Author: Cheryl Morgan

Cheryl Morgan is the editor of Salon Futura and owner of its publisher, Wizard's Tower Press. She is also non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine. Cheryl has won three Hugo Awards: Best Fanzine in 2004 for Emerald City, Best Fan Writer in 2009 and Best Semiprozine for Clarkesworld in 2010. She is a director of San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions and of Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation. She lives near Bath in the UK.

Issue #65

Issues

This is the October 2024 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: The Green Man’s War: Ben Baldwin has raised the bar for book covers once again

  • The Moonlight Market: A charming tale of the war between the butterflies and the moths, fought out on the streets of London

  • The Knife and the Serpent: Tim Pratt is back with a new series. In this one a hapless student from Berkeley finds himself in the middle of a war for the multiverse, with the main protagonists being his girlfriend and his ex.

  • On the Economics of Small Presses: Is running a small press a viable business? Not without significant discrepancies in who gets paid.

  • Juliet McKenna Interview: The Green Man's War is on pre-order. Juliet McKenna talks to Cheryl about the future of the series, and about where she got some of her ideas from.

  • BristolCon 2024: For the first time ever, BristolCon runs for 2 whole days.

  • The Sheep Look Up: A reprint of Cheryl's review of the classic John Brunner novel of eco-catastrophe, first published in Emerald City #96

  • The Wood at Midwinter: Brilliance from Clarke as always, but possibly the shortest hardcover book Cheryl has ever read

  • Rings of Power – Season 2: Like Durin III and his mithril, the folks of Amazon are determined to mine every bit of fan service out of The Silmarilion

  • FantasyCon 2024: If it is Chester then it must be Romans, with a little FantasyCon on the side.

  • Editorial – October 2024: Cheryl is having a very busy month

The Moonlight Market

065, Book Review, Joanne Harris

Joanne Harris is, of course, a hugely well-known and respected writer of mainstream fiction. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, which is not the sort of honour that is doled out to hoi polloi of genre like us. And yet, she turns up at conventions. She was at Worldcon in Glasgow, and she’s a Guest of Honour at this year’s BristolCon. I first met her at FantasyCon the previous time it was in Chester. I interviewed her and she pointed out that almost all of her books include magic in some shape or form. She is totally one of us.

Given that she has now written books about Loki, most people probably accept that. But The Moonlight Market is somewhat different. It is a straight up fairy tale, set in London. If you are pining for the likes of Neverwhere and Stardust, this is a book for you. I see that the publishers are promoting the book on that basis, which is very perceptive of them.

The background to the story is a war between the Butterfly Queen and the Moth King, a feud which started when their son accidentally left the Kingdom of Faerie and ended up in the world of the Sightless Folks (us). The Spider Mage, whose incompetent babysitting caused this tragedy, has vowed to find the lost Prince and put an end to the war, but it has been going on for so long now that no one else cares about anything except victory.

Tom Argent is a young man who has devoted his life to photography. He manages a photography shop near King’s Cross which never seems to do much business. Tom is kept in a job by the shop’s kindly owner, the mysterious Mr. Burnett.

One day Tom meets a beautiful woman called Vanessa. He falls instantly and helplessly in love. Little does Tom know that the woman of his dreams is a powerful butterfly whose only interest in him is to feed on his life force, something the butterflies call “nectar”. Thankfully help is at hand in the form of an old homeless man who calls himself Spider, and his scruffy, sarcastic assistant, Charissa.

All would be well, except that Tom is a hopeless case, totally in thrall to the glamorous Vanessa. No matter how many times Spider and Charissa point out that his life is in danger, he insists on trying to find Vanessa again and beg her to love him in return. Slowly we begin to understand that this is not the first time this story has played out, and it always ends the same way.

Except, of course, that fairy stories have to have a happy ending. We know that, and anticipate it. The joy in reading comes from the way in which the inevitable unfolds, and how well the author illustrates the emotions of the protagonists as it does so. In the hands of a expert writer such as Harris, the predictability of the ending is not a problem, especially given the convoluted route by which she gets us there.

book cover
Title: The Moonlight Market
By: Joanne Harris
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Knife and the Serpent

065, Book Review, Tim Pratt

If I need something that will be a quick and entertaining read, not too challenging or depressing, I know I can always rely on Tim Pratt. Their books are inventive, amusing, and contain just enough mild peril to keep you reading. The books also tend to include a few queer characters, Pratt being genderfluid, which is nice.

The Knife and the Serpent is a new departure for Pratt, in that there are no previous novels in the universe. However, they have tested the waters with a couple of short stories featuring the concept of Nigh-Space. This is a version of the multiverse which is described as being multiple planes of existence stacked on top of one another like a ream of paper. Moving between nearby planes is fairly easy, but the further apart two planes are the harder it becomes. Thankfully for the rest of the multiverse, Earth does not yet have inter-dimensional transit capabilities.

Our hero, Glenn Browning, is a mild-mannered PhD student at the University of Berkeley. Imagine his surprise when he discovers that his sexy new girlfriend, Vivy Sattari, is secretly an alien spy whose job it is to help keep Nigh-Space free of Fascists and other unpleasant and aggressive persons.

Imagine his surprise also when he discovers that his ex, Tamsin Culver, is also an alien and is heiress to an arms dealing empire on another plane. She’s on Earth because her family was the victim of a mafia-style hit operation by a rival family, and she’s the only survivor. But blood breeds true, and Sin, as she likes to be called, wants her family empire back, and more.

Add to this the fact that Glenn is an enthusiastic sub who very much enjoys being tied up and ordered about by powerful, confident women. Oh dear.

Actually Pratt doesn’t make as much of that as I expected. I had thought that we’d see Glenn torn between his two loves, but in practice Tamsin is so awful that there really isn’t a choice. Pratt must have had enormous fun writing her, because she is utterly selfish and megalomanical. At one point Pratt actually has her say, “After all, why shouldn’t I get everything that I want.” But Tamsin, who is the viewpoint character for half of the chapters, is brilliant at self-justification. She really didn’t have any choice about murdering all those people. It was them or her.

As this is space opera, the book wouldn’t be complete without a sentient spaceship. That would be Vivy’s sidekick, who calls himself The Wreck of the Edmund Pevensie. For much of the book he ends up manifesting as a very annoying foppish Englishman.

The other interesting innovation in the book is something called snap-trace. It is a means of travel between planes invented by Vivy’s employers, a group called The Interventionists. The way that snap-trace works is that you concentrate on something or someone that means a huge amount to you, and you are immediately drawn through the multiverse to where that thing or person is. It is a method of inter-dimensional travel powered by love. Someone should tell Russell T Davies. I’m sure he could find a use for it.

I guess I should probably describe this book as Cosy Space Opera. If that sort of thing tickles your fancy, I warmly recommend it. If you prefer something meatier, more grim, or with less kink, you should maybe give it a miss. But personally I think that everyone deserves a little light-hearted fun now again. And the beauty of a book is that you don’t need a safe word, you can just put it down.

book cover
Title: The Knife and the Serpent
By: Tim Pratt
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

On the Economics of Small Presses

065, Articles

At World Fantasy this year, Scott Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies gave a speech about the economics of short fiction magazines. His point was that, while they pay writers very well, and pay people such as slush readers, they mostly don’t pay the actual editors. This, Andrews maintained, meant that only people with a substantial amount of personal privilege could afford to be an editor, and that necessarily limited the diversity of the field.

Andrews was specifically talking about short fiction magazines, but he did add that he thought that similar issues affected small presses, and he is dead right. When I started Wizard’s Tower, I promised myself that the company would not lose money. Technically it makes a small profit each year, but that’s only because if I charged all of my convention travel to expenses it would make a big loss and the tax man would get suspicious. So I mostly account for things like flights and hotel bills as my hobby. I’d be going anyway, regardless of whether I’d be selling books.

Clearly I have a lot of privilege to be able to do this. I have a reasonable income from other work. My time is fairly flexible. And these days I get a state pension as well. So I’m old, white and fairly comfortably off, which is what people tend to think of when it comes to privilege. I would like to publish a more diverse range of writers, but I suspect that a lot of the people I’d like to work with either wouldn’t trust me, or would not want to be associated with me. There’s not a lot I can do about that. Thankfully I have managed to publish a number of stories by trans people, which makes me happy.

But the economics of small presses skews strangely in other ways. There is a hierarchy when it comes to who gets paid. I don’t take a salary at all, so all of the layouts, the admin and what marketing I can manage to get done is all unpaid. I don’t pay the authors an advance, but I do pay royalties. That means that the authors are taking a risk that their books will sell well, and that therefore they’ll get some decent money. That works for some, but not for others.

There are other people who are needed to get a book out. You need a cover artist, and unless the author is very experienced you need an editor. Even the best authors will produce better books if they are edited. These people are freelance professionals and they expect to get paid market rates. Most people who work with small presses don’t get the sort of money they would get if they were working for a mainstream publisher, but they do expect a decent rate. What’s more they expect to put their prices up on a regular basis. Over the 13 years that Wizard’s Tower has been running, the costs have gone up quite a bit.

Let’s look at an example. Suppose I have to pay £400 for a cover, and another £400 to an editor. If I only do an ebook there are no additional costs except the ISBN. Suppose I sell it on Amazon at £5. That means I get £3.50 per copy, if Amazon don’t discount it. That means I would have to sell just shy of 230 copies to break even. But that assumes no money to the author. I probably need to sell nearer 500 copies. The chances of that are not good. And all this is without considering a paperback edition, where the costs are higher and the margins razor-thin.

With those numbers, the author would be getting a little over £800 for the book, which is not to be sniffed at. But in terms of an hourly rate it is still way less than the cover artist and editor are getting. Writing a novel takes a long time.

There are, of course, people out there prepared to do a job for “mates rates”. But that just leaves the publisher feeling guilty about not having paid the going rate, and wondering when someone is going to call her out for exploiting people.

It would be nice if I could put the prices of the books up. I’ve had to do it with the paper editions because the cost of paper went through the roof over the past few years. Putting the prices of ebooks up is only going to lead to lower sales.

As a result, I’m not sure how much longer I can do this. I’m not going to invest £1000 or so in each book with little hope of getting the money back, because I promised myself that I would not run the company at a loss. Also I don’t fancy being investigated by the tax man. It is all very challenging, and not sustainable in the long run.

Juliet McKenna Interview

065, Interviews, Juliet E McKenna

The Green Man’s War is currently available for pre-order (links here). Because Wizard’s Tower was launching two books at BristolCon, I wasn’t planning to interview Juliet at the launch. Instead I did it via Zoom, which also gave us more time to chat. The results are in the podcast below.

Juliet and I discuss a range of subjects. Obviously the new book is top of the list, but it isn’t the only book that she has due. Look out for Different Times and Other Places, forthcoming from NewCon Press in December. That’s a short story collection, and it includes a new Green Man story. We also discussed plans for the future of the Green Man series.

It is something of a joke in writerly circles that the one question authors hate getting asked is, “where do you get your ideas from?” As Juliet often notes, getting ideas is not the problem, it is turning them into quality fiction that is the hard bit. However, once in a while an author will experience something that sticks with them, and which gets used in a book. In this podcast you will hear about an event that affected Juliet and her husband, and which directly influence the frightening events that open The Green Man’s War.

BristolCon 2024

065, Convention Report

This year saw the 15th iteration of BristolCon, and the first that was a whole weekend long rather than just Saturday. Con Chair MEG was upfront about this being an experiment. Lots of people had asked for it, but the only way to know if it would work was to try it.

From my point of view the con was something of an embarrassment as I was supposed to be launching two new books – The Green Man’s War and Fight Like A Girl 2 – but neither was ready in time so I could only sell ebooks and pre-orders. Thankfully some people did pre-order the books.

