Er.
Wow.
Apparently “Immersion” and On a Red Station, Drifting are both finalists for the Locus Awards (best short story and best novella, respectively).
I’m on a freaking shortlist with Ursula Le Guin. *faints*

Congrats to all my fellow nominees, and best of luck to everyone!
(I won’t be at the Awards ceremony, sadly. End of June is way past the time when I’m allowed transatlantic flights, so I’ll be content with cheering everyone on).

In other Red Station news, I can confirm we’re on track for a release of the ebook at the end of May (maybe earlier if I can tackle it before I leave for the US, but not guaranteed). And I have seen the new cover sketches and they are awesome.

-“Two Sisters In Exile” will be reprinted in David G. Hartwell’s Year’s Best Science Fiction, out from Tor sometime this year. Haven’t seen a TOC yet, but I know the volume contains at least “The Waves” from Ken Liu–nice company to be in :p

-Also quite pleased to announce I sold my novelette “Memorials” to Asimov’s. This one took a lot of work whipping into shape, so many thanks to Ken Liu, Bo Balder, Joe Crow, Pam Wallace–and special ones to Tricia Sullivan, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Benjanun Sriduangkaew for keeping up my faith in the story.

Snippet:

Cam finds Pham Thi Thanh Ha in her house, as she expected. By now, she doesn’t question the aunts’ knowledge or how they came by it. She does what she’s told to, an obedient daughter beholden to her elders, never raising a fuss or complaining– the shining example of filial piety extolled in the tales her girlfriend Thuy so painstakingly reconstitutes in her spare hours.

Set in the postcolonial corner of Xuya (except no mindships this time around!). With my favourite secondary characters ever, the cabal of aunts who know what is good for you (even if you don’t!).

I tend not to stop when I’m writing a draft, unless it’s for something really vital (for instance, the precise headdress that someone is wearing is something I can always work out later; the layout of the rooms where the nobleman was murdered and that my characters are searching is rather more vital to the way the scene plays out, and requires me to have actually done the research/invention/work). Accordingly, my first (and subsequent) drafts are peppered with little notes to myself, that I generally smooth out in the next revision.

I stole a leaf from a friend’s book, who marks such places in his manuscripts with @; except I upgraded to square brackets because 1. there’s less risk of me accidentally using them in anything, and 2. Square brackets enable me to see the beginning and the end of my own annotations.

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Other Half of the Sky cover

Today is the release date for The Other Half of the Sky, Athena Andreadis’s and Kay Holt’s amazing anthology of space opera with female protagonists (with Elena Tsami’s stunning cover art). Contains my postcolonial Xuya continuity story “The Waiting Stars” (with mindships, and attack drones; and cousins making snarky comments at each other), as well as stories by Ken Liu, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Nisi Shawl, Vandana Singh and many other fine writers.

You can buy direct from Candlemark and Gleam here, either the physical copy or the ebook (and physical copies come with a DRM-free ebook), or on amazon. If not in the US, check the Book depository here.

And, if you still need extra motivation, check out the reviews, interview and excerpt website here.

Tentative title: “The Frost on Jade Buds”
Snippet:

On the comms-image, Chi looked much as Thuy remembered her: tall and thin and dour, almost skeletal, as if what had had happened to her in her youth still stifled her metabolism–and, in truth, perhaps it did. Neither Thuy nor any of the family–or, indeed, any inhabitant of the Scattered Pearls Belt–really knew the full extent of what happened to her, or how to reverse it.
“You look well, elder sister,” Chi said. The words would have suited the imperial court; would have been appropriate for an elder of Chi’s generation. There were other, more familiar ones, more suitable for the sister’s of one’s blood; and Chi could have used them. She could have pretended to care. But of course she no longer bothered.

With two mindsships–and orbitals–and horrific weapons!

And why, yes, I procrastinate by writing Xuya mindship stories (well, OK, not quite procrastination, it was a commission). Now to clean up the mess of the first draft…

For everyone who missed it yesterday on twitter, I can confirm there will be an ebook of On a Red Station, Drifting, for sale on amazon (and on other platforms if I work out the principles of the thing. Have only ever done Kindle for Scattered Among Strange Worlds).

The e-edition should have a different cover than the paper book, and Immersion Press will continue to sell that as a limited edition hardback (just as a reminder, there were only 200 copies of those printed, and they’re going fast, so if you want to grab one, head over to their website). It will be a self-published edition; release date will be May or beginning of June, depending on how much energy I have and how soon we can get the new cover done.

Watch this space for more news as I have them.

Illustration (click to zoom)

Isn’t it pretty?

Art courtesy of Richard Wagner (and many thanks to Andy Cox as always). “The Angel at the Heart of the Rain”, my sort-of-magical-realism piece about war and refugees, will be out in the May issue of Interzone. 

“The Weight of a Blessing” is one of those stories that took me a long time to write–by my standards, that is. I first had the idea for it around August or so, walking around in Brittany with the H; I wanted to do something about “refugees and virtual realities”.

(spoilers after the cut, please read the story first!)
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Just a note that my angry short story “The Weight of a Blessing” is now up at Clarkesworld. This was a really tough story to write, for much the same reasons as “Scattered Along the River of Heaven”, though this one took months to get right…

Have a look and tell me what you think?

And because good news obviously don’t come alone… Please to announce that I’ve sold my Xuya story “The Weight of a Blessing” to Clarkesworld. I started this while on the Rainy Writers’ Workshop in Brittany, and had a long… reflexion period to basically come to the conclusion I needed to take a baseball bat to my existing scenes and change the existing structure to better reflect the plot arc. This is part of my “Vietnamese in space” series with the Rong people (the same as in “Immersion”). It’s also, er, a somewhat angry story about colonialism, cultural legacies and virtual realities. Should be in the March issue of Clarkesworld.

Many thanks to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Tricia Sullivan, and the WIB writers’ groups (Dario Ciriello, Traci Morganfield, Juliette Wade, Keyan Bowes, Genevieve Williams) for their sharp eyes and wonderful advice.

Snippet:

On her third visit to Sarah—on the last occasion that she sees her daughter, even if it is only in V-space—Minh Ha says nothing. There are no words left, no message of comfort that she could give her.

Instead, she takes Sarah’s hand, holds it tight until the last of the warmth has leached from her body into her daughter’s—and braces herself for the future.

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Even in the visitors’ V-space, Sarah looked awful—thin and wasted and so ethereal that Minh Ha wanted to take her daughter home and ply her with rich dish after rich dish to bring some fat back on her bones. But, of course, it was too late for that—had been too late ever since the much publicised arrest and the even more publicised trial, all the grandstanding that had brought a taste of bile in Minh Ha’s throat.