3) Cold Days, Jim Butcher (Penguin Audio)
4) The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien (Recorded Books)
5) Trapped, Kevin Hearne (Random House Audio)
6) The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien (Recorded Books)
7) A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
8) A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
9) The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien (Recorded Books)
10) A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
11) A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Random House Audio)
12) Storm Front, Jim Butcher (Penguin Audio)
13) Theft of Swords, Michael J. Sullivan (Recorded Books)
14) Hounded, Kevin Hearne (Brilliance)
15) The Twelve, Justin Cronin (Random House Audio)
16) A Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness (Penguin Audio)
17) Hexed, Kevin Hearne (Brilliance)
18) The Passage, Justin Cronin (Random House Audio)
19) Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness (Penguin Audio)
20) The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan (Macmillan Audio)
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NEW AND NOTABLE
Jesse Bullington, The Folly of the World (Orbit 12/12) This historical fantasy revels in the grime and filth – human and otherwise – found in the aftermath of the Saint Elizabeth Flood that devastated Holland in 1421, with a trio of conspirators out to make a profit from the chaos. ‘‘Suspense and horror lurk around the edges of this gritty, ribald book where nothing comes easy.’’ [Faren Miller]
Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, eds. Spectrum 19: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood 11/12) The latest lavish installment in this essential annual art book series presents more than 500 gorgeously reproduced images by over 300 artists, selected by a jury of experts in the field.
Steven Gould, Impulse (Tor 1/13) The latest novel in the series begun with Jumper (1992) continues to provocatively explore the human and social consequences of individuals who develop the power to teleport, this time following original jumper David’s teenage daughter Millicent as she discovers the limits and possibilities of her ability. ‘‘The Heinlein heritage is hard to avoid in YA (or YA-ish, or kid-protagonist) science fiction, and while Impulse has a modern YA sensibility… it still has a particularly strong affinity to the Old Man’s picture of the value of discipline, hard work, and general competence in the life of a young person.’’ [Russell Letson]
Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road (Tor 1/13) This science fiction thriller is a standalone of epic proportions, combining police procedural elements and the hunt for a serial killer of clones with keen extrapolation about the world of 2143, set among scattered colony worlds.
Diana Wynne Jones, Reflections (Greenwillow 9/12) This collection of 28 essays and speeches, selected by the beloved children’s author before her death in 2011, demonstrates the depth and breadth of her understanding and insight into all facets of literature, as a writer and a critic. Also includes an interview with Jones, contributions from her family members, a foreword by Neil Gaiman, an introduction by Charlie Butler, and a preface by Jones herself.
Roz Kaveney, Rituals (Plus One 8/12) The noted SF critic’s first foray into novel-length fiction begins the four-book Rhapsody of Blood series, presenting parallel plotlines about Mara the Huntress, a mythical figure given power by the gods to defend the weak against the strong, and Emma Jones, a woman who fights supernatural evil in the contemporary world. ‘‘While the novel covers some familiar bases of both mythological and urban fantasy, it’s also informed in sly ways by Kaveney’s shrewd understanding of the true subtexts of comics, Buffy, superheroes, and various SF films.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]
New and Notable continues after ad.
Margo Lanagan, Cracklescape (Twelfth Planet 8/12) This slim collection by one of our most consistently ambitious and excellent short fiction writers collects four original stories, all set in her native Australia, with an introduction by Jane Yolen. A ‘‘writer whose short fiction has stealthily resisted classification, unless you consider ‘Margo Lanagan stories’ as a kind of classification by itself… her new collection… may come as something of a revelation even to devoted Lanagan readers.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]
David Levithan, Every Day (Knopf 8/12) The celebrated YA writer creates a moving and romantic story with a high-concept fantasy element at its heart: each day the bodiless intelligence that calls itself ‘‘A’’ wakes up in control of a new teenager’s body, and does its best not to interfere in the life of its unwilling host – until A falls in love with his latest host’s girlfriend. In ‘‘his most accomplished – and most fantastical – work yet… Levithan resists the easy, the overly comforting, and in doing so manages a breathtaking and honest exploration of what love means.’’ [Gwenda Bond]
Melissa Marr, Carnival of Souls (Harper 9/12) One of the leading lights of YA fantasy explores a metropolis of daimons called The City, and the Carnival of Souls at its center, where every sort of pleasure and pain can be had for a price. Mallory’s father fled The City to raise her as a human in the mundane world, but even though she pretends to be a normal teenage girl, Mallory can’t escape the consequences of her heritage or the lure of the Carnival forever.
Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath (Cheeky Frawg 11/12) The first English-language collection by the Swedish author brings together 13 of her strange and lyrical stories of the fantastic, two original and five previously published only in Swedish, with translations by the author herself. She ‘‘promises to be one of the most distinctive new voices in short fiction since Margo Lanagan.’’ [Gary K. Wolfe]
Walter Jon Williams, The Boolean Gate (Subterranean 10/12) This secret history novella brings together Samuel Clemens – the tragic private person behind the public persona of writer and lecturer Mark Twain – and eccentric scientist Nikola Tesla in a tale of loss, discovery, and first contact. ‘‘Despite the Ragtime-like sense of a slice of Gilded Age life among the historically prominent, this really is SF… Once again, Williams demonstrates the range of his writerly chops.’’ [Russell Letson]
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THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
February 19, 2025. NCAA settles. All college football players who dressed for a bowl game since 1968 to get one million dollars tax free. Eleven college presidents on suicide watch as NAACP, which initiated lawsuit, promises further attacks on ‘‘student slavery.’’
February 4, 2065. Franchise fix. Responding to a contentious, decade-long ‘‘No Representation Without Taxation’’ campaign, Congress restricts federal voting rights to employed persons between ages of 20 and 65. AARP protests ‘‘coup.’’
February 24, 2176. Mars or bust. SpaceX offers one-way cold sleep steerage to fourth planet, tidally locked by a series of controlled fusion pulses. The new Earthlike climate on the sunlit half of the red planet is expected to draw millions of ‘‘daytimers.’’
February 11, 2321. Zodiac switch. The sudden 164 degree shift in star maps, at 6:56 am MT (Mecca Time), is attributed to a change in the galactic orientation of the solar system, perhaps caused by a space-time fold. Astrologers scramble to rewrite planetaries.
–Terry Bisson
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OBITUARIES
SF writer STEVEN UTLEY, 64, died January 12, 2013, just weeks after a cancer diagnosis. Utley began publishing with ‘‘The Unkindest Cut of All’’ in 1972, and is best known for ambitious short stories like Nebula Award finalist ‘‘Custer’s Last Jump’’ (1976) and ‘‘Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole’’ (1977), both in collaboration with Howard Waldrop. He also frequently collaborated with Lisa Tuttle. Utley’s popular Silurian Tales series of stories began with ‘‘There and Then’’ in 1993, and some of them have been collected in The 400-Year-Itch (2012), with second volume Invisible Kingdoms forthcoming in 2013; the title story of the latter was a Sturgeon Memorial Award final
ist in 2005. His short fiction has also been collected in Ghost Seas (1997), The Beasts of Love (2005), and time-travel collection Where or When (2006). Utley was also an editor, with anthologies including Lone Star Universe: Speculative Fiction from Texas (1976, with George W. Proctor) and Passing for Human (2009, with Michael Bishop). He wrote poetry under his own name and as S. Dale. Some of his poems were collected in This Impatient Ape (1998) and Career Moves of the Gods (2000).
Steven Utley (2011)
Steven D. Utley was born November 10, 1948 to an Air Force family, and grew up on various military bases in the US, UK, and Japan. In the ’70s he became a member of the Turkey City writers’ workshop in Austin TX, with fellow writers Tom Reamy, Bruce Sterling, Lisa Tuttle, Howard Waldrop, and others. Utley moved to Tennessee in 1997, where he lived for the remainder of his life. On December 27, 2012, Utley was diagnosed with cancer in his intestines, lungs, and liver, along with a brain lesion. He sent a message to friends on January 7, 2012, explaining that he was losing his motor skills, and naming Jessica Reisman as his literary executor. He became comatose on January 12, 2013, and died later that night.
STEVEN D. UTLEY by Howard Waldrop
The first time I met Steven, he’d come to the last DASFS meeting I was at before I was drafted in 1970.
By the time I got out, 18 months and a day later, he, me and almost everyone I knew – Lisa Tuttle, Joe Pumilia, George Proctor, Buddy Saunders – had sold our first or second stories.
