Locus, December 2012
Page 6
Italian rights to Unbreakable by Kami Garcia sold to Mondadori in Italy, in a pre-empt, via Elena Benglia of Luigi Bernabo Associates. French rights sold to Hachette, in a pre-empt, via Eliane Benisti; Brazilian rights to Record, in a pre-empt, via Suely Pedro dos Santos of Karin Schindler Agency; Taiwanese rights to Sharp Point via Cynthia Chang of Bardon Chinese Media; and Russian rights to Azbooka-Atticus via Natalia Sanina of Synopsis Literary Agency, all on behalf of Cecilia de la Campa and Jodi Reamer of Writer’s House.
Italian rights to Natural Causes by James Oswald went to Giunti, Brazilian rights to Record, German rights to Goldmann, Serbian rights to Alnari, and Czech rights to Jota, all via Rachel Mills of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop.
Spanish rights to Brandon Sanderson’s The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and Hero of Ages sold to Ediciones B. French rights to Steelheart and two other books sold to Audrey Petit at Calmann-Levy, and Spanish right sold to Ediciones B. in Spain, all via Montse Yanez of Julio F-Yanez Agency on behalf of Brady McReynolds at JABberwocky. Brazilian rights to The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages sold to Texto via Suely Pedro Dos Santos via Karin Schindler Agency on behalf of Brady McReynolds at JABberwocky.
Complex Chinese rights to Lucky Bastard by S.G. Browne sold to Fantasy Foundation via Molly Jaffa and Jonathan Lyons of Folio Literary Mangement on behalf of Michelle Brower in association with the Grayhawk Agency.
French rights to James S.A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, and a third title went to Actes Sud via Heather Baror-Shapiro at Baror International.
German rights Dan Simmons’s The Abominable went to Heyne, and Italian rights to Fabbri, both via Danny Baror of Baror International in association with Richard Curtis Associates.
German rights to Terry Goodkind’s The First Confessor sold to Blenvalet via Danny Baror of Baror International in association with Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency.
Polish rights to Belladonna by Anne Bishop went to Initium via Prava I Prevodi in association with Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.
French rights to The Wyrmling Horde by David Farland sold to Fleuve Noir via Danny Baror of Baror International in association with Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency.
German rights to books three and four in the Falling Kingdoms series by Michelle Rowen writing as Morgan Rhodes went to Goldmann, French righs to Michel Lafon, Italian rights to Nord, Russian rights to Azbooka-Atticus, Bulgarian rights to MBG books, Polish rights to Amber, complex Chinese rights to Wisdom, simplified Chinese rights to Shanghai Zui, Portugese rights to Companhia das Letras, Czech rights to Egmont, Dutch rights to Luitlngh-Sijthoff, Catalan rights to Cruilla, and Spanish rights to Circulo de Lectores, all via Jim McCarthy of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management.
Spanish rights to The Curious Steambox Affair: A Novel of the Merry Gentlemen by Melissa MacGregor sold to Leis Pederson of Intermix via Margaret Spain of Spain Law Firm.
Turkish rights to The Sea Wolves & White Fangs by Christopher Golden & Tim Lebbon went to Altin Kitaplar via Heather Baror-Shapiro of Baror International and Nurcihan Kesim, in association with Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.
Czech rights to Ganymede by Cherie Priest sold to Triton via Prava I Prevodi in association with Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.
Polish rights to The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill went to Muza, SA.
Japanese rights to Dan Sehlberg’s Mona and sequel Sinon sold to Shogakukan via Miko Yamanouchi at Japan Uni, Korean rights to Hyundaemunhak via Geenie Han of Momo Agency, and Dutch rights to Karakter, all on behalf of Tor Jonasson of the Salomonsson Agency. Slovak rights went to Ikar, world Spanish rights to Destino, and Hungarian rights to Ulpius-Haz, all via Federico Ambrosini at Salomonsson Agency. Swedish rights sold to Stockholm Text via Jessica Bager and Leyla Bell Drake at Salomonsson Agency.
Japanese rights to The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible and The Lost Starts: Tarnished Knight by John Hemry, writing as Jack Campbell, went to Hayakawa via Hamish Macaskill at the English Agency on behalf of Brady McReynolds at JABberwocky Literacy Agency.
