Locus, May 2013
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IN THIS ISSUE
May 2013 • Issue 628 • Vol. 70 • No. 5
46th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman
Writers and Illustrators of the Future Administrators, Judges, Winners, and Others: John Goodwin, Gunhild Jacobs, Brett Kennedy, Dave Wolverton, Tina Gower (Writer Winner), Aldo Katayanagi (Illustrator Winner), Ron Lindahn, Kimberly Locke, Joni Labaqui
Interviews
Tim Powers: An Unexpected Direction
Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden: The Continuation of Fanac by Other Means
The Small & Independent Press
Introduction • Small Beer Press • Lethe Press • PS Publishing • Earthling Publications • Cheeky Frawg Books • Fairwood Press • ChiZine Publications • Twelfth Planet Press • EDGE Books • Prime Books • Aqueduct Press • Tachyon Publications • Ticonderoga Publications • Subterranean Press • Night Shade Books
People and Publishing
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Harlan Ellison, Nnedi Okorafor, Ray Bradbury, Susanna Clarke, and many others.
Conventions & Workshops
Norwescon 36 • 2013 Writers and Illustrators of the Future • 2013 Williamson Lectureship • 2013 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts • 2013 Rainforest Writers Village Retreats
Main Stories
2013 Hugo Awards Nominations • Slattery Wins Dick Award • Banks Diagnosed with Terminal Cancer • 2012 BSFA Awards Winners • Clarke Award Shortlist • Night Shade for Sale
The Data File
Bookseller Class Action Update • Amazon Buys Goodreads • Underland Press Sold • Eclipse Online Closes • B&N Cuts S&S Orders • More E-books in Libraries • Petition for Asimov Historical Marker • Stephen King News • Announcements • World Conventions News • Legal News • Magazine News • Publishing News • Bookstore News • Awards News
Locus Looks at Books
Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois
Asimov’s 3/13; Superheroes, Rich Horton ed.; Future Games, Paula Guran, ed.; Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, Jack Vance.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton
Subterranean Spring ’13; Clarkesworld 3/13; Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/7/13; Asimov’s 4-5/13; F&SF 5-6/13; Lightspeed 4/13; Trafalgar, Angélica Gorodischer; Squaring the Circle, Georghe Sasarman; The Queen, the Cambion, and Seven Others, Richard Bowes.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe
London Falling, Paul Cornell; Martian Sands, Lavie Tidhar; Squaring the Circle, Georghe Sasarman, Ursula K. LeGuin, trans.; Spin, Nina Allan.
Reviews by Faren Miller
Without a Summer, Mary Robinette Kowal; The Aylesford Skull, James P. Blaylock; Doktor Glass, Thomas Brennan; London Falling, Paul Cornell; Wolfhound Century, Peter Higgins.
Reviews by Russell Letson
Zero Point, Neal Asher; The Kassa Gambit, M.C. Planck.
Short Reviews by Carolyn Cushman
Stolen Magic, Stephanie Burgis; Wednesdays in the Tower, Jessica Day George; Tarnished, Rhiannon Held; Flash Point, Nancy Kress; Antiagon Fire, L.E. Modesitt, Jr.; Iron Kin, M.J. Scott; Kitty Rocks the House, Carrie Vaughn; Binding, Carol Wolf.
Divers Hands: Reviews by Gwenda Bond, Karen Burnham, and Stefan Dziemianowicz
When We Wake, Karen Healey; September Girls, Bennett Madison; Speculative Japan 3: Silver Bullet and Other Tales of Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy, Edward Lipsett, ed.; The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, John Langan; The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Laird Barron.
Commentary
Cory Doctorow: Improving Book Publicity in the 21st Century
Listings
Magazines Received: March • Books Received: March • British Books Received: February • Bestsellers
New and Notable
Terry Bisson: This Month in History
Obituaries
Roger Ebert • Appreciation by Richard A. Lupoff • Basil Copper • James Herbert • Rick Hautala • Paul Williams • Appreciation by Eileen Gunn • Nick Pollotta • Robert Morales • Jennifer Schwabach • Mitchell Hooks • DEATH NOTED: Dan Morgan
Editorial Matters
ICFA • Night Shade and Skyhouse/Start • Iain M. Banks • Locus Awards
Photo List and Ad List
Masthead
Return to In This Issue listing.
