In the “shameless promotion for friends” department:

-Strata, by Brad Beaulieu and Stephen Gaskell, a hard sf novella set on the Sun. In addition to having awesome cover art, this is a collaboration by two awesome writers, and I have no doubt it rocks. You can get it via the various flavours of amazon: here’s a link to the .com version
-Yseult, by Ruth Nestvold. This is the novel that Ruth sold in translation in German, Dutch and Italian (at least), a glorious retelling of the Tristan and Yseult legend. With battle scenes, magic, and you know, sex scenes I read bits and pieces, and Ruth excels at making the past come alive, as well as giving life to a variety of complex and sympathetic characters. Check it out! It’s only on amazon (KDP exclusive).

-Elizabeth Bear, New Amsterdam, Seven for a Secret, and The White City. A series of linked short stories and a novella, all set in an alternate history where the English Crown still has the colonies, and where magic works. It’s very effective urban fantasy, both drawing on the stereotype of the vampire as the ultimate seducer (vampires have groupies who only live for the pleasure of providing the ecstatic gift of blood, and are drawn into various relationships with humans–that run the gamut from patrons to abusers, from friends to walking pints of blood), and it just hits so many small details in a fashion that had me nodding along: for instance, at one point, one of the (rather long-lived) main characters reflects that churches are becoming unfriendly places because religion has changed beyond all recognition, compared to what he remembers from his childhood, and this is SO true. And it has Bear’s usual pretty writing, which flows along effortlessly (even though I’m sure the actual process of couching it onto paper involved blood and sweat); and wonderful and deep characters that refuse to become established stereotypes, and feel very much like real human beings with their flaws and frailties, but also their wonderful capacity for quiet heroism. I’m very much looking forward to the last book, Ad Aeternum.

-Steam-Powered 2, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft (review copy). I’m probably not in the target audience for this, because I’m not particularly fond of romance in general, and a lot of steampunk leaves me cold (the “mad adventure and costume” side doesn’t appeal overmuch to me). And, indeed, the main problem I had with this anthology was that I could predict a lot of the endings: if a story only has two women on stage, and it’s in a book of lesbian steampunk, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what will happen… On balance, I thought that the best stories in the book were those that moved away from the stereotype of two women falling in love, and dealt with other aspects of the relationship: either further along in time, like Nisi Shawl’s “The Return of Cherie”, or by questioning its power dynamics and putting it into a colonial framework (such as Stephanie Lai’s “One Last Interruption Before We Begin”); or by eschewing the mad adventure steampunk altogether and focusing on much smaller-scale events (Alex Dally MacFarlane’s awesome “Selin that Has Grown in the Desert”, by far and above my favourite story in the book). I also enjoyed those stories with a very different setting and mindset: “In the Heart of Yellow Mountain” by Jaymee Goh is reminiscient of Chinese fairytales and adventures stories, and has a very unique vibe; “Not the Moon but the Stars” by Shveta Thakrar is set in a wonderfully recreated India that brims with lovely cultural details; and Zen Cho’s “The Terracotta Bride” takes Chinese Hell as its setting, deftly dealing with issues of power between the haves and have-nots (your status in Hell being, very appropriately, determined by how many children you had, and whether they’re still burning funeral offerings for you). Overall, even though I didn’t enjoy everything, the book as a whole is definitely worth reading. (and I suppose it says something about me that the stories I enjoyed most didn’t follow the brief of “independence, romance and adventure”, and tended to be written by people outside of the US, or by US POCs *sigh* I’ll go hide away now, promise).

Because, you know, I enjoyed those things when I critted them, and now they’re out in the wide world!
-T.L. Morganfield sidewise-nominated “Night Bird Soaring” is up at Escape Pod. I’ve loved this story since critiquing an early draft of it five or six years ago, and I’m definitely tickled pink that it’s had such a good career. And the ending is a killer (though T.L. might not agree with me on this, but hey, I’m entitled to my personal early reader opinion ).
-Rochita Loenen-Ruiz “Return to Paraiso” is going to be in the October issue of Realms of Fantasy. It’s a fantastic, magical story with Rochita’s wonderful and ethereal use of language. You can get a peek at the illustration for it here.
-And now, for something I didn’t crit: Lavie Tidhar’s Osama is available from PS publishing and for the Kindle (US, UK). From the blurb:

Osama tells the story of a private detective hired to locate the obscure writer of pulp novels featuring one Osama bin Laden: Vigilante. The detective’s quest takes him from Vientiane to Paris, London, New York and Kabul, across a subtly-changed world where nothing is quite as it seems – including himself.

