Locus, December 2012

by Locus Publications

  IN THIS ISSUE

  December 2012 • Issue 623 • Vol. 69 • No.

  45th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner

  Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman

  Interviews

  Elizabeth Bear: Earthly Conventions

  Ted Kosmatka: Game Master

  2012 World Fantasy Award Winners

  World Fantasy Convention 2012

  People and Publishing

  Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Terry Pratchett and Rhianna Pratchett, Richard Bowes, Louise Marley, Charles Stross, Stephen Baxter, and many others.

  Main Stories

  Random House and Penguin Merger • Alexander Wins National Book Award • Carnegie Medal Longlist • Rusch Wins Endeavour

  The Data File

  PW Best of 2012 • Amazon’s Best of 2012 • Humble eBook Bundle • SFWA Launches YA Group • Fictionwise Closes • Amazon News • Frazetta and Suydam Art Stolen • 2012 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Nominees • Eaton Journal Launched • Announcements • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights • Audiobooks Received • Publications Received • Catalogs Received • Hurricane Sandy Brings New York to a Standstill

  Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois

  F&SF 11-12/12; Asimov’s 12/12; Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed.; Going Interstellar, Les Johnson & Jack McDevitt, eds.; Arc 1.3.

  Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton

  Eclipse Online 10/12; Eclipse Online 11/12; Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed.; Asimov’s 12/12; Analog 12/12; F&SF 11-12/12; Strange Horizons 10/12; Electric Velocipede Summer ’12; Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, Ann VanderMeer, ed.

  Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe

  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; Errantry: Strange Stories, Elizabeth Hand; Jack Glass, Adam Roberts.

  Reviews by Faren Miller

  Bad Glass, Richard E. Gropp; The Inexplicables, Cherie Priest; Dodger, Terry Pratchett; Devil Said Bang, Richard Kadrey; The Rise of Ransom City, Felix Gilman.

  Reviews by Russell Letson

  Apollo’s Outcasts, Allen Steele; The Cassandra Project, Jack McDevitt & Mike Resnick; Fate of Worlds, Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner.

  Reviews by Adrienne Martini

  Year Zero, Rob Reid; Merger/Disciple, Watler Mosley; Nell Gwynne’s On Land and At Sea, Kage Baker & Kathleen Bartholomew; Shift, Kim Curran.

  Reviews by Divers Hand: Reviews by Cecelia Holland, Richard A. Lupoff, Gwenda Bond, and Karen Burnham

  Something Red, Douglas Nicholas; Nell Gwynne’s on Land and at Sea, Kage Baker & Kathleen Bartholomew; The Diviners, Libba Bray; After, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds.; AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Ivor W. Hartmann, ed.

  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: October • Books Received: October • British Books Received: September • Bestsellers

  New and Notable

  Terry Bisson: This Month in History

  Obituaries

  Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. • Janet Berliner • Appreciation by Kevin J. Anderson • David Grove • Alan Hunter • Jacques Goimard • Pam Fremon

  Editorial Matters

  WFC • Back at the Ranch • This Issue/Next Issue • Happy Holidays!

  Corrections

  Photo List and Ad List

  Masthead

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky was born September 22, 1971, in Hartford CT. She attended the University of Connecticut, where she studied English and Anthropology, though she did not take a degree. She has worked as a technical writer, stable hand, reporter, and in assorted office jobs, and has been writing full-time for the past several years. She married Christopher Kindred in 2000, divorcing in 2007.

  Bear sold a few short stories to small-press publications in the ’90s, but began writing seriously in 2001. Notable stories include the Tiptree Award longlisted ‘‘This Tragic Glass’’ (2004), British SF Award finalists ‘‘Two Dreams on Trains’’ (2005) and ‘‘Sounding’’ (2006), Sidewise Award nominee ‘‘Les Innocents/Lumiere’’ (2007), WSFA Small Press Award finalist ‘‘Orm the Beautiful’’ (2007), Hugo and Sturgeon Memorial Award winner ‘‘Tideline’’ (2007), Hugo Award Winner ‘‘Shoggoths in Bloom’’ (2008), and World Fantasy Award finalist Bone and Jewel Creatures (2010). Some of her short work has been collected in The Chains that You Refuse (2006) and Shoggoths in Bloom (2012).