Timothy Thomas Powers was born in Buffalo NY on February 29, 1952 (he only gets a birthday during leap years). He moved with his family to Southern California when he was seven and has lived there ever since. He attended California State University Fullerton, graduating with a BA in English in 1976. While in college he became friends with James P. Blaylock and K.W. Jeter, and all three spent time with Philip K. Dick, who influenced their writing and careers in various ways. In college Powers co-created fictional poet William Ashbless, who first appeared as the author of a poem Powers and Blaylock collaborated on, each adding one line at a time. Ashbless has since written introductions to (and harsh critiques of) each writer’s work, and has authored various pamphlets, as well as featuring in The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook (2001).
Powers has written some science fiction, but more often his work involves the supernatural and magic, with an emphasis on mythology and secret histories of historical figures, including Bugsy Siegel, Lord Byron, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, and, most recently, the Rossetti siblings. His first two novels were SF: The Skies Discrowned (1976; revised as Forsake the Sky 1986) and Epitaph in Rust (1976; revised as An Epitaph in Rust 1989). Fantasy The Drawing of the Dark appeared in 1979. Time-travel novel The Anubis Gates (1983) and post-holocaust SF Dinner at Deviant’s Palace (1985) each won a Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. On Stranger Tides (1987) involves pirates and voodoo, and The Stress of Her Regard (1989) concerns the supernatural exploits of poets Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Contemporary fantasy Last Call (1992) won a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award, and began a loose trilogy that also includes Expiration Date (1995) and Earthquake Weather (1997), both Locus Award winners. Declare (2001), a supernatural secret history about Cold War spies, won a World Fantasy Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Three Days to Never (2006) involves time travel, supernatural creatures, and the secret histories of Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin. He returned to the world of The Stress of Her Regard with his latest novel Hide Me Among the Graves (2012), this time with a focus on painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti.
Powers has produced a small but exceptional body of short fiction, most collected in Night Moves and Other Stories (2001), Strange Itineraries (2004), and The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011). Some stories have been published as standalone books, including Night Moves (1986), Where They Are Hid (1995), The Bible Repairman (2005), A Soul in a Bottle (2006), and Salvage and Demolition (2012). Collection The Devils in the Details (2003) features a story by Powers, a story by James P. Blaylock, and a collaboration.
He lives in San Bernadino CA with his wife Serena (married 1980).
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‘‘With Hide Me Among the Graves, I didn’t deliberately set out to write a sequel to The Stress of Her Regard, which had been published more than 20 years earlier. I was snagged by reading somewhere that when Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s wife committed suicide, and he blamed himself and was all torn up about it, he took his notebook of poetry and laid it into her coffin, and she was buried with all his poetry. Everybody admired this gesture of extreme grief. Several years later, though, a publisher said, ‘You know, if you had a collection of poetry we could publish a book.’ And Rossetti said, ‘Ah, give me a couple of days,’ and he
dug her up and retrieved the manuscript. My first thought on reading that was, ‘Oh yeah? Why did he really dig her up?’ Plainly he either needed to get something else out of the coffin, or he needed to put something else into it. That was an obvious event to use as the kernel of a fantasy novel, and so I began reading very obsessively about him and his sister Christina Rossetti and their siblings and all their various associates. I discovered that John Polidori was their maternal uncle, and Polidori had been a character in The Stress of Her Regard. Then I discovered that Edward John Trelawny, a sort of piratical figure who knew Byron and Shelley and who arranged Shelley’s funeral pyre – and who also had been a character in my older book – knew the Rossetti siblings. He was in his eighties by that time, but still a very important character. For instance, William Rossetti’s children always died in infancy, and Trelawny gave him a piece of Shelley’s charred jaw bone which he had saved as a souvenir from the funeral pyre 50 years earlier, and immediately William was able to have children that lived. This was all true!
