Cheryl Morgan's Fanzine
This is issue #6 of Salon Futura. This being the Valentine’s Day issue, Jonathan Clements has a fine Japanese love story for us, but there’s plenty of non-romantic material too. We have two more new small presses to welcome to the bookstore. Also the Queensland Flood Relief book is only on sale until February 15th, so if you don’t have a copy please check it out now.
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Cheryl Morgan ponders different barriers to suspension of disbelief.
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This month on The Salon we welcome three people who run their own science fiction and fantasy publishing businesses. To find out just what it takes to do this sort of thing, and what the various changes affected the publishing business will mean for a small press, listen to L. Timmel Duchamp (Aqueduct Press), Alisa Krasnostein (Twelfth Planet Press) and Sean Wallace (Prime Books).
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Cheryl Morgan talks to critic Gary K. Wolfe at the London home of fellow critic, John Clute. A certain amount of red wine is involved.
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Cheryl Morgan talks to editor, Ann VanderMeer, about Weird Tales and some of the projects she is working on with her husband, Jeff. Our apologies for the lack of video. As we are living in the future you can, of course, get free video phone calls to anywhere in the world, but the quality is not yet up to publishing standards. Ann is at home in Florida, Cheryl at home in England, the recording is voice only.
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I’m delighted to be able to report that two more small presses have decided to sell through the Wizard’s Tower bookstore.
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It is a cliché for a magazine editor to say that things are busy, because things are always busy when you are on a monthly schedule. Yet busy I am. Here’s a brief run-down of what is going on.
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Those of you who enjoyed Sam Jordison’s exploration of Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain and its relationship to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness might be interested in this review of the Conrad story by Larry Nolen.
Jonathan Strahan has posted the Table of Contents for the fourth volume of his critically acclaimed Eclipse anthology series. You can find the list of stories at his website.
NESFA Press has announced the publication of a fourth volume in its continuing series collecting the short fiction of Poul Anderson. It is named Admiralty after the lead story. The book has 508 pages and contains 23 stories. It is edited by Rick Katze, has an introduction by David G. Hartwell and a cover by John Picacio. For further details click here.
Over at the Interstitial Arts Foundation Delia Sherman and Helen Pilinovsky are launching what they describe as a “rolling online anthology of interstitial criticism on interstitial texts”. One essay of between 750 to 3500 words will be published each month. Payment will be “a $25 honorarium per essay for non-exclusive world anthology rights.” For full details including how to submit work, see here.
YES. Next question?
That was especially for you, Charlie Jane Anders.
Meanwhile, for everyone else, Damien G. Walter has made another assault on the Booker Prize over at The Guardian.
Jeff VanderMeer has announced the table of contents for the forthcoming The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. It promises to be even more weird and wonderful as the now legendary Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.
Sean Wallace, the owner of Prime Books and former fiction editor at Clarkesworld, will edit the forthcoming Mammoth Book of Steampunk. Submissions guidelines are available on Sean’s LiveJournal.
The popular podcast, StarShipSofa, will be running an online SF&F writers workshop in March. The tutors will be Michael Swanwick, James Patrick Kelly, Sheila Williams, Gregory Frost and David Mercurio Rivera. That’s a very impressive list. The cost is £30 up until Feb. 27th and £35 thereafter. Further details here, and sign-up here.
Editor Ann VanderMeer has announced that Weird Tales will now pay 5c/word for their fiction. The magazine has also revamped its website and adopted the famous Clarkesworld online submission management system. The full press release is available here.
Following our podcast discussion for issue #5 Maura McHugh ordered a copy of Ross Campbell’s Shadoweyes. She reviewed it on her blog. I ordered a copy as well, and I’m happy to confirm Maura’s opinion.
Author Mark Chabourn is planning a series of posts on writing historical fantasy. The first one is here. It looks like it could be an interesting series.
Colin Harvey will be editing a new anthology for the Irish company, Aeon Press. Transtories will be “a collection of original stories based on, developed from or including any word from the dictionary prefixed by ‘trans;’”. The submission period begins on March 1st and closes on March 31st. Full details at the Aeon website.
Today’s Guardian Book Blog features a post by Damien G. Walter in which he implores readers not to be put off by the gaudy, and sometimes frankly awful, covers used on speculative fiction books. Examples of fine writers he says can be found behind lurid covers include JG Ballard, Kim Newman and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. (It sounds like some smart person has got ARCs of The Fallen Blade to several Guardian Book Blog contributors.)
Jeff VanderMeer is one of those writers who loves to have a soundtrack to his writing. Today the music blog, Largehearted Boy, has a feature by Jeff in which he talks about the musical inspiration for his collection, The Third Bear.
The boss of PS Publishing is making a new foray into writing with the Forever Twilight trilogy of “apocalyptic science fiction novels”. Yes, that’s during the apocalypse, not post-it. Angry Robot books has signed him up. More details from their website.
This is issue #5 of Salon Futura. We have a lot of great content for you again. Please do check out the New In Store column where we have two great new small presses to welcome and a charity fund raiser for Queensland Flood Relief.
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Cheryl Morgan looks at some of the debut writers from last year.
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Cheryl Morgan makes the case for genre as a process rather than a category.