I had two panels. The first was on Saturday when I was moderating a discussion on worldbuilding societies. I hadn’t got contact details for the panel in time to check in with them beforehand, but I needn’t have worried. I had GoH, Peter Hamilton, on the panel, and he is more than capable of doing the entire panel by himself. Ditto Penny Hill who was muttering about writing a book on the subject. If she does I will buy it. You might think that it was odd to have Kevlin Henny on such a panel, given that most of his fiction weighs in at 1000 words or less, but the skill and precision required to give a sense of a real society in very short fiction are not easily gained, and Kevlin is a master. Helen Gould wasn’t quite as much of a history buff as the rest of us, but she hangs out at radical book fairs and was more than capable of holding her own in discussions of politics and economics. I think the panel went very well.

My Sunday panel was about climate fiction, which I used as an excuse to enthuse about Sean McMullen’s powerful Generation Nemesis. Doing good climate fiction is hard these days because it is clear that all of the warnings that people have been writing over the past decades have largely fallen on deaf ears. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream in the Science in the Capital trilogy twenty years ago, and now people are asking why science fiction didn’t foresee this possibility. Now it is too late to prevent a whole raft of catastrophic changes to our climate. The panel spent most of its time asking what writers of climate fiction should do now. I’m not sure that it came to any great conclusions save that we should not give up hope.

Anyway, I got to recommend The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner to a bunch of people who are too young to have seen it when it came out. I have included my review of it from Emerald City in thhis issue in case anyone else out there has never heard of it.

Sunday was also my book launch. Juliet read from The Green Man’s War, and if you want to know the sort of thing she was reading about you should check out the podcast interview elsewhere in this issue. I was also lucky enough to have Juliet, Gaie Sebold and Anna Smith Spark on hand to read from Fight Like A Girl 2. There was cake. We sold books.

It is not yet clear whether the two-day convention experiment was a success. Quite a few people only attended on Saturday. A smaller number only attended on Sunday. As far as I am aware, the total number of memberships wasn’t much changed. This meant that there was more room in the function space.

We could have more programme, which was nice. From my point of view, two days meant two book launches. Had we just had the one day, I would have lost out to Macmillan who were doing an event for Peter Hamilton.

The main issue for me, however, was sales, which were up 44% on last year. That was quite encouraging. If I had had paper copies of the two new books I would have done even better.

If there was a downside to the con, it was the number of people who came to my table, looked at the pile of books under five different names (plus two anthologies) and said to me, “that’s an awful lot of books you have written.” Apparently these days it is inconceivable that anyone would be selling books at a convention unless they are self-publishing. The trouble is that if I saw a self-published writer with that many titles I would assume that the books were pretty bad. I’m not sure what I can do about that.

Finally for me, it was great to catch up with Peter, Geoff Ryman, whom I have not seen at a BristolCon before, and Joanne Harris, who was the other GoH. Harris is a very fine fantasy writer, and it surprises me that she doesn’t get more attention from the community.

The Sheep Look Up

065, Book Review, John Brunner

This review was first published in Emerald City #96, dated August 2003. Twenty-one years later, we are now scarily much closer to the world that Brunner described in his novel.

Science fiction books are not generally supposed to be predictive. Where they do include things like social and political commentary, their writers intend them to be read as an examination of how we live today, not some irrelevant tale about the future. Even so, some SF writers do manage to sound awfully prescient after the event. This is particularly true if they concentrate on near-future stories. John Brunner (The Shockwave Rider) and Pat Cadigan (Synners) are now credited with having foreseen computer viruses and spam. Philip K. Dick’s work is currently hugely popular as a reflection of modern society, though people thought him paranoid when he wrote his books. But perhaps the most prescient SF book ever written is also one of the least known, at least outside the environmentalist movement. Now at last it has been reissued by a small press company in the US. In 1972 when it was released, John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up seemed an unlikely nightmare vision of the future. These days it is scarily prophetic. The quotes from The Independent and New Scientist are real.

I am especially pleased to see […] The Sheep Look Up reappear in a fine edition. Its warning, and stark, terrifying beauty, are just as relevant today, even if its message has been partly heeded. For we need reminders that the ultimate decision is ours.

David Brin
from his Introduction to the new edition


At its most basic, The Sheep Look Up is an eco-disaster novel, much like Oryx and Crake. However, there is no mad scientist plotting the downfall of the human race. It is a book entirely about incompetence, greed, and the remarkable fragility of our modern world when faced with disaster. Brunner did not consider the possible collapse of power grids — his agenda was purely in the area of biosciences — but his awareness of the type of trouble we could get ourselves into was striking.

More cows had died in the night, bellies bloated, blood leaking from their mouths and nostrils, frozen smears of blood under their tails. Before the children were allowed to go to school they had to dip their rubber boots in pans of milky disinfectant. The same had been sprayed on the tires of the bus.

The book has an innovative structure, being made up of a monthly diary of seemingly unconnected events that eventually coalesce to form a coherent plot. Many of the entries under a particular month are quite short: a news report or extract from a political speech. Others follow the declining fortunes of a range of well-meaning but largely ignorant characters as their world falls apart around them.

The story begins with an horrific outbreak of violence in a small African state caused by a shipment of food aid that turns out to have been contaminated with an ergot-like hallucinogen. The Africans, used to a long history of American economic imperialism (if you don’t think that happens see the quote below, and yes I suspect the EU is just as bad), assume that they are being deliberately poisoned.

US cotton subsidies […] Oxfam claims, are distorting the world market with payments worth $4bn a year — more than America spends on aid for the whole of Africa — enabling America’s 25,000 cotton farmers to dump their produce on the international market and get rich in the process. World cotton prices are now lower than at any time since the 1930s Depression, causing an economic and social crisis in sub-Saharan Africa and tipping the 10 million people who depend on cotton for their livelihood below the poverty line.

The Independent Magazine
16 August 2003


The tale of how the contaminant got into the food, and the impact this has on US society, forms the backbone of the novel. Along the way, the US President, a character portrayed as a bumbling idiot who speaks in tabloid newspaper headlines, claims that terrorists have attacked the US with biological and chemical weapons. A war on terrorism is declared and draconian security measures are instituted.

Meanwhile, in the US, public health is becoming a major issue. More and more children are being born with diseases such as asthma, and even physical deformities. Tap water is unsafe to drink. Medicines cease working, as bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. The cost of health insurance skyrockets. Does any of this sound familiar?

“You bastard,” she said. “You smug pompous devil. You liar. You filthy dishonest old man. You put the poison in the world, you and your generation. You crippled my children. You made sure they’d never eat clean food, drink pure water, breathe sweet air. And when someone comes to you for help you turn your back.”

Thankfully much of what Brunner foresaw has not come to pass. The Sheep Look Up was significantly instrumental in the founding of the environmental movement (Brunner himself was one of the founders of CND). As a result, DDT is no longer commonly used as a pesticide (at least not in countries with firm environmental regulations), supersonic planes do not over-fly the US causing avalanches in the Rockies and the Mediterranean is not a fetid cesspool. Of course as a result we also have extremists like the Animal Liberation Front to deal with. But Brunner foresaw that too. In the novel his environmentalist hero, Austin Train, despairs at the violence done in his name.

Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting the layer of oily residues surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet plastic: a mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals, and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking the surface. There were no fish.

There are also elements of The Sheep Look Up that will jar with a modern readership. Although Brunner demonstrates a social conscience throughout, characters in the book express attitudes regarding race, gender and sexual preference that are likely to be the cause of a discrimination suit if uttered in public in a Western society today. But of course Brunner is only commenting on society as it was in his day, like any good SF writer should.

“What frightens me in retrospect about The Sheep Look Up […] is that I invented literally nothing for it, bar a chemical weapon that made people psychotic. Everything else I took straight out of the papers.”

John Brunner


You won’t find any comfort in reading The Sheep Look Up. Brunner is unrelentingly bleak in his prose. Although his “sheep” do finally decide that the way their world is going is not what they want, and that they must take action, it is far too late for them. Possibly the planet can be saved, but for individuals there is no hope. There are books (including Oryx and Crake) in which the author destroys the world in some spectacular cataclysm or disaster. But The Sheep Look Up is the only novel I can think of in which almost every character you meet dies alone, unheroically, and often through some stupid accident or mistake. But that, as David Brin says, is the terrible beauty of the book. It is a stark and uncompromising warning of what can happen to a world that puts short-term comfort and political expediency before all else. Just as in 1972, we can read it and think, “it couldn’t happen to us.” But in the intervening years much of it has. And it could yet get worse.

The growing trend around the world to drink water from underground sources is causing a global epidemic of arsenic poisoning. Tens of thousands of people have developed skin lesions, cancers and other symptoms, and many have died. Hundreds of millions are now thought to be at serious risk.

New Scientist
9 August 2003


book cover
Title: The Sheep Look Up
By: John Brunner
Publisher: Benbella
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Wood at Midwinter

065, Book Review, Susanna Clarke

When Susanna Clarke produces a novel it makes a huge amount of money for Bloomsbury. Naturally they would love her to do so regularly. Probably more so now as their other best-selling author is doing everything she can to trash her own reputation. But Clarke seems to produce novels only once a decade. Therefore, Bloomsbury will push out absolutely anything as the new Susanna Clarke book, as long as it is something she has written. If she sent them her shopping list, they would probably publish that.

The Wood at Midwinter began life as a short story to be broadcast by the BBC as part of their Christmas radio programming in 2022. Clarke tells us this in a lengthy Afterword which also talks a lot about Kate Bush and her album, 50 Words for Snow. The Afterword is 9 pages long, out of a total of 60 in the book. But the story is heavily and beautifully illustrated (by Victoria Sawdon). I haven’t counted, but I suspect that there are more words in the Afterword than in the story.

Because this is Susanna Clarke we are talking about, the story, short though it is, packs an awful lot into it. On the surface it is a charming tale about a young woman called Merowdis who sees animals as people. Along the way the story touches on issues of arranged marriages, the stupidity of lapdogs, autism, the nature of sainthood, and that very weird Christian concept of a virgin mother who acquires a child in the depths of winter.

It is a brilliant story.

Is it worth buying as a hardcover book? Let’s just say that, as a publisher, I wouldn’t have the nerve to put it out in that way, no matter who had written it.

book cover
Title: The Wood at Midwinter
By: Susanna Clarke
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Rings of Power – Season 2

065, TV Review

Amazon’s Tolkien vehicle continues to be Marmite for fans. I’ve seen some people who have been hate-watching it, and others who love it to pieces. There doesn’t seem to be much in between.

Of course trying to craft a sensible storyline from the dull and largely plotless mess that is The Silmarilion is a monumental task. Much of the criticism seems to come from people who assume that the show has been crafted from scratch, rather than started from a position that no one in their right mind except a marketing executive would actually start from.

The Rings of Power script team do seem to have done some interesting things. They have tried hard to provide character motivations for the various events that happen in the timeline. They have also, shock horror, added some women to the story. After all, the events of The Lord of the Rings would never have happened had the non-Elven peoples not had women to make more people for them. The only woman we know for sure existed in that time is, I think, Galadriel, and she’s not going to have given birth to whole nations of men, dwarves, hobbits and orcs.

The best thing they have done is try to portray Sauron as a genuinely cunning and deceitful adversary, rather than the cardboard cutout from LotR. The way in which he manipulates Galadriel in season one, and Celebrimbor in season two, is very well done. I particularly liked the way in which Celebrimbor is undone by his desire to perfect his craft.

One of the most interesting characters in this season is Adar, the fallen Elf who has taken the orcs under his wing and who tries to free them from Sauron’s control. In some ways he’s the most noble character in the show. Of course the poor guy is doomed, but he is a useful means of puncturing the self-righteousness of the Elves.

All of this would be fine were it not for the fact that the showrunners feel the need to fill each episode with fan service moments. It is all depressingly predictable. At some points I could actually predict what a character was going to say. Some of this, I suspect, is because of the heavily structured nature of modern screen-writing. There are rules, and the writers’ room has to stick to them. Being an old-fashioned curmudgeon, I much prefer the freedom of prose fiction.

