly in Virginia. After their divorce, Valente moved to Cleveland OH. She now lives on Peaks Island ME with second husband Dmitri Zagidulin.
The Labyrinth, her surreal first novel, appeared in 2004, followed by Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams (2005) and The Grass-Cutting Sword (2006). Those books, along with novella Under in the Mere (2009), were collected in 2011 omnibus Myths of Origin. Her Mythopoeic Award-winning Orphan’s Tales duology, In the Night Garden (2006) and In the Cities of Coin and Spice (2007), brought her to the attention of a wider audience; the first volume won the Tiptree and was a World Fantasy Award finalist. Hugo and Mythopoeic Award finalist Palimpsest appeared in 2009. Children’s book The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (which was first a book-within-a-book mentioned in Palimpsest) was serialized online the same year, and won the Andre Norton Award; it appeared in print in 2012. Sequel The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (2012) followed, with more books in the series forthcoming. Two books in the historical fantasy Dirge for Prester John series have appeared so far: The Habitation of the Blessed (2010) and The Folded World (2011). Deathless, a fantasy set in Russia, appeared in 2011, and a companion book is forthcoming.
Valente’s short stories have appeared in various literary and genre magazines and have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies and published as standalone books. ‘‘A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica’’ (2008) was a World Fantasy Award finalist, and novella Silently and Very Fast (2011) was a Hugo, Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and Nebula Award finalist. Western fantasy novella Six-Gun Snow White is forthcoming.
Valente was first published as a poet. Notable works of poetry include chapbook Music of a Proto-Suicide (2004), Oracles: A Pilgrimage (2005), Apocrypha (2005), and The Descent of Inanna (2006). She won a Rhysling Award for best long poem with ‘‘The Seven Devils of Central California’’ (2007). She has also published and presented various critical papers, mostly about feminism, mythology, and literature. Valente helps run the SF Squeecast podcast, winner of a 2012 Hugo Award for Best Fancast.
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‘‘I started out publishing in the small press. I wasn’t even living in the US then. I was living in Japan when my first novels sold. I came to publishing assuming that nobody was going to do any promotion for me, so I just figured out how to promote myself on the web, because I couldn’t be in the US, I couldn’t go to conventions. I figured out ways to serialize things, to do websites that went along with books, and things like that. I had three novels and two collections of poetry come out from Prime, and The Orphan’s Tales came out from Bantam. The Orphan’s Tales did well, much better after it won the Tiptree Award – that was the thing that set everything in motion – but never spectacularly well. It sounds weird to say now, but we all thought Palimpsest was my more commercial work.
‘‘In 2008 we were making all these publicity plans for the book. The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland was just supposed to b
e part of Palimpsest. Fairyland is the protagonist’s favorite novel from when she was a child, and Palimpsest includes the first paragraph of Fairyland. I never intended it to be more than that. The thing is, the economy crashed, and Bantam Spectra was reorganized. A lot of authors were let go. I call it The Great Diaspora. Tor got a lot of the authors, and Night Shade got some of us. It really was just a bomb that went off. My editor Juliet Ulman was laid off, my publicist was laid off. Basically everyone involved with Palimpsest was laid off six weeks before it came out. I had blurbs that never ended up on the cover of the book, because there was nobody answering the phones at Bantam. It was the worst possible time. I was the first person Juliet Ulman called. It was early in the morning, and I had that moment where the curtains close in your brain and you think, ‘This can’t possibly be happening.’ I sat down with my husband to figure out what to do. We decided to create an alternate-reality game to promote Palimpsest.
‘‘My husband’s a programmer. I do graphic design as well as writing, so I did the graphics, he did the code, and we created a game that flowed through all these different websites, and I made a few short movies and audio tracks. The ARG was an insane amount of work. Maureen McHugh was my mentor, because she had worked on things like that, like the Halo alternate-reality game. She asked me how long I want the game to be, and I said three months. She said, ‘You’ll be lucky to make it six weeks.’ She was absolutely right. I didn’t believe her at the time, but it’s an unfathomable amount of work for two people. As part of the alternate-reality game, we made fake Amazon pages for all of the different books that were mentioned in Palimpsest. I made a cover for Fairyland and the others, and the entire Amazon pages were there. You couldn’t order the books – they would be listed as out of stock, or there would be one used copy that led to another page in the alternate-reality game.
