You can download it here (I can’t see every amazon country, but it looks like it’s free in France, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this promotion was valid in every amazon country).

To tide you over into the weekend, have an online story: “The Heartless Light of Stars” over at Daily Science Fiction, aka the Sài Gòn story, and last of my contribution to the Numbers Quartet (but there’ll still be Nebula Award nominee Nancy Fulda’s awesome “Godshift” to round off the sequence).

Meanwhile, I’ll be off to brainstorm more Jade in Chains, which has morphed into Thick Waters considering the way the story is developping (yeah, the whole “blood is thicker than water” thing, and a few other clever allusions in there. I’m going to need to research the history of the Seine a bit). It’s occurred to me, reading stuff over the week (two of Kameron Hurley’s awesome posts on Gender Equality, in addition to her novel God’s War, which messes with your head in all the right way, and one from Requires Only That You Hate on female strength in popular UF series), that one of the reasons I’m having trouble with this book is that I’m trying to fit in a typical UF narrative with, er, someone that’s not best suited to it? My MC’s main reaction to anything is unlikely to be ass-kicking, and she’s not very much the lonely vigilante type either. It occurs to me I need a new plot, or a new MC. Or both…

My first two pieces are up, respectively set in Hà Nội (the exponential “e”) and Huế (Boltzmann’s constant “k”). The last story, “The Heartless Light of Stars”, which is based on the speed of light “c” and set in Sài Gòn, will be available March 14th to DSF subscribers (and will be up on March 21st on the DSF website).
-“Worlds like a Hundred Thousand Pearls”
-“The Princess of the Perfume River”

And you will also be able to find my short story “A Dance of Life and Dust” in Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke, aka crazy second-person present tense written in the point of view of an AI in a futuristic London. Here‘s the complete TOC, and that of the supplementary chapbook, Fire–it all includes stories by Lavie Tidhar, Kaaron Warren, Adam Roberts, and Harry Markov. This is the one I workshopped on OWW in a bit of a hurry: many thanks to Oliver Buckram, Brent Smith, Larry Pinaire, Hugo Xiong, and Christine Lucas for their input!

Snippet:

At first, you make it easy for yourself. You possess a member of a clade on the outskirts, away from the dark, looming presence of the London Mind. You barely have to stretch yourself: the clade’s small village is halfway to your boundaries, and your ride–a woman named nDevan323–shares genetic material with the last Receptive you’ve colonised. As you slip into her bloodstreams, assimilating nanite after nanite, you taste familiar code, with the slightly acrid aftertaste of decay – the never-ending fight of the immune system against cancerous, decaying cells, the hundred infections dormant in the body, awaiting the smallest of nudges to unfold in dark, grim coronas within muscles and flesh and bone.

I only published three original pieces of short fiction this year, and of these the one that has the most visibility is this one (it got noticed in Rich Horton’s year-end summary of Asimov’s, among other things):

-”Shipbirth”, published in the February 2011 issue of Asimov’s, best described as “Aztecs in space”. Eligible in the short story category. If you’re interested, I’ve put it online here (it’s in EPUB and MOBI format as well, for ereaders).

On a not-so-selfish note, meanwhile, here’s the stuff I read this year that was awesome:
Short stories:
-Nancy Fulda, “Movement” (Asimov’s March issue). OK, I’m biased. I read an early draft of this and loved it. But Lois Tilton and Jason Sanford also think it’s a great story, so I’m not the only one. It’s in the point of view of a child with temporal autism and a unique outlook on life–but what happens when her parents want to cure her of her “disease”?
-Yoon Ha Lee, “Ghostweight” (Clarkesworld, January 2011). I’m a big Yoon Ha Lee fan, and this story is awesome. It’s about a woman (and an entire people) who carry the souls of the dead, and how far she’s willing to go to get revenge against the empire that destroyed her home. It’s also about origami, and war-kites, and change. Wonderful from beginning to end.
-Ferrett Steimetz, “Run, Bacri Says” (Asimov’s October 2011). The premise is goofy (what if you could save your life like in videogames, and then rewind to the save point); the story is anything but, taking the reader along with it, and raising hard questions about the worth of actions. Good, in a very disturbing kind of way. And also recommended by Lois Tilton.
-Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, “Return to Paraiso” (Realms of Fantasy, October 2011). A wonderful piece, set in a fantastical version of the Philippines, with a rebel returning to her home in a cage, and the effect she has on the community. Chockful of detail, with a strong voice reminiscent of the best magical realists. Track it online and read it, you won’t regret it. Plus, it has an awesome illustration.