I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve enjoyed the short stories, and Lavie’s interview about its release (in Interzone this month) brings up fascinating topics about terrorism and the myths it engenders, and how to use the pulp fiction frame to tackle hard truths. And the book has been getting rave reviews, too, so definitely worth checking out.

6600 words total. It’s mostly going very fast because I’m combining existing sections rather than writing them from scratch.
(also, yes, if I keep this up, I should exceed my target of 30k by a large margin–prov. total is in the high 40ies. However, I probably have tons of things to prune from the worldbuilding, which should help)

To tide you over: Gareth L. Powell has just released his SF novel The Recollection with Solaris:

(and if that cover doesn’t convince you to check out the book, try this handy summary over at the Solaris website)

The blurb is bittersweet, though, and reminds me that today is the day of Colin Harvey’s funeral–my thoughts go out to his family and friends. Still angry, and very sad at the hole he leaves behind him.

In which the World SF team strikes again:

A combination of genre professionals and fans from the international scene and the United States have gathered together to create the World SF Travel Fund. The fund has been set up to enable one international person involved in science fiction, fantasy or horror to travel to a major genre event.

The first recipient of the fund is genre blogger and activist Charles Tan, from the Philippines.

Charles is a tireless promoter of speculative fiction. Besides his own Bibliophile Stalker blog, he contributes to the Nebula Awards blog, the Shirley Jackson Award blog, SF Signal and The World SF Blog. He also edited two online anthologies of speculative fiction from the Philippines.

Charles is highly regarded in the SF scene both in the USA and internationally. The Fund’s intention is to facilitate Charles’ travel to World Fantasy Con 2011 in San Diego, California. Multiple award winning editor Ellen Datlow said: “Charles Tan has in a very short time, become a major force in science fiction and fantasy. Bringing Charles over to the United States for the World Fantasy Convention would be a boon the convention by adding a truly international voice to the mix and selfishly, it would allow many of Charles’s fans in the field to meet him personally.”

Living in the Philippines, where wages are far lower than in the West, Charles would be otherwise unable to ever attend a major convention. The Fund’s purpose is to make such a trip possible, for the benefit not only of the recipient but for creating and extending dialogue in the wider world of speculative fiction.

Author and editor Jeff VanderMeer said: “Charles Tan is tireless, talented, indefatigable, a great guy, and someone who has become indispensible to our sense of the genre community. He’s a wonderful choice for this initial effort.”

The Fund has set up a Peerbackers Project with the hope of raising $6000, enabling two years of running. The Board, tasked with selecting future candidates, is composed of Lauren Beukes, Aliette de Bodard, Ekaterina Sedia, Cheryl Morgan and Lavie Tidhar and reflects the truly international nature of the SF world today.

For inquiries and further information please contactworldsftravelfund@gmail.com.

The Peerbackers Project: http://peerbackers.com/projects/the-world-sf-travel-fund

If I can add a few words–Charles is a fantastic person, and more than a little insane. I never quite understood how he could hold a dayjob and do all the stuff he does for genre–but he does, and it’s amazing stuff too, from gathering the SF tidbits for SF Signal, to organising interviews for the Nebula Awards, and of course keeping the World SF blog up and running.
I definitely think it’s high time he was brought over from the Philippines, and also high time we had a travel fund like this. There are many things set up to enable fans to travel to conventions, and they’re fantastic initiatives, but so far there has been nothing that focuses on getting people from developing countries into the US or the UK: the price differential, as Lavie points out, is just ginormous for people like Charles–way too much to pay for so much as the entry fee for the con.

There you go. I hope you’ll check out the peerbackers page, and if you can afford to donate anything… (this is very much a case of every little bit helps)

And, as promised, here is J. Damask (Joyce Chng) on her process of writing Wolf at the Door–enjoy!

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Back in the first half of 2009, I was pregnant with my second child. I was also filled with an inexplicable energy to write. Novels, short stories – you mean it, I wrote them. Call it a weird side-effect from pregnancy: I was just incredibly productive.

I wanted to write an urban fantasy story. Yes, urban fantasy, not the kind I saw popping up everywhere, replete with kick-ass heroine, hunky hero and assorted kinds of were-animals. I wanted to write an urban fantasy set in Singapore, the land of my birth. The main character would be a mother with kids. She would not fit the mould of the stereotypical werewolf. Most of all, she would be Chinese.