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This month on The Salon Cheryl Morgan and her guests discuss which 2010 graphic stories might be good candidates for the Hugo Award. With Cheryl in The Salon are writer Maura McHugh, retailer and blogger Joe Gordon, and podcaster David Monteith.
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Cheryl Morgan talks to Paul Cornell in the bar at BristolCon 2010 where Paul was one of the Guests of Honour.
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Cheryl Morgan talks to Judith Clute at her home in North London.
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We have an embarrassment of riches arriving in the store this month. I’d say that I don’t know where to start, except that this one is important.
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It has been a busy month. Yes, I know there were supposed to be holidays, but it has been all go around here.
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When he was researching his review of Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain, Sam Jordison discovered that Joseph Conrad had co-authored a science fiction novel with Ford Madox Ford. Sam was intrigued, and tracked down the book, The Inheritors. His review of it has just gone up at The Guardian.
Our sister site, SF Awards Watch, has just reported that Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker has won the prestigious Printz Award from the American Library Association. Further details here.
In the latest episode of the wonderful “Live with Gary K. Wolfe!” podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe talk about what they are looking for in writing about books. If you want to know the sort of thing that I’m looking for as regards submissions to Salon Futura, go and listen to them. They have nailed it.
Orbit UK has emailed us with a link to their 2011 catalogue. You can find it here (along with Little Brown’s other imprints). Highlights for me include Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s venture into vampire-ridden Venice, a new fantasy series from Daniel Abraham, and Deadline, the sequel to Mira Grant’s wonderful FEED. It is also good to see them picking up authors from the other side of the world such as Helen Lowe and Trent Jamieson. Orbit’s operation is fairly international these days, so there’s a good chance you’ll be seeing all of these books in North America as well.
Cheryl Morgan looks at fantasy written by women.
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This month in The Salon we discuss whether steampunk is necessarily all about empire. The guests are Karin Lowachee (from Canada via Guyana), Lavie Tidar (from Israel) and Jeff VanderMeer (co-editor of two steampunk anthologies and other steampunk-related books).
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Cheryl Morgan talks to Alastair Reynolds in a hotel room during BristolCon 2010. Al talks about his books, the future of space flight, the lack of women science fiction writers, and how events such as RaceFail have influenced his work.
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Cheryl Morgan talks to Juliet E. McKenna in a hotel room at BristolCon 2010. Juliet talks about her own novels, and about how to promote UK writers in a time of savage cutbacks in arts funding. Immediately after this interview Juliet and John Meaney did a wonderful panel on writing fight scenes, much of which involved doing violence to their brave volunteer victim, Joe Abercrombie.
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Tom Hunter, the current Clarke Award Administrator, has published an open letter on the Torque Control blog asking for feedback on the future of the award. You can add your comments here.
Lots has been happening on the bookstore front since last issue. We now have a proper bookstore which is gradually filling up with interesting material. Right now it is fairly limited, but I am busy talking to a number of small presses about offering their books. I talked quite a bit about my philosophy for the store on my blog, in particular the donations system. There’s a whole brave new world of publishing being opened up by the advent of ebooks. It will be fascinating to see what comes of it, but whatever happens we do need to find ways in which writers can make money from what they do.
So what do we have in the store?
Obviously there is Dark Spires. While the paper books are selling reasonably well in the UK, I didn’t expect to get orders from overseas. The postage adds significantly to the price. But you can buy ebook editions, and at current exchange rates it is under US$5. Of course you can buy the book anywhere in the world. There’s no DRM, and no region restrictions. I expect this to apply to everything we sell.
In addition you can buy ebook editions of Salon Futura and Clarkesworld. Yes, these are available for free on their respective web sites, but the ebook editions are very cheap, and if you buy them it helps Neil and I keep our magazines going. I expect to be adding other magazines soon.
New for December I’m delighted to announce that we have started to stock some ebooks published by Lethe Press. Lethe is an American-based small press specializing in books of interest to the LGBT community. Many of their books are science fiction and fantasy, and they also publish Icarus, “The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction.”
First up in our list of books from Lethe is Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories, a collection by Sandra McDonald. Many of you will remember the fabulous “periodic table” promotional video that McDonald created for the book, celebrating other female science fiction writers. You may also have read some of her recent short fiction, such as “Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots” at Strange Horizons, or “Beach Blanket Spaceship” at Clarkesworld. If you like those examples of McDonald’s style of humorous, inventive, LGBT-themed fiction them you will love Diana Comet as well.
A much older book is Meslissa Scott’s Shadow Man. This is one of those books that always comes up when people talk about gender-themed science fiction. Set at a time when humanity has developed five distinct genders, the novel explores themes of gender and sexual identity. The book won the 1996 Lambda Award in the Science Fiction and Fantasy category (tied with Nicola Griffith’s equally superb Slow River).
Back with short fiction, we have So Fey: Queer Fairy Fictions. This is an anthology with the tongue-in-cheek theme of fairy stories with LGBT themes. Contributors include Rick Bowes, Sarah Monette, Holly Black, Laurie J. Marks, Christopher Barzack, Delia Sherman, Melissa Scott and Eugie Foster. The book is edited by Lethe’s founder, Steve Berman.
Finally we have Second Thoughts: More Queer and Weird Stories, a collection of stories by Steve Berman himself. The title pretty much explains what it is all about, except for the “second” bit which refers to the fact that this is Steve’s second collection.