By the end of this season, most of the major pieces are in place. Sauron has all of the rings save the important one. We have been introduced to all of the important Elves, Dwarves and men, and to Gandalf. It should be possible to wrap things up in one more season that features the fall of Númenor and the war against Sauron. However, I have been given to believe that five seasons are planned. Goodness only knows how they will pad that out. Oh well, I’ll probably watch it, as long as it isn’t just bloody Tom Bombadil singing silly songs.

FantasyCon 2024

065, Convention Report

I hadn’t been intending to go to FantasyCon this year because October was busy enough already. Or, at least, I didn’t think I had a membership and I wasn’t going to buy one. Then, about a month before the convention, I got sent some programme assignments. I hastily checked with the con, and lo, I did have a membership. I must have bought it last year and then forgotten about it. The programme assignments sounded interesting, and Chester is a great place to visit, so I decided to go.

The con was quite small this year, presumably because many people were financially tapped out by having gone to Worldcon. That’s entirely understandable. The dealers’ room was correspondingly small, and seemed to be mainly self-published people. There was no art show, and I didn’t have a banquet ticket, so all that was left was programme. Well, and Chester.

You see, Chester has a whole pile of Roman ruins. And a museum full of more Roman ruins. Some of it is quite important. There are even a couple of images of Attis, proving that Cybele worship happened in Deva (the Roman name for Chester). It is also the city from which Macsen Wledig embarked on his ultimately doomed quest to become Emperor of the Romans. I’m not going to bore you with details here. I spent much of Saturday in town doing research, and buying books in the museum.

But I had panels. Three of them. The first was on Friday evening and was about Cities in Fantasy. That’s what the title said anyway. But the description talked about Urban Fantasy, and there were two Urban Fantasy writers on the panel. Now clearly Urban Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in cities, but it doesn’t represent the totality of fantasy set in cities and I was hoping to bring a different perspective to the panel. Thankfully the moderator was OK with that, and Davd Green backed me up.

On Saturday I’d been put on the queer representation panel. It was scheduled against the banquet. There were four of us on the panel, and three people in the audience. As I was moderating, I invited the audience to join us on the panel and we had a great chat between us.

This was when I discovered that young folks these days, even feminist young folks these days, have never heard of The Female Man. And presumably haven’t heard of Joanna Russ either. Aaargh.

The title of the panel was a bit scary because it talked about role models in fandom. Thankfully the description made it clear that what that meant was fans finding role models in fiction. And we then went on to debunk the concept of role models, so all was well.

My final panel was on Sunday and was about demystifying the editing process. I would have felt a bit of a fraud on this had I not been moderating, but I had a superb crew with a wide variety of experience. They were absolutely brilliant. I learned a lot, and by all accounts the audience did too. You get a real buzz when a convention panel goes really well.

There is no FantasyCon next year because the crew that usually runs it is running World Fantasy instead. I know that I have a membership for that. I also have a dealer table, so I won’t be doing much programme.

Editorial – October 2024

065, Editorial

Well, this has been a busy month. It has included three conventions, though I have not done a report for Octocon because my presence there was limited to one online panel. I’m on my way to a fourth right now. And in the middle of all that I have produced two new books through Wizard’s Tower. It has been, and continues to be, rather exhausting.

Of course, despite the rather gloomy look at the economics of small presses in this issue, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The point of running Wizard’s Tower is to get good fiction into the hands of readers, and the pay the authors at least something for it.

If you were at BristolCon you will know that there is a lot more coming from Wizard’s Tower over the coming months. Look out for press releases. Much of this is to do with rescuing people left high and dry by the collapse of Grimbold / Kristell Ink.

At least next year should be quieter. I’m not taking books to Eastercon because the whole Brexit nonsense is too complicated. Worldcon is in the USA, and there is no FantasyCon because there is World Fantasy instead. I’ll be at Archipelacon, of course, but that’s the Eurocon and there is no Finncon or Åcon because of it. I’ll have to find some other events to go to instead.

This issue is a little late. I was hoping to get it finished while I was at Bristol Airport waiting for my flight, but the free wifi there was terrible, presumably because they have way too little capacity for the number of users. Also I got bumped from my flight and was 4 hours late arriving in Stockholm, so all I wanted to do when I got to my hotel was sleep. Thankfully Fantastika does not start until late afternoon, so I’m sat here in the hotel getting this done.

Issue #64

Issues

This is the September 2024 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Resurrection Code: This month's cover art is by Ben Baldwin

  • Space Oddity: Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes are back in a new crazy caper. Rock 'n' Roll never read so good.

  • The Sunforge: Book two of Sascha Stronach's Endsong trilogy has arrived, and some of the mysteries from book one are explained.

  • Eyes of the Void: Adrian Tchaikovsky writes books faster than Cheryl can read them, but a dent has been made in the TBR pile.

  • Lyda Morehouse Interview: Cheryl and Lyda chat about Resurrection Code and the influences on the AngeLINK series

  • Star Trek Prodigy – Season #2: The crazy kids are back in the latest animation offering from the Star Trek franchise. And so is the Emergency Holographic Doctor.

  • Speculative Insight: Can you make a paying venue for SF&F non-fiction work? Alex Pierce is the latest to try.

  • The Acolyte: The latest TV series from the Star Wars franchise seems to have bitten off more than it can chew.

  • Editorial – September 2024: In which going to England proves dangerous

Cover: Resurrection Code

064, Art, Ben Baldwin

This is the cover art that Ben Baldwin produced for Resurrection Code, the fifth book in Lyda Morehouse’s AngeLINK series. The previous four covers had been done by Bruce Jensen. As he wasn’t available this time round, we asked Ben to produce something in the same style. The only other direction he got was that the central figure should be a mouse avatar, and that the background should be Egyptian-themed. He delivered magnificently.

As usual, the unadulterated art is shown below.

Space Oddity

064, Book Review, Catherynne M Valente

Get your feather boas and glitter ready, folks. It is time for another round of the Metagalactic Grand Prix! Or, in other words, Catherynne M Valente has written a sequel to Space Opera.

To understand these books we need to consider what Eurovision means to people. It can be very different for Europeans and Americans. In particular, for those of us young enough to have seen it live, Abba’s arrival on the Eurovision stage was strongly reminiscent of Dorothy stepping from monochrome Kansas into the glorious Technicolor world of Oz. Music would never be the same again.

For Americans, however, Eurovision is a window on that vast and ancient mystery called European civilization. That is for them, what ancient Egypt is for us: impossibly old and long-lasting, and full of strange and eccentric customs that thrill and delight the tourist. Thankfully, ancient Egypt is no longer with us. If it was, Pharoah TV would have shows such as Mummies for Dummies, Good Morning Kephri (Wake Up and Smell the Dung), and Sekhmet’s Hunting Party. But Europe still shambles along, zombie like, through the world, and thus we have Eurovision in place of The Book of the Dead. Americans have spent decades trying to decode its mysteries. Valente has perhaps come closest to understanding it.

She has also created a version of it that is beyond the wildest imaginings of most entries.

Whereas Adrian Tchaikovsky (see elsewhere in this issue) ramps up danger planets to the max, he still plays by the rules of science. Valente rips up the rule book, cuts it into little confetti unicorns, and scatters it willy-nilly across the face of the universe, daring it to explode them in as creative a way possible, while also humanizing the process with outlandish analogies. Valente asks us things like–and I’m making this one up, her stuff is much better–what if the universe were Los Angeles, and all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas, and are royally pissed about it? What would a royally pissed superheated ball of hydrogen gas behave like?

Along the way she also comes up with some amazing rants. This one about the English language is a particular favourite of mine. I shared it with my Welsh tutor, who also loved it. Welsh might seem a very weird language, but it has its own internal logic. English is just, well…

“That English robs other languages blind, saws off their best vocabularies, and wears them stapled, still dripping, to its own face, is both well-known and not much of a problem for man, mushroom, or Meleg. But English, inasmuch as it has rules, is so constitutionally incapable of obeying even itself that virtually every possible sentence contains some exception, some rude gesture of pug-nosed defiance toward the concept of order itself, some precious little bit of spelling or syntax that thinks it’s so special it doesn’t have to behave like all the other children. You can hardly turn a phrase without being accosted by silent letters lying in wait for innocent spellers-by, half-dressed homonyms beckoning with come-hither stares, red-light district infinitives doing the splits, some dubious fellow in a trench coat lined with irregular verbs, delinquent subclauses loitering in the night, delusional plurals insisting they’re perfectly normal, broken sentence fragments desperate for the love of a good subject, unhinged apostrophes clinging to your clothes, and roving gangs of wildly disparate diphthongs all pronounced eh.”

Quite.

But anyway, what about the plot?

Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes have saved Earth from destruction by not finishing last in the Metagalactic Grand Prix. However, all is not well with our heroes. Oort St. Ultraviolet has gone home to his family. Mira Wonderful Star is alive only because her twenty-something self is stuck in a time loop that allows her to resurrect in the present for limited periods. And as for Dess, he’s in a massive funk because they didn’t win.

You see, that’s the thing about song contests. If you win you can hold your head up high and go on to bigger and better things. But if you don’t, well, that was the pinnacle of your career. From now on there is nothing for it but endless touring of backwater planets where you will play gigs to audiences who prefer corporate hospitality boxes to mosh pits, you will appear on celebrity game shows, and you’ll shoot advertising videos for household cleaning products. In other words, the only reason that you are not actually dead is that one day you might be sufficiently old and infirm and well-loved enough to be asked to come back one last time to headline Glasto.

So Dess is in a massive funk, despite the fact that he has command of a luxury starship on which to conduct his mandated post-contest tour. Foolishly he asks the ship to take him somewhere cool, and the ship drops him in very hot water indeed.

Specifically it causes Dess and his crew to make First Contact with a new intelligent species. That means that there has to be a new Metagalactic Grand Prix, in which Dess’s new “friends” are in danger of having their planet destroyed. And it is Dess’s job to help them through the process.

Along the way we get a look at the internal working of the Galactic Broadcasting Union. It transpires that it is run as a never-ending committee meeting which operates on Rakevat’s Rules of Chaos. Yes, this is a WSFS Business Meeting joke. It is probably also the most Douglas Adams aspect of the book, and Valente generously acknowledges the debt she owes to the master of absurdist SF.

Thankfully(?) for Dess and the crew, Öö the Keshet is on hand to cause even more trouble as only an over-excitable time-traveling red panda-like species can.

If I have a complaint about this book, it is that it resembles a large helping of exceptionally rich Death by Chocolate. Yes, it is delicious, and you can probably manage a couple of helpings. But after that you just have to give it a rest and come back for more tomorrow. That makes reading the book quite slow compared to one that rushed you from one chapter to the next (for example, the new Green Man book from Juliet McKenna, which I also had the pleasure of reading this past month).

That said, Space Oddity features one of the oddest star systems, many of the oddest aliens, and absolutely the best music of any book out there. Somewhere in an alternate universe, David Bowie has read it and loved it.

book cover
Title: Space Oddity
By: Catherynne M Valente
Publisher: Little Brown
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Sunforge

064, Book Review, Sascha Stronach

I’ve been looking forward to this book for some time. It was clear from the first book in the series, The Dawnhounds, that there was a lot to be learned about the world in which the book is set. In particular, while some of the characters are able to do magic, and attribute this to the favour of gods, it is obvious that the gods are actually people (and therefore not actually gods, if you were at the “Gods in Fantasy” panel at Worldcon).

The middle book of a trilogy is a challenge for authors in many ways. Sascha Stronach has chosen to use hers to reveal the true nature of her world. There is not a lot I can say about this without excessive spoilers, save to say that it is clear why Tamsyn Muir loves these books (other than Kiwi solidarity).

So what can I say? Well, Yat and Sen, from the previous book, are now crew on board the Kopek, which is anchored just off the old imperial capital of Radovan. The ship has just come under serious magical attack. It has barely survived, and Captain Sibbi is missing. Much of the first half of the book is then told in backstory. We get to meet the various characters in Radovan with whom the Kopek crew had been working, and we are given a view of what is happening in the city.

