A reminder that pre-orders are open for my limited-edition hardback Xuya novella “On a Red Station, Drifting”, and that you save £3 off the cover price of £10 if you preorder–see here for details, including a sampler scene from the book!
(and if you’re still hesitating, there’s a more detailed review over here by @requireshate)
So… remember the Vietnamese-space-station Xuya novella? Pre-orders are now open; and you’ll save £3 from the cover price of £10 if you preorder via the Immersion Press website!
ETA: the ebook is now available here: amazon.com|amazon.co.uk|amazon.fr|smashwords
Here’s a little snippet from the book to whet your appetite (more info here):
Linh arrived on Prosper Station blown by the winds of war, amidst a ship full of refugees who huddled together, speaking earfully of the invading armies: the war between the rebel lords and the Empire had escalated, and their war-kites had laid waste to entire planets.
Remember when I said selling two different stories to two different Year’s Best was a first for me? I spoke a little too soon…
Sean Wallace just let me know that Rich Horton wants to reprint “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” and “Heaven Under Earth” in his Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2013. That’s four freaking different stories to three different Year’s Best anthologies…
*faints*
If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll be off to do some massive squeeing….
Quite happy to announce that my Interzone story “Ship’s Brother” will be reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Thirtieth Annual Collection. This is, er, pretty awesome? First time I ever sell two reprints to two different Year’s Bests…
You can find the complete TOC here.
The amazing Fran Wilde has interviewed me for her series “Cooking the Books”–interviews focused on food and SF writers (you can understand why I was deliriously happy to be picked as an interview subject 🙂 ). I wax lyrical about the power of food, lemongrass chicken in “Immersion”, and my recipe process here.
So, in case you didn’t get the memo, RL & the dayjob are still eating away at my sanity spare time. In the meantime however, we had a rather busy weekend, but we did take time to eat a phở at a new place in the 13e, and that’s where I ate this:
Yup, durian bavarois (I was originally going for durian macaroon, but got sold this instead, which was way less sweet and made all of yumminess). The perfect end to a meal with a phở.
Funny observation of the day: the H and I noticed that there was a clear difference between Asian and non-Asian tables: every single Asian (mostly Vietnamese) table was having the phở, sometimes without even bothering to open the menu; every other table had picked the rest of the menu items. There’s a rational explanation, I suspect: most of the other dishes they offer are easy to make at home if you have a Vietnamese pantry (I would never order a bò bún in a restaurant, and I can make my own bò lúc lắc/shaking beef). Phở, on the other hand, is a little more… intense to prepare, which I guess explains the disparity between people familiar with the cuisine and people who are not.
Anyway, that’s all from the blog; hope I can try some recipes soon, but last week scooped my brains out and ate them with a little cream…
Got the recent Locus, and Rich Horton recommends “Heaven Under Earth”, and says this in his review:
Best of all is ‘‘Heaven Under Earth’’ by Aliette de Bodard. Liang Pao is the First Spouse of a man on a planet where, for some reason, women are rare. Liang is genetically male, but has been altered to be able to bear implanted children as have his fellow Spouses, but now he must welcome a surprise – an expensive female bride. His first concern is for his own position, but he soon understands that the woman is in a difficult position herself – an aging ex-prostitute who had no interest in this marriage. Again, the hints of the society in the background are very interesting, and the predicament and position of Liang Pao is involving and affecting.
Rather pleased 🙂
The weekend’s challenge: how to create a buffet for 25 guests in a day or less (I had intended to do some pre-shopping but ended up leaving work far too late on the Friday evening). Bonuses (or lack thereof): lack of the H during the morning (due to mysterious shopping activities aka getting my present), and a small Parisian kitchen.
I knew ahead of time that the choking point was going to be the oven: I had to cook 2×2 savory cakes and 60 chả giò, and I only had the one oven. On the day before the party (and rather late at that), however, I realised that I’d forgotten a very important item to be cooked in the oven: the dessert! There followed some slightly frantic twitter and FB queries for possible recipes. I got tons of good ideas, but a lot of them required advance preparation and/or lots of time and/or unfamiliar kitchen techniques; in the end, the H and I settled for waffles, which had the advantage of being a familiar recipe. (but I took lots of notes and fully intend to cook the suggestions–discovered lots of pastries I didn’t even know existed!)
I went to do some shopping in the morning, and came back with a full shopping cart; then I settled for the first of the savoury cakes (it started out as a chicken-and-tarragon cake, but I couldn’t find any tarragon, and ended up with chicken-ginger-mint cake. This is why you should never leave me in control of any recipe; I almost put soybean paste in the second cake but the H put his foot down). Then the oven basically worked overtime until 8pm or so (it turned out I’d drastically under-estimated the time it took for chả giò to cook–each batch of 15 rolls needed about 20 minutes near the heating element of the oven, which in turn meant quite a bit of attention from me…
I also had a lot of manual work to do (chopping carrots and putting spread on canapés), but a group of guests very kindly agreed to come ahead of time and help with that–we made such good time that we were basically ready ahead of the 6pm starting date.
The only surprise of the evening turned out to be our waffles: the H took the waffle recipe from the Larousse des Desserts , a venerable encyclopedia of French desserts which turned out to have quite a lot of embarrassing typos–specifically, when he popped the dough into the waffle-maker, it basically evaporated as it was cooking (you can imagine this didn’t really create satisfactory waffles). There followed about 1 hour of war councils between various guests to determine the best strategy to fix the dough; by the end, I think they’d tried adding everything to the dough, including but not limited to orange blossom water, corn starch, and 1.5kg of flour… In the end, we determined that the reason it wasn’t working out was the lack of a leavening agent in the dough (rather a grievous error for a recipe): basically, we’d been trying to make waffles with pancake dough… So they threw in baking soda, waited for a bit, and finally could start making decent making waffles.
I settled for making the chocolate sauce: turns out tablets of Nestlé’s full-bodied cooking chocolate works out marvels 🙂
In the end though it all worked out quite well, and (I think) the party was a success (as usual, mainly thanks to the guests for the company and the help). But I swear that’s the last time I trust a recipe from the Larousse…
Speaking of cover reveals… Here’s the cover for On a Red Station, Drifting, my novella forthcoming from Immersion Press. More information about the novella here and here. This is my “Dream of Red Mansions” in space with fish sauce and family feuds (oh, OK, and a cool AI and mem-implants and various shenanigans).
It should be released mid-December as a limited-edition hardback–more pre-ordering information when I have it!
Cover for The Other Half of the Sky
So, here’s the cover for The Other Half of the Sky, the anthology of feminist space opera story edited by Athena Andreadis and Kay Holt. It’s courtesy of Eleni Tsami (that link leads to Eleni’s blog, where you can see her discuss the evolution of the cover and show the full wraparound).
Isn’t it pretty? The anthology has my Xuya story “The Waiting Stars” as well as stories by Ken Liu, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Christine Lucas… (see the full TOC here as well as a mini-widget with excerpts).
Quite looking forward to this one!