Novella:
-”The Man Who Ended History: a Documentary”, Ken Liu (available online here at Ken’s website, originally published in Panverse Three). Ken had a lot of very good stories this year, but this one is my favourite (narrow tie between this and “Paper Menagerie in F&SF, though). It deals with a novel method of observing history–about what this means for memory, for the victims of atrocities and their descendants, and for history as a discipline. It’s a harrowing look at a dark episode in the history of Asia, too, and will definitely make you think.

Novel:
-Zoo City, Lauren Beukes. It won the Clarke Award, and deservedly so–a rich thriller set in a world where criminals acquire an animal familiar who gives them supernatural power, the novel follows Zinzi December through Johannesburg and the titular slum–and her attempts to make sense of the mysterious disappearance of a singer. Bursting at the seams with wonderful world-building and a sharp eye for details and voice, this should make final ballots if there’s any justice.

Campbell:
-Zen Cho (qian on LJ) is eligible for the Campbell! You should totally read her Malaysian-vampire novelette, “The House of Aunts” in Giganotosaurus, and her short story (?) about lion dancers and exorcisms, “起狮，行礼 (Rising Lion—The Lion Bows)” in Strange Horizons.

Other than that… I haven’t been reading much short fiction or recent novels lately. What’s out there that’s award-worthy? I still have ten days (for the BSFA), and a couple of months (for the Hugos and Nebulas) to catch up on stuff… Any recs much appreciated (feel free to plug yourself, too). Thanks in advance!

ETA: Ken’s novella is actually available on his website (thanks to Dario Ciriello for the link). Go check it out!

The whole Qiu Jin angle tied in with some thinking I’ve been having about revolutions and wars of liberation; and about messy transfers of power. Mainly, that revolutions always have a losing side, and that they create exiles–the Russian émigrés to France and Britain in the beginning of the 20th Century, the Iranian diaspora from 1979, who got hounded out of the country for being loyal to the Shah; the loyalists to Chiang Kai-shek, who had to forcibly relocate to Taiwan… And that revolutions might indeed be liberating for a country as a whole, but that beneath you’ll find power struggles, and that one social strata or one region will often come to dominate everyone else. Finally, the fact that social dominance often translates into language power-plays: for instance, the “standard” dialect of Vietnam is now Northern Vietnamese (because the Communist Party rules from the North); the “standard” language of France was imposed over all local dialects aka patois in the 19th Century (see here for an account of how non-French dialects gradually lost the struggle). I’m not saying it’s necessarily and completely a bad thing to have one dialect become dominant: if we had kept all the patois in French, we still wouldn’t be able to understand one another and wouldn’t have a sense of national identity; but there is still a tremendous loss in languages that can happen when a country unifies itself and becomes a whole.

Somehow, all of this merged together into a story of colonial empires and uprisings and poetry. Yup. Go figure.

I wanted one of the strands of the story to be poems: the idea was that Anshi’s life would be seen through her writings; and what better writings for a scholar than poems? Most scholars in Vietnam or China composed poetry; and the ability to do so was widely praised; in a quasi-Asian future, it made sense that poetry would still be very important. Qiu Jin’s poems provided much of the verse that I put in the story: see the first three poems of this post, and you’ll notice many familiarities… Another poem I used for inspiration was Bei Dao’s “The Answer”, which you can read here, probably his most famous one, as it was written during the 1976 Tiananmen demonstrations, and was taken up as an unofficial anthem in the 1989 ones.