Stronach has perhaps been watching UK politics. Failed empires have a habit of falling into Fascism because Fascist leaders love to talk about how they will restore former glories. In Radovan this means an organization called the Vuruhi who recruit amongst disaffected and violent young men. Naturally they prey on foreigners and queers. It is all very familiar. Thankfully Reform doesn’t have actual paramilitary thugs on the streets yet, but they came close to it over the summer.

This being a fantasy novel, there is a lot more going on behind the scenes, and the Vuruhi are merely pawns in a much bigger game. I suspect that Stronach enjoyed having them come to a nasty end. I would have done.

Some readers will find the book difficult to follow. As in the work of Gene Wolfe and Tamsyn Muir, characters are not always who them seem, because they may be possessed by other characters, or be cloned versions of the people you think they are. Sometimes they swap identities from one paragraph to another. I love this sort of thing, but your mileage may vary.

I should also note that that Stronach uses a number of terms from Pacific cultures with which she is familiar. Not all of them are Māori. And, this being Stronach, there is some excellent trans rep in the book. (And no, it does not center on the possession thing. That’s what a cis writer would have done.)

Book three seems to have been fairly well set up by the end of The Sunforge. I wouldn’t put it past Stronach to pull some major surprises. There is, after all, a story that is much bigger than the one most of the characters know about to be resolved. I’ll be pre-ordering book three as soon as it is announced.

book cover
Title: The Sunforge
By: Sascha Stronach
Publisher: Saga Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Eyes of the Void

064, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Book Review

I very much enjoyed the first book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Final Architecture series, and bought the other two books as soon as they came out. But they are enormous, which is a bit off-putting when you have a lot of books to read. Thankfully the Best Series Hugo gave me the impetus I needed to get back into the saddle.

In Shards of Earth we are introduced to a future in which the universe is menaced by moon-sized entities called Architects who delight in refashioning planets in bizarre ways, seemingly uncaring about the deaths of everyone living on those planets. Their depredations were stopped 50 years ago when humanity learned to speak to them using specially talented and trained people called Intermediaries, but now they are back and as destructive as ever.

Our heroes in the story are the Intermediary, Idris Telemier, and the rag tag crew of the we’re-not-smugglers-honest ship, Vulture God. They are focused on trying to find out why the Architects have returned, and how they can be persuaded to stop. Meanwhile the various poltical power blocks in the galaxy are arguing amongst themselves. As Tchaikovsky has one of his characters think in Eyes of the Void:

It was as though, in the face of a threat as vast as the Architects, the human mind slid off sideways towards conflicts more winnable.

Replace “Architects” with “Climate Change” and the relevance of the story is immediately obvious.

In this book Idris and his friends follow the trail of the ancient civilization known as the Originators to try to find out more about the Architects. It seems that Architects are unwilling to attack planets that contain Originator remains, so this is obviously a giant clue. Along the way they are pursued by the Bond-like character, Havaer Mundy, who works for the Council of Human Interests (colloquially known as Hugh) and who has his own personal journey through the books.

First up on the tour is a planet called Arc Pallator which has the largest known collection of Originator remains. Archaeology happens, despite the bad behavior of various human and non-human power blocks. However, the expedition creates more questions that answers, and things go badly wrong.

Eventually the plot leads to a world called Cricceth’s Hell, which is a planet that is utterly inimical to life, or indeed any sort of biology. It is a masterpiece of ramping the science up to the max. The point here is that Cricceth’s Hell is such an awful place that no one in their right minds goes there. As a result of which it is home to an actual, functioning Originator settlement. Idris finds himself there as a prisoner of a group of renegades led by one of the giant aliens known as Naeromathi. This character calls himself Ahab due to his absolute obsession with destroying the Architects. The crew of the Vulture God are trying to rescue Idris, but are seriously hampered by a bunch of human oligarchs who think that the Architects are a perfect tool for their unique form of Disaster Capitalism. They have their own version of, “ignore Climate Change, we’ll just terraform Mars.”

It is not much of a spoiler to say that the unique nature of the ruins on Cricceth’s Hell provide Idris with a clue to solving the problem of the Architects. It provides, as the title suggests, eyes on the void of Unspace where the Architects live. The question is, will they be able to do anything about it, or will idiots amongst the human and alien powers get in the way. The final book in the series will presumably have the answer.

book cover
Title: Eyes of the Void
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Lyda Morehouse Interview

064, Interviews

The new edition of Resurrection Code is due for release on October 3rd. Lyda and I are very excited about this, because at last the AngeLINK series has all five books back in print and looking line a set. So we did a podcast to talk about how the book came to be, and why we wanted it as it is.

Along the way we discuss how the ability to get mainstream publishers to accept queer content has changed over the years. There is also discussion of how Lyda’s new book, Welcome to Boy.net, relates to the AngeLINK universe.



Star Trek Prodigy – Season #2

064, TV Review

The animation folks at Star Trek have another huge success on their hands. Whereas Lower Decks manages to love Trek whilst thoroughly taking the piss out of it, Prodigy has turned into a classic Trek series with a full-on space opera story arc and plenty of great Trek moments.

If you have seen Season #1 you will remember that the rag tag bunch of kids who are the stars of the series have made it to Federation Space where they hope to become actual Starfleet Academy Cadets. However, events get in the way of this plan, and they find themselves involved in a mission to rescue Chatokay was is trapped in the past with the Protostar. Meanwhile Gwyn gets sent on a diplomatic mission to her home planet, Solum. Inevitably things go badly wrong, and the kids end up creating a time paradox which threatens the stability of the universe. The rest of the series is taken up with their attempts to put things right.

Of course Starfleet did not send a bunch of cadets on a highly sensitive mission by themselves. They are only there because of their knowledge of the Protostar, and Gwyn’s connection to Solum. The mission is supposedly under the command of Admiral Janeway, so a significant part of the story is essentially a “kids have to save their dumb parents” type story, in which Janeway is their over-protective mom, and the Emergency Holographic Doctor is their incompetent dad.

Along the way there is plenty of character development for the kids, including a fascinating evolving relationship between the energy being, Zero, and an arrogant Vulcan pilot who has the highly significant name of Ma’jel. You can’t give a character in Star Trek that name and not have her play a major role in the story.

There are also some very Trek moments. While the series does have a very clear arc, there are a few filler episodes that introduce lighter themes and provide opportunities for character development. One of them involves landing on a planet where a Klingon scientist has accidentally bred a species of giant, carnivorous tribbles.

Because this is a time travel story, it is inevitable that there is a guest appearance by temporal agent extraordinaire, Wesley Crusher. It is also inevitable that one of the first things Janeway says to him when they meet is, “You need to call your mom.”

All in all, it is a great story that had me bingeing through it as fast as I could because I very much wanted to know what happened next. It looks like there will be more, because our heroes get back to Earth just in time for the attack on the Utopia Planitia shipyards, and an excuse for a whole new season is provided.

Both series of Prodigy have been in the form of 20 half-hour episodes. This seems to give plenty of opportunity for story-telling, and somehow a half hour of animation manages to pack in as much story as an hour of live action. Add to that the fact that it is much easier to do interesting aliens with animation, and you’ve got a recipe for a very successful series. I very much hope that Star Trek does more of this sort of thing.

Speculative Insight

064, Alex Pierce, Book Review

One of the things that irritates me about the world is that non-fiction is valued much less highly than fiction. I could see this when I was editing non-fiction for Clarkesworld. It was clear from the reader surveys that a lot of the readers didn’t bother with the content I was acquiring. They just read the fiction. And when I tried running Salon Futura as a paying venue for non-fiction, it quickly became obvious that most SF&F readers were not willing to pay for a non-fiction magazine. You can see the same thing in the wider book-publishing world too. Academics are generally expected to write for free, despite the fact that the books they write are sold for ridiculous amounts. And public historians are moving more and more into what is called “creative non-fiction”. Meanwhile garbage like Ancient Apocalypse gets made for Netflix while actual archaeologists can’t get a look-in.

Human beings love stories, and there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done about that.

However, one brave person is once again trying to create a paying online venue for SF&F non-fiction. Thank you, Alex Pierce and Speculative Insight.

Alex is financing the site in a number of ways. While some of the content is free, other essays are behind a paywall. In addition, you can now buy a collected edition of January-June 2024 content as either an ebook or paperback. Alex also had books available at Worldcon, and they seemed to be going well.

Obviously I am a bit biased here, because an essay of mine was the first thing that Speculative Insight published, but there has been lots of other content since then. For Terry Pratchett fans, Tansy Rayner Roberts has a series of essays about the male supporting characters in the Witches books. Tansy is always good value on feminist issues. There’s also an essay on Flemish folklore, which is something very new to me.

On the science fiction side of things, there are essays about Murderbot, Diversity in Star Trek, the future of Solarpunk, and the type of spaceships that are likely to exist, assuming that inter-stellar travel was possible. And much more.

If you already have a subscription, there’s a lure for you to buy the book as well in the form of a bonus essay from Lisa L Hannett. This looks at themes of childbirth and parenting in science fiction, contrasting them with Lisa’s own experience of a rather challenging birth. I suspect that it qualifies as creative non-fiction, but it is rather good (albeit with trigger warnings for anyone contemplating pregnancy for the first time).

As far as I can see, the books are only available from the Speculative Insight website. And as Alex is based in Australia it would make sense for most of us to get the ebook. I do hope it sells well. I want to see people writing good non-fiction about SF&F, and it won’t happen unless there is some means of people getting paid for it.

The Acolyte

064, TV Review

I really wanted to like this series. It had Carrie-Ann Moss. It featured a trans actress (Abigail Thorn). There was significant writing and production involvement for Jen Richards, who is one of the most successful trans women in Hollywood. It would really have annoyed the dudebros had the show been a big success.

Sadly, it wasn’t. I think it may have worked better as a book, as that would have given the ambitious plot more room in which to develop character motivations. As it was, and 8-episode series didn’t give the story enough room to breath. Consequently, when we finally got to the point of finding out what really happened on Brendok 16 years ago, the whole thing kind of fell apart.

The highlight of the series was Amandla Stenberg who played both the lead characters: the twin sisters Osha and Mae. She deserved better from the series. So did Dafne Keen whose Jecki was one of the more interesting characters in the series, and who was randomly killed off because someone had to be the red shirt.

I’m also somewhat sad that the idea of interrogating the downfall of the Jedi order by focusing on the inability of individual Jedi to live up to the order’s moral code is not going to go anywhere. Having said that, I suspect that the idea was unpopular with quite a few people within the Star Wars organization. It is hardly very Joseph Campbell.

I understand from Wikipedia that a couple of tie-in novels based on the setting of The Acolyte have been commissioned. Possibly these will provide more insight into the character motivations and the rot within the Jedi order, but I can’t imagine that I will have the time to read them.

Editorial – September 2024

064, Editorial

The plan was that, once Kevin had been safely delivered to Heathrow, I would have several weeks in September to get caught up on stuff. Sadly things didn’t work out like that.

We had both done Worldcon and been fine. We had spent three weeks touring Wales, including attending Carmarthen Pride, and been fine. Then we went to London. Kevin, thankfully, managed to avoid getting infected, but I spent the next two weeks recovering from a bout of COVID. It was very annoying.

It was also quite odd. I had very little in the way of symptoms. Indeed, had I not just been to England I might have assumed it was just a cold or allergies and not tested. So then I had two weeks of feeling mostly fine waiting for it to go away. I can see how so many people are wandering around sick and spreading it.

One thing I am pleased about in this issue is that I have got back into doing podcast interviews. Hopefully this will once again become a regular feature of the magazine.

The good side of this is that I should now be safe for the four events, including three conventions, that I have to go to in the next 5 weekends. October is going to be rough.

Issue #63

Issues

This is the August 2024 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: Future Ruins

063, Art

For this issue’s cover we are back to Pixabay and a very nice far future archaelogists piece from Gordon Taylor. As usual, you can find out more about the artist by these convenient links:

Image by Gordon Taylor from Pixabay

I had to crop the image somewhat to make it cover-shaped. The full image is displayed below.