OTHER RIGHTS
Audio rights to Randal Garrett’s Murder and Magic, Too Many Magicians, and Lord Darcy Investigates, and also the Gandalara Cycle by Garrett & Vicki Ann Heydron went to Steve Feldberg at Audible via Eddie Schneider and Joshua Bilmes at JABberwocky. Audio rights to The Shrouded Planet and The Dawning Light by Robert Silverberg & Randall Garrett writing as Robert Randall sold to Steve Feldberg at Audible via Eddie Schneider and Joshua Bilmes at JABberwocky.
Audio rights to 28 novels by Mike Resnick sold to Audible via Eleanor Wood of the Spectrum Literary Agency.
Large print rights to Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris and An Apple for the Creature edited by Harris & Toni Kelner went to Thorndike Press via Ace.
Audio rights to Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews and the following five Andrej Koscuisko novels sold to Steve Feldberg at Audible via Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.
Audio rights to Rootless by Chris Howard went to Rebecca Bullene at Scholastic Audio via Laura Rennert of Andrea Brown Literary Agency.
Audio rights to The Weight of Stars and The Strange Maid sold to Laura Duane of Listening Library via Laura Rennert of Andrea Brown Literary Agency.
Audio rights to the Dinocalypse trilogy by Evil Hat Productions LLC sold to Audible via Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.
Book club rights to Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer went to SFBC via Ace.
Book club rights to Taylor Anderson’s Rising Tides and Firestorm sold to SFBC for an omnibus edition called Rising Storm via Roc.
Book club rights to Bronze Summer by Stephen Baxter went to SFBC via Ace.
Book club rights to E.E. Knight’s Vampire Earth series, to be done as an omnibus titled Enter the Wolf: Vampire Earth Volume 1 went to SFBC via Ace.
Book club rights to Doctor Who: Wheel of Ice by Stephen Baxter sold to SFBC via Ace.
AUDIOBOOKS RECEIVED
Eve & Adam by Michael Grant & Katherine Applegate (Macmillan Audio, $29.99, 6 CDs, 8 hours, 978-1-4272-2663-1) Unabridged audio recording of Eve & Adam read by Jenna Lamia and Holter Graham.
Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet by Darynda Jones (Macmillan Audio, $39.99, 9 CDs, 10 hours: 30 minutes, 978-1-4272-2594-8) Unabridged audio recording of Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet read by Lorelei King.
Mercury Rests by Robert Kroese (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 8 CDs, 9 hours: 48 minutes, 978-1-4692-3662-9) Unabridged audio recording of Mercury Rests read by Kevin Stillwell.
At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (Naxos Audiobooks, $28.98, 4 CDs, 5 hours: 3 minutes, 978-184-379-594-0) Unabridged audio recording of At the Mountains of Madness read by William Roberts.
Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories by Bram Stoker (Naxos Audiobooks, $34.98, 5 CDs, 5 hours: 41 minutes, 978-184-379-563-6) Unabridged audio recording of Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories read by Rupert Degas.
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED
Burroughs Bulletin New Series #86 (Spring 2011), quarterly publication for members of the Burroughs Bibliophiles, with articles on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s life and works, plus letters and reviews. Information: Henry G. Franke III, 318 Patriot Way, Yorktown, VA 23693-4639; phone: (573) 647-0225; e-mail:
Mythprint Vol. 49, No. 10 (October 2012), monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, with news, reviews, etc. Non-member subscription: $25.00 per year US, $32.00 Canada and Mexico, $41.00 elsewhere. Information: Mythopoeic Society Orders Department, Box 71, Napoleon MI 49261-0071; e-mail:
The NASFA Shuttle Vol. 32, No. 11 (November 2012), monthly newsletter of the North Alabama Science Fiction Association. NASFA news, reviews, etc. Single copy: $2.00. Membership: $25/year, subscription only: $15/year. Information: NASFA, Inc., PO Box 4857, Huntsville AL 35815-4857.
Rabbit Hole No. #52, newsletter of the Harlan Ellison Reco
rding Collection, with essays, letters, books, and recordings. Information: Susan Ellison, Editor, PO Box 55548, Sherman Oaks CA 91413; website:
CATALOGS RECEIVED
Wrigley Cross Books, PMB 455, 2870 NE Hogan Rd., Ste. E, Gresham OR 97030; phone: (503) 667-0807; toll free: (877) 694-1467; e-mail:
HURRICANE SANDY BRING NEW YORK TO A STANDSTILL
Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, formed on October 22, 2012 and did not dissipate until October 31. It struck the Caribbean, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeastern US, affecting 24 states and did an estimated $20-50 billion (including losses from business interuptions) in damages. It also brought the New York publishing industry to a standstill. Here are photos from some of the folks affected.