‘‘I thought, ‘Okay, and I haven’t even made anything up yet!’ And so I just read very extensively about all these people. There is a book of several volumes, ‘The Rossetti Papers’; it’s as if somebody came and emptied all their desks and published the contents. It’s not in any particular order, and there are letters from Christina and Trelawny and everybody, and if you read all that very detailed stuff with the particular paranoid squint I like to have when I do research, you see a lot of apparently occult clues and you think – ‘Aha!’
‘‘My approach is to assume that nothing in history is a coincidence – if any two things happen at the same time, then there is a connection – and to ask myself, ‘What were they up to really?’ If history says a person was in a particular place to meet somebody, or attend a funeral, or get married, you look for little details and you’ll find he threw a cigar into someone’s drink, maybe, and so you find out whose drink it was, what he was drinking, did either of them have any false limbs or a glass eye, what phase the moon was in, everything. And if you’re obsessively looking for evidence of some supernatural context, you’ll generally find something. I let the pieces of the plot suggest themselves – I connect the dots, but the dots present themselves. My system of writing is really designed for someone with no intrinsic imagination (though I suppose it does take imagination to know what is a suggestive dot and what is useless trivia).
‘‘What I found was a story that obviously involved John Polidori, and Trelawny and his relic from Shelley’s funeral pyre. And those were just too connected with stuff from The Stress of Her Regard for me to keep this new one from being a continuation of the world of that book. I never meant to write a sequel after that long an interval, because I’m just a different guy after 20 years, but if connecting the dots spelled a sequel, what else could I do? It’s not a dependent sequel, though – I swear! – you don’t have to have read The Stress of Her Regard to get what’s going on. But I think if you pushed the two books together and read them as a single package, there would not be contradictions.
‘‘When I’m using real events in a book, I never change historical facts or rearrange the calendar. That seems like cheating. If history says three weeks went by between these two events and it would be more immediately convenient if one happened the day after the first, I tell myself, ‘No. You have to put the three weeks in. Find some good reason why there was a delay, something to usefully fill in the three weeks.’ It’s sort of like writing sonnets. If you want to write a sonnet, you can’t have 15 lines. There are boundaries. I like more rather than fewer restrictions, and once I’ve located and charted my restrictions, I figure out, what is the best way through this maze? I would find it very difficult to write a story with no immovable yard lines and goal posts – it’s that sort of unalterable terrain that suggests and even dictates the story. I never have a story in mind and then do the research for it. I always do research in order to discover what my story is about. It saves me from the necessity of imagination. Luckily the nonfiction I read is pretty widely spread. I’ll read about Teddy Roosevelt, say, and I’ll think, ‘That event there looks interesting,’ or I’ll read about people climbing Mount Everest, or how Fleming discovered penicillin, and maybe I’ll snag on some intriguing coincidence. Every now and then I do come across something that suggests a plot element, and then it stops being recreational reading and becomes research – which means I have to read a dozen more books on whatever the subject happens to be. And so I might have to read every book on Mount Everest, for example – but if I read about George Mallory, who died on Everest and may or may not have reached the summit, and it turns out his hobby was beekeeping, then I’d better read some books on beekeeping. If it turns out his father was a cobbler, I have to read about shoes from the 19th century, and if I discover his father made only right shoes, except in his old age when he feverishly made a whole bunch of left shoes – then, wow! Suddenly it’s not about Mount Everest at all, and I have to deal with those shoes.
‘‘It’s always great when you come across a character like Edward Trelawny. He was closely involved with Byron and Shelley and Leigh Hunt in Italy in the 1820s, and decades later turned out to be an important figure who knew Swinburne, the Rossettis, and the artist Burne-Jones in the 1860s. He also happened to be a vain, grotesquely self-exaggerated character. He wrote an autobiography that was a very dramatic romantic story of the sort Sabatini could have written, and it eventually turned out to be all lies. But after he wrote the autobiography, he went and actually had a life that Sabatini could have written! He was first lieutenant to a mountain warlord in Greece in a cave on Mount Parnassus, and he was in dozens of battles, and at one point he was nearly fatally shot in the back, and the way he recovered was to simply sit out in the weather for 40 days and not move, sustained only by eating raw eggs. This appears to be the true story! With a character like him, the only challenge is how much of the extravagant figure that he was can you possibly scrape off and put into a book? The only other character I can think of right now who spans distinct eras like that is Neal Cassady, who was crucial to the Beats with Kerouac and Ginsberg, and was later crucial to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. (I’ve always thought you could do something with that crowd. What were they up to with that bus, really?)
‘‘It’s hard to say why Christina Rossetti, who was a very devout Christian, never married and never had any real romantic attachment with anybody. She got a couple of proposals from gentlemen, but turned them down. You’d think it would be a very drab, internal, conventionally Christian life, but in fact her poetry is full of nightmare images, and guilt and shame, and doubt about the possibly of forgiveness from God, and reproachful ghosts. In reality, I have no conception of what stained her life that way. There’s speculation that perhaps her father or a relative molested her – at age 14, she went fairly abruptly from being a happy, outgoing, horse-riding, sporty girl to a recluse. Whatever it was, that’s when it happened. There are a lot of plausible speculations, but none are substantiated by anything documented – so I decided it was caused by interactions with the vampiric ghost of her uncle Polidori.
‘‘Luckily I don’t keep up with current SF and fantasy. Up until 1975 I read virtually everything, but now I don’t really know what’s being written about – case in point – vampires. I get the idea that current vampires are metrosexual guys who are kind of perversely charming. I certainly prefer the kind of vampires like Dracula – they’re more fun because the metrosexual with nice hair is going to be too much like a human character, one who probably reads the same blogs and magazines as everybody else, and probably goes to Starbucks. I want an inhuman species that will be alarmingly and disorientingly alien. I want them to only peripherally overlap with humans, so that humans can’t comprehend their emotions or their thoughts. The vampires can’t really understand very much about us, either, but to our misfortune there is an overlap. That’s more interesting to write about. Vampires shouldn’t tweet.
‘‘I try very hard to make my history accurate, and so I’m always a little baffled if I see a book of mine called alternate history. If it’s actually alternate, I screwed up! It’s supposed to be as close as I can make it to, in this case, the real London.
‘‘The next novel looks likely to involve Los Angeles and Hollywood, and it will be pretty much contemporary. It involves consequences from things that happened in the ’20s and ’30s – how can you not have consequences from the ’20s and ’30s? One nice thing about the history of Hollywood and LA is, you can comprehend it. The city itself only goes so far back. If you go back to 1890, you have pretty much encompassed all the history of LA, unlike London or Rome where you have to go back thousands of years before you’ve seen everything. I find Hollywood totally fascinating. LA is my favorite city. Some people are baffled by that – they’ll say, San Francisco, New Orleans. But it only takes ten minutes to fall in love with San Francisco. You have to hang around LA and take some wrong turns and funny off-ramps and get to know it for a while before its charms become evident. The Hollywood area especially is so full of mythology and extravagance and doubtful stories, apocryphal stories that may be hugely important or might be smoke, and lots of them involve physical places that are still there – you can go stand there and look around. You can see the secret black Madonna embedded in a wall, which is only visible if you stand in a particular place across the street. What’s the story on that, really? There are stairways that let you skip long roundabout roads and climb right over a hill into an adjoining valley, and I swear you can’t get to some of those valleys except via those stairways. Weird temples in the hills, forgotten tunnels, abandoned Nike missile bases! I find Hollywood endlessly full of implications, and stories, and colorful history, all lending themselves to fantasy. We live only an hour away and research is a great excuse to go there and climb up and down the hills and spend an hour in a bar where Orson Welles threw up, or see where F. Scott Fitzgerald fell down dead. The place is full of the suggestive details that I use in lieu of imagination. The details of Hollywood are likely to be florid and sensational and full of exaggerated drama, as opposed to the history of Akron OH, which I’m sure is not less important but probably has less flamboyance and is less obsessively documented, photographed, and filmed.