Was originally shooting for 6k words on this one, and I ought to have remembered that a two-strand narration with six main characters was a bad idea for length… Very fortunately, I checked the guidelines for the market I’m supposed to submit this to, and realised I’d misremembered and that it was going up to 10k (I doubt they’re going to be very happy about the 9k, but there’s clearly no way I can cut text out of this. If anything, it’s too short).

Don’t have a title yet: it’s called The Turtle’s Citadel after one of the main characters, but it’s a really bad title and I need to change it as soon as my magical title generator (aka the H) has read it and offered opinions. Also waiting for bunch of readers to read it and see how much is unclear. Lots of space scenes, which is unusual for me (I find space boring. Fortunately, a squad of homicidal attack drones generally makes things very interesting for everyone concerned). Also, lots of reflections on postcolonialism, imperialism and cultural clashes, as par for the course.

The derelict ward was in an isolated section of outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalising than its neighbouring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided–skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep spaces, passed around at low speeds by outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.

Only if anyone got closer would they see the hulking masses of ships: the glint of starlight on metal, the sharp, pristine beauty of their hulls, even though they all lay quiescent and crippled, forever unable to move–living corpses kept as a reminder of how far they had fallen; the outsiders’ brash statement of their military might, a reminder that their weapons held the means to fell any Mind-ships they chose to hound.

On the sensors of The Cinnabar Mansions, the ships all appeared small and diminished, like toy models or avatars–things Lan Nhen could have held in the palm of her hand and just as easily crushed. As the sensors’ line of sight moved–catching ship after ship in their field of view, wreck after wreck, indistinct masses of burnt and twisted metal, of ripped-out engines, of shattered life pods and crushed shuttles–Lan Nhen felt as if an icy fist were squeezing her heart into shards. To think of the Minds within–dead or crippled, forever unable to move…

And here’s the artwork by Jim Burns for my story “Ship’s Brother”, which will be in Interzone 241. Full table of contents here (I share a TOC with Gareth L Powell, yay!).

(click to zoom)

This is part of the Xuya continuity and deals with Vietnamese in space. Snippet (with diacritics added in):

You never liked your sister.

I know you tried your best, that you would stay awake at night thinking on filial piety and family duty, praying to your ancestors and the bodhisattva Quan Âm to find strength, but that it would always come back to that core of dark thoughts within you, that fundamental fright you carried with you like a yin shadow in your heart.

(the sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that I used “yin” instead of the more correct “âm”–Vietnamese yin and yang are âm and dương respectively. I would have used the correct words, but since this was a passing reference and was never ever explained, I thought there’d be more chance of people recognising it)

Some of you might remember that snippet from my WIP I posted a while back? It was a snippet of character work I’d planned to shelve, but in the face of the enthusiasm I turned it into a short story, “The Two Sisters in Exile”, which was about Mind-ships and countries at war, and inciting incidents (as Rochita was saying, it’s actually a very 9/11 story, though I hadn’t realised it at the time). It’s set in the Xuya continuity, in that developing bit of space that has two factions of Imperial Vietmam cohabit rather uneasily.

And, er, I sold said short story to Ian Whates for Solaris Rising 1.5, an ebook anthology that will be out this summer. Will you just look at that cover. (also, at the names. Wow. Rather nice company to say the least). Shiny planets! (I usually don’t do planets, so I seldom get that kind of cover 🙂 )

My thanks to everyone who took a look at it on OWW–Christine Lucas, Merrilee Faber, Larry Pinaire, Chris Behrsin, Justin Tyme, Darryl Knickrehm, and Oliver Buckram–and to the inimitable Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, whose critiques are always fabulous. Also, many thanks to the entire crew of VD10 for making this possible–I cleaned it up, returned the crits during the workshop, and submitted it shortly afterwards.

Yup, that’s right, you can buy Obsidian and Blood, the massive omnibus containing the series of Acatl’s adventures, plus all the short stories (they’re all in the ebook edition but not in the print one due to space constraints; if you buy the print edition, you’ll get a link to download the ebook supplement). Get your complete trilogy now!

More info, including buy links, here. I’ll be guest posting at various places over the Internet, though it’s going to be a very short blog tour…

Now if you excuse me, I have a synopsis to polish the heck out of…

“Immersion”, like many stories, grew out of conversations–specifically with Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and several other Asian bloggers/writers.
I wanted to write a story about cultural domination; about how the cultural norms from the dominant culture also infect the non-dominant ones; about how globalisation and its products don’t necessarily make the world smaller and communications between cultures easier, but tend to foster a harmful atmosphere in which one culture or subset of cultures (US/Europe, to be specific) takes over the existing ones and remakes everything in its image. That the takeover is subtle, not done by guns but rather through commerce and the diffusion of media, doesn’t make it less visible or excusable: not all wars are waged with weapons and violence; and the more subtle and insidious version of cultural colonisation that’s currently going on in the world is a phenomenon with obvious and damaging impact (and also includes Western tourism in developing countries, which is often intensely problematic and fraught with coloniser attitudes).

The story is also very obviously based on our trip in Vietnam and my rants at the guidebooks which distill a culture in an outsider, monolithic (and many times wildly inaccurate) version: the immersers from Galactic to Rong are guidebooks V2.0. I also imagined their counterpart from Rong to Galactic, something that would make it clear that unbalanced cultural exchanges could lead to severe cultural distortion, as well as rejection of one’s home culture–a phenomenon that’s not always harmful, but is taken to its extreme in Agnes. I also tried to tackle how damaging the imposition of languages and standards of beauty could become, though through lack of space I had to go for a fairly caricatural version of it.

