Locus, January 2013

by Locus Publications

  IN THIS ISSUE

  January 2013 • Issue 624 • Vol. 70 • No. 1

  46th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner

  Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman

  Interviews

  James S.A. Corey (Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck): Lurid Tales of Space Adventure

  Delia Sherman: Historical Dimensions

  People and Publishing

  Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Madeleine L’Engle, Gene Wolfe, Angela Carter, Cecelia Holland, Michael Moorcock, Ted Chiang, and many others

  Main Stories

  World Fantasy 2013 Judges • 2012 Sunburst Awards Winners • First Annual Copper Cylinder Awards • Gaiman Foundation Gives to CBLDF • PW Radio

  The Data File

  Best of the Year Lists • Bookscan Bestsellers of 2012 • Most Powerful Authors in Hollywood • Albee Agency Controversy • Scalzi Writes Morning Star • Tolkien Estate Sues Filmmakers • Magazine News • Bookstore News • World Conventions News • Awards News • Publishing News • Announcements • Legal News • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights • Publications Received • Catalogs Received

  Feature

  Sail to Success

  Locus Looks at Books

  Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois

  Robots: The Recent A.I., Rich Horton & Sean Wallace, eds.; War and Space: Recent Combat, Rich Horton & Sean Wallace, eds.; Armored, John Joseph Adams, ed.; Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Paula Guran, ed.; Under My Hat: Takes from the Cauldron, Jonathan Strahan, ed.; Epic: Legends of Fantasy, John Joseph Adams, ed.

  Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton

  Asimov’s 1/13; Phantom Drift #2 Fall ’12; Eclipse 12/12; Strange Horizons 11/12; Strange Horizons 12/12; Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/15/12; After, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds.; Stranded, Anne Bishop, James Alan Gardner, and Anthony Francis; Bloody Fabulous, Ekaterina Sedia, ed.; Rip-Off!, Gardner Dozois, ed.

  Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe

  Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway; Blood Oranges, Caitlín R. Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney; Salvage and Demolition, Tim Powers; Son of Destruction, Kit Reed; SHORT TAKE: John Brunner, Jad Smith.

  Reviews by Faren Miller

  Turing & Burroughs, Rudy Rucker; The Folly of the World, Jesse Bullington; Six-Gun Tarot, R.S. Belcher; At the Edge of Waking, Holly Phillips.

  Reviews by Stefan Dziemianowicz

  As If, Michael Saler; The Book of Cthulhu II, Ross Lockhart, ed.; Black Wings II, S.T. Joshi, ed.; Vlad, Carlos Fuentes; Above Ker-Is and Other Stories, Evangeline Walton.

  Reviews by Russell Letson

  Impulse, Steven Gould; American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, Gary K. Wolfe, ed.

  Short Reviews by Carolyn Cushman

  Steel’s Edge, Ilona Andrews; Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling, Michael Boccacino; Ironskin, Tina Connolly; The Midnight Game, Cecilia Dart-Thornton; The Silvered, Tanya Huff; Polterheist, Laura Resnick; Fire Season, David Weber & Jane Lindskold; The Dirty Streets of Heaven, Tad Williams; The Far West, Patricia C. Wrede.

  Divers Hands: Reviews by Richard A. Lupoff & Gwenda Bond

  A Niche in Time and Other Stories: The Best of William F. Temple, Vol 1, William F. Temple; Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo; The Raven Boys, Maggie Stiefvater; The Crown of Embers, Rae Carson.

  Locus Looks at Art Books: Reviews by Karen Haber

  Brian Froud’s Trolls, Brian & Wendy Froud; Exposé 10: Finest Digital Art in the Known Universe, Ronnie Gramzaio, ed.; In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, Ilene Susan Fort & Tere Arcq, with Terri Geis, eds.; SHORT TAKES: Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention, Paul Guinan & Anina Bennett; The Arctic Marauder, Jacques Tardi; Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm with Illustrations by David Hockney, David Hockney.

  Locus Listens to Audiobooks by Amy Goldschlager

  The Diviners, Libba Bray; The Girl of Fire and Thorn, Rae Carson; The Crown of Embers, Rae Carson; Methuselah’s Children, Robert A. Heinlein; The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner; Every Day, David Levithan; Days of Blood & Starlight, Laini Taylor; Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny; Trumps of Doom, Roger Zelazny.

  Commentary

  Cory Doctorow: Where Characters Come From

  Listings

  Magazines Received: November • Books Received: November • British Books Received: October • Bestsellers

  New and Notable

  Terry Bisson: This Month in History

  Obituaries

  Boris Strugatsky • Sir Patrick Moore • Jeff Millar • Death Noted: Michael Embden

  Editorial Matters

  Hello, 2013 • Holiday Party • Visitors • This Issue/Next Issue

  Photo List and Ad List

  Masthead

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  James S.A. Corey is the pseudonym for collaborators Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck. (The first and last name are Abraham’s and Franck’s middle names, respectively, and the middle initials are those of Abraham’s daughter.) Together they write the Expanse SF series: Hugo Award finalist Leviathan Wakes (2011), Caliban’s War (2012), and the forthcoming Abaddon’s Gate, with a further three books to follow. They are also writing a forthcoming Star Wars novel about iconic character Han Solo.

  Daniel James Abraham was born November 14, 1969 in Albuquerque NM and attended University of New Mexico, where he earned a degree in biology. After graduating in 1996, he spent a few months in New York working at a bookstore, then returned to New Mexico and spent ten years in tech support. He now writes full time.

  Abraham’s first story sale was ‘‘Mixing Rebecca’’ in 1996, followed by sales to various magazines and anthologies. Notable stories include Nebula finalist and International Horror Guild Award winner ‘‘Flat Diane’’ (2004) and World Fantasy and Hugo Award finalist ‘‘The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairytale of Economics’’ (2007). Some of his short work has been collected in Leviathan Wept and Other Stories (2010). Novella ‘‘Shadow Twin’’ (2004), written with George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, formed the basis for novel Hunter’s Run (2008).

  Abraham’s debut novel was A Shadow in Summer (2006), first in the Long Price fantasy quartet, which also includes A Betrayal in Summer (2007), An Autumn War (2008), and The Price of Spring (2009)

  As M.L.N. Hanover he writes the Black Sun’s Daughter series: Unclean Spirits (2008), Darker Angels (2009), Vicious Grace (2010), Killing Rites (2011), and the forthcoming Graveyard Child (2013). He wrote six-issue comic book miniseries George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards: The Hard Call (2008) and is writing the comic adaptation of Martin’s A Game of Thrones now.

  Abraham’s most recent work under his own name is the Dagger and the Coin series: The Dragon’s Path (2011), The King’s Blood (2012), and the forthcoming The Tyrant’s Law (2013), with two more volumes planned.

  Abraham lives in Albuquerque with wife Katherine Abraham (married 2002) and their daughter Scarlet, born 2006.

  Tyler Corey Franck was born May 18, 1969 in Portland OR and has spent most of his life in the West and Southwest. He developed the world of the Expanse series as the setting for a roleplaying game. He has broken rocks at a quarry, built masts for sailboats, sold newspaper and radio ads, worked as a reporter, renovated high-rises, served as director of operations for Northgate Computers, and co-founded a financial software consulting firm. For the past several years he has been George R.R. Martin’s personal assistant.

  Franck began publishing SF with story ‘‘Audience’’ in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (2006), which qualified him to join professional writing group Critical
Mass, where he met Abraham. Franck lives in New Mexico with his wife Jayné.

  •

  Ty Franck: ‘‘I’ve always been a fan. While I was working for Northgate Computer, I had this idea for a story. My sister asked if she could use the idea for a Creative Writing project she had in high school. She wrote a story based on this idea that I had, and let me read it, and it was all wrong. She turned it in and got a good grade on it, but it was wrong. So I wrote my own version of it.

  ‘‘I occasionally corresponded with a woman named Kathryn Kidd, who had collaborated with Orson Scott Card on a book called Lovelock and was a writer in her own right. She ran Card’s website, Hatrack River, and at the time I posted there occasionally. She was willing to look at the story, so I sent it to her. She was very complimentary. And then about a month later, she said, ‘Scott was staying at our house and I gave him the story. He thought it was brilliant, and he would like you to come to his Writers’ Bootcamp.’ He didn’t know who I was, but he said, ‘Whoever wrote this is a writer.’

  ‘‘Right around that time, I had just taken Northgate through going public and I was tired of working 80-hour weeks. Jayné and I were living in California at the time, and we had this giant sack of non-compete money, my bonus for leaving Northgate. I said, ‘Normal people would take this and buy a house or something like that, but what we should do is take a six-month vacation and drive all over the United States.’ My wife said, ‘Sure, let’s do that.’ We wound up spending three months just driving all over. As part of that, we spent two weeks in Greensboro NC, with me going to Card’s Writers’ Bootcamp. It was sort of like a one-week Clarion: writing stories and being critiqued. It was very interesting, and I met some interesting people. And then I was done; I didn’t continue writing.

  ‘‘But when Scott started Intergalactic Medicine Show, his online magazine, he wrote to me and said, ‘You have to sell me that story.’ So I sold it, and now I had a professional sale (he was paying pro rates). Then he wanted it for an anthology, The Best of the Intergalactic Medicine Show, so I sold it again. And then for an audio anthology – so I had three sales!

  ‘‘I wound up moving to New Mexico so my wife could go to the university and study architecture; that’s where I met Daniel Abraham and George Martin and all those guys. My friend Emily Mah was in a writers’ group with them and Steve Stirling: Critical Mass. The group was exclusive: you either had to be a Clarion grad or have a professional sale. So I started going there and writing. In New Mexico, for the first time in 20 years I literally had nothing else to do.

  ‘‘I wound up working part-time for George Martin, which has turned into way more than part-time: I now run a small company in New Mexico called ‘George Martin.’ And I wound up writing a few things for Critical Mass. That’s when Daniel and I started hanging out.’’

  Daniel Abraham: ‘‘Of the folks in Critical Mass, Ty and I live closest to each other. He had this roleplaying game that started a long time before I came on.’’

  TF: ‘‘The first time I formulated it and started writing notes was after Emily Mah came to me and said, ‘Would you write a proposal for an online game?’ Emily had never played an MMORPG. I had played World of Warcraft, and she knew I was really into game design. (That was always my passion.) The version I came up with was the first sort of fledgling version of The Expanse. I was running the game on a private forum for three or four years – mostly, it was just a test. Do the rules work? Does this universe make sense? Are there interesting stories that can happen inside of it?’’

  DA: ‘‘Ty didn’t know it, but he had a laboratory going, with this ongoing world-building project. When he came to New Mexico where we have a lot of gamers, we played a couple of times, and I thought, ‘Oh, look! All the world-building is done. There’s plenty here to make a really cool book.’ I have a long history of collaborating with folks, so I’m not intimidated by that. My plan was: I would write it, and he would tell me what to write. (I’d ask him, and he’d know.) But it didn’t work out that way.’’

  TF: ‘‘Daniel did the first chapter, but I was very frustrated because he wasn’t doing it right. It was the same thing that happened with my sister’s version of my story. We had already decided there would be two point-of-view characters. One of them was already based on the character Daniel played in the game, and I was fine with that. But the other character was one we’d stolen from another game I’d run for several years (with the creator’s permission and blessing), and he wasn’t doing it right. So I wound up writing that one.’’

  DA: ‘‘We’d get together on Wednesday (Ty’s day off) and plan out where the chapters were going and what the scenes were going to be. I’d do my chapter, and he’d do his, and then we would rewrite and edit each others’ chapters, and compare the changes we had made.’’

  TF: ‘‘When we started writing Leviathan Wakes, Daniel had already written six or seven novels. I’d only done short stories – maybe a dozen all-told, and only two or three of them had ever seen print. But it turns out that Daniel and I had a very similar idea of what the voice should sound like, without ever having talked about it. We ended up on the same really basic levels: what a narrative voice sounds like, what a description looks like.