NASA photo of Hurricane Sandy; Matthew Kressel documents flooding in New York and his cousin’s home in Long Island
HarperCollins editor Jennifer Brehl & Peter Schneider (Hill House) clean-up the damage to their New York home
Return to In This Issue listing.
GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS
F&SF 11-12/12
Asimov’s 12/12
Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris) December 2012.
Going Interstellar, Les Johnson & Jack McDevitt, eds. (Baen) June 2012.
Arc 1.3
The best story in the November/December F&SF, and easily the best SF story that F&SF has published all year, is Robert Reed’s novella ‘‘Katabasis’’, another of his Great Ship stories, a long-running series about a Jupiter-sized spaceship that endlessly travels the galaxy with millions of passengers from many different races, including humans. In this one, bored rich immortals compete to complete a months-long trek across difficult terrain for no particular reason except to gain prestige in the eyes of their peers and perhaps to face a deadly challenge as a change from their over-protected lives. Many of them don’t make it, in fact – but death is not quite as permanent a condition in this society as it is in our own. The novella follows the progress of one such party, shepherded on the way by an alien guide, the eponymous Katabasis, whose own story about how she came to be traveling on the Great Ship is told in flashbacks. Reed may be the best in science fiction at taking you step by painful step through a grueling, extended physical process, really making you feel the reserves you have to call upon in order to make it, and here we get two such processes, the almost-unsurvivable trek of the tourist party that Katabasis is guiding, and her own earlier and even more harrowing race across an alien desert, family and friends falling at her side almost with every step. I sometimes wonder if it’s Reed’s own personal history as a long-distance runner that makes him so good at describing these kinds of limits-testing physical ordeals? At any rate, I felt like putting my feet up after reading this one, and you may too. Also good here is Naomi Kritzer’s ‘‘High Stakes’’, a direct sequel to her ‘‘Liberty’s Daughter’’ in the May/June issue, part of a YA series which reads sort of like Nancy Drew written by the Heinlein of Podkayne of Mars, set in a floating Libertarian Utopia that becomes more unpleasant the more closely the way it really functions is examined. It’s even more obvious here than it was with the first story that this is a de facto novelization, with major plotlines left unresolved, something that will probably be exacerbated in further chunks as conveying the backstory becomes more of a chore. Entertaining reading, though, with a nice voice.
Nothing else in the issue is as successful. Steven Popkes’s ‘‘Breathe’’ is about a family with the power to steal breath from other people, and the morality of using that gift, and to what degree. Albert E. Cowdrey sends his pair of ghostbusters, Jimmie and Morrey to Mississippi, to an Antebellum mansion where they have to deal with ‘‘The Ladies in Waiting’’. Chris Willrich gives us a man fighting Alternate Universe versions of himself, in ‘‘Waiting for a Me Like You’’. New writer Alter S. Reiss’s ‘‘If the Stars Reverse Their Courses, If the Rivers Run Back from the Sea’’ features a man going back to the past to win a current-day battle, although, unusually, the time-travel method is fantasy rather than SF. And Alan Dean Foster spins another Tall Tale about series character Mad Amos Malone in ‘‘Claim Blame’’.
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The best story in a strong December Asimov’s, capping a strong year overall, is Steven Popkes’s novella ‘‘Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected’’. I often don’t like rock ’n’ roll stories, which frequently demonstrate little knowledge either of music or the music business, but Popkes does a good job of convincing me that he knows both well, and his performance scenes, which often ring false in this kind of stories, are similarly convincing. The story is also peopled with psychologically complex and real-feeling characters whose fate you come to care about, and is very well executed.