‘‘I made a book trailer for Palimpsest, which has over two and a half million hits now, and that had the link to begin the alternate-reality game. That was my first experience with something really going viral. Book trailers weren’t brand new, but they had fallen out of fashion. I still have no explanation for the success. Obviously two million people didn’t buy that book, so I have no idea why they watched – except that there are naked people in it, so maybe that’s why. People started talking about trailers again, and mine was part of the wave of book trailers coming back. I can’t take credit for that, but Palimpsest was definitely part of the conversation that led to book trailers becoming a thing again.
‘‘We were running that whole game, but we decided that no one was going to support Palimpsest. It wasn’t anyone’s fault – it was just that there was no one to support this book. Because it was my third book with the publisher, and The Orphan’s Tales had done well but not spectacularly, we had the feeling that this was it. We could either do something drastic to make Palimpsest a success, or I could go back to school and stop writing.
My friend S.J. Tucker – a singer/songwriter who did a tie-in album for Palimpsest – and her partner and her manager and my husband and I got in a truck, rented a trailer, and toured the country for four months from Maine to Los Angeles, living in the car and staying on people’s couches. S.J. is a magical person. She is a truly extraordinary human being. That’s one of the most amazing things about science fiction and fantasy – it’s a family, it’s a tribe, and when people are in trouble, they help each other out.
‘‘I don’t think we meant for the tour to be as long as it ended up being. It was winter, and we had to drive through a lot of snow. But it worked. We were selling the books out of the back of the truck. We took 40 fans on a train from Chicago to New Orleans, and did a masked ball in New Orleans. All the way across the country, everywhere I went, people asked, ‘Where can I get that Fairyland book? Is that real?’ And I would be like, ‘No, no.’ People said, ‘When are you going to write Fairyland?’ And I said, ‘Never. Nobody’s going to publish a children’s book that came out of an incredibly adult novel.’ It’s not just adult like The Orphan’s Tales or Deathless – Palimpsest is full of sex! So I said, no, I’m not doing that. But I had already written half of the first chapter as an Easter egg in the alternate-reality game….
‘‘We called the tour events ‘reading concerts’ when we pitched it to venues. Back then it was hard for people to understand. Now the venues know us, but back then they were like, ‘You want to read from a book, and sing songs?’ And we’d say, ‘Yes, and we have a snake dancer, and an aerial performer….’ We’d pick up local performers through Livejournal and Twitter. The show was different in every city. In Brooklyn we had aerial performers suspended from the ceiling, and in St. Louis we had the snake dancer. We had all these rope artists in New Orleans. The show grew, and kept growing and growing. Sometimes we’d have a cellist, sometimes we’d have a fiddler. It was a genuine circus, and we called it the ‘corset tour.’ I honestly can barely wear corsets anymore, after four months of that.
‘‘We tried to make it a little more rock-star than your standard author reading. S.J. did a techno track to be played behind my readings, so even the readings were like spoken-word songs. We did one event in a hotel where we were all standing on different stairs on a winding staircase. I have a background in theater and so does S.J., so we stage-managed the hell out of those shows. They were something else. We always knew our people because they would come in these huge, elaborate costumes. Palimpsest itself, what the novel is about, is a city we create when we connect with other people. We had a following already from The Orphan’s Tales and from the books before that and from the blog. I’d been blogging since 2000. And S.J. has her own following – she does filk but she also does these amazing original folk rock albums. I was a huge fan of hers, even before ever met her. I met her at Lunacon, and I was like, she’s so amazing. We were sisters right away.