  ‘‘I come from a corporate world where you find people who are experts, and you let them be experts. I knew he knew how to structure a novel, how to break it up so you have three acts or five acts. What he would say to me was, ‘We really need to end this chunk on a big moment, because this is our second act.’ I accepted this as true, because he was a novelist and I wasn’t yet. The other people in our group were real writers. Steve Stirling sells a hundred jillion books a year, George Martin’s a monster seller, and Daniel had already written like six novels. My thought was, ‘If I spend a year doing this and it doesn’t sell, I still spent a year learning how to plot a novel from somebody who’s done it six times. People pay a lot of money for one-week classes. I got to spend a year doing it, and pay nothing for the privilege.

  ‘‘I did know what the world looked like, so I would go in and change all Daniel’s descriptions of things, like the kind of technology people were using – ‘No, we don’t have laser guns in this world.’ He didn’t mind. And I learn quickly. I got to see both versions of a chapter: what I had originally sent him, and what he had done. I joke with him now, ‘There’s a little Daniel that lives in the back of my head, and as I’m typing it will tell me to use this word.’ Daniel’s not even there, but the little version in the back of my head is. Also, he’s much more familiar with the universe now, so I rarely have to correct what things look like anymore.’’

  DA: ‘‘We started with two different skill sets, and since then they have merged and blurred a little. After Leviathan Wakes, we felt that alternating two characters was fun, but it really trapped us a couple of times. One character was doing really interesting shit, while the other character was sitting around feeling bad about himself. There were a couple of times when we thought, ‘God, if we could just drop this guy out for three chapters and then bring him back – it would be awesome!’ So for the second book, Caliban’s War, we decided we needed four point-of-view characters, and we didn’t always alternate them. Whichever character has the most interesting things going on, that’s the point-of-view character. It really allowed us so much more freedom.

  ‘‘The first couple of books, we’d be hard-pressed to say who had written which sentence. One of us will do a complete edit, and then the other one will. So just the number of times that eyes have been on the manuscript has really helped.’’

  TF: ‘‘Although, oddly enough, for all three books we’ve done now, Daniel has written the first line and I’ve written the last line. I have a terrible time with the first sentence, but I appear to have a good sense of what line to end things on.’’

  DA: ‘‘It was originally planned to be three books, but now we’re under contract for six.’’

  TF: ‘‘After the first book came out, I think it sort of surpri
sed everybody – no one more than us. We did this just to goof off, and Daniel said, ‘OK, maybe we’ll sell it for a couple of bucks or whatever.’ The goal of the project was to write the kind of science fiction book Daniel and I had grown up reading in the ’70s, that nobody seemed to be doing anymore. Not that the new stuff isn’t great (a lot of it is), but I was thinking, ‘I want a book about spaceships and spaceship battles, that is competently written and has interesting characters. But then these ships shoot at each other.

  DA: ‘‘The thing that has been interesting for me is people who are reading it as hard science fiction, when really I think what we were shooting for was plausibility, in the Wikipedia sense of plausibility: ‘OK, that makes sense.’

  TF: I actually know how the Epstein Drive works, the theory behind it, and we will never say what it is because at some point, it will turn out to be wrong.

  DA: There’s no reason to explain. And that’s the other thing about this project. Our theory on writing this type of science fiction – it’s like, in the real world, if somebody says, ‘Hey, you bought a new car’ and I say, ‘Yeah, it’s a hybrid’ and you go, ‘Cool,’ do you have any idea how a hybrid car works? So if you live in some fictional future and you say, ‘I’ve got an Epstein Drive in this,’ the person goes, ‘Yeah, cool. I hear those are good.’’’

  TF: ‘‘We wanted that feel of, ‘Sounds like a real thing, like it could be plausible. But….’ People now don’t sit and lecture each other on how the internal combustion engine works. Most people have no idea how it works. Some writers can do that kind of explanation well, but a lot of time when you’re reading a book like that, one of two things happens. Either there’s an infodump where it’s clear the writer of the book (not the narrator) is explaining to you how things work (and that throws me out of the story) or two characters talk to each other about it. If it’s not done really well, my first thought is, ‘Why are these people talking about this?’ Nobody walks into the room and says, ‘Hey, Dan, can you turn on the light? As you know, when you flip the light switch on, the contacts will allow electricity to flow to an incandescent coil inside a vacuum inside a glass tube.’ ‘Yes, I do know that. I’m turning the light on now.’