  First novel Hammered (2005) began the Jenny Casey trilogy, which also includes Scardown (2005) and Worldwired (2005). She has two standalone novels – Carnival (2006) and Undertow (2007) – but mostly writes in various series.

  Her sprawling Promethean Age fantasy sequence includes Blood and Iron (2006), Whiskey and Water (2007), Ink and Steel (2008), Hell and Earth (2008), and the forthcoming One-Eyed Jack (2013). The SF Jacob’s Ladder trilogy includes Dust (2007), Chill (2010), and Grail (2011), and postapocalyptic fantasy the Edda of Burdens includes All the Windwracked Stars (2008), By the Mountain Bound (2009), and The Sea Thy Mistress (2011). She has published many stories and novellas set in an alternate history with magic inspired by the work of Randall Garrett: titles in this New Amsterdam sequence include New Amsterdam (2007), Seven for a Secret (2009), The White City (2011), ad eternum (2012), and a forthcoming collection. The Eternal Sky series began with Range of Ghosts (2012) and continues with the forthcoming Shattered Pillars (2013).

  With Sarah Monette she writes the Iskryne series, a savage deconstruction of ‘‘animal companion’’ fantasies: A Companion to Wolves (2007), A Tempering of Men (2011), and forthcoming An Apprentice to Elves (2013). Since 2007 Bear has collaborated on web serial Shadow Unit, a supernatural FBI procedural, with Emma Bull, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, Leah Bobet, and Holly Black. She also helps host Hugo Award-winning podcast SF Squeecast. Bear won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and has taught at writing workshops Viable Paradise and Clarion West.

  After spending several years in Las Vegas, she returned home to New England in 2006. Her partner since 2011, fantasy writer and firefighter Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin.

  •

  ‘‘In 2001, I turned 30, 9/11 happened, and I got laid off from my job within a 30-day period, and I may have had a slight existential crisis. Las Vegas suffered very badly in the Post-9/11 economic crash, because it’s all airplanes, so there was no tourist trade. I wound up being put on half-time, then laid off. There were no temp jobs, so I was on unemployment, and it was driving me crazy. I had been working 10 to 12 hours a day at my job, trying to get to the gym, and trying to have a relationship with my then-husband. I wouldn’t say I had abandoned writing, but it was definitely on the shelf. Then suddenly I found myself with all of this free time, and carrying this emotional wound. I grew up in the northeast, and I spent a lot of time in New York, so I was having a hard time dealing with 9/11 emotionally. There’s only so much TV you can watch. So I started writing again.

  ‘‘At that time, some of my friends (who were somewhat worried about me) sent me links to what was then the Del Rey Online Writing Workshop – which is now just the Online Writing Workshop, and which (in one of those weird ironies) now employs me as an editor! We all just kind of glommed onto each other, and hauled each other up by our bootstraps.

  ‘‘I have this reputation of being an extremely fast writer, and I’m not. When I think o
f a fast writer, I think of Catherynne Valente, who can literally sit down and write a novel in two weeks. I can’t do that. I did once, after a four-day cross-country drive where I had nothing to do but think, write a short novel in about a month. Though it wasn’t the cleanest first draft I’ve ever written, all I wound up doing with that was changing one of the characters’ points of view from first-person to third-person. You can plot a short novel in four days, if all you have to do is stare at Nebraska.

  ‘‘For the next three years, I basically had hypergraphia. There was one year where I wrote almost three-quarters of a million words, writing 10-12 hours a day. (I had lost a job, so that time and energy needed to go somewhere!) In college, I did a stint as a journalist, and you get trained to produce the words, but I think my best day ever was 7,000 words – and that was a 20-hour day! I love it when I can get in the zone and just sit down and type a story, and then go back and read it and say, ‘Wow, this came out of my head?’ Lately that happens less and less often. I seem to be in a place in my professional development where everything is much more work. I’m pleased with the quality, but the process is very much up in my head, all very conscious.

