This is one of the panels I recorded at the most recent ICFA conference. The participants (in order of appearance) were Jim Casey, Sharon Emmerichs, Kevin Crawford, Neil Gaiman, and Conor McCreery. How do you adapt Shakespeare? Is there any such thing as a single true, definitive “Shakespeare”? How do the plays adapt into different media, different costumes, different generations? A very thoughtful discussion on the malleable Bard.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:03:07 — 57.8MB)

It is well past time for any new comments on Paul Kincaid’s “The Widening Gyre” or Jonathan McCalmont’s response to such, “Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future.” However, I’ve been reading one of Damon Knight’s collections of criticism, In Search of Wonder, and came across the following gems. They come back-to-back-to-back in a chapter on Anthologies, discussing the first three Judith Merrill S-F, the Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy anthologies. (Pardon the typos, as these excerpts are all transcribed, not pasted.) Starting with 1955:

Readers of Miss Merril’s previous anthologies already know that her taste is unfaltering [...] Taken altogether, the eighteen stories (and the eighty honorable mentions in the back of the book) give an intriguing picture of science fiction, 1955. The spread of subjects is rather small: there are six space stories, three about robots or androids, two each about psi phenomena and supermen, and a scattering of others: but no cataclysm stories, no dangerous inventions, no time travel. The range of periods is correspondingly small: one story takes place in the past, the rest either in the present or the comparatively near future.

[...] the one thing that most of these stories have in common is their tragic mood. Miss Merril worked hard to keep this from overbalancing the collection I know–one of the year’s best but most dismal stories had to be jettisoned on that account–and yet all but seven of the stories [out of eighteen] that were finally chosen give a dominant impression of sadness [...]

I have the feeling that in spite of itself, science fiction is pulling in its horns. In these stories, we are visited three times by beings from else-where, but our own far traveling is limited to wistful glimpses of distant worlds [...] The flow of technological marvels has dried up. Of the eleven stories which make some use of the familiar “world of tomorrow” background, only one–Asimov’s–explores the consequences of a new invention; the rest merely postulate the usual equipment, spaceships, robots or what have you, and go on from there.

In the space stories, the sense of destination is lacking. Sturgeon’s “Bulkhead” takes place in a spaceship, but it might just as well have been a psychoanalyst’s broom closet. Gone is the exuberance with which, in the thirties, writers peopled far planets with fascinatingly cockeyed life forms. Modern astronomy is no doubt partly responsible for this, but certainly there has been a change of mood among the writers, too. There was a lightheartedness in the way prewar writers used to destroy the Earth by solar flares, invasions, earthquakes or inundation; but stories like “The Hoofer” [Walter M. Miller] and “The Cave of Night” [James Gunn] seem to suggest a feeling that nothing so fortunate is likely to happen.

I am far from wishing to suggest that all this is evidence of the desperate plight of our times: to the contrary, science fiction was never more romantic and outward-looking that in the Depression years. What it does prove, if anything, is the desperate (and traditional) plight of writers.

Then for the same anthology covering 1956:

It may be that science fiction, which looks so flourishing, is coming to the end of its cycle. I crib this notion from Walter Kerr, who thinks our disillusionment with technological progress has already doomed out present theater, with its naturalistic conventions and its preoccupation with ideas drawn from science.

Maybe the same thing is happening to science fiction. Of the fifteen stories in this collection, three are upbeat in tone [...] The rest range from mild, almost cheerful pessimism [...] to the unrelieved gloom of my own “Stranger Station.”

Knight defends his own gloominess thus:

(I have been writing gloomy stories for years, in a reaction against the silly convention that ruled in the magazines when I was a pup, that all stories must have happy endings. But I think a convention of gloom is just as silly as the other one, and you may expect me to turn optimist just as soon as I can retool for it.)

But that doesn’t stop him from going on:

The point is not so much that the people in these stories come to sticky ends; I’m used to that. But never before have the futures imagined by sf writers seemed to me so thoroughly dismal.

A little of this goes perhaps a longer way that we have been realizing. All right, our confidence in the future has slipped a little, for good reasons, in the last decade; all right, science fiction is among other things a literature of escape and of protest: but surely we don’t have to bang the same drum all the time.