Echo of Worlds

063, Book Review, Mike Carey

Here is a book that I have been eagerly waiting for some time, and now find very difficult to review. Mike Carey’s Pandominium duology is not two separate novels, it is one long novel split in two for publication purposes, and with some shock reveals at the end of part 1 that make talking about part 2 in a spoiler-free way quite challenging.

OK, let’s start with a recap. Infinity Gate introduced us to a multiverse in which infinite versions of Earth exist and where intelligent life has taken very different evolutionary routes in each universe. Two of our heroes—Hadiz and Essien—are humanoid. Of the other two, Moon is a felid (a cat) and Topaz is a lagomorph (a rabbit). The cast also includes Rupshe, an AI accidentally created by Hadiz, and a second AI whose identity is revealed in the first book.

The primary source of conflict in the books is the fact that there are some worlds in the multiverse where the dominant form of life is mechanical rather than biological. We thus have conflict between the Pandominium (a vaguely democratic association of worlds inhabited by biological lifeforms) and the Machine Hegemony (a collection of worlds inhabited by a hive mind of intelligent machines). Both sides believe that the other side is inhabited by creatures that class as vermin rather than self-aware intelligent entities, and so both sides want to utterly destroy the other.

The points that Carey is making here should be obvious, but he’s not doing it in a preachy way so you don’t feel that you are being hit over the head with the message.

Infinity Gate takes us through the initial discovery of the true nature of the book world, and conflict that is about to engulf it. Echo of Worlds is about the efforts that our heroes make to avoid that catastrophe. Do they manage to do so? Yes, of course. Are billions of innocent lives nevertheless lost in the process? Also yes. This is space opera. You can’t get by without destroying a few worlds.

There is only one significant new character introduced in Echo of Worlds. This is Mother Mass, not quite a living planet, but absolutely a planet inhabited by a single, enormous biological entity. She (they?) is the sort of thing I can imagine Kirk and Spock encountering in Star Trek.

The way in which the plot is resolved should be fairly obvious early on, though there are some good shock reveals along the way. What is more interesting is the way in which you start to see how everything has been carefully set up from the beginning. It is a masterful exercise in plotting.

Those of you who enjoyed the relationship between Hadiz and Essien in the first book may be disappointed that it has no further to go, but then how could it? Of more interest in book two is how Essien becomes more of a conscience for Moon who, being feline, has a passion for killing things with extreme prejudice. However, the primary focus of book two is on Paz. She turns out to be rather more competent than one might expect for a sixteen-year-old girl, even one who is a rabbit, but she’s a great character so I didn’t mind too much.

Overall this is a very fine pair of books, and I’m rather sad that we won’t be able to treat them as a single work for award periods, because a single work is undoubtedly what they are.

book cover
Title: Echo of Worlds
By: Mike Carey
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Beyond the Light Horizon

063, Book Review, Ken MacLeod

When I reviewed Beyond the Reach of Earth, the second volume in Ken MacLeod’s Lightspeed Trilogy, I found myself asking why there will be a book three. Clearly there were unanswered questions at the end of that book, but exactly which ones MacLeod would pick up and run with was another matter entirely. As it turned out, Beyond the Light Horizon is something else entirely.

Obviously the themes raised in the first two books still exist. The three main political power blocks: the Union, the Alliance and the Co-Ord, are still competing ferociously for access to territory, resources and technology. That, MacLeod suggests, will be a constant feature of the world as long as those power blocks exist. Interestingly, he also adds the African Union to the mix. They are not on the same level as the other three, but with careful politicking they could get there.

We also have the mystery of the Fermi to be resolved. The new book does explain who they are and how they came to be. But it is their motivation, hinted at in book 2, that is most important.

There is also the ongoing tension between the entrepreneurial spirit of John Grant, and the fact that he lives in a very socialist society. The way in which the two co-exist will doubtless be the subject of academic papers in the future.

However, the main thrust of Beyond the Light Horizon is the issue of colonialism. Thanks to the invention of the FTL drive, human beings have been able to reach out into the galaxy and find new worlds to exploit. We have already seen questions about the colony on Apis, and those will multiply. There is also the question as to what happens when mankind, inevitably, encounters other advanced, sentient species. (This being MacLeod, who loves to play with the silly end of popular conceptions of aliens, one such race are dinosaurs.)

There are no neat and simple answers at the end of this series. MacLeod makes it clear that humans will always be on the look out for an opportunity to enrich themselves. Even older and presumably wiser intelligent species may be tempted. And while many individuals might want to do the right thing, there will always be powerful factions that want to maintain their power by any means possible. Some readers may be put off by what seems like a non-ending, but I’m pretty sure that what MacLeod wants us to do is go away and think about the issues he has presented, not to ask him for a pre-packed solution.

book cover
Title: Beyond The Light Horizon
By: Ken MacLeod
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Marvellous Light

063, Freya Marske

I was familiar with all of the Best Series finalists for this year’s Hugos bar one: The Last Binding by Freya Marske. Therefore I decided to give the first book a try. A Marvelous Light could probably be described as being in the subgenre of English Magic fantasies. Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it centers on the fact that some people in England (upper class people, obviously) have preserved magical skills over the ages and now (in this case in Edwardian times rather than Georgian) this is becoming a matter of political importance.

Our hero, Sir Robin Blyth, is an impoverished minor aristocrat who civil service career takes a turn for the weird when he is appointed to a small and secretive department responsible for magical affairs. It turns out that his predecessor in the post, one Reginald Gatling, has disappeared without trace. We readers, as we have more viewpoints than Robin, know that poor Reggie has probably been murdered by magicians.

So much for the plot, but this is not what the book is about. A Marvelous Light is a gay romance, centering on the relationship between Robin and his prickly new boss, Edwin Courcey. I think by now you are used to my opinions on romance, though Marske does handle the tropes better than some I have read. Worse still, from my point of view, the book is verging on erotica. Reader, I have absolutely zero interest in what gay men do in bed together. At least that meant I got the book read more quickly as I was able to skip large chunks.

I wasn’t hugely impressed with the worldbuilding either. For people in a highly important government department with direct access to the Prime Minister, Blyth and Courcey seem remarkably powerless.

So far, so disheartening, and yet I quite enjoyed the book. That’s partly down to the characters, and partly down to the way that Marske portrays the agonies of two gay men in a deeply homophobic society. This is not a “the past was gay because I want it to be” book, it makes a serious attempt to engage with how being closeted messes with your mind.

The other thing I really liked about the book is the departmental secretary who works for Blyth and Courcey. Adelaide Morrissey is, inevitably, far more competent than her bosses. She is also, despite the name, of Indian extraction. I would have liked to see more of her.

Book 2 in the series, A Restless Truth, features Robin Blyth’s headstrong teenage sister, Maud. It is likely to be of more interest to me, even if it is still a romance. I might give it a try.

book cover
Title: A Marvellous Light
By: Freya Marske
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Rose/House

063, Arkady Martine, Book Review

There was some pretty stiff competition in the Novella category for the Hugos this year. I have already reviewed Thornhedge, Mammoths at the Gates, and The Mimicking of Known Successes, all of them favourably. But there was also an Arkady Martine story on the list, and I’ve loved everything of hers I have read. How would Rose/House stack up to the others?

I should start by noting that there is a really interesting review of the book at Strange Horizons that examines aspects of the book that did not occur to me when I read it. Thank you, Vanessa Jae, it is always interesting to get a new perspective on a work.

My thoughts on reading the book, rather more obviously, was that it was about billionaires and AIs. Rose House itself is an AI, and was created by a reclusive billionaire, possibly one who was an actual genius, rather than a self-styled genius like a certain real world billionaire I could mention. But even a genius can’t create incredible things without lots of money. To create something incredible by yourself requires absurd amounts of money. Basit Deniau, the creator of Rose House, while now deceased, exhibits exactly the sort of egomania we have come to expect from the fabulously wealthy.

So we have a house that is an AI, and also a potential murder suspect. How does a house kill someone, and why? Also how does a detective go about interrogating something that isn’t human, and thinks very differently than humans. That’s doubtless a topic that has been addressed before (presumably by Asimov), but that will always be worth revisiting, especially in these days when people claim (rather absurdly) to have produced actual AIs.

Then we get to the dénouement, and without being too spoilery I think I can say that where billionaires and amazing inventions are concerned, it all comes down to money, and to other people wanting a share of it. It also reminded me somewhat of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s wonderful Flower Cities series.

Rose/House is a clever, thoughtful book that may well have other depths that I have not noticed. It is a worthy competitor in the category. By now, of course, the voters have spoken. But if you didn’t read this one, do give it a try.

book cover
Title: Rose/House
By: Arkady Martine
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Worldcon #82

063, Convention Report

While I have been to many Worldcons, this was the first one at which I have been a dealer. The experience is very different. It is also my first post-COVID Worldcon, which also changed things a lot.

Usually Worldcon for me has meant attending a few panels during the day, browsing the Dealers’ Room, Fan Tables and Art Show in the gaps, then going out for dinner and attending parties in the evening. This year, with one small exception, I was in the Dealers’ Room from when it opened until it closed. After that I was so tired that on most days I grabbed a quick meal from the food trucks and fell into bed. Not that I actually wanted to spend time in bars or at parties, as I was pretty sure that they would be prime sites of infection.

From a COVID point of view, the Dealers’ Room was a good deal. The hall had a high ceiling, lots of ventilation, and some doors open to the outside. This was a relief because I needed to spend a lot of time talking to people and I’m not easily understood when wearing a mask as my voice is quite quiet.

Not having attended a Worldcon as a dealer before, I didn’t have much idea of what to expect. I just stuffed my car with as much as I could carry and hoped for the best. As it turned out, I sold around 170 books, and sold out of a number of titles. I was very pleased. That was despite being given a pitch way at the back of the hall where some people never ventured. I noticed that I was placed close to Bona Books, AK Faulkner and Sandra Bond, which made our part of the hall something of a queer ghetto. But The Portal Bookshop was much nearer the front so I don’t think this was anything deliberate on the part of the convention.

The one thing that was slightly annoying about the arrangements was the issue of at-table events. We were told very firmly before the convention that we were not permitted to hold events at our dealer tables. This was to avoid queues for author signings clogging up the alleyways between the tables. Nevertheless, some larger publishers did arrange such events, advertised them widely, and were allowed to get away with it. I totally understand the concern about space, and have been at Worldcons where queues at tables would have been a massive problem. But in Glasgow we had a huge amount of space. There wasn’t any need for that rule, and enforcing it selectively just penalized smaller dealers.

I had one panel. Roz & Jo kindly looked after the table for a couple of hours while I was away. The panel was on Gods and Faith in Fantasy. Besides me it featured Dr. Meg MacDonald (who has a PhD in the very subject of the panel) and Wole Tabali, with Ehud Maimon as moderator. It was great fun, and we good some really good feedback. I hope to catch up with some of the other panels on replay, but this far the only one I have seen is the History of LGBT+ SF&F one, which is hilarious, at least in part as Trip and Chris were asleep on their feet when they did it.

I did also briefly attend one fan party. That was because Pride Space is a project backed by San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions Inc., and Wizard’s Tower was sponsoring the party. I didn’t stay long. I was too tired.

Kevin spent almost the entire convention in the Business Meeting. How he managed to do so and yet remain sane and free of COVID is a mystery to me. Apparently it went about as well as could be expected, given that executing people for engaging in Recreational Parliamentary Practice while people are trying to get important stuff done is not allowed. Most importantly it appears that none of the miscreants from Chengdu have been given an excuse to sue the Worldcon. Hopefully they will eventually be dealt with in a manner that doesn’t put any conventions at risk.

Aside from move-in and move-out, the one thing we got to do together was attend the Hugos. Of course the last time that Worldcon was in Glasgow (2005), the ceremony took place in the starship WSFS Armadillo, and Kevin and I were running Events. The time before that (1995) we went to the Hugos for our first date.

Attending the ceremony when you have been in charge of it means that you see it in a very different way to the average punter. Things were done differently; sometimes for the better, and sometimes not so.