Also good in December are Ken Liu’s ‘‘The Waves’’, Robert Reed’s ‘‘The Pipes of Pan’’, and Chris Beckett’s ‘‘The Caramel Forest’’. The Liu story begins aboard a generation ship which is in the midst of a long journey to the stars when a message is beamed from Earth telling the people aboard the secret of achieving immortality; like Liu’s ‘‘Arc’’ in the September/October F&SF, this part of the story then becomes a debate about when/whether you should die to make room for new generations if the choice not to die is yours, although here Liu seems to come down on the opposite side of the argument than he did in ‘‘Arc’’. Just when it seems the story is about to end, though, there’s a scene change, as it turns out that colonists from Earth have arrived at the target planet long before the inhabitants of the generation ship, using Faster-Than-Light travel invented subsequent to their departure, and they offer the crew another choice – whether to stay organically human or to change into a mechanical posthuman form. And there’s another decision yet to come, after a subsequent journey to another star-system, as relentless change continues to crash over the ship’s crew like the waves of the title. Reed’s story is a quiet study of a scientist coming to learn, over the course of a long and turbulent career, the choice every living being must sooner or later. Beckett’s story, a sequel to his ‘‘Day 29’’ from last year’s July issue, examines colonists, or, in this case, their children, trying to adapt to life on a strange alien planet where, as becomes increasingly obvious with each story in this sequence, they don’t belong and probably shouldn’t be at all.
Mike Resnick’s ‘‘The Wizard of West 34th Street’’ is not in the same league as the above stories, but then, it doesn’t intend to be, and works fine as what it is: a funny story that adapts a classic fantasy trope to a modern urban setting. As a humorous piece, it’s more successful and less heavy-handed than the issue’s other attempt at humor, Sandra McDonald’s ‘‘The Black Feminist’s Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing’’.
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Easily the best original science fiction anthology of the year, by a good margin, is Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan – true, original SF anthologies have been light on the ground this year, but Edge of Infinity would be a standout in any year. Unusually, in these days when it seems almost de rigueur for editors to sneak some slipstream or fantasy stories into even ostensibly ‘‘All SF’’ anthologies, everything here actually is pure-quill core SF, some of it hard SF at that, and the literary quality is excellent across the board.
There’s nothing that’s bad here, again unlike most anthologies, which makes it difficult to pick favorites, but among the strongest stories are Pat Cadigan’s ‘‘The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi’’, about a worker who was injured in an accident in orbit around Jupiter dealing with the problems and benefits of changing your species, Paul McAuley’s linked quintet of five small stories ‘‘Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, The Potter’s Garden’’, which provides a picturesque tour of the ou
ter solar system in the aftermath of the Quiet War, Gwyneth Jones’s ‘‘Bricks, Sticks, Straw’’, in which software agents struggle to reassemble their identities after suffering a solar storm on Callisto, Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘‘Tyche and the Ants’’, which tells a tale of political warfare and cyber attack through the focus of a child’s whimsical fantasy world, and Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘The Peak of Eternal Light’’, a comedy of manners about intricate sexual mores on Mercury that reveals one of Sterling’s influences to be P.G. Wodehouse (something that might come as a surprise to someone who never read earlier stories like his ‘‘The Beautiful and the Sublime’’). In addition, Edge of Infinity contains excellent work by Elizabeth Bear, James S.A. Corey, Sandra McDonald & Stephen D.Covey, John Barnes, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, and An Owomoyela, any of which would have been among the standout stories in any other SF anthology of the year. If you like core SF, this is the anthology to buy this year.
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Going Interstellar, edited by Les Johnson & Jack McDevitt, is another of the year’s rare original SF anthologies – it’s nowhere near as good overall as Edge of Infinity, but it does contain an excellent novella by Michael Bishop, ‘‘Twenty Lights to ‘The Land of Snow’’’, in which Tibetan dissidents and refuges flee to the stars in a generation ship in company with the Dali Lama.
It’s the first core SF story Bishop has told in some years, and a welcome return to the days when he was turning out SF novellas such as ‘‘Death and Designation Among the Asadi’’ and ‘‘The House of Compassionate Sharers’’. Going Interstellar also contains solid work by Jack McDevitt, Ben Bova, and others, as well as non-fiction essays about possible designs for interstellar spaceships by Dr. Gregory Maloff, Dr. Richard Obousy, and Les Johnson himself.
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After two strong issues, the latest edition of Arc, Arc 1.3, is somewhat disappointing. Put together by the publishers of Scientific American magazine, and described as ‘‘a new digital magazine about the future,’’ Arc, edited by Simon Ings & Sumit Paul-Choudhury, exists mainly in various downloadable formats for the Kindle, the iPad, iPhones, Windows PC and Mac computers, orderable either from Amazon or directly from