I jumped right back in, so did everyone, but mostly Steven (who worked in the daytime at a vinyl-extruding plant). There were two-three- and four-way collaborations.
Steven and I did ‘‘Custer’s Last Jump!’’ mostly over the phone, in 5 days (he in Carrolton, me in Grand Prairie) in 1972, though it wasn’t published til 1976.
Steven had been an Air Force Brat (his dad was a fireman whose job just post-WWII was melting down surplus B-29s) so he’d already spent time in KS, TN, and Okinawa before ending up in the Dallas area on his own. (He was once arrested in TN – he looked like a typical hippie at the time – for ‘‘resisting arrest’’ – no other charges – which the judge threw out. TN cops did that in those days….
Steven was a ball of fire early on (and somewhat not appreciated in the SF readership at large, for being ‘‘a downer.’’ Of course he and Barry Malzberg struck up a long and energetic correspondence.) As an index of some of Steven’s varied interests, he had some of Richard S. Shaver’s last letters to him, and some ‘‘pre-Deluge artifacts.’’
Steven, besides his own work, collaborated with almost everyone in sight – Proctor, Lisa Tuttle, Joe Pumilia.
He only attended one Nebula Banquet in LA in his life, where, no longer able to take it anymore, he went to the mens’ room, and found several writers crying while the GoH droned on and on and on…
He and I did ‘‘Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole’’ because I said, ‘‘If Bob Silverberg comes up to you and says he wants to see the story, nod your head ‘yes.’’’ As soon as Steven got back, we refashioned it from an old non-working story of his called ‘‘Into the Flaming World’’ (or something). We also sold a surprise-ending story to Famous Monsters of Filmland, which Forry somewhat messed up by putting a full-page photo of Karloff from Bride of Frankenstein opposite…
Steven cartooned as well as wrote. In 1979, he’d just sold 11 stories in a two-month period, when letters came that seven of the markets were folding.
‘‘Plautus wouldn’t put up with this stercus!’’ he famously yelled, and got a job, last with the TX legislative council, and later endlessly redrawing maps of the colored pencils in the Redistricting Dep’t. His main work in those years was drawing The Huggy-Bunnies, ‘‘a satirical strip set in Lagomorha City (he once referred to The Great Ratsby by F. Scott Fitzgerbil). I think much of this period had to do with his as-yet-undiagnosed clinical depression.
They found the right meds and suddenly Steven was back with a vengeance.
He sold story after story (I think the audience had caught up with him). When he sold one to Analog, people actually said, ‘‘Who’s next? Malzberg?’’
The major work of his last ten years has been the Silurian Tales, which appeared in F&SF, Asimov’s, and less likely places, a novel told in short stories. Both volumes of them – The 400 Million Year Itch and Invisible Kingdoms will be published by Ticonderoga Publications of Perth, Australia. I’m sorry Steve isn’t around to see it – he’d waited 30 years to have his first collection published in the ‘90s.
Steven returned to TN in early 2000 to take care of his ailing dad. He bought a house, settled into Smyrna TN, got a day job, as first, a skip tracer at a bank, then running a scanner at a publishing house (‘‘Better than extruding vinyl,’’ he said).
Steve was diagnosed with cancer about 6 weeks ago (I’d always figured in the old days if anything got to him, it would be because he smoked like a freight train for 30 years, but he’d quit 15 years ago.)
He let a few people know (‘‘I didn’t really want to spoil their Christmas,’’ he said) and put most of his affairs in order.
He slipped into a coma the day before and died on Saturday January 12, 2013. His mother, brother and ex-wife Molly Gardner were there.
Steven will be missed, more places than I hope he knew. And his best work is coming out next month.
As he used to say: ‘‘In this field, we get all the glory we can eat!’’
–Howard Waldrop
French editor and author JACQUES SADOUL, 78, died January 18, 2013.
