Pretty pretty cover (link here if you’re reading the LJ/DW mirrors).

Upcoming from Fata Libelli, end of the year. The artist, Omar Moreno, is also working on a cover for the Xuya collection, “El Ciclo de Xuya”.

PS: I’m not *quite* back online full time. The household has caught the crud, and we have a few RL problems (scheduling issues with the snakelet, our childminder and the H. Nothing serious!) which means this blog will get toned down even more than usual while we sort them out. Posts this week thanks to WordPress automatic scheduler ^^

My colonial Indochina story “The Moon over Red Trees” is up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies: you can read it here. This is something of a departure for me: I haven’t done historical fantasy in a while, especially not in that time period. Would be very happy to hear what you think.

I’ve updated the story page of “The Moon Over Red Trees” with copious author notes: go here, though they’re spoiler-filled and better read after the story.

There was a sound, on the edge of sleep: Suu Nuoc wasn’t sure if it was a bell and a drum calling for enlightenment; or the tactics-master sounding the call to arms; in that breathless instant–hanging like a bead of blood from a sword’s blade–that marked the boundary between the stylised life of the court and the confused, lawless fury of the battlefield.

Aka, “Aliette writes a really ambitious novella that might unexpectedly turn into a novel” (I really hope not. Over 40k but below 70k is really a bad length for fiction). It’s a loose sort of sequel to On a Red Station, Drifting, with some of the same characters making guest appearances (basically set in the Imperial Court eighty years after the ending of the novella).

Since we’re travelling light (hahaha), I’ve left my research books at home, but I thought I’d recommend:

–Vietnam History: Stories retold for a new generation, Hien Vo, Chat Dang. Ok, here’s the deal. You emphatically will not get a history from this book–the authors aren’t historians, and it’s not a scholarly dissection of various motives and sources. However, what you will get is the kind of stories my grandma tells me, the “folklore”, or history as it’s perceived by the people who aren’t formally trained. It’s biased, of course; I wouldn’t necessarily agree with everything (particularly in the colonial era); but it’s a nice springboard for learning more about the major figures of folklore. As a bonus, it has a freak amount of the Vietnamese equivalents to Chinese deities and Chinese historical figures, which saves me the trouble of going through Wikipedia armed with a meagre command of the language…
–1587, a year of no particular significance: the Ming Dynasty in Decline, Ray Huang: I really like this book for its portrayal of court life in the tail end of the Ming dynasty. Really handy for those court intrigue bits ^^
–Monarchy and Colonialism in Vietnam: 1875-1925, The Anh Nguyen: I’m still halfway through it. It’s really hard to stomach, for obvious reasons (the sheer arrogance of the colonialists and the total lack of comprehension of the Nguyễn court of what they’re really up against, for starters; also, the slow encroachment of loss of sovereignty even as the colonial empire starts tightening up is heartbreaking). It turns out to not really pertain to the novella, so I’ll be going through it at a more restrained pace…

Strange Horizons very kindly asked me to curate a reprint for their June issue. I picked Elisabeth Vonarburg’s “Chambered Nautilus” (translated from the French by Jane Brierley). I really like Vonarburg’s introspective, dreamy science fiction, and I think it’s a shame that so little of it got translated into English (you can pick up The Maerlande Chronicles from amazon–I prefer her Tyranaël series, but I think this stopped being translated after two volumes?). More info here at her English website.
Being an editor, even if it’s for a brief, one-story stint, means I read a lot of stories and didn’t have nearly enough space for all the stuff that I loved. Can I recommend you check out the following anthologies for great fiction? The Apex Book of World SF (volume 1, volume 2; and volume 3 which has recently been released), Afrofuturism, Mothership, AfroSF, and, if you have a copy lying around, Bloodchildren, which was a limited-time anthology by the Octavia Butler scholars and is sadly no longer available)? Also, anything by Yukimi Ogawa (she’s got a great story in this issue of Strange Horizons,  “Rib”, a mordant tale of a skeleton woman and the child who befriends her), Zen Cho (her collection, Spirits Abroad, just got released, and that link explains how to get a copy from her), Benjanun Sriduangkaew (who is up for the Campbell Award this year, and whose story “Autodidact” ought to be on awards list next year if there’s any justice), and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (check out “Of Alternate Adventure and Memory” up at Clarkesworld, as well as her newest “Movements” column in this issue of Strange Horizons, which focuses on languages, hegemonies and translations).

That’s all from me for the moment–please do leave feedback on Strange Horizon’s website on the story if you’re so inclined.

Quite pleased to announce that my short story “Immersion” will be reprinted in Alex Dally MarFarlane’s Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women. Will you just look at that cover and at that TOC? Very honoured to be part of this.