‘‘We had been promised that there was a job waiting for my husband Dmitri when we got back home, but it evaporated; it wasn’t there. People say, ‘How could you go on tour during a recession?’ But it cost very little. We stayed on couches the whole way across America, we sold books out of the car, and people fed us. We had savings, but we’d been using it to pay the rent. I mean, my husband’s a programmer; he’d never not had a job. But after the tour we got to the point where we didn’t have money for rent the next month, and we didn’t have money for groceries. And I thought, ‘All right, I guess I’m going to have to get a non-writing job, but I can’t do that in time for next month’s rent. I have to do something now.’ I remember talking to Amal El Mohtar, and saying, ‘I think I’ll write a serial novel. I’ll put it on my website with a donation button. It’ll work.’ She said, ‘What are you going to write?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I’m looking through my ideas file for one I can sacrifice because nobody will ever publish it once I’ve published it online.’ This was before Kickstarter was a thing, and before people were reading on Kindle. It was new. I remember typing, ‘Oh, I could write Fairyland. Everybody wants to read Fairyland.’ And she said, ‘Oh, my God, please write Fairyland.’ I started posting chapters every Monday. I put a button up saying, donate whatever you think it’s worth, if you can. Neil Gaiman posted about it, Cory Doctorow posted about it, Warren Ellis posted about it, John Scalzi posted about it. And the serial went viral within a day.
‘‘But it’s deceptive, because I published seven books first through traditional publishing. I get e-mails all the time – I signed myself up for a lifetime of this – saying, ‘How do I make my book do what yours did?’ And I tell people, ‘Publish seven books traditionally. Spend a lot of years getting to know people in the community of writers and editors and journalists and bloggers.’
‘‘When I started the Fairyland serial I made a blog post and said, ‘Look. The economy is what it is, and seven months ago we were a three-income household, because my husband had two jobs, and now we are a no-income household. I couldn’t sell a book; nobody could sell a book in 2008 and 2009. We can’t pay the rent for the ne
xt month. I’m not asking for a handout. I was raised by a single mom, so asking for help is really tough. I don’t want charity – I want to work and be paid for work. So I am working. If you feel this work has value, you can pay for it. You don’t have to pay for it, even if you think it has value. You’re under no obligation.’
‘‘James Owen called me and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. Don’t do this from a place of fear. Do it from a place of love for what you’re writing. You will be surprised how far this is going to go. I’ve read the first chapter. I know it will. You will feel better in five years if it came from a place of joy and not fear.’ I remembered that all the way through the writing. Lots of the people I know and work with have been in this same position. They struggle in the same way. We just don’t talk about it – we don’t talk about our failures. The way that people talk about the narrative of being a writer, there’s this idea that it’s always up, up, up. It’s magical thinking, like if we don’t talk about failure it won’t see us. I’ve proposed panels about authors discussing their moments of feeling as if their careers were over. I think everybody feels that. It still floors me that my lowest moment is what saved me, and that I was saved by my tribe, my family online, and by people who love books and want there to be magic in the world, and want something real.
‘‘SFWA had only changed the rules to the Andre Norton and Nebula Awards two years before, to allow for digital publications. No book had yet had enough momentum to make the ballots. Mary Robinette Kowal emailed me and said, ‘Do you know Fairyland is eligible for the Norton?’ The book just skated in. I was blown away that it was even nominated. It had been picked up for print publication by then, but I knew it wasn’t going to come out in print until 2011. The Norton Award was in 2010. Scott Westerfeld and John Scalzi were both on the ballot. The only reason I went to the ceremony in Florida was because of the space shuttle – my husband and I had both dreamed of seeing a space shuttle launch.
‘‘I didn’t write an acceptance speech. I thought, ‘I’m here to see a spaceship.’ I was so convinced I wasn’t going to win. All the blood rushed to my head when the winner was announced. I couldn’t quite comprehend it. The title is so long, the presenter didn’t get through the word ‘circumnavigated’ before people started clapping. I just couldn’t believe it. I cried. It still seems like a miracle. I have moments where I see Fairyland sitting on the table, and I think: ‘It’s a real book.’ This novel that was just a metaphor in another book, and now it’s sitting there for real, and it won this award.
Locus, February 2013 Page 1