One big change is that Glasgow did away with the role of Toastmaster. There was no overall host for the ceremony. Various presenters rotated through the evening, each controlling the stage in turn. The slot at the beginning in which the Toastmaster normally tells some jokes was replaced by John Scalzi doing a 5 minute history of the Hugos. John is very amusing, so it went pretty well, though because it had to be very quick he inadvertently added to the suggestion that Kevin and I were somehow partly responsible for the Hugos in Chengdu. He also seemed to mangle Cheryl’s Second Law of Fandom. For those who have forgotten, here are the Three Laws again. I think you’ll agree that they are even more true now than they were in 2008 when I first devised them.

  1. Never accept accident or incompetence as an explanation when a bizarre and complex conspiracy can also be advanced to explain the known facts.
  2. One data point indicates a dangerous trend that must be resisted; two data points indicate a sacred and holy tradition that must be preserved.
  3. If a tree falls in Central Park, New York, is seen to fall by 100 New Yorkers, is captured on film by CNN and the video of the fall is broadcast around the world, but I wasn’t there to see it, then it didn’t fall.

I’m not sure that doing away with the Toastmaster adds anything to the ceremony, but it does free up money to have a more varied set of GoHs so it might be worth doing.

Something that may be a really good idea, and I understand was first done in Chengdu, is to have the roll-call of the names of the finalists pre-recorded. This relieves the presenter of the need to learn how to pronounce all those names. They just have to get the name of the winner right. The downside is that, having been relieved of the need to read the names of the finalists, some of the presenters clearly did no prep at all, and one badly mangled the name of the winner despite having just heard it read out.

The thing that everyone at the ceremony will remember is the tech failure on the pre-recorded video. One of the presenters, Catherine Heymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was unable to be at the convention in person. She had pre-recorded some video, and tech was unable to play any of it. Because of this, there was no envelope on stage, and the people doing their best to cover ended up reading the plaque on the trophy to find out who won.

Kudos is due here to Meganne Christian, who had presented some awards earlier and came back on stage to take control of the chaos. You can tell she’s an astronaut, she was utterly calm and decisive in a crisis.

What most people in the audience probably didn’t notice was that there was no other recorded video. That means no clips of the Best Dramatic Presentation finalists. That’s probably a good thing as they eat up a lot of time in the ceremony, and devour an absurd amount of volunteer time trying to get permission to show them. It also meant no acceptance speeches from people who could not attend the convention. It seems highly unlikely that none of the absent winners would have wanted to say anything, so I have to assume that Glasgow did not give them the opportunity. That seems churlish, except that presumably those videos would not have worked either.

The new Best Game or Interactive Work Hugo seems to have gone down well. Unlike the last time this was trialed, there was a lot of interest in the category. Also the winners, from Larian Studios who produced Baldur’s Gate 3, turned up in force to accept the trophy. This was a big shock. Most of us Worldcon veterans had assumed that video game companies, like Hollywood studios, would not care about the Hugos. Larian were clearly delighted to have won.

I’m not going to comment on the results much. They are what they are, and they are voted on by fans. Besides, the novel that I placed first actually won this year, which is a rarity. Of course the best novel of last year, The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson, barely made it onto the “also ran” list in the Lodestar. Your mileage may vary. I am, however, deeply delighted that Juliet McKenna’s Green Man series was on the “also ran” list for Best Series. Thank you, everyone who voted for it.

The Emerald City Best Dressed at the Hugos Award went to Adri Joy for her magnificent jellyfish hat. I’d like to see someone try to top that.

That’s about all I have to say, because I didn’t see most of the convention. I understand from other reports that it was generally very well received. The two major areas of complaint were the usual suspects complaining about Worldcon having “gone woke”, and people upset at having caught COVID. The former were likely to complain no matter what happened, and I suspect that the only way to attend Worldcon and guarantee not to get sick is to attend virtually. UK fandom is probably less rigorous about masking that Americans, but it is in bar spaces where everyone is packed together and is unmasked because they are drinking and talking that you are most likely to catch the virus.

Finncon 2024

063, Convention Report

It is great to be back. One of the worst things about the pandemic was that I could not make my regular trips to Finland. I have been suffering sauna-deprivation.

This year Finncon was in Jyväskylä which meant that my good friend Irma Hirsjärvi was involved in the organization. I absolutely could not miss that. Also one of the Guests of Honour was Ursula Vernon, and I’ve been wanting a chance to chat to her about the Sworn Soldier books, and about weird animals.

Talking to Ursula was easy. It turned out that she and her husband, Kevin, were taking the train from Helsinki to Jyväskylä. I needed to do the same, so I volunteered to go along as a “local” guide. As it turned out, we only made it as far as Tampere, but that was because Irma came to collect us and take us to the Moomin Museum. They have done a lot of work on it since I was last there. I warmly recommend it.

First up for me at the convention was the academic conference, which is how I ended up reading Ghost Stories for Darwin (reviewed elsewhere in this issue). That was Friday morning sorted.

In the afternoon I headed off to the Writers’ House for the traditional “On Writing” panel. This part of the con is supposedly aimed at professional writers, but a lot of fans come along too. I got to interview Ursula, which meant that we got to talk about Sworn Soldiers and weird animals in public. As I recall, Ursula knew about the paper nautilus, but the Spanish mole story was new to her. I live in hope of it turning up in a Hugo acceptance speech one day. (If you are not familiar with these animals, you need to buy Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction from Luna Press and read my essay on “Worldbuilding with Sex and Gender”).

Finncon proper was very much as expected. There were lots of young people in costume. There were many interesting panels. The good folks from Rosebud had tables groaning with books. It was all very pleasant. I gave a lecture entitled “Wales in the Time of Arthur”, which had an audience of around 120. I also participated in the LGBTQ+ Fiction panel. And of course I got to help judge the masquerade.

Much fun was had. Much sauna was had. I got to eat at Harald. And I went to a really interesting panel on Hopepunk, which I shall write about separately.

After the con I delivered Ursula and Kevin back to Helsinki Airport, and then spent a week at an Assyriology conference at Helsinki University. That was also fun, but in a very different way.

Ghost Stories for Darwin

063, Banu Subramaniam, Book Review

I owe this one to Finncon, or more precisely to the traditional academic conference that takes places on the Friday before Finncon. Irma messaged me to tell me that one of the papers was about Oryx and Crake, and this strange academic book, neither of which I was familiar with. Could I help? Well, I had some memory of reading Oryx and Crake, and being deeply unimpressed. But as for this Ghost Stories for Darwin thing? A book on evolutionary biology written by a woman with a very Indian name. WTF? As I believe people say these days.

My expectations were not improved when I started to read the book on the train to Jyväskylä. I explained to Ursula Vernon and her husband, Kevin, why I would have my nose in a book during the trip. They looked at me as if I had just confessed some sort of masochist fetish. What good could possibly come of this bizarre exercise in self-immolation?

I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting much myself. I have always viewed evolutionary biologists as being insecure white men who are racist, misogynist, queerphobic and ableist, and who invent pseudoscientific theories to justify their bigotries; said theories being provable as correct solely by the existence of patriarchy.

Thankfully I soon changed my mind. Banu Subramaniam grew up in India and traveled to the USA to pursue a PhD in evolutionary biology. She was, by her own admission, naive and starry-eyed. She saw the USA as being a land free of the classism she was familiar with in India, she saw science as being a discipline free of sexism, and she had no idea about the level of racism in US culture. That she survived the experience is a testament to her strength of will, and also to the support she gained from the Women’s Studies department in her university.

Subramaniam’s subject for her PhD was the Morning Glory, a plant closely related to the notorious British Convolvulus, hated by gardeners throughout the land. The convolvulus does have very pretty white flowers (there will probably be lots in my back yard when I get home), but the morning glory has a wide variety of flower colourations, and it is these that Subramaniam was planning to study.

Doing so, and in the process experiencing life as a woman of colour in the USA, led to a political awakening that has established Subramaniam as one of the foremost experts on gender in the sciences. And if that immediately brings to mind the phrase, “women in science”, well you are exactly the sort of ill-informed person that Ghost Stories for Darwin is intended for.

I should note at the start that the book does not entirely succeed. Subramaniam is not a professional science communicator, and there are times, particularly when she is talking about her own academic specialisms, that she veers into complex jargon. Thankfully I have a science degree and was able to make sense of most of it, but other readers may find it very hard going.

Being an academic book, Ghost Stories for Darwin has a subtitle. It is, The Science of Variation and The Politics of Diversity. This is a good place to start looking at the argument. One of the great debates within evolutionary biology is the role of variation in evolution. Some people in the field believe that diversity has an evolutionary advantage for the species, as that provides a wide range of mutations to help it evolve into something better. Others believe that all variation is bad, and that only the fittest variation should be allowed to pass its genes on to new generations. This latter view leads inevitably to eugenics.

But, and here is our first important feminist lesson of the day, all binaries are false. Neither of the explanations above helps us understand why variation in the colour of morning glory flowers persists through hundreds of generations, and can exhibit stable shares of the population to which the species will return if the balance is perturbed. Variation in flower colour appears to be baked in to the morning glory as a species.

The answer to this conundrum is that evolution is not just driven by genetics. It is also influenced by a range of environmental factors including, but not limited to, climate, pollinator preference, soil conditions, human cultivation and so on. Subramaniam quickly discovered that the scientific ideas of doing a simple, one-variable experiment on a field of morning glory flowers tells you nothing.

Exploring the underlying assumptions of her field, and seeking support as a doubly marginalized person within US academia, led Subramaniam both to discover the horrendous eugenicist underpinning of her discipline, and the fundamentally masculinist nature of science as it is practiced.

One interesting aspect of Subramaniam’s section on eugenics is the fact that many of the pioneers of the field saw themselves as striving for a better world, and even as being good Socialists. The idea that the socially inferior should, for their own good, not be allowed to survive, is deeply seductive. While most of the extreme horrors perpetrated in the name of this belief have been minority ethnic groups, the differently abled and queer communities can recognise the syndrome. There have been many times when I have been told that my life would have been easier had I not been born.

Subramaniam moves on from eugenics to matters of race, and the complicated discipline known as Invasion Biology. We are all, I am sure, familiar with stories about how our native ecosystems are being “invaded” by dangerous foreign plants that are “taking over” and “crowding out” native species. Would it surprise you that there is a direct correlation between the frequency of such stories in the newspapers and the level of popular concern about human immigration? And the two types of story use exactly the same types of language.

Of course migration of plant species around the world has a long and in many cases glorious history. Where would our cuisines be without the potato, the tomato, and the chili pepper, all of which were unknown outside the Americas before Columbus accidentally ran into them on his way to India. The famous Georgia Peach is an immigrant from China. The same is true for animal species, though sometimes a little creative marketing is required. The Patagonia Toothfish was unheard of in restaurants before it cleverly changed its name to the Chilean Sea Bass.

The final section of the book is about gender, and it focuses on how the practice of science has been socially constructed in a very masculine fashion. A woman wishing to practice science has to buy into that construction and present herself as “one of the boys” in order to be taken seriously as a scientist. She must not wear make-up, she must not show emotion, and so on. Or at least, she should do so inside the lab. Outside the lab, in social spaces, she must present as conventionally feminine. After all, she will soon want to give up her career and become a wife and mother instead.

Feminist lesson two of the day is that all too often talk of gender focuses solely on the “woman problem”. It talks about how women must change themselves in order to fit into the masculine world, or about the accommodations that must be made for women because they do things like have families. (Men never have families, they have wives to do that for them.) Subramaniam says:

[…] the consistent emphasis on family and women reinforces essentialist ideas about women. What has remained unchallenged is the normative model of the male as the ideal scientist, which insists on productivity that can only be achieved by very long hours, a singular dedication to work, and an exclusive focus on one’s profession.

It occurs to me that many of the lessons Subramaniam presents about life in academia, particularly about the sink-or-swim culture of graduate education, are equally applicable outside of the sciences. Indeed, the failure of senior staff to properly train their subordinates in anything other than the technical aspects of the job at hand (and not in how to do things like be a good manager) is endemic in the world of work at large.