So, I wrote. At first, the story grew into a novella, Full Moon, Dragon Gate. But you know about novellas: they are hard to sell. I ended up putting the novella on the back-burner. I delivered and two months later, decided to write a 50k novel for Nanowrimo. That’s right. 50k in a month. I had a newborn to look after. What was I thinking? People were going “You must be kidding me!”

Throughout the entire process, I was telling myself that I was crazy. Why would I want to write the novel within a month? But I did and Wolf At The Door was born.

As the story goes (no pun intended), I shopped around for a publisher. The rest, you, know, is history.

Perhaps it was/is the drive to see more urban fantasy (and heck, SFF) novels from Southeast Asia that pushed me on. There are novels set in the United States of America, Britain and even Australia. I want to see stories coming from Singapore and the rest of the Southeast Asian countries. I mean, just look at the mythologies – they are so perfect for urban fantasy, the old adapting/co-existing/interlacing with the new (urbanization). I want to see more urban fantasy – creatures of myths and legends living side by side or within the human population. I want to see more of the cultures.

[You see, I keep repeating "I want"...]

So, if you want more diversity in urban fantasy, be sure to enjoy Wolf At The Door.

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J Damask (aka Joyce Chng) lives in Singapore, loves gardening and is a cat herder. She has a writery blog at A Wolf’s Tale.

So, apparently, you can search the contents of Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction on Amazon.com, and, hum, in addition to publication of “The Shipmaker” in the volume itself, I have 4(!) Honorable Mentions: for “Father’s Last Ride” in The Immersion Book of Science Fiction, “Desaparecidos” in Realms of Fantasy, and my two Asimov’s stories, “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” and “The Wind-Blown Man”. Particularly happy for “The Wind-Blown Man”, which was a hassle to write because of the world-building (making up a new kind of science based on Daoist alchemy and not overly polluting the text with references to current science was a tricky balance to strike).

(and huge congrats to the friends on the HM list, but most particularly to T.L. Morganfield for “The Hearts of Men” in Realms of Fantasy, a story I’ve always believed would go far; and to Lavie Tidhar, who’s just racking up the HMs)

Meanwhile, a further 1000 words on the novella. Stopped because my cool ideas weren’t integrated well enough (ie, need to think a little more on how the science would work on a day-to-day basis without sounding too much like an engineer). Also, I fear people will tear out their hair with names like “Lê Thi Linh”, “Lê Thi Huu Phuoc”, etc. Yeah, Vietnamese without the diacritical marks is a bit of a hassle as well…

So, I finally got a chance to read J. Damask’s Wolf at the Door (published by Lyrical Press)–and really, really liked it. It’s a urban fantasy set in Singapore: Jan Xu is part of the lang, the Chinese werewolves: her pack is her family, and the thing around which her world revolves. She has married and settled down with her partner Ming, who isn’t a werewolf; and she has two small girls, whom she raises half like humans, half like wolves.

Then Marianne comes back. Marianne is Jan Xu’s sister, but there’s a catch: raised like all werewolves, Marianne failed to shape-shift when she hit puberty. Though considered a member of the family, Marianne has always chafed at what she saw as second-class membership of the pack, and left Singapore after quarrelling with Jan Xu. But now she’s back, boyfriend in tow–and she seems to have ideas of her own about where to take the pack…

This is original on several levels: the most obvious is the setting, which shows us not only Singapore seen through the view of an insider, with no exoticisation or over-description of familiar items and locations. It’s very casual about everyday life, but nevertheless effectively manages to convey not only Jan Xu’s life and her excursions to all ends of the city (including a hunting reserve in Malaysia), but also to effectively base its mythology on its setting, making the most of Singapore as a crossroads, teeming with immigrants who each bring their own folklore (I loved the bar which had vampires mingling with nagas). I also liked the way Damask ties her werewolves to Chinese folklore, rather than to European myths; it’s very nicely done.

The second thing is the emphasis on family. A lot of urban fantasy is focused on the single girl (who might have children of her own, but who is still secretly looking for The One); and while those are definitely strong stories, it was really nice to see a book which focused on, well, what happens after the wedding and the childbirths. Marianne’s returns has repercussions on Jan Xu’s family life, and her relationship with her husband and her two girls: some of my favorite scenes take place in the quiet times at the flat, when the emphasis is on how she and Ming can deal with the consequences of what happened, and how to best shield the girls from it all. Jan Xu also has strong ties to her extended family, which nicely dovetail into the pack mentality of werewolves.