Then we move on to the 1959 volume:

More and more during the last ten years, the field has come to be dominated by writers who are interested in s.f. chiefly as a convenient vehicle.

Hardened old addicts have been watching this change a little dubiously. In style, depth of character, and other literary values, the new work is superior (that is to say, the top tenth of it–the remainder, according to Sturgeon’s Rule, is, was and will be crud). But what we used to regard as the essential thing in s.f.–the technical idea, rigorously and imaginatively worked out–is almost as passe as the pure deductive element in the mystery novel.

This is dramatically shown by the contents of Judith Merril’s fourth annual SF, the Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy. The thirteen s.f. and fantasy stories are of high quality; but there is not one new s.f. idea in the book, unless you count Avram Davidson’s madly ingenious notion about the life-cycle of the bisexual bicycle.

[...] As I noted earlier, “Casey Agonistes” by Richard M. McKenna, and “Space-Time for Springers” by Fritz Leiber, seem to me the strongest stories in the book. Both are pure fantasy. Almost invariably, where an s.f. gimmick appears in the other stories, it does so with an air of intrusion, and the story is weakened by it.

What we are calling “s.f.,” it seems to me, is at an awkward transitional stage. Either that, or (more hopefully), the field has drifted as far as it can go in the direction of indifference to science, and in the next few years we can expect a resurgence of space stories written by people who can tell the moons from the comets.

Compare this with Kincaid in 2012:

THE OVERWHELMING SENSE ONE GETS, working through so many stories that are presented as the very best that science fiction and fantasy have to offer, is exhaustion. Not so much physical exhaustion (though it is more tiring than reading a bunch of short stories really has any right to be); it is more as though the genres of the fantastic themselves have reached a state of exhaustion.

And McCalmont:

I think that science fiction has lost interest in the world and fallen out of step with the times resulting in the emergence of a narcissistic and inward-looking literature devoid of both relevance and vitality.

Consider that the years 1955-1959 were only 10-15 years before landing on the moon, and that Judith Merril’s later anthologies are now considered to be critical to the development of the New Wave.

Having done the year’s best review circuit myself, I can empathize with the feeling of exhaustion and despair it can engender in the reviewer, especially in Paul’s case when he had to review three at once. I once had to review two for one column, and afterwards the editor apologized and promised that I could review novels for the rest of the year.

Still, if 10 years after Knight had his despair we landed on the Moon and started the New Wave (the period on which Kincaid and McCalmont look back nostalgically, as Knight looks nostalgically on the thirties), then I expect great things from NASA and SFWA no later than 2025.

P.S. In Search of Wonder is a book that the late Charles N. Brown more-or-less forced me to buy at the 2008 WorldCon in Denver. I caught up to him in the dealer’s room as he was heading back to the Locus table. He, in his power scooter then, quickly veered over to the NESFA table and started handing me book after book that I “needed to read.” I’m unashamed that I bought them all, and just I’m sorry that it took me until 2013 to start reading this Knight collection. It really is great and sheds a lot of perspective on sf literature (and debates about the same) over the years.

The Five Best…
…genre stories about creepy telepathic kids.

Everybody loves a mind-reader, right?

The telepath or mentalist has been a part of the genre landscape since the days of vaudeville and traveling carnival sideshows, where “mind-readers” trained in observation would use shills and accomplices to wow the crowd with amazing displays of their supposed psychic powers.  It was understandable that these figures would loom large in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror communities.  These are some of my favorite mind-readers…and best of all, they’re all kids.  Creepy, creepy kids.

Tin foil hats won’t help.

5: Danny Torrance, The Shining by Stephen King.

Until The Sixth Sense came along and updated the pop culture yearbook, Danny Torrance was viewed by many people as the quintessential example of the creepy yet harmless psychic child.  He was blessed—or cursed—with “the shine,” an undefined psychic gift which made him unfortunately attractive to predatory ghosts.  That might not have been as much of a problem, had his father not taken a job as caretaker at the phenomenally haunted Overlook Hotel.  Oops.

First published in 1977, The Shining is a story of hauntings and horror that has seen multiple adaptations, including an upcoming sequel from King himself, titled Doctor Sleep.  But it’s little Danny Torrance himself who helped to elevate the story to the classic position it holds today.  Ghost stories are always at their best when there are children involved, and Danny and his “shine” have been capturing imaginations—and scaring people sleepless—since page one.

Creepy kid count: one.
Psychic powers: undefined, telepathy, clairvoyance, and sensitivity to the dead included.

4: David and Petra Strorm/Rosalind Morton, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham.

I blame much of my lifelong obsession with creepy telepaths on John Wyndham, whose works found me at a very early and impressionable age.  He, too, had a curious fascination with telepathic children, and nowhere is this clearer than in The Chrysalids (published in the United States as Re-Birth).  Originally released in 1955, The Chrysalids can almost be viewed as a precursor to the X-Men.  Our title characters are all mutants, living in the wake of a catastrophic nuclear and/or biological war.  Their world is controlled by the fear of genetic variance, and anything that doesn’t fit a carefully documented list of pre-war characteristics is destroyed.

You can imagine how happy their parents are to discover that their children are telepaths.

The Chrysalids has very skewed ideas about radiation and biology, but some fascinating ones about telepathic society and the way that the human race will react to change.  It’s also one of the most gender-balanced of Wyndham’s works, having both male and female major characters.  Best of all, it’s hopeful, showing that telepathy could be a positive adaptation, something to bring us closer to together as a species.  Highly recommended, but remember when it was written.

Creepy kid count: at least three among the telepaths, more among the wider cast.
Psychic powers: telepathy, empathy, some hints of precognition.

3: Katie Welker, The Girl With the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis.

This is a book that will cause people who grew up in the 1980s to go “oh, yes, I remember,” and may elicit blank stares from the rest of the audience.  Thankfully, Willo Davis’s classic tale of isolation and telepathy is back in print as of 2011, and should be easily found at your local bookstore or library.  It was originally printed in 1980, and was one of my favorite books growing up.  It tells the story of Katie Welker, who has never felt like she quite fit in…with anyone, really.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that her eyes are silver.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she can move things with her mind, and everyone around her thinks she’s a witch.

This is very much a middle grade book, suitable for any kid smart enough to read it.  I can’t honestly say how it would play with an adult who was reading it for the first time, but I feel that the themes are universal enough, and the prose strong enough, that it’s worth trying.  If nothing else, you may find a wonderful new story for the children in your life.  Telepathic or not.

Creepy kid count: one, to start.
Psychic powers: telekinesis, telepathy, some hints of precognition.

2: Kami Glass and Jared Lynborn, Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan.

If The Girl With the Silver Eyes is this list’s foray into middle grade, Unspoken is pure modern YA literature… except for the part where it’s also a Gothic mystery, complete with creepy old houses, intrepid heroines, and the occasional gloomy moor.  Kami Glass has lived her entire life with the voice of her imaginary friend, Jared, sounding in her head.  He’s also her best friend, and all attempts to get her to give up on the fantasy of his existence have failed.  Despite this, she’s an energetic, well-liked girl whose efforts to found a school newspaper are actually bearing fruit, and the scoop of a lifetime has just walked into her grasp: the mysterious Lynborns have returned to Sorry-in-the-Vale…

Part modern YA, part classic Gothic, Unspoken was one of my favorite books of 2012, and the bizarre relationship between Kami and Jared definitely qualifies it for a place on this list.  Come for spooky atmosphere, stay for the witty banter.  And the naps.

Creepy kid count: oh so very many.
Psychic powers: telepathy, sorcery.

1: The children of Midwich, The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham.

If the creepy psychic children of speculative fiction can be said to have a godfather, it must be John Wyndham, the only author to make this list twice.  His second entry brings us to the sleepy town of Midwich, where a strange phenomenon has left all the women pregnant—and the children, when they come, look nothing like their parents, but very much like one another.

The Midwich Cuckoos was originally printed in 1957, and has since been adapted for the screen multiple times, as well as inspiring creepy hive-mind telepathic children in everything from books to comics.  Unlike The Chrysalids, Wyndham doesn’t bother trying to make science explain the telepathic offspring of his villagers: it’s aliens, pure and simple, and they mean nothing good for the human race.  Although very much a product of its time, with stereotyped gender roles and pacing that seems slow by our modern standards, this book set the tone for all the creepy telepaths to follow.

Welcome to Midwich.  Hope you’ll get home alive.

Creepy kid count: all of them.
Psychic powers: telepathy, mind control.

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, where she failed to demonstrate any measurable psychic powers (although not for lack of trying).  Disappointed but not discouraged, she turned herself to writing, and has released thirteen books since 2009, with three more coming this year alone.  It is widely believed that she doesn’t sleep.  Seanan lives in a crumbling old farmhouse in the San Francisco Bay Area, which she shares with three enormous blue cats, a lot of books, her machete collection, and more creepy dolls than anyone is comfortable with.  

Our guests this month:

Mélanie Fazi is a long-time fan of fantasy, horror and SF as well as a writer and translator. Although her published books include two novels and two collections of stories, she’s mostly a writer of short fiction. Some of her stories were translated in English and appeared notably in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science-Fiction, Black Static and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She has also translated works by writers such as Brandon Sanderson, Poppy Z. Brite and Lisa Tuttle (whose short stories have been a major influence on her writing). She currently lives in Paris and is working on a new collection of stories.

Originally a marine biologist, Lionel Davoust has been an editor-in-chief, anthologist, translator, but mostly writes. Attracted by surrealism and weird fiction, he recently completed Le Mystère Léviathan (The Leviathan Mystery), a trilogy of urban fantasy thrillers with strong initiatic overtones which earned him the honors of national television and mainstream press, and builds in parallel Évanégyre, a steampunk world reflecting on the course of history. He can be found in translation in Interfictions 2 (Small Beer Press), with “L’Île close”. Aged 34, he lives in Brittany, and on occasion volunteers to contribute to whale and dolphin science.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:15:59 — 69.6MB)

Topics and links with more information:

Conventions:

• Utopiales
• Imaginales (Con report, Video Diary — includes interviews with Lionel and Jean-Claude Dunyach)

Magazines:

• Galaxies 
• Bifrost
• Fiction
• Angle Mort

Websites:

• Noosfere
• ActuSF
• Elbakin

Publishers:

• Bragelonne
• Mouton Électriques
• L’Atalante
• Mnémos
• La Volte

Awards:

• Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire
• Prix Imaginales
• Prix Utopiales
• Noosfere awards database

Golden Age:

• Victor Hugo
• Jules Verne
• Albert Robida
• The Twentieth Century

Pulp:

• Black Coat

Current writers:

• Pierre Pevel
• Jean-Claude Dunyach
• Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
• Maurice Dantec
• Babylon Babies
• Michel Houellebecq
• Roland Wagner
• Pierre Bordage
• Ayerdhal

Five Books/Series That Should Totally Be Adapted With Puppets

Many of us, fans and authors alike, play the dream casting game where we imagine who should star in film or television adaptations of our favorite books. But not all stories were meant for live-action, or even animation. Some stories require the warmth, creativity, and downright fun of puppetry.

• The Discworld Series, by Terry Pratchett. I’m assuming you’re all familiar with the marvel of humorous fantasy that is Discworld. (If not, shame on you. Get off the internet and get to your library!)

  The early Discworld books featured the bumbling wizard Rincewind and, more importantly, the Luggage. The Luggage is made of sapient pearwood, and is characterized as “half suitcase, half homicidal maniac.” It’s nigh invulnerable, and makes a habit of devouring whatever gets in its way. This is the character puppets were made for!

  Discworld also includes one of the best librarian characters ever, a wizard who was accidentally transformed into an orangutan, but liked his new form and decided to keep it. While his vocabulary might be rather limited (“Ook!”), imagine what a good puppeteer could do with the facial expressions.

  Pratchett has such brilliant, well-developed, more-than-real characters that it’s unfair to expect mere humans to do them justice. This requires the magic of puppets.

• The Newsflesh Trilogy, by Mira Grant. Grant’s Hugo-nominated thrillers about the rise of zombies and the political conspiracies that result might not seem like the ideal choice for puppetry, but I really want to see a puppet Shaun Mason going to town on puppet zombies.

  Puppet zombies. Why is this not being produced and performed already, people?

  Many of the high-tension break-ins and escapes throughout the trilogy are just dying for the occasional Kermit-flail. And for those of you who are into that sort of thing, you’d get at least one scene of puppet nookie.

• Zahrah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor. I included this one because Okorafor’s story would make for an absolutely beautiful puppet world. Zahrah was born dada, with vines growing within her thick locks, vines that twined themselves to her hair while she was still in the womb. She lives on a planet colonized ages ago and developed with biological technology, a world rooted in African culture and folklore. Zahrah grew her own computer from a seed. Shots are given using insects, and the patient is swabbed with sugar water so the insect will bite and inject the medicine. And oh yes — Zahrah can fly.

  There are talking gorillas and a trickster frog and a confused war snake and it’s a freaking gorgeous story and someone please puppetize it right now!

• Chicks in Chainmail, edited by Esther Friesner. Because who doesn’t want to see puppet swordswomen in chainmail bikinis kicking ass, taking names, and turning ridiculous fantasy tropes upside down? The anthology format means you could do a series of shorter episodes, and Friesner’s editorial taste means you’ve got plenty of fun and humorous stories to work with.
• Shatterpoint, by Matthew Woodring Stover. This Star Wars novel is a Heart of Darkness-style journey with Mace Windu attempting to save his former Padawan on the jungle world of Haruun Kal. It’s a darker Star Wars adventure than I’m used to, and surprisingly intense. But that’s not the point.

  The real point can be summed up in three words: Mace Windu puppet.

Jim C. Hines is the author of Libriomancer, about a magic-wielding librarian who pulls laser guns out of books and shoots sparkling vampires. He’s also written the Princess series of fairy tale retellings, and the humorous Goblin Quest trilogy. (Jig the goblin would make an awesome puppet, by the way.) He’s an active blogger, and won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer.

At ICFA this past March we were lucky enough to have three recent Crawford award winners attending the conference: Chris Barzak, Jed Berry, and Genevieve Valentine. (Acutally, there were five winners at the conference that weekend, one of whom was one of our guests of honor, Kij Johnson.) I was lucky enough to catch the three of them after their joint reading on Saturday morning. In a mostly coherent fashion we discussed what winning the Crawford means to the winners, their movement from short fiction to novels, experiments in formalism, brushes with academics, approaches to research, and other topics.

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Karen Burnham
Unreliable narrators. Why use them? Is it playing fair with the reader? What stories do it best? Who will mention Gene Wolfe first? (Ah, I guess that’d be me.) Who else uses them effectively?

As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease of reading. If you’d like to read it all on a single page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down menu above. If you don’t see the drop down menu, please click here.

Stefan Dziemianowicz
Speaking for the horror field, you could go back at very least to Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw,” where we get the uneasy suspicion near the story’s end that the governess narrator’s own emotions and psychological issues are distorting the events that she is reporting. Perhaps you could even go back to Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein’s account of himself as a much put-upon victim seems very valid until the monster waltzes in and tells his side of the story.

I’d have to think about more modern examples, and more deliberate uses of the unreliable narrator.

Brian Evenson
I’ve long felt that “unreliable”, while a pretty good blanket term, is problematic in that it doesn’t get down to the specifics. There are so many reasons that a narrator is unreliable, some of them willful, some of them out of ignorance, some out of malice. All of those modes can be interesting, but they all have a decidedly different effect…

Cat Rambo
One of my favorite unreliable narrator stories of ALL TIME is Stephen Graham Jones’ “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit.” It uses the device so very effectively.

Another favorite is the Tiptree story, “Your Face, O My Sisters, Your Faces Filled of Light” for the subtlety with which it signals the narrator’s unreliability right from paragraph one.

Cecelia Holland

I don’t really like omniscient narrators. The best narrative voice is strained through one character’s sensibilities so completely it’s all just what he sees, and who sees everything? And sometimes–often–what he sees is the story–as in the “Telltale Heart”.

Click here to continue reading.

Five Animal Stories that Manage Not to Be Twee

Animal stories have a certain quality that really lets writers play with emotions. There’s a reason White Fang and Black Beauty are classics. And plenty of speculative fiction writers have advantaged themselves of the approach. And OMG sometimes the twee factor runs far too high in this. It’s very easy to do in an animal story.

But we do it nonetheless. And sometimes succeed. Here’s five of my all-time favorite animal stories, all of which manage to escape the trap of sentimentalism.

• “Sergeant Chip” by Bradley Denton

  Dog stories automatically have grabbiness for anyone who likes dogs. And this story plays on the things that we love dogs for: their enthusiasm, their loyalty, their whole-heartedness. A simple straightforward story purporting to be the dictated testimony of Sergeant Chip himself, this is a heartwringer that was published by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It won the 2005 Sturgeon Award and was nominated for a Hugo.

• “Rachel in Love” by Pat Murphy

  Rachel’s been given a personality overlay that makes her one of the loneliest creatures in speculative fiction, trapped between her own species and humanity.

  Rachel likes fairy tales and she likes happy endings. She has the mind of a teenage girl, but the innocent heart of a young chimp.

  This is another lovely but tear-jerking story, told in beautifully simple and wonderfully clear writing. It originally appeared in Asimov’s in 1987, won the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards, and was nominated for a Hugo.

• “The Fate of Mice” by Susan Palwick

  One of the reasons I like this story so much is that it’s a reply to another favorite work, Daniel Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon. Palwick gives Algernon a voice, but the story is much more than a retelling. It’s an amplification, a weaving upon what went before that creates a fabulous story.

  Sadly, I could find no online version. The story is the title story from Palwick’s collection, The Fate of Mice, which appeared in 2007.

• “Spacetime is For Springers” by Fritz Leiber

  Kitten Gummitch is that scrap of reckless, selfless courage that some can summon in the face of terrible odds. This is just such a charming story and I’ve loved it ever since I first read it. There is an affectionate humor throughout and linguistic play:

  So to all outward appearances Gummitch was just a vividly normal kitten, as shown by the succession of nicknames he bore along the magic path that led from the blue-eyed infancy toward puberty: Little One, Squawker, Portly, Bumble (for purring, not clumsiness), Old Starved-to-Death, Fierso, Loverboy (affection, not sex), Spook, and Catnik.

  In fact, the whole story, which appeared in 1958, is full of beautiful, quotable moments.

• “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” by Ursula K. LeGuin

  The first story in LeGuin’s collection, The Compass Rose, (1982) “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” purports to be lifted from a scientific journal. LeGuin makes the most of the trope, using its language to tremendous effect, and at the same time manages to create a revolutionary ant whose double-sided story is both poignant and exhilarating. Again, no online version.

Cat Rambo has worked as a programmer-writer for Microsoft and a Tarot card reader, professions which, she claims, both involve a certain combination of technical knowledge and willingness to go with the flow. In 2005 she attended the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. Among the places in which her stories have appeared are Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons, and her work has consistently garnered mentions and appearances in year’s best of anthologies. Her collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight was an Endeavour Award finalist in 2010 and followed her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories. Her most recent collection is Near + Far, from Hydra House Books.

She has edited anthologies as well as critically-acclaimed Fantasy Magazine, is a member of the Codex Writers’ Group, and volunteers with Clarion West. Her work with Fantasy Magazine earned her a nomination for a World Fantasy Award in 2012. She teaches at Bellevue College as well as running a highly successful series of online classes.

In this episode from Brazil, our guests are:

Fábio Fernandes is an SFF writer and translator living in São Paulo, Brazil. He’s got several stories published in online venues in the US, the UK, New Zealand, Portugal, Romenia, and Brazil. He also contributed to Steampunk Reloaded, Southern Weirdo: Reconstruction, and The Apex Book of World SF Vol. 2. Co-edited (with Djibril al-Ayad) We See a Different Frontier, an upcoming anthology of colonialism-themed speculative fiction from outside the first-world viewpoint for The Future Fire Magazine. He translated to Brazilian Portuguese several SFF essential works, such as Neuromancer, Snow Crash, A Clockwork Orange, Boneshaker, The Steampunk Bible, and is currently working on the translation of Robert Jordan’s A Wheel of Time. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Fix, Fantasy Book Critic, Tor.com and SF Signal. Personal blog: Narrative Textures. Twitter: @fabiofernandes

Jacques Barcia is a weird fiction writer from Recife, Brazil. His stories have sold to Clarkesworld, Solaris, and Apex, among others. When he´s not writing, he´s either growling in a grindcore band, or fighting Muay Thai. You can reach him via his blog and his Twitter account (@jacquesbarcia).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:24:56 — 77.8MB)

Show Notes

Sources of Information

• SF Encyclopedia


• Notes on Science Fiction and Fantasy in Latin America. Roberto de Sousa Causo

What is the fan scene like in your country (conventions, fanzines, etc.)?

• Magazines: Hyperpulp


• Overclock


• Steampunk community

What English-speaking writers are popular in your country?

• JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, George RR Martin


• Greg Bear, Karen Traviss – Halo


• Moira Young


• Trudi Canavan


• Brandon Sanderson


• Cory Doctorow

What writers from your country are available in translation into English?

• “The Remaker“, Fábio Fernandes, The Future Fire


• “Salvaging Gods“, Jacques Barcia, Clarkesworld


• “To Dive Into a Godling, Where Life Begins“, Jaques Barcia, Electric Velocipede


• “The Greenman Watches the Black Bar Go Up, Up, Up”, Jacques Barcia, Shine (ed. Jetse de Vries, Solaris)


• “Nothing Happened in 1999″, Fábio Fernandes, The Apex Book of World SF 2 (ed. Lavie Tidhar)


• “Secondary Mission“, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro


• “Xochiquetzal and the Vengeance Fleet“, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro


• “Peak Time“, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro


• “The Most Beautiful Woman In the World“, Roberto de Sousa Causo


• André Carneiro, Jerônimo Monteiro, Braulio Tavares – all in Cosmos Latinos


• Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro sows confusion

What writers from your country would you like to see translated into English?

• Cristina Lasaitis


• Luis Bras (Nelson de Oliveira)


• Romeu Martins


• Octavio Aragão


• Carlos Orsi


• Eric Novello


• Ana Cristina Rodrigues

What writers from other non-English-speaking countries are popular in your country?

• Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges


• Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Roberto Bolaño and Enrique Vila-Matas

Brazilian words that don’t translate (or don’t need translation):

• Saudade (as used by M. John Harrison)
• Gambiarra (“kludge” only in the technical sense, but used in a much wider sense in Brazil
• Caipirinha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caipirinha)
• Futebol

5 sf books worth reading I wouldn’t otherwise have discovered if I hadn’t been reading for SF Mistressworks

I’d always considered myself well-read within the genre, but when people started talking about the poor representation of women sf writers in late 2010/early 2011, I discovered that my own reading was chiefly of books by male writers. And this was despite the fact that through the years my favourite writers had often been women. I decided to change my reading habits, to make an effort to read more books by women sf writers. I also wanted to encourage others to do the same. That’s why I started SF Mistressworks.

A number of the books I’ve read and reviewed for SF Mistressworks were either rereads or books I had always planned to read. But there have been several I doubt very much I would have read had it not been for SF Mistressworks. Such as these five:

The Wanderground, Sally Miller Gearhart (1979)
I remember seeing the The Women’s Press sf books, with their distinctive grey livery, back in the 1980s. There was a vegetarian café/socialist bookshop I used to visit, back when I was at university, which had a carousel full of them. But I never bought any of them. I don’t recall even borrowing any from the library. Which is a shame. However, I don’t know if I’d have found The Wanderground as appealing then as I did when I read it for the first time last year. It’s about a women-only utopia, and the women have special (unexplained) powers which allow them to speak to plants and animals. They can also fly and talk to each other telepathically. Meanwhile, the men are stuck in the cities – and stuck in their horrible chauvinistic ways. I found The Wanderground – which is more of a collection than a novel – an easy book to like. Perhaps it’s not the most rigorous sf ever written, but some of the stories in it are affecting. And it is an essential antidote to sadly more common science fiction tales of male derring-do in outer space.

Islands, Marta Randall (1976)
I’d never even heard of Marta Randall until someone mentioned this novel when I was putting together a list of 100 recommended sf novels by women writers. As far as I can determine, she was never published in the UK, which might perhaps explain – though not excuse – my ignorance. Happily, I found a copy of Islands at a British sf con last year, bought it, read it and posted a review on SF Mistressworks. In the world of the novel, everyone is immortal… except for a few sports, for whom the treatment does not work. The narrator of Islands is one such sport. She has come to terms with her mortality, but it seems not all of the immortals have. During an expedition to drowned Hawaii to dive for artefacts of past centuries, events come to a violent head. Interspersed with this are the narrator’s early years, detailing how she learned to cope with her condition. Islands is a story carried by its protagonist, so I’m happy to report Randall has done an excellent job in that regard. Perhaps the world-building feels a little old-fashioned, and the ending takes a turn into somewhat implausible superpowers, but Islands is certainly a book worth seeking out.

Metropolis, Thea von Harbou (1926)
This is hardly an unknown title, though I suspect most people know it only as a film and not a novel. The book may well be the genre’s first novelisation, as von Harbou based it on her 1924 script. Which likely explains its differences to Lang’s movie. There’s not much difference in story between book and film, though the metallic robot Maria of the movie is in the novel a creature made of crystal. The writing is a little florid and over-emphatic for modern tastes, but as an example of a science fiction tradition entirely independent of Hugo Gernsback and his Amazing Stories, it’s an important historical document.

New Eves, edited by Janrae Frank, Jean Stine & Forrest J Ackerman (1994)
The Women of Wonder series of women-only sf anthologies edited by Pamela Sargent are probably better known than this one, but this single volume gives a good overview of women’s contribution to science fiction. The stories covering later decades are, perhaps, obvious choices, but some of the early fiction predates those chosen by Pamela Sargent. New Eves includes sf by writers such as Francis Stevens, Hazel Heald, Helen Weintraub, Leslie Perri… In fact, most of the authors in New Eves with stories published prior to 1950 have been forgotten. Read it for those stories, as well as to rediscover the stories from the 1960s through to the 1990s. There’s also an excellent introduction – but ignore its final section as it pretty much undermines the entire argument laid out in the rest of the piece.

The Wall Around Eden, Joan Slonczewski (1989)
You know when you read a novel and you enjoyed it and thought it was quite good, but then later you start to write a review of it and belatedly realise it was a much, much better novel than you had initially thought? That. It may well have been that the disappointing novel I read between finishing The Wall Around Eden and starting the review prompted my re-evaluation, but I’m not so sure. Or it could be the fact that Slonczewski’s novel is post-apocalyptic fiction which doesn’t involve warlordism or slavery. Gwynwood is one of several communities worldwide to have survived a global nuclear war, because it was protected by an alien force-field. But, despite the title, the village is no Eden. The Wall Around Eden has a smart, engaging heroine, a well-drawn cast, and a plot that relies on the ingenuity of its characters for its resolution. In many ways, it’s a masterclass in sf writing. It needs to be brought out in a new edition, perhaps as a YA novel.

Ian Sales reviews books for Interzone, curates the SF Mistressworks website, and writes his own fiction. In 2012, he edited the Rocket Science hard sf anthology for Mutation Press, and founded Whippleshield Books, a literary hard sf small press. His novella, Adrift on the Sea of Rains, the first book of the Apollo Quartet, was also published in 2012 by Whippleshield Books. The second book of the quartet, The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, will be published in January 2013. His fiction has also appeared in Postscripts, Alt Hist, Jupiter, and the original anthologies Catastrophia, Vivisepulture, The Monster Book for Girls, Where Are We Going? and The Maginot Line.