Ghost Stories for Darwin was published in 2014, and there are probably areas where its analysis of academic culture in the USA are out of date. In particular, while Subramaniam did see the commercialization of universities coming, she did not know how close it would come to destroying the institutions it was supposed to rescue.

I noted also that there is very little discussion of sexuality as a marginalized identity. Subramaniam does note that it is an issue, but when she actually talks about it she tends to do so by contrasting the profoundly asexual nature of laboratory life with the expectation of normative heterosexuality outside of the lab. She does make brief note of the famous trans masculine neurobiologist, Ben Barres, to illustrate just how foolish misogynist ideas of what makes a good scientist are, but her discussion of gender is primarily limited to performance rather than identity.

These, however, are minor quibbles. Ghost Stories for Darwin is a fascinating and well-argued book that gave me lots of useful pointers as to how to think about gender and its effects on the world.

Which leaves us with one question: where do the ghosts come in? It turns out that Subramaniam has borrowed the metaphor from Bollywood cinema. In a Bollywood movie, a ghost is always someone who has been unjustly forgotten and ignored after their death, and perhaps in life. They desperately want to be listened to, understood, acknowledged, and recognized so that they can stop haunting the living and rest in peace. The history of feminism, in all areas of life, is a story of Bollywood ghosts.

book cover
Title: Ghost Stories for Darwin
By: Banu Subramaniam
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

What Is Hopepunk?

063, Lit Crit

For me, the most interesting panel at Finncon was the one on Hopepunk. It is not a genre that I have paid much attention to in the past. I had a vague idea that to qualify as Hopepunk a book had to be unchallenging, heartwarming and relentlessly positive, after the manner of a Travis Baldree novel. This panel disabused me of that notion, and also got me thinking that Wizard’s Tower might have published some Hopepunk.

Please note that this essay will contain some spoilers for Welcome to Boy.net and Generation Nemesis.

The term, Hopepunk, was first coined by Alexandra Rowland in 2017 as a counter to Grimdark, and the official definition, at least according to Wikipedia, is that Hopepunk books are about, “characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges”. There’s nothing necessarily soft and fluffy about that. What I learned from the panel, and the Wikipedia entry, is that Hopepunk practitioners have embraced the necessity to fight for a positive future.

What I took away from this is the idea that to qualify as Hopepunk, a book (or other work) has to show belief that a better world is possible, and can be achieved by people acting in a positive, progressive and cooperative way. This does relate well to the original concept, because the primary ethos of Grimdark is that, no matter what anyone does, things will always turn out badly.

So how does this relate to Wizard’s Tower? Firstly I would like to point readers at Lyda Morehouse’s Welcome to Boy.net. On the face of it, this is hardly a cuddly book. It features a pair of lesbian bounty hunters fighting against an oppressive military dictatorship that wants to take over the Solar System. One of our heroines is a former senior officer in that society who defected so that she could undergo gender transition. It all seems rather grim.

But, and this is the thing I loved most about the book when I first read it, while Lucia del Toro does occasionally have to make use of her cyborg abilities, this is not how our heroines win the day. Victory is achieved, not through force of arms, but through the citizens of the free colonies of the Asteroid Belt refusing to be cowed by thugs in uniforms. There is political protest. People get out on the street with banners. That is not the usual ending for a piece of space opera. And it very much suggests that a better world is possible if we all work together for it.

The other book that I want to discuss is Sean McMullen’s Generation Nemesis. That’s a book that has been getting very negative responses when I’ve talk to people about it at conventions. It is, after all, set in a world in which Earth’s climate has been comprehensively wrecked, and vast numbers of people have died. It seems that a lot of people don’t want to admit that climate collapse is now likely, and prefer to read books in which it is not an issue, or where it is somehow prevented. Sean takes what I think is a more realistic view. We are probably already past the point of no return. The question now is how we deal with it.

The plot of Generation Nemesis suggests that humanity will react with anger, and that young people who have seen themselves denied the sort of future that their ancestors enjoyed, will turn upon the old. Drawing on the Terror of the French Revolution, Sean creates a world in which the only choices facing the elderly are a matter of how soon, and how horribly, they are executed.

And yet the book is not without hope. The plot revolves around the attempts of the scientist hero, Jason Hall, to convince the climate courts that revenge is a wasteful strategy. While a few elderly people are indeed wasters in every sense of the word, most of them have some useful skills and can be useful to a society that desperately needs all the help it can get to adapt to the radically different world it has inherited. If the book has a message, it is that humanity can survive climate collapse, but only if we all work together rather than turning on each other. That sounds like Hopepunk to me.

Of course your mileage may differ. And I’m not advertising either book as Hopepunk. That’s partly because I find such labels limiting, and partly because I don’t want to get into any fannish fights about whether the books deserve the label. However, hopefully this essay will help you see both books in a different light. I know that the Finncon panel did that for me. My thanks to Xan van Rooyen for organizing it.

Editorial – August 2024

063, Editorial

Well, Worldcon happened. Not doing an issue last month was definitely a wise idea. And in fact it was touch and go whether I would get one out this month. Kevin has been staying with me since Worldcon, so I have been having a life outside of work for a change. It is very nice, but it means that I haven’t read or written much since getting back from Glasgow. Thankfully I had banked a few articles in July.

Worldcon went pretty well, as I explain in my con report. But things have been quite busy since I got back because I needed to process the accounts and order a lot more stock. The latter was quite urgent as I need copies of some books for Carmarthen Pride which is taking place tomorrow (Saturday 31st). Also I have a bunch of new books to get ready for BristolCon. If all goes well, I will have four new books on sale there. Plus I have a bunch of people interested in being published by Wizard’s Tower. That’s partly thanks to Juliet McKenna winning Best Novel in the BSFA Awards, and partly thanks to issues with other publishers. Wizard’s Tower was founded to help mid list authors who were being dropped by their publishers, so I am very happy to be able to help out again.

I won’t be at any conventions in September. Next issue will have more news about BristolCon, and about Fantastika in Stockholm the following weekend where Juliet will be a Guest of Honour. Nordic readers, I can’t import books into the EU, but the English Bookstore in Stockholm is able to do so and they will be handling getting copies of Juliet’s books for sale.

Finally I should say something about the ongoing Neil Gaiman situation. I haven’t said anything to date, partly because trying to explain things on social media is fairly pointless, and partly because I am just too angry. I’m angry with Neil, primarily for the way he treated those young women, but also for other reasons, including the damage this affair has done to the trans cause. I’m also angry with a whole bunch of other people who have pitched in in various unhelpful ways. Maybe when I have calmed down more about it I will say more.

What I will say is that the TERFs are not in this to protect women. Indeed, their insistence that trans women are the primary threat to the safety of cis women provides a valuable smokescreen for government who can claim to be doing something about VAWG (by removing trans rights) while leaving cis men free to continue preying on women unfettered. Having seen the way that TERFs have exploited vulnerable detransitioners, I am very worried about those of Neil’s victims who have fallen into their clutches.

Issue #62

Issues

This is the June 2024 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Mary Ellen, Craterean!: The cover is taken from Ben Baldwin's art for the latest Crater School book

  • What Feasts at Night: The new Alex Easton novella sees our hero once again in the wilds of Gallacia, though this time without the homicidal mushrooms

  • Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow is producing some very interesting books, including this one

  • Waypoint Seven: A new space opera novella from a Finland-based author and a South African small press

  • Unexploded Remnants: Elaine Gallagher's debut novella is space opera with a strong Indiana Jones influence

  • Tolkien Lecture 2024: This year's Tolkien Lecture was given by Neil Gaiman. Cheryl was there.

  • The Book Blinders: John Clute is justifibly angry about the vandalism perpetrated by the British Library upon its collection of books

  • Doctor Who 15-1: As always, some people absolutely adore the new incaration of The Doctor, while others hate him

  • 3 Body Problem – Netflix: The people who allegedly ruined A Game of Thrones on TV have turned their hands to a famous science fiction trilogy

  • Furiosa: More gorgeous Australian scenery, more car chases, but does Furiosa have anything new to offer

  • Editorial – June 2024: There will be no July issue, but hopefully a bumper one in August

What Feasts at Night

062, Book Review, T Kingfisher

I’m a little surprised to see a new Alex Easton story. The first one seemed complete in itself. But novella series have been very successful so I’m not too surprised that this is happening.

As you may remember, What Moves the Dead was neat little re-working of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, with added homicidal mushrooms. It co-starred Miss Eugenia Potter, a thinly disguised version of Beatrix of the same surname, who was actually an expert on mushrooms. That book also provided us with an introduction to Alex’s status as a Sworn Soldier; that is, someone assigned female at birth who has taken up a male identity on becoming a soldier. That was a lot to fit into one novella.

What Feasts at Night has difficultly developing that theme. Miss Potter once again makes an appearance, but there are few mushrooms to be examined and none of them are homicidal. Instead she is there as an excuse for being out in the wilds of Gallacia, and because of her ongoing and rather cute relationship with Alex’s batman, Angus.

The Ushers, of course, have no role in the new story.

As for Alex, we hear rather more about the horrors of war than the horrors of gender transition. Everyone seems perfectly happy to accept Alex as a man. Indeed, the Widow Botezatu, the peasant woman that Alex hires as a housekeeper for his hunting lodge, treats him with exactly the same amount of disdain that she would have for an assigned-male member of the minor nobility who has taken up soldiery. The only person who expects Alex to be treated in any other way is Alex because, like any other trans person, he can’t forget who he is. That’s a nice touch that I appreciated.

So what is T Kingfisher planning for what will presumably be an ongoing series of Alex Easton novellas? Well, they will probably be neat little horror stories based on European folklore. Having come from a Ruritanian country allows Kingfisher to borrow from many different European countries, which I am sure will be useful as the series develops.

That may be the plan. But I’d like to suggest another one. Alex is clearly a man of the world. He has sufficient means to travel, and he clearly has done. It would be interesting, I think, to see him and Angus in environments other than the dark woods of their native country. Alex is certainly fond of Paris:

Paris, when we left, had been in full glory. Much is made of springtime there, but for my money, a warm autumn is just as spectacular, and you don’t trip over nearly as many poets.

Ouch! That was sharply observed. Alex has clearly also been to Finland as he knows the Finns well.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Finns. Some claim they’re unfriendly, but every one that I’ve met has been quite pleasant, if reserved. They have the quiet confidence of a people who know that, at any moment, they could strap on skis, go into the woods, and take out an entire squad of enemy soldiers before anyone knows they are there.

Yeah, that’s Finns alright. For some strange reason, Alex isn’t much taken with salmiakki. Clearly no one has persuaded him to try terva yet.

Anyway, my point is that taking Alex out of the woods would give plenty of opportunity for more observations of this type. It may also bring Alex’s trans status more to the fore. Because the more civilized people thing they are, the more daft social mores they tend to come up with.

book cover
Title: What Feasts at Night
By: T Kingfisher
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
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Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature

062, Book Review, Taylor Driggers

One of the great things about the ‘Perspectives on Fantasy’ series of academic books being produced by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow is that all the books get a paperback edition at a price that mere humans can afford. You do have to wait about a year after the publication of the hardcover, but you will get it. I’ve been eagerly awaiting Taylor Driggers’ book, and am pleased I can finally own a copy.

This being an academic book series, it is a bit heavy going. Driggers leans heavily on the theory of deconstruction as propounded by Jacques Derrida. It also helps to have some knowledge of the work on gender by Judith Butler. Those two I can manage. As for the feminist theologies of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Marcella Althaus-Reid and Linn Marie Tonstad, nope, I’d never heard of them either. Consequently I was required to take Driggers’ word as to what their positions were, which is not ideal when reading academic works, but thankfully that didn’t matter too much.

Cixous, by the way, seems like my sort of feminist. Driggers quotes her as saying, “we have to be careful not to lapse smugly and blindly into an essentialist ideological interpretation between man and woman.” I might need to read some of her work.

