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Online Fiction Recommendations & Publications for 3/12/2013

Photograph of a red flower.

Here’s some pieces that I’ve particularly enjoyed over the last week, as well as pointers to some recent publications of my own.

Print:

Audio:

P.S. If you’re in the Seattle area, Deb Taber is reading tonight at the University Bookstore and should be well worth attending.

One Response

  1. Thanks for the kind words, Cat! To answer your question: The nature of the piece was one that the Lightspeed team wouldn’t lend itself easily to audio. So I’m currently thinking of sending it off to an audio publication.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

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Michael DeLuca's Reckoning 2: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice

Reckoning 2: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice is solid in weight and content. The stories, poetry, essays, and art deal with the world around us and our ethics in dealing with it. This refined focus sharpens the magazine’s impact, I think, and makes it something that tries to evoke change through its art rather than the shallow comfort afforded by something whose theme was simply “Nature”.

The annual’s mission statement is A locus for the conflict between the world as it has become and the world as we wanted it to be. Editor Michael DeLuca’s opening editor’s note, “On Having a Kid in the Climate Apocalypse,” deals with a life situation that makes that mission even more pressing: having a kid:

My son is three months old. He has no idea what the world is, what it has become. I can say anything in front of him. I can curse. I can cry. He’s happy or he’s sad. there’s no cause and effect. I can read to him from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a book that spends hundreds of pages drawing an analogy between a child growing up and an invasive tree species flourishing in a sidewalk crack, a book full of compassion for the poor hated by the rich, casual about the hatred it portrays for people of other cultures. He doesn’t understand a word.

The essay is intimate, frank, and willing to comtemplate its own imperfections:

Maybe this revelation isn’t for everyone. Maybe not everyone needs it. Maybe, to people who aren’t white, aren’t straight, aren’t privileged children of educated families, some of this is so painfully obvious. I’ve spent this essay embarrassing myself. I needed it. I needed to write it. I needed my assumptions undermined and broken up and reassembled around someone who wasn’t me.

While there are several essays in the magazine, all of them nicely put together and executed, my favorite pieces from the issue are all stories:

“Wispy Chastening” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires is slight but significant, much like the narrator’s crimes against the environment, turning this into a sharp look at the idea of thinking globally but acting locally, or even individually.

“To the Place of Skulls” by Innocent Ilo provides an Afrofuturist post-apocalyptic world where its protagonists visit a landscape of grit and myth:

We are going to the Place of Skulls: Saro-Wiwa, Babbe, Gokana, Ken, Nyo, Ueme, Tai, and myself. For you to know, this is not the place Bro Lucas said Jesus was crucified when he was spitting into my face from the broken lectern during his sermon, last Sunday. The Place of Skulls is where a stark reality stares us in the face. We all have after-school exhaustion, Babbe’s diarrhea has worsened, Gokana is still nursing the burns on his legs from our last visit and Mama will yank at my ear if she hears fim about it, but we must go. The Place of Skulls is that important.

“Girl Singing with Farm” by Kathrin Köhler broke my heart and yet I know I’ll go back and read it several more times. What seems like it may be simplistic turns into a beautiful, layered story with a final image that will linger with the reader.

I’m saving the best for last and that is the story “Fourth-Dimensional Tessellations of the American College Graduate” by Marie Vibbert. I love this story so much that I am not going to discuss a single detail except that the ending made my heart leap and it is my favorite story of 2018 so far. I will hold onto my copy of this magazine forever because it contains it.

Highly recommended for those enjoying more literary SF as well as thoughtful essays.

(Reckoning Press, 2017)

You can read this review at http://thegreenmanreview.com/books/recent-reading-reckoning-2/

...

To Eligibility Post or Not to Eligibility Post?

Photo of speculative fiction writer Cat Rambo with Cinderella's Wicked Stepmother at Disneyworld.
In my position as SFWA President, sometimes I have to confer with fictional characters.
Let us begin by acknowledging that this is a rancorous period, full of clashing agendas, bewildered onlookers, and all too many innocents caught in the crossfire (although it is not the first time we’ve seen these storms, nor will it be the last.). And that right now making an eligibility post particularly mentioning Hugo Award categories like Related Work is something that some of us are circling and wondering about.

And my answer is yes. Yes, you should. Why?

