My SF dystopia “Father’s Flesh, Mother’s Blood” will be appearing in Jason Sizemore’s anthology Dark Futures. Many thanks to Jason for the invite and eventual acceptance, to Marshall Payne for helping me settle on a title, and to everyone who took a look at it on OWW: Colum Paget, Ilan Lerman, Mark Hunken, and Alter Reiss (special thanks to Alter for helping me see my original ending was rubbish). EDIT: and to Justin Pilon for the awesome crit, as usual.
It’s Chinese alt-history once again (I’m in this phase), the dark counterpart to my gender-change story Heaven Under Earth (which I love but haven’t managed to sell yet), featuring possibly one of my more unpleasant, bigoted set of characters. Also, changes of identity and invasive surgery. The usual unsettling stuff

You can check out the table of contents here, which includes Codexians Alethea Kontis and Geoffrey Girard as well as Paul Jessup and Ekaterina Sedia.

Part II of Nicholas Seeley’s conversations with the Apex Book of World SF contributors, dealing with local markets, national preoccupations and the universality of SF. Fascinating stuff.

Realms of Fantasy launches their new website–and their electronic edition. To celebrate, you can download the February 2010 issue for free (and read my short story “Mélanie” as well as Ann Leckie‘s awesome “The Unknown God”, a cool tribal-ish fantasy about gods and their powers, which reminded me of Greg Keye’s The Waterborn and Blackgod).

Angry Robot has gorgeous covers for Kaaron Warren‘s Walking the Tree, Colin Harvey‘s Damage Time and Andy Remic‘s Soul Stealers. I especially love the cover for Kaaron’s novel.

They’re also holding the 12 days of Christmas over at the website, with authors contributing a different blog post every day. So far we’ve had Chris Roberson and Colin Harvey–stay tuned for more goodies.

And Stephanie Burgis is holding an ARC giveaway contest for her novel A Most Improper Magick, a Regency YA novel about a girl dressing up as a boy to save her family from impending ruin. Oh, and it’s got highwaymen, too.

So… Took Friday off, and dragged the BF to London, in order to see the Aztec exhibition at the British Museum.

Friday was the obligatory trip down memory lane, specifically of South Kensington and our old house–which felt very weird, especially when walking in front of the French lycée. It was followed by a wonderful Indian dinner with Seb Cevey and Jane in Brick Lane. Tried a random Bengalese dish with mango, which turned out to be wonderfully sweet (and not really spicy).

Saturday morning was Forbidden Planet, aka the bookshop of doom. I had almost succeeded in emerging with only one book (an omnibus edition of Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos books), when the BF suggested innocently, “Are you sure this is all you want?” Whereupon I stupidly turned around to stare at the “New Releases” rack, nabbed a signed copy of Elizabeth Bear‘s By the Mountain Bound, caught a glimpse of Daryl Gregory‘s new The Devil’s Alphabet, which made me decide to buy his Pandemonium…
At least I only got three books. *whimper* (I also got the chance to see some of Angry Robot‘s most recent releases on the shelves, eye-catchingly placed).

In the afternoon, we went to meet up with VDer Stephen Gaskell and Elle for a look at the new “We Are Astronomers” show at the Greenwich Royal Observatory. The show itself didn’t feature ground-breaking science, but the presentation was awesome, with very cool illustrations and pseudo-3D effects that look pretty good when spread over the dome of a planetarium. Much, much fun. Unfortunately, we couldn’t have dinner with Steve, but it was a great afternoon all the same.

And finally, Sunday, aka the day for which we’d booked the exhibition tickets.

All I can say is “wow”. They had really gathered a lot of cool pieces. A particularly geeky moment included my bending over a glass case peering at a codex and going, “This can’t possibly be the real Codex Mendoza“. (it was). They had the Codex Duran too, the Codex Borbonicus, the Great Temple dedication stone (yes, I realise I’m gushing and that you probably don’t know what they are. It’s like having most of the major artefacts in a very small room. With only a handful of people so you can stare all you like). And I actually got to see a sculpture of an ahuizotl (a creepy water-creature that plays a big part in both my novels) as well as artefacts linked with Tizoc, an Aztec emperor who also features in the novels.

The items themselves were pretty nicely presented with plenty of context, even if, on multi-object displays, it wasn’t always obvious to see which tag corresponded to what. And while I loved the scaled model of the Tenochtitlan sacred precinct (which had me pointing, “Oh, look, Acatl’s temple is here, and this major location in the book is here”…), I could have done without the dramatic trails of blood on the temple staircases, especially since most of the temples didn’t actually have the sacrifice stone. It felt pretty cheap. But overall, it was an awesome exhibition, and I’m glad we got tickets and saw it before it finishes.

And then we hit the exit and the souvenir shop, and it was Forbidden Planet all over again.

In addition to lots of Aztec-themed souvenirs (the mug with the “Five Movement” glyph really had me hesitating), it also had books. Whole bookshelves of them. The BF was very understanding and let me browse for half an hour, writing down the names of authors and books that looked interesting. In the end, I stuck to three books again: the catalogue of the exhibition, which like all British Museum catalogues is amazingly detailed with lovely pictures and plenty of extra information (and a handy index), Karl Taube’s and Mary Miller’s The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, the closest to a dictionary of symbols I could find (with illustrations), and Michael E. Smith’s The Aztecs, which has interesting considerations on crafts and agriculture as well as daily life.

On the minus side, I got to drag the aforementioned souvenirs through the rest of the afternoon–which meant a Chinese noodle restaurant and part of the rest of the British Museum (the Enlightenment gallery, which chronicles the history of science in the 18th and 19th century, and an exhibition on Japanese culture throughout history). But it was well worth it.

And since I never got to see the Chinese ceramics, I’ve made a mental note to come back to the British Museum next year :=)

(I have some genre-related stuff to catch up to as well, but that will have to wait until I have defeated the Giant Pile of Laundry To Be Ironed)