It’s not perfect. There is a set of flashbacks to Jan Xu’s past as a teen vigilante (sort of The Famous Five, except with dragons and other supernatural creatures), which feel a bit out of place: I love the background and the fact that they place Jan Xu’s friends as strong individuals (and I would really love to see those expanded into a YA novel), but the way they’re scattered throughout the story feels a little haphazard, and I felt those sections could have greatly benefitted from tidying up. But, all in all, it was a very nice and interesting read, and definitely worth a look if you’re tired of urban fantasies set in the US.

J. Damask should swing by at some point for a guest post–look out for it soon!

To Stéphanie Nicot (organiser of the French con Imaginales among many other activities), and her companion Elise, for tying the knot yesterday at the town hall of Nancy!

(you can actually see them both here, via big French daily Le Figaro, which covered this because of the–somewhat crazy–legal situation: homosexual weddings are still not allowed in France, but since they didn’t allow Stéphanie to change gender on the records, I guess it sort of worked out. Sort of…
ETA: don’t look at the comments on the article if you don’t want to get depressed at the general state of human tolerance and intelligence…)

Following excellent posts by Nicola Griffith and Cheryl Morgan on Women’s invisibility (if you missed the twitter storm, this started off as a Guardian article asking people to name their favorite SF–which mentioned more than 500 books in the comments, out of which only 18 women…), it’s high time I play my part in redressing the balance…

Part of the problem, as Cheryl and Nicola both point out, is that best-of lists tend to be made by men, and that it’s been proved that while women will read men and women equally, men tend to read and remember men (and women tend not to volunteer for voting or for making such lists in the first place). So it’s a vicious circle in which men continue to predominate on awards lists, and to be enshrined in history while women mostly slip by the wayside.

Accordingly, I’m making my list of favorite novels written by women. Pretty much no criteria (I’m no good at Golden Age SF, since the only authors in that batch I read were Asimov and Zelazny; and I came very late to fantasy): only that I read and enjoyed the book. Here you go, my recs:

SF
Dust, Chill and Grail, Elizabeth Bear
Moxyland, Lauren Beukes
Miles Vorkosigan series, Lois McMaster Bujold
Golden Witchbreed, Mary Gentle
The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin
China Mountain Zhang, Maureen McHugh
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
The Snow Queen, Joan Vinge
Empire of Bones, Liz Williams

Fantasy
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley (as Kari Sperring points out, the history in this one is rubbish. Nevertheless, as a revisionist version of a well-known myth from a female POV, it’s definitely seminal)
The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
Crown of Stars series, Kate Elliott
Tamir trilogy by Lynn Flewelling
Ash, Mary Gentle
The Liveship Traders, Robin Hobb
Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones
Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner
Cyrion, Tanith Lee
The Book of Atrix Wolfe, Patricia McKillip

What about you? What are your favorite genre books written by women? Feel free to make your own list! (whether you’re a woman or not, BTW. We need more people celebrating women in the genre)

ETA: additions suggested in comments:

SF
Virtual Death, Shale Aaron
Happy Policeman and Brother Termite, Patricia Anthony
Catherine Asaro
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
All the Windwracked Stars and sequels, Elizabeth Bear
The Darkover series, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (and other books)
Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh (and other books)
The Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins
The Mount, Carol Emshwiller
Sarah Canery, Karen Joy Fowler
C.S. Freidman
Slow River, Nicola Griffith
God’s War, Kameron Hurley
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Lear’s Daughters duology, Marjorie Bradley Kellogg
Nancy Kress
A Different Light, Elizabeth Lynn
Dragonriders of Pern, The Talent series, Anne McCaffrey
The Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon
The Healer’s War, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Virtual Girl, Amy Thompson
Star of the Guardians, Margaret Weis
Uncharted Territory, Connie Willis
Looking for the Mahdi, N Lee Wood

Fantasy
Blood and Iron and sequels, Elizabeth Bear
The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susannah Clarke
Deverry series, Katherine Kerr
The Farseer trilogy, Robin Hobb
The Fox Woman, Kij Johnson
His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
The Earthsea Cycle, Ursula Le Guin
Lavinia, Ursula Le Guin
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
The Riddle-Master trilogy, Patricia McKillip
The Folding Knife, KJ Parker (assuming KJ Parker is indeed a woman)
The Orphan’s Tales, Catherynne Valente
Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner