Fellow VDer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s beautiful tribal story, “Hi Bugan ya Hi Kinggawan”, is now online at Fantasy Magazine. I first read it a year ago at VD4 in England, and just knew this awesome piece of prose would find a good home. Go read it!

If not for the Mama-oh’s quick actions, you would have grown up without a mother. With a bamboo tube, and a woven blanket, she captured your mother’s spirit just as it was leaving her body, and so your mother was restored to life.

Your father came to see you when he was told all was well.

He looked at you, and he looked at your mother, then he took you in his arms and he gave you your name.

“We will call her Bugan,” he said.

“A wise choice,” the Mama-oh replied. “The Sky Goddess will be pleased.”

There was a Canyao. A carabao was killed, two pigs were offered up, and rice wine flowed freely.

Read more.

Since everyone is doing it for the final Hugo push (not that I think I have a rat’s chance, but it’s fun to share), a re-post of the stuff I’m particularly proud of for this year:

Short stories
-(SF) “After the Fire”, Apex Magazine, November 2009. Available in handy podcast format as well at StarshipSofa.
-(dark fantasy) “Golden Lilies”, Fantasy Magazine, August 2009. Came in the Top Five of the reader’s poll for 2009. Available in handy podcast format as well.
-(epic-ish/philosophical fantasy) “In the Age of Iron and Ashes”, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 31st December 2009. Also available in handy podcast format.

Novelette
(SF)“On Horizon’s Shores”, IGMS, issue 14, September 2009. Will email.

You can find a longer list of what I published in 2009 here at my website. If you feel like reading anything in the short fiction department, feel free to email me and I’ll provide you with a e-copy (PS: the offer applies whether you’re a voting member or not; I’d be delighted to share what I published).

Next post will feature actual content, I swear.

I dithered over whether to post, or not, but what the heck…

Should you wish to read some of my shorts and nominate them for the Hugos (before March 13th): here are some stories I’m particularly proud of.

Short stories
-(SF) “After the Fire”, Apex Magazine, November 2009. Available in handy podcast format as well at StarshipSofa. AKA the one Lavie Tidhar commissioned out of me for his World SF special issue. Post-apocalypse, Chinese style.

In her dreams, Jiaotan saw Father: hands outstretched, the flesh of the fingers fraying away to reveal the yellowed, tapered shape of bones, the deep-set eyes bulging in their sockets, pleading, begging her to take him away.

-(dark fantasy) “Golden Lilies”, Fantasy Magazine, August 2009. Came in the Top Five of the reader’s poll for 2009. Available in handy podcast format as well. A story of Chinese ghosts, bound feet and unsatiated desires. This one was a lot of fun to write–fair warning though, it’s pretty explicit and somewhat gruesome (the violence is somewhat peculiar, and no one dies, but it’s kind of squicky all the same).

It was the smell which woke me up, insinuating itself between the planks of my coffin: cooked meat mingling with the sweet odour of aromatic rice, and the tangy hint of fruit and spices — a powerful summoning if there ever was one.

-(epic-ish/philosophical fantasy) “In the Age of Iron and Ashes”, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 31st December 2009. Also available in handy podcast format. In a besieged city, a man confronts a runaway slave–and faces what he’s made of his life. I confess this one is by far my favorite of the three. I am not very sanguine about its chances, though, as it’s even bleaker than the other two (and believe me, that takes something), and it’s been published in a fairly obscure venue. But one can hope :=)

They ran the girl down, in the grey light of dawn: a ring of copper-mailed horsemen, racing after her until her exhaustion finally felled her.

Novelette
(SF)“On Horizon’s Shores”, IGMS, issue 14, September 2009. Erm. My only true SF story of the year (the other one is an alternate history). A story of extreme transformations, love and learning to let go.

Alex and Thi Loan transferred at Sapalawa Spaceport, from their small shuttle to a military Naga craft — the only ones still allowed to crawl between the stars with the fuel shortage.

You can find a longer list of what I published in 2009 here at my website. If you feel like reading anything in the short fiction department, feel free to email me and I’ll provide you with a e-copy (PS: the offer applies whether you’re a voting member or not; I’d be delighted to share what I published).

Just found out that “Golden Lilies” was among the top five stories of Fantasy Magazine as voted by the readers–along with stories by Jessica Lee, Camille Alexa, Aidan Doyle, and Cate Gardner. My deepest thanks to everyone who voted for it!

In other news, I sold my Aztec steampunk story “Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, to appear in an upcoming issue. Many thanks to the Liberty Hall people who took a look at it, and to my WIBite pals for the help (including a new, catchier title and a better ending paragraph).

So, back from Vietnam. I am officially 100% jetlagged, and propped up mostly by caffeine at this point. Here’s what seems to have happened on the interwebs (regarding my fiction) while I was away:

-Gill Polack offers thoughts on Servant of the Underworld, particularly on why it’s a very male-oriented book (on which I tend to concur)
-Antony at Science Fiction and Fantasy reviews the book:

Servant of the Underworld is an intelligent, involving and very rewarding novel which I have no hesitation in recommendation to one and all.

-Val reviews it at his blog:

An interesting and unusual setting, a well rounded main character (did you ever meet a priest of the dead being the good guy in a fantasy novel?) and a brisk pace. This novel has a lot going for it.