Because it helps people discover the work that you’re proud of. You know what you wrote. You know what you want to make sure they see. It’s okay to say, “Hey, if you’re looking to read something by me, I would try this.”

Because it helps people read widely. Every writer in F&SF should — well, I don’t want to make it seem mandatory so I won’t say that you must do this, but you should at least feel free to make eligibility posts. So when someone’s poking around, they can find your stuff and read it.

Because you shouldn’t self-censor out of modesty when talking about your work. You are its best champion. Go ahead and help people find the best examples of it. Be humble and lovable in some other way. (Thank you to Erin M. Hartshorn for the link to the piece of self-effacement.)

And so, I’ve finally been prodded by a Twitter conversation into doing my own in part because I want to say to you, no matter where you are sited in the bizarre and incredibly wordy conflicts, that you should do it. Let’s have lots of wonderful reading lists, the more the merrier, and part of creating those is making readers aware of what you (and others, sure) have done. Please feel free to post a link if you’ve made an eligibility post. Yup, even if you think you’re not welcome. You are.

I published a bunch in 2015. You can find the full list elsewhere, but here are my best of recommendations:

  • Related work: I co-edited Ad Astra: The SFWA 50th Anniversary Cookbook with Fran Wilde. (Hard copies are available here.) I remain inordinately proud of the work, which contains recipes like Charles Brown’s Turkey Turkey Turkey and Octavia Butler’s Pineapple Fried Rice. (I think these two essays #PurpleSF and On Reading the Classics are also eligible.
  • Novel: Kevin J. Anderson’s excellent Wordfire Press published my first novel, Beasts of Tabat, the first in a fantasy quartet. SFWA members can find a copy of it up in the 2015 Fiction forum. There have been some nice Amazon reviews, but I know the book isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and there’s been some awesome awesome novels published in 2015. *goes back to read that self-deprecating piece again and quickly moves on*
  • Novella: Nothing this year, but wait till you see the one Bud Sparhawk and I have coming up in Abyss & Apex!
  • Novelette: Also nothing this year.
  • Short story: As always, plenty of stuff here. The pieces that I am proudest of are Primaflora’s Journey, which appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, “The Subtler Art”, which appeared in Blackguards: Tales of Assassin,s Mercenaries, and Rogues, edited by J.M. Martin, and “Marvelous Contrivances of the Heart,” which appeared in Fiction River: Recycled Pulp, edited by John Helfers. I am glad to send a copy of the latter two to any requester.

Please feel free to comment and include a link to your own eligibility post. In this coming week, I’ll also be posting a list of my favorites from 2015, but there are so many it may take a while, plus I’m still reading a few.

Peace out,

Cat

P.S. Here are some additional eligibility posts. I’ll add more as I get them. Please note that A.C. Wise has a great post here where she’s collecting these as well as book recommendation posts.

John Joseph Adams
Mike Allen
Robin Wayne Bailey
Nicolette Barischoff
Helena Bell
Brooke Bolander
A.C. Buchanan
Beth Cato
Nino Cipri
Gwendolyn Clare
Clarkesworld
Fred Coppersmith
A.M.Dellamonica
Seth Dickinson
Andy Dudak
Scott Edelman
FantasyLiterature.com
A.J. Fitzwater
Sam Fleming
T. Frohock
Nin Harris
Maria Dahvana Headley
Kate Heartfield
Jim C. Hines
M.C.A. Hogarth
Annalee Flower Horne
Alexis A. Hunter
José Pablo Iriarte
Heather Rose Jones
Jason Kimble
Mur Lafferty
Rose Lemberg
Natalie Luhrs
J.M. McDermott
Seanan McGuire
Kris Millering
Lia Swope Mitchell
Sunny Moraine
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Linda Nagata
Mari Ness
Daniel José Older
Carrie Patel
Sunil Patel
Laura Pearlman
Andrea Phillips
Sarah Pinsker
Adam Rakunas
Jessica Reisman
Kelly Robson
Sean R. Robinson
Merc Rustad
SF Signal
Shimmer
Skiffy and Fanty podcast
David Steffen
Penny Stirling
Bogi Takacs
Shveta Thakrar
E. Catherine Tobler
Tor.com
Uncanny Magazine
Unlikely Story
Ursula Vernon
Marlee Jane Ward
M. Darusha Wehm
Martha Wells
Fran Wilde
A.C. Wise
Alyssa Wong
Isabel Yap
Caroline M. Yoachim

...

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