TOC:
“Girl Hours” by Sofia Samatar
“Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang” by Kristin Mandigma
“Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra” by Vandana Singh
“The Queen of Erewhon” by Lucy Sussex
“Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine’s Day” by Tori Truslow
“Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor
“The Science of Herself” by Karen Joy Fowler
“The Other Graces” by Alice Sola Kim
“Boojum” by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
“The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul” by Natalia Theodoridou
“Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Tan-Tan and Dry Bone” by Nalo Hopkinson
“The Four Generations of Chang E” by Zen Cho
“Stay Thy Flight” by Élisabeth Vonarburg
“Astrophilia” by Carrie Vaughn
“Invisible Planets” by Hao Jingfang
“On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse” by Nicole Kornher-Stace
“Valentines” by Shira Lipkin
“Dancing in the Shadow of the Once” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
“Ej-Es” by Nancy Kress
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu
“The Death of Sugar Daddy” by Toiya Kristen Finley
“Enyo-Enyo” by Kameron Hurley
“Semiramis” by Genevieve Valentine
“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard
“Down the Wall” by Greer Gilman
“Sing” by Karin Tidbeck
“Good Boy” by Nisi Shawl
“The Second Card of the Major Arcana” by Thoraiya Dyer
“A Short Encyclopedia of Lunar Seas” by Ekaterina Sedia
“Vector” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
“Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities” by Angélica Gorodischer
“The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” by Catherynne M. Valente

Belatedly announcing that I sold my short story “The Moon over Red Trees” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies (yeah, this is a BCS kind of year. Not that I’m complaning. It’s a great market, and, as evidenced by publication of Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Seth Dickinson and Yoon Ha Lee  , Scott H. Andrews has got awesome taste).

It’s a bit of a change for me, as this is a historical fantasy set in colonial Indochina in the beginning of the 20th Century.

Snippet here.

I will now go back to my novel writing being the mother of the snakelet.

Keeping this brief…

In 2013, I published a handful of stories (see here for a complete list), and managed to write a couple more. I worked on my novel (but see below why the progress on that got a little interrupted…); attended a couple cons (Eastercon, Nebula Awards and Rencontres de l’Imaginaire).

I won a Nebula Award (for “Immersion”), a Locus Award and was twice finalist for the Hugo, finalist for the Sturgeon and finalist for the Sturgeon Memorial Award.
I got my novelette, “The Waiting Stars”, into Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best.

Also made my first foray into self-publishing with the release of the e-edition of On a Red Station, Drifting. The response to it has been overwhelming; in general, this has been a year to be greatly thankful for–my gratitude goes to everyone who supported me, whether by reading my stuff, promoting my stuff, listening to my (numerous) twitter rants and/or giving me pregnancy/parenthood/writing/misc. advice. Much much appreciated; I’m humbled to have such generous people around me.

And, of course, the major production of the year was the successful (and mostly eventless, though those things are always more eventful than you’d like!) delivery of the snakelet. The side-effects included selling the old place, buying the new place and moving into it–still an ongoing project. My current level of parenthood is “apprentice”, I reckon…

2014 should see publication of a few stories; hopefully work on that %%% novel (I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything longer than a few thousand words lately–we didn’t get the baby model that had long, quiet naps!); and attendance at Worldcon and possibly Nine Worlds (we should be in London August 8th-August 18th).

Hope everyone has a great end of year and a very happy 2014, and see you on the other side!

Hum, so, that story about the phoenix?

I’ve sold it to Subterranean Online for a future issue. Many thanks to Yanni Kuznia for the invitation, and to Gareth L Powell and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for the feedback (extra thanks to Rochita for putting up with my total absence of a brain). It’s set in the Xuya continuity, some time after On a Red Station, Drifting (and even has a returning minor character from that novel). Features mindships (of course), the Four Saintly Beasts, and the Vietnamese concept of “duyên” (wonderfully economical concept, a headache to translate into English though!). Also, I actually wrote this while feeding the snakelet nonstop, which is probably worth a zillion achievement points all by itself…

6000 words, which I count a great victory (the snakelet being a major force for distraction). Temp title: “Days of the War, as Red as Blood, as Dark as Bile” (just until I find something slightly less unwieldy).

Snippet:

In the old days, the phoenix, the vermillion bird, was a sign of peace and prosperity to come; a sign of a just ruler under whom the land would thrive.

But those are the days of the war; of a weak child-Empress, successor to a weak Emperor; the days of burning planets and last-ditch defences; of moons as red as blood and stars as dark as bile.

#

When Thien Bao was thirteen years old, Second Aunt came to live with them.

She was a small, spry woman with little tolerance for children; and even less for Thien Bao, whom she grudgingly watched over while Mother worked in the factories, churning out the designs for new kinds of sharp-kites and advance needle ships.

(am aware Thien Bao is a man’s name in Vietnamese–there’s an in-story reason for it, but am struggling to manage the related exposition. Might just give up and go for a more traditional woman’s name)

Hoping to level up into progress on the novel after that (but not wholly optimistic).

Ok, so I’m biased because I wrote the preface for this, but you can now buy the e-edition of Djibril al-Ayad and Fabio Fernandes’s We See a Different Frontier here on amazon.

(I admit I’m not a big fan of the cover, but that’s my  personal opinion, and the fiction collected in the antho itself is well worth a closer look)

The anthology collects SFF from the point of view of people outside the usual SFF hegemony, with countries such as Brazil, Singapore, the Philippines, etc.; and writers such as Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Joyce Chng and Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Stories focus on imperialism, the difficulties of navigating a postcolonial history and of being the silenced voices on the world scene–it’s a very chewy, fertile terrain in which to plant fiction, and by and large this is a stunning anthology. The stories I loved most were Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “What Really Happened in Ficandula”, an angry tale of retribution and revenge that stretches across generations, Dinesh Rao’s “Bridge of Words”, an elegiac story about diaspora and losing one’s language, and Benjanun Sriduankaew’s splendid “Vector”, about the rewriting of history and the fight of the oppressed to impose their own voices over those of their oppressors.

Do give it a try. It’s a great read, and it’s stuff that needs to be tackled in SFF.