  ‘‘The Eternal Sky books are set in a fantasy world, but they draw on Central Asian history. While I was writing the Promethean Age fantasies that started with Blood and Iron, I also got very interested in the history of the Mongol tribes of Central Asia, for a number of reasons – some of them personal. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was an honest-to-god Cossack. There’s an expression in Russian that basically boils down to ‘Scratch a Russian, and you’ll find a Mongol.’ A lot of people in the Ukrainian area are very aware of their Mongol heritage, and also of their Scandinavian heritage. It’s an unholy combination. When the Rus and the Mongols (both with a warrior tradition) meet and reproduce, you get Cossacks – like Africanized bees.

  ‘‘I have heard from a number of friends, of Asian and African descent, about how frustrating it is to see how focused Western fantasy is on the history of medieval Europe. With Range of Ghosts, I wanted to write a book for them and their kids, that would in some way honor their heritage. There are obviously issues of cultural appropriation, which is one of the reasons I wanted to make it very plain that this is not real history: it’s not my history to play in. But I also think it’s necessary for us as a genre to be more aware of the world outside of fake-medieval Germany and fake-medieval England.

  ‘‘One of my best friends is a direct male-line descendent of Genghis Khan. She has the documentation to prove it. I got fascinated by the way Genghis Khan is portrayed, as opposed to the way Alexander the Great is portrayed. They both won! In Mongolia, Genghis Khan is a culture hero, still to this day. The stuff that he accomplished, on a technological level and on a social level, is astounding. The Mongol Empire had bankruptcy laws. The third time you declared bankruptcy, they executed you, but that might not be a bad thing for us – it might solve some of our Wall Street problems.

  ‘‘The Mongols also had fine art. They kidnapped and enslaved artisans. And there were roads – I think you could get from Beijing to Istanbul in six weeks, across Asia on horseback, because the roads were that safe. And they had post riders. This was an astounding cultural achievement, yet in the West they are portrayed as the ‘barbarian horde.’

  ‘‘I wanted to explore that whole bunch of history that we’re not aware of in the West. (There was a Tibetan empire, which was vast.) I probably didn’t do as much research as I did for the Elizabethan novels Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth, but I wasn’t attempting to write a historical novel; I was attempting to create a group of cultures out of whole cloth, and I very much wanted it not to be an Orientalist Japanasia, that vaguely panAsian kind of thing that sometimes exists in fantasy novels. So I wanted a wide range of cultures, a sprawling civilization.

  ‘‘I realized I didn’t have to be bound by earthly conventions. If you’ve got a world in which there really are gods who really can be made manifest, there’s such a thing as Divine Right of Kings, and you do have intervention by saints and deities and demigods, that can lead to a lot of interesting things. You have astrological phenomena that are directly linked to what the gods are doing. When a political situation changes, the sky changes, so you can tell when kings have lost favor with the gods, and different groups of gods are vying for power themselves, via their intermediaries: their human chess pieces.

  ‘‘This is both metaphorical and literal, in the Eternal Sky books. Things are both physical, concrete, and metaphysical. In the worldbuilding, there’s no contradiction. I was very tired of this idea that magic and science are a dichotomy, and I wanted to integrate magic and science. That’s just the way human brains work – that’s why science becomes religion, to people who don’t really understand it.

  ‘‘It was important to me to create a well-rounded world with a lot of different cultures that were not direct analogues of historical cultures, but obviously influenced by them. I try to be careful and respectful of the real cultures, as I try to create a world that has all kinds of different people in it. Otherwise, you’re contributing to the problem. I have a firmly held belief that the way to deal with literary stereotyping is to represent the hell out of everybody.