Jacques Sadoul (1985)
Born in 1934 in Agun, France, Sadoul was one of the first editors to successfully launch paperback SF lines in France, beginning with Éditions Opta and later with J’ai Lu; at the latter he founded the Sciencefiction imprint, where he edited anthology series Les Meilleurs Récits, publishing translations of stories from US pulp magazines. He edited from 1968 until his retirement in 1999. His novels include La Passion selon Satan (1960), Le Jardin de la licorn (1978), Le Miroir de Drusilla (2011), and Le jaguar rouge (2011). He compiled Hier, l’an 2000: L’illustration de science fiction des années 30 (1973; in English as 2000 A.D: Illustrations From the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps, 1975) and SF history Histoire de la sciencefiction moderne (1973, revised 1984). He also helped found the Prix Apollo Awards in 1972.
Short story author MICHAEL ALEXANDER, 62, died December 4, 2012 of cancer. Alexander attended Clarion West in 2010, and first story ‘‘Advances in Modern Chemotherapy’’ appeared in F&SF that year. He went on to publish several more stories in F&SF and Analog; his most recent publication was ‘‘The Moon Belongs to Everyone’’ (with K.C. Ball) in Analog (12/12). Alexander was born September 29, 1950, and lived in McMinnville OR. Before he retired, he worked as an engineer.
ALICE S. CLARESON, 83, widow of SF critic THOMAS D. CLARESON (1926-1993), died December 29, 2012. She edited more than 20 of her husband’s books of SF research, and worked in an editorial capacity on Extrapolation, the academic SF journal he founded.
Alice Jane Super was born May 5, 1929 in Wilkes-Barr PA. She eared a BA in English from Wilson College, and a master’s in English from the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. While at college she met Thomas Dean Clareson, and they married in 1954. They lived in Wooster MA, where her husband was an English professor. She was a children’s librarian for the Wooster public library in the 1970s and ’80s, and also worked as a teacher and editor. She is survived by a son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren.
ALICE CLARESON by Joe Sanders
Alice was one of the sturdiest early members of academic SF fandom, although she preferred to stay in the shadow of her husband Tom. That was the way she was and the way people behaved in mid-20th-century middle-America. Nevertheless, she used her degrees in English and her training as a librarian to help edit at least 20 of Tom’s 21 published books, and she tirelessly helped produce the Science Fiction Research Association’s jour
nal Extrapolation, even typing mimeograph stencils for its first issues. It’s no disrespect to Tom’s scholarly accomplishments to say that he couldn’t have accomplished nearly as much without Alice. I irritated her by saying as much, several years ago when I was drafting an essay to accompany a special SFRA citation for her contributions to SF scholarship; she was self-effacing to a fault. But she was a more important figure than anyone recognized – including Alice herself.
–Joe Sanders
Fan MARY GRAY, 63, died January 15, 2013. She co-founded the Hampton Roads Science Fiction Association in 1977 and worked on various SF conventions, notably Hark!-Con and Sci-Con, sometimes serving as chair. She was to be honored at the 2013 Marscon in Williamsburg MD, held January 18-20, 2013, as fan guest of honor.
Mary Epperson was born December 25, 1949 in Philadelphia PA, moving to Newport News VA as a pre-teen and attending Christopher Newport College. She married and had a son in 1972, and worked as a librarian, researcher, engineering assistant, and book editor. She is survived by her second husband Terry Gray, whom she met in the SF association she helped found.
Death Noted
Fan MIKE DECKINGER died February 2, 2012 at home in San Francisco CA. Michael Deckinger became involved in fandom in the ‘50s, and was a member of the Eastern Science Fiction Association, including a term as director, until he moved west in 1971. He also edited and contributed to fanzines, and was a book and magazine collector. He is survived by his wife of 47 years, Sandi.
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EDITORIAL MATTERS
Around here, January is the cruelest month. Fresh from a spot of vacation time over the holidays, we return to a mountain of work that can’t be attacked until the year ends and all the copies, issues, and numbers are in. For the Book Summary, we crunch publishing statistics for the genre, breaking down production for the year by original and reprint, by format, and by house, and try to come to some reasonable conclusions. For the Magazine Summary, we track down all the available magazines for the year and count stories and non-fiction pieces, finding circulation and unique visitor numbers, going to websites counting stories and podcasts, and looking for commentary for each periodical. It’s just a ton of work (Carolyn worked through several nights and a weekend at the office to get the Book Summary completed), but we come away with a better understanding of what is happening in the field, and a slew of data for those that are fond of such things. It almost didn’t fit – excuse the microtype, we had no choice – next time we’ll need to include reading glasses!
Locus, February 2013 Page 28