(mild spoilers, plus somewhat long rambles)
Continue reading →

A few cool news: first, I’ve put together an ebook sampler for my fiction. The idea isn’t to do a short story collection (or even to make money!), but simply to allow people to discover my stuff by browsing through their Kindles and other reading devices. The thing is called Scattered Among Strange Worlds, and regroups my Clarkesworld Chinese/Vietnamese diaspora in space story “Scattered Across the River of Heaven” and my IGMS apocalyptic mermaid tale “Exodus Tides”. Due to exclusivities, etc., it will be available end of July (or possibly a bit later if I have to fight to upload a book on amazon…). Price should be the lowest I’m allowed to set, so 99 cents?

The cover and ebook design is by the ultra amazing Patrick Samphire, who recently launched his own ebook cover and ebook design business over at 50secondsnorth. He blogs about the design and the choices he had to make here, on his blog.

Isn’t it fabulous? Many thanks to Patrick, who’s got a very sharp eye for what works for books covers, and does absolutely freaking gorgeous stuff (and his rates are pretty darn affordable, too). You know you want an ebook this summer 😀

Also, my Chinese-y story “Under Heaven” will be available in Electric Velocipede issue 24, in which I share a TOC with Ken Liu (then again, who doesn’t share a TOC with the ever-prolific Ken? 🙂 ) and Ann Leckie. You can find the full list of stories here, and their publication date should be available soon.

Finally, I’ve sold my short story “Ship’s Brother”, set in the Xuya continuity, to Interzone for their next or after-next issue. Featuring a ship named after a fairytale character (Mị Nương, aka The Fisherman’s Song. If you’re read the fairytale, you’ll know why). Many thanks to Chris Kastensmidt and the ever-awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for reading it and offering very cogent suggestions!

Snippet:

You never liked your sister.

I know you tried your best; that you would stay awake at night thinking on filial piety and family duty; praying to your ancestors and the bodhisattva Quan Am to find strength; but that it would always come back to that core of dark thoughts within you, that fundamental fright you carried with you like a yin shadow in your heart.

I know, of course, where it started. I took you to the ship–because I had no choice, because Khi Phach was away on some merchant trip to the Twenty-Third Planet–because you were a quiet and well-behaved son, and the birth-master would have attendants to take care of you. You had just turned eight–had stayed up all night for Tet, and shaken your head at your uncles’ red envelopes, telling me you were no longer a child and didn’t need money for toys and sweets.

In other news, packing for Romania in a bit of a panic. More later, but a small reminder you can find me in Bucharest Friday 17:00, at the Calderon Cultural Center, 39, Jean-Louis Calderon Street, sector 2, for the Society of Romanian Science Fiction’s ProspectArt meeting. I’ll be interviewed by the tireless Cristian Tamas, and will read from “Immersion”, a full two weeks before it’s published in Clarkesworld!

Remember that snippet I posted earlier? I now have a 4000-word story to go with it–temporary title “The Two Sisters in Exile”. Put it up on OWW for crits, and waiting for the inevitable complaints about density. (to be fair, it’s very very dense, and I didn’t even get to cram enough food in it [1]).
*sigh*
I shall now go back to my novel and browbeat it into submission. So far, it hasn’t exactly been cooperative…

[1] All stories should have food. It improves the plot immeasurably. Also, it compensates for those times when I’m typing on my computer and can’t have more than a mug of tea and a raisin because it’s not dinnertime yet.

So, I haven’t posted a lot about this, but Daily SF is running The Numbers Quartet, the series of flashes Nancy Fulda, Stephen Gaskell, Benjamin Rosenbaum and I wrote–basing ourselves on physical and mathematical constants such as pi, infinity, the speed of light… The stories are going up one at a time until March 28th (they’re also available via email to subscribers a week early, and subscribing is free). You can check them out here.

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.

The bleariness is mostly a ref. to doing Vietnamese early in the morning, which always makes me feel inadequate as a language learner (but offset by the fact that I think I’m getting somewhere with the latest short story brainstorming, yay!).

However… this is also offset by the fact that I’ve sold two short stories–one sale I think I can’t announce yet, and the other… Sheila Williams let me know she was taking “Starsong” for Asimov’s. Doing the Snoopy dance here. Many thanks to the November 2010 Villa Diodati crew for reading the first version of this (Ruth Nestvold, John Olsen, Jeff Spock, Steve Gaskell, Ben Rosenbaum, Nancy Fulda, and Christian Walker); and for my last-minute awesomely fast beta-readers (Mark Hünken, Tricia Sullivan, Chris Kastensmidt, and Kate Elliott [1]). You guys all rock.

This is the Xuya story with the Flower Wars in space (and, in a bit of an Easter egg, the origin story of the Minds, my ship-bound AIs borne in human wombs–though it will take many, many decades of work before the incident described in “Starsong” leads to the creation of Minds).

In other news, I just discovered I’m a little under halfway through the Vietnamese lesson book. I certainly don’t feel halfway proficient, but I have faith…

Back to brainstorming a story. See you guys later…

[1] The market I had in mind originally for this (and which set the punitive deadline) turned out not to be a match for the story, so I emailed it to Sheila.

So, since everyone is doing it, the obligatory awards eligibility post…

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!