  ‘‘I had a conversation with a group of others, including Paul Cornell, that turned into a podcast. Paul said he really thinks science fiction is undergoing a new golden age. In my generation (if I may be so bold as to claim a generation of science fiction writers), there are a whole bunch of people who seem like your basic white Americans but who grew up in other places – as Peace Corps kids, diplomatic kids. And there are so many wonderful writers of color currently. It’s amazing to have this diversity of voices suddenly flowering, when for so many years diversity in speculative fiction was represented as just Octavia Butler. The queer writers, the transgender writers, the writers who do not claim gender at all….

  ‘‘I think this diversity of voices makes some people very uncomfortable. It can also make certain political aspects of the genre difficult to navigate, because now nobody agrees about where the lines are. We’re having to discuss the boundaries, but that discussion is so valuable, so necessary! If science fiction is not going to devolve into endless arguments about late-period Heinlein, we need that diversity, that flowering of different perspectives. The writers who have come into the genre out of this sudden blossoming of different life streams are among the best that the genre has ever had. (Nalo Hopkinson is one of the best fantasy writers, ever.)

  ‘‘There are people who are very resistant to queer writers, and writers of color. I think they don’t want to accept that they have privilege. One has to acknowledge that there are parts of the human experience that one is not equipped to comprehend, because one has not had the formative experience that will make it seem real. Part of the issue is that the first step in empathy is just to accept that, as a white male, you’re the horse with the lightest handicap in the race. If you can accept that, you can have more sympathy for other human beings. I know heterosexual white men who are perfectly capable of understanding why feminism is important, why anti-racism is important, why queer activism is important, because they have been able to make that leap. Part of being a decent human is accepting that life is not fair, and trying to make it more fair.

  ‘‘There are some genre works that make me extremely uncomfortable – this whole Ayn Randian streak of science fiction! The classic Randian philosophy really does not acknowledge privilege. You have this level of thought where you’re a self-made man and you’ve done everything for yourself, this mentality built up about how competent you are: the Heinleinian omnicompetent hero who started from nothing – except people don’t really start from nothing. You get physical inheritance from your parents (health or handicaps); you get education. If you come from a family that has good middle-class money-management skills and you are trained in those skills, you have an advantage over somebody who was raised in a hand-to-mouth, ‘We never had enou
gh money to put food on the table’ way.

  ‘‘While there are more than two categories of story, obviously, there are two broad, general categories that talk about experience: insider stories and outsider stories. The easiest way for me to talk about this is via a five-year-old movie, Brokeback Mountain. I grew up in a queer family, so this is part of my zeitgeist. There was a lot of resistance to Brokeback Mountain in the queer community, because at the end of the movie one of the two lovers dies, making it a tragic love story. And the gay community is really sick of, ‘You can only be gay if you’re dead.’ The thing is, it’s a story about two gay men that was written by a white heterosexual woman and directed by an Asian heterosexual man. It takes this sort of quintessentially gay experience of being closeted and passionately, desperately in love with somebody you can’t have, because society won’t let you. There’s a reaction from some queer viewers, ‘Why didn’t they just go to fucking San Francisco?’ But that was outside the characters’ experience, so it was not an option.

  ‘‘What that movie successfully did was create a watershed in how straight people think about gay people, because it universalized the experience of being in love with somebody you can’t have and made it acceptable to heterosexuals. Whereas the Torch Song Trilogy, a brilliant movie in the heroic-drag-queen subgenre, is about a very flamboyant gay man – a drag queen – attempting to find love and happiness in 1980s New York, in the midst of a lot of anti-gay backlash. That’s an insider story.

  ‘‘In writing Range of Ghosts, I was very aware that I cannot write an insider story about a mythic, precolonial-era Asia. I cannot write a story from the perspective of somebody who was living that. All I can do is try to create an outsider story that’s not too terribly exploitative.’’

  –Elizabeth Bear

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  Theodore Anthony Kosmatka was born December 16, 1973 in northwest Indiana, and was raised in Chesterton IN. He studied biology and chemistry at Indiana University, and worked as a zookeeper, steel mill worker, and laboratory research tech before becoming a writer for video game company Valve in 2009 (a job he describes as ‘‘like working in heaven, and your big fear is being kicked out of paradise.’’) Kosmatka has five children and lives with his second wife in Washington State.