For the very last poem, though, I wanted something a little mellower, about separation–it’s an easy theme to find in classical Chinese poetry (much of which was written between friends who had known each other in the capital and been posted to opposite ends of the country), so I turned to the Tang poets. Not remembering my sources quite so well; but I went for an amalgam of poetry about loss and nostalgia, which also–quite naturally–gave me my title. For once, I didn’t have to struggle to find one

Or, if audio fiction is more to your liking, you can listen to the podcast by the awesome Kate Baker.

This is the pseudo-Asian SF story with bots, a dying colonial empire, and a prison orbiting a black hole–aka the one where I had to improvise four pseudo-Chinese poems before I could actually write any of the story’s scenes. It was, well, not fun to write, but very instructive. And scary. This is a very scary story, because it’s ambitious, and touches on matters I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I feel very much exposed publishing it.

Would love to know what you thought of it (either at Clarkesworld or here)–this is possibly the best thing I’ve written yet, and I’m curious (OK, and scared, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?) to see people’s reaction to it.

I’ll post author notes and thoughts on writing processes tomorrow, so do stay tuned

After a lot of fighting the thing with scissors, I opened it, and behold:

I have my contrib copies of Master of the House of Darts!

To celebrate, I’m giving away ten copies of the book. 5 are up at Goodreads (and I’ll note the giveaway is available worldwide). Another 5 are up for grabs here: the difference with the Goodreads ones is that I’m trading those for a review of the book posted on your blog or on amazon (I have a slight pref. for amazon because the book hasn’t been getting a lot of signal boost, but do post wherever you want on the Internet, and whatever you feel about the book–more than a few sentences, of course–and you’re obviously free to say if you didn’t like it). First come, first served. I’ll sign and personalise them if you so require.

Memo: you don’t have to have read the previous books in the trilogy to make sense of this one; it’s a standalone like an episode of a crime series, though obviously character arcs get wrapped (last book of the trilogy, yadda yadda). Post here or in the LJ mirror if you want to give a copy a good home.

ETA: wow, thanks everyone! All copies offered through aliettedebodard.com are gone now, but you can still get the ones from goodreads by entering the giveaway, as indicated above (you have until January 8th).

Back in July, the awesome Stephen Gaskell got Nancy Fulda, Benjamin Rosenbaum and me together, and convinced out to collaborate on The Numbers Quartet. The idea was to use a similar format as The Alphabet Quartet published in Daily Science Fiction, but using numbers instead of letters as prompts: we have stories based on pi, the golden ratio, the speed of light… We wrote twelve of them all in all; and we sold the resulting compendium to Daily Science Fiction, where the pieces will appear, starting in January (one piece every week, 12 in all).

Mine form a loose trilogy of pieces set in Việt Nam’s three great cities (Hà Nội, Huế, Sài Gòn, from North to South, and inspired respectively by Euler’s number e, Boltzmann’s constant k, and the speed of light c). I wrote them all in August, back when we were travelling over the US and having fun at Worldcon; thank God they were flashes… Mostly near-future SF (with a softer edge for one of them). They should be published starting from February: the ordering of stories mean I’m not in the first four pieces, but you can check out Nancy’s, Steve’s and Ben’s pieces starting January 4th.

Click here for the podcast. Thanks to Sharon Ring, Kate Sherrod and the rest of the Dark Fiction Magazine team!

-And you can also get The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction, which includes “The Shipmaker” (and, uh, has me in great company) here, or via amazon. This includes the awesome “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain”, which was among my favourite stories last year.

-Not audio fiction, but if you happen to speak Hungarian, here is “A Jaguár Háza, árnyékban”, the translation of “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” in Hungarian. Many thanks to Csilla Kleinheincz!