Deconstruction, of course, is one of those things that the ‘Anti-Woke’ love to complain about. It doesn’t help that it is not an easy concept to understand, and is often poorly explained by academics. One of the best explanations I have found is this essay by Catherine Turner on a legal website. She describes deconstruction as “an on-going process of questioning the accepted basis of meaning”. That makes it sound very like the scientific method, because no matter what current science accepts as true, a good scientist will always question that orthodoxy.

Of course this is anathema to authoritarians, because they love to roll out “fundamental truths” in support of their position of supremacy. This is very much true of organized religion.

Inevitably a book titled Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature also leans heavily on Queer Theory. That sometimes gives me pause for thought, because I’ve seen rather too many examples of people doing versions of, “I’m going to give a queer reading of this text because it will be fun and I want to, even though there is no other justification for it.” Thankfully, Driggers doesn’t go there. He also provides a rationale for something that has been puzzling me for a while.

Here in the UK we have a history of using “queer” as a synonym for the alphabet soup of LGBTQIA+ and variants thereof. But a US-based history group that I follow has recently had a massive internal fight over the use of “queer” as an umbrella term because, so many members say, it is trans-exclusive. Also there was a panel at the recent Nebulas Conference that specifically used “queer and trans” in the title. Driggers cites Cáel M Keegan as pointing out that Queer Theory has an “insistence on the instability and incoherence of sex and gender identity”. That in turn can lead to an insistence that gender identity is purely a choice, which is clearly at odds with the lived experience of many (though not all) trans people.

One final thing before I stop talking about theory and get back to the book. Having written an essay on queer gods for the most recent Academia Lunare publication, I was interested to see what Driggers made of gods in fantasy. As it turned out, he led me to a quote from The Left Hand of Darkness that I wish I had used in that essay because it perfectly encapsulates what I was trying to say:

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion…

Le Guin, a genius as always.

But wait, I hear you say, The Left Hand of Darkness is science fiction, what is it doing in a book about fantasy? Well that depends on what you mean by fantasy. Driggers has a very expansive view of the term. His book focuses primarily on three texts, of which Le Guin’s is one. The other two are Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, which is also generally classed as science fiction, and ‘Til We Have Faces by C S Lewis.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about The Left Hand of Darkness in terms of what it has to say about gender. I have tended to forget that it has a lot to say about religion as well, and is infused with Le Guin’s fascination with Taoism. Driggers makes the point that it is the absence of a gender binary on Gethen that allows the Gethenians to develop a religion that is not patriarchal, or even obsessed with stereotyped gender roles, as so many Earthly religions are.

The Passion of New Eve is also fairly obviously about religion. The title makes that clear, and Mother’s transformation of Evelyn into Eve is very much intended to be the foundation of a new, feminist religion. The book certainly pokes away at essentialist ideas of gender that can underpin “goddess religion”, but Driggers seems unaware of the nascent ideas of transphobia within feminism at the time the book was written, which makes his analysis of the text less useful.

That leaves us with ‘Til We Have Faces, a book that I had largely ignored because Lewis is notoriously a Christian apologist and a misogynist. However, it is his last novel, and Driggers suggests that it has a far more interesting approach to religion than Lewis’s other works. Here are a couple of choice quotes:

She [Ungit] is a black stone, without head or hands or face.

…pigeons, which are specially sacred to Ungit.

Cybele, like many near-Eastern gods, was represented by a black stone rather than a statue. And doves were specially sacred to Ishtar. Lewis has clearly been reading up on Mesopotamian religion.

I was so impressed by Driggers’ description of ‘Til We Have Faces that I have bought a copy. Hopefully I’ll get time to read it soon.

So were does this leave us? Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature is a difficult read, but a rewarding one if you have the necessary academic background and an interest in the subject matter. I was very pleased with Driggers’ nuanced approach to the issues, and very much applaud his willingness to question doctrine and seek to create a Christianity that is less patriarchal and more welcoming to women, queers and minorities of all sorts.

As to the general thesis, fantastic fiction is absolutely a tool for asking “how might things be different?” and as such is ideal for the sort of theological thought experiments that Driggers’ champions. Because of this it is rather a shame that so much ‘religion’ in fantasy is nothing of the sort. Perhaps this is why Driggers had to pick his examples from the field of science fiction.

book cover
Title: Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature
By: Taylor Driggers
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
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Waypoint Seven

062, Book Review, Xan Van Rooyen

Here’s one you may not have heard of. Xan van Rooyen is a South African non-binary person currently living in Finland. Xan and I have been on a number of panels together at Nordic conventions, and at this year’s Finncon we will be discussing Queer Fantasies. Waypoint Seven, however, is not exactly a fantasy, it is a space opera with magic.

The book, by the way, is published by Mirari Press. You probably won’t have heard of them either. They are a relatively new small press based in Cape Town. I know how tough it is to start a publishing company, and I wish them well on their journey. Especially as they have a commitment to publishing diverse voices.

As to the book, well, the universe is under threat. It is space opera, right. One of the more technologically advanced civilisations has sent missions out through the universe looking for a solution to the problem that threatens their survival. These ‘wayfarers’ have been given strict Prime Directive instructions.

Waypoint Seven is one of their targets. To date, three missions have been sent there. All have been lost.

Meanwhile, on the planet that has been named Waypoint Seven, magic is literally falling from the skies, from a rent in the universe. Runo and his friends live by scavenging this bounty. They work for a vicious gang boss called Malikin who has a reputation for abusing his underlings. They’d love to run, but they need money to do so, and keeping profits from Malikin is a dangerous business. It doesn’t help that Runo is a member of a minority culture in their city, and liable to be executed by the city’s racist high priestess if he’s found out.

Then, one day, an angel falls from the sky.

As you can see, there is a lot going on here. It may surprise you to learn that the book is a novella. Given the amount of worldbuilding that van Rooyen has done, I could feel a novel straining to burst out of the confines of this little book. Then again, novellas are popular these days, and if you are interested in trying a new author, perhaps a shorter book is more appealing.

Anyway, I hope you do. After the first couple of chapters, there’s a breakneck pace to this book. Also it asks interesting questions about how people respond to looming disaster. And if that isn’t topical these days, I don’t know what is.

book cover
Title: Waypoint Seven
By: Xan van Rooyen
Publisher: Mirari Press
Purchase links:
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Unexploded Remnants

062, Book Review, Elaine Gallagher

When I first started writing book reviews, I could count the number of trans authors active in the speculative fiction field on the fingers of one hand. These days they are everywhere. So welcome, Elaine Gallagher, previously best known as a Scottish poet, but now the latest in the stable of novella writers for Tor.com.

Unlike Waypoint Seven (also reviewed in this issue), Unexploded Remnants is one of those books that focuses tightly on the plot, leaving only vague sketches of the vast galactic canvas against which it is set. Alien species are introduced in a sentence and then never heard of again. Our heroine, Alice, goes fleeing through wormhole gateways at dizzying speed, briefly leaving a few footprints on a new world each time, before heading off somewhere new.

Why so much running? Well one of the major influences on the book is Indiana Jones. Alice thinks she has scored a bargain from an antique dealer in a bazar. But before she has a chance to celebrate her fortune she finds herself being chased by an ever-increasing collection of bad guys who are keen to separate her from her prize, preferably with a clean laser cut.

So Alice ends up getting chased over the galaxy, and inevitably there are interludes of extreme violence during which various AIs deploy ridiculously powerful weaponry at speeds mere humans cannot follow. It is very space opera. Reminds me a bit of Banks.

Gallagher, like the Wachowskis, seems obsessed with Lewis Caroll and white rabbits. There is Alice, obviously. Her personal AI is called Bugs. She spends a lot of time going down rabbit holes. I’m not sure if there was supposed to be a purpose to this, but it was fun.

The point of the story, however, is much more serious. The treasure that Alice has picked up is not just a fantastically powerful weapon. It is a soldier in a genocidal war that ended millennia ago. The point of the book is that the most likely response to an atrocity is a retaliatory atrocity, and so on through a cycle of ever-escalating violence. The only way to win such a conflict is to refuse to play. It is a message that many parts of the world need to hear, and none of them seem to want to.

book cover
Title: Unexploded Remnants
By: Elaine Gallagher
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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Tolkien Lecture 2024

062, Lecture

It was that time of year again, so off I went to Oxford for the annual Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature. This year was a bit special. That was partly because at long last a memorial to Professor Tolkien was to be unveiled in Pembroke College. That was as much a project as the lecture series itself: something that Gabriel Shenk, Will Badger and their colleagues had pressed the college for from their student days. Because really Pembroke should make more of its most famous Fellow.

The other reason this year was special was because the lecture was to be given by a chap called Neil Gaiman, of whom you may have heard. Whereas previous lectures had all been held on Pembroke’s premises (they do have a lecture hall), this one was planned for Oxford Town Hall. I gather than tickets sold out on the first day they went on sale.

Being a Friend of the Lecture Series (not to mention an old friend of the lecturer), I got a freebie. That also meant an invitation to the memorial unveiling. So on a sunny afternoon in Oxford I ended up in the Master’s Garden eating cream teas and sipping bubbly in the company of the Great and Good. That included quite a few of the Tolkien family, because the memorial had been designed by the Professor’s nephew, Tim. Much to my delight, it also included Kim Stanley Robinson, whom I’d not seen in ages, and Geoff Ryman, so I was able to thank him for HIM.

Also present were Maria Dahvana Headley and little Grim, because they are part of the Tolkien Lecture Family now. Roz Kaveney, being a Pembroke alumnus herself, was there, and Neil had asked her to write a poem for the unveiling. A surprise to me was the presence of historian, Kate Lister. I hope I didn’t fangirl too badly. And if you have not heard the episode of her podcast that Neil guested on, you really should give it a listen. It is hilarious.

The memorial was duly unveiled. I’ve included a photo of it with this report. Inevitably reply guys on social media were jumping on my posts complaining that it is ugly. That’s art for you though. If you haven’t upset some idiots in the process, you are probably not doing it right. I can’t find a copy of Roz’s poem online, possibly because internet search is rubbish these days.

Neil’s speech was very Neil. If you have heard him talk before you’ll have some idea of what it was like, even though each speech is quite different. Juliet McKenna has a post about it here, in which she picks up on her mention of the idea that the only people opposed to escapism are jailers (via CS Lewis, credited to Tolkien).

Neil spent much of the speech talking about his childhood, and how he got into reading fantasy. This led to favorite authors from his childhood, one of whom was Nicholas Stuart Gray. For those of you who missed the social media storm this produced, Gray was a 20th Century trans man. He’d had a fairly successful career as an actress in the 1930s and 40s, but during the War he took the opportunity to disappear and reinvent himself as a man. Many fine books ensued.

That’s very early, as far as modern trans history is concerned. For comparison, Michael Dillon, who pioneered medical transition for trans guys, also transitioned during WW2. Gray would have had no idea that such things were possible when he began his journey, but he made it nonetheless.

The fact of Gray’s transition was known to very few people. Neil had to do quite a bit of digging to get to the truth, including ordering a copy of Gray’s death certificate. That’s a fascinating document because laws about gender transition were decades away when Gray died. It gives his sex as male, but cites one of the causes of death as cancer of the ovaries. There is a fascinating note on that: “NB Sex Change 1959”.

Dillon was outed in the Daily Express in May 1958. Gray presumably read that story, and may have learned from it that medical transition was a possibility. If he did, he clearly wasted no time in availing himself of what was possible.

These days Gray’s books are all out of print. This is a great shame, as they are much better than the books written by a certain well known transphobe. Hopefully they can be brought back into print, though as is often the case with deceased authors, there are legal issues to be resolved.

Oxford Town Hall, by the way, is a beautiful building. I hope we can go back there again sometime soon.

After that we all trooped back to Pembroke for dinner in Hall. I was lucky enough to end up sat next to Carolynne Larrington, and we had an interesting chat about Spear and mediaeval Welsh literature.

A recording of Neil’s speech will be made available on the Tolkien Lecture website in due course.

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