-Couple of reviews showed up at amazon, mostly bewildered by the names (a sentiment I can share, though I have to admit being puzzled by some of the names that gave them pause)
-Over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, you can now listen to the podcast of my story “In the Age of Iron and Ashes” (it’s still up in issue 33 if you want to read it)
-Some love for “The Wind-Blown Man” (incidentally, the February issue of Asimov’s just turned up on my doorstep)

Mostly of the short fiction kind:
-Lois Tilton reviews “Melanie” (in the February 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy) and “Safe, Child, Safe” (an Acatl story in the last issue of Talebones). She thinks the learning displayed in glowing symbols on the arms in “Melanie” is “A Neat Idea”, and mostly likes the other story as well.
(she also lists her Top Ten for 2009, among which are several friends such as J.Kathleen Cheney, Sarah L. Edwards, and Lavie Tidhar. Go f-list!!)
-K.V Taylor mentions “In the Age of Iron and Ashes” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #33) over on her blog, as having this “killer South Asian influence”–quoting, in particular, the Shiva concept, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita (all of which were used at some point in the story, though more as a layer of pseudo-Hinduism over “traditional” fantasy tropes. This wasn’t meant to be authentic Indian, by a large margin). Neat. [1]
-Over at Fantastic Reviews Blog, “By Bargain and By Blood” (Hub issue 108) is Aaron’s Story of the Week:

This makes Aliette de Bodard only the third author to receive two different story recommendations on this blog, joining Paolo Bacigalupi and Catherynne M. Valente.

Er, wow? That’s some company…

[1]The particular setup of “In the Age of Iron and Ashes” refers to the Muslim invasion of India in the 13th Century. I read a series of elegiac texts about the loss this incurs, one of which featured a dancer on the walls of some Indian city, as a symbol of the beauty that was going to be lost in the carnage that followed. I can’t find the text for the life of me. I think it’s back at my parents’ place.

My Lansara (aka pseudo-Hindu) short “By Bargain and by Blood” is in the 108th issue of Hub Magazine, courtesy of the awesome Lee Harris. Here’s a snippet from the beginning:

The blood empath came when my niece was eight.

I should have suspected something like that–but my sister Aname had told me little about the begetting of her daughter, little beyond her certainty that everything would turn out right in the end. Her death in childbirth had left my questions forever unanswered.
Nevertheless, when Aname told me about her child to come, she spoke of a bargain struck. And thus I should have known someone would come to honour it–that someone would walk through the rice paddies and the forests until he reached our jati, our small community isolated from the affairs of the world.

But, just as you know about death but do not think about it, so I did not think about him.

A mistake. Perhaps I would have been better prepared, had I thought of his coming.

Read more. (free download at the Hub website)

Many many thanks to Marshall Payne for his help on this one, as well as tlmorganfield, tchernabyelo, and everyone else who took a look at it on Liberty Hall (the crits date back to before I got smart enough to record who had critted my stuff for later thanks). And to Lee for prodding me into submitting it and accepting it for publication.

(and arg: D-4 until release date…à

And to start off 2010:
-you can read “In the Age of Iron and Ashes” in the newest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, along with a story by B. Gordon

They ran the girl down, in the grey light of dawn: a ring of copper-mailed horsemen, racing after her until her exhaustion finally felled her.
Yudhyana sat on his horse, shivering in the cold morning air, and thought of home—of the narrow, spice-filled streets of Rasamuri, and of his daughters shrieking with delight as he raced them in the courtyard. Anything to prevent him from focusing on what was happening.
Read more

-the French website Elbakin has launched its new web design, which is very clean and very handy to navigate. Among their latest stuff is an interview of Chris Evans, author of the Iron Elves series. (it’s also available in English for the non-bilingually oriented). They’re a portal for everything fantasy, but I really do love the fact that the new design makes the reviews very handy to read (I’m always interested in their take on things, and it’s quite informative to see how things come across in the French community–which I’m not really part of, with the whole writing-in-English thing).
-on that topic, I’m glad to see that Pyr has snapped up the US rights for Pierre Pevel’s The Cardinal’s Blades (swashbuckling à la Dumas, with dragons, translated by Bragelonne’s Tom Clegg). It’ll be interesting to see the reaction to that one.

If you want something that looks like a book, Angry Robot has a sample of Servant of the Underworld to download, which contains the first chapter. Available in Mobipocket, EPUB or PDF.

Or you can also read the first three chapters online at My Favourite Books (they were cut into five parts to make them more manageable, hence the number of links).

In the silence of the shrine, I bowed to the corpse on the altar: a minor member of the Imperial Family, who had died in a boating accident on Lake Texcoco. My priests had bandaged the gaping wound on his forehead and smoothed the wrinkled skin as best as they could; they had dressed him with scraps of many-coloured cotton and threaded a jade bead through his lips – preparing him for the long journey ahead. As High Priest for the Dead, it was now my responsibility to ease his passage into Mictlan, the underworld.

I slashed my earlobes and drew thorns through the wounds, collecting the dripping blood in a bowl, and started a litany for the Dead.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia interviews me at Innsmouth Free Press on Servant, writing in other cultures and my pet history peeves.

The Shine competition has gone live: basically, guess the next sentence AND guess the story. See if you can spot the collab I did with Gareth L. Powell 🙂

And chapter 2 of Servant of the Underworld is now live at My Favourite Books.