You Should Read This: Some Recent Reading

Last year I provided a list of five gifts for the speculative fiction writer on your list. Here’s another installment of that. Sure, you can go for the old standbys: notebooks, pens, a gift certificate so they can buy books, t-shirts with amusing sayings and, depending on the writer, coffee or chocolate. But if you want to go a little further…well, here you go.

1. I know I pushed Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook last year, but I’m going to push it again, because it’s just such a cool book and Jeremy Zerfoss’s illustrations are so wacky, wildly beautiful, and wonderful. There aren’t that many books on writing I’d be willing to go back to over and over again, but this is one.
2. A SFWA membership if they’re eligible, a subscription to Locus Magazine if they’re not. For me, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have been a source of professional networking, career advice, and some great friends. If you go to Worldcon, the SFWA suite has always been a welcome place to hang, nosh a little, and talk to some of the greats. In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently the organization’s Vice President, and I’m looking forward to great things next year, which is SFWA’s 50th. If they’re still aspiring, encourage them with a subscription to the F&SF trade journal, Locus Magazine
3. An anthology (particularly if they write short fiction). One of my favorites from this year was edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin, Dangerous Women. If you’re interested in something that I’ve got a story in, the anthologies I appeared in this year were By Faerie Light, Fiction River: Past Crime, Shattered Shields, Stamps, Tramps, and Vamps, and Unidentified Funny Objects 3.
4. Something to fiddle with. A puzzle, a worry stone, a Lego minifig. Writers are often superstitious creatures and we like our little totems, whether they’re pop culture icons or natural objects.
5. A ticket somewhere. Get your writer out of the house and somewhere that will provide new ideas. Doing it on the cheap? Plan a day trip with a picnic basket? More extravagant? Well, there’s plenty of choices there, from riding the Orient Express to cruising the world. Tailor your destination to the recipient.

#sfwapro

Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith, is subtle and beautiful and a terrific piece of speculative fiction. An anthropologist, Marghe Taishan, arrives on the planet GP, there to test a vaccine against the deadly virus that has killed all but a few of the original colonists. She finds that the survivors, all women, have developed the ability to give birth without men.

The book won both a Lambda and Tiptree Award, and it’s easy to see why. A dynamite protagonist interacting with intriguing and beautifully three-dimensional characters. The world is fabulously drawn, evocative, and both the anthropological and physical science are accurate and carefully thought out.

Ammonite was Griffith’s debut novel. I’d also recommend her most recent, the absolutely amazing Hild, a retelling of the life of historical figure, Saint Hild of Whitby. Come to think of it, nothing I’ve read by her has been shabby, including Slow River, a near-future thriller that is also beautifully told and engaging.

I had the luck to sit in on a class Griffith taught for Clarion West a couple of years ago. She is a consummate, careful wordsmith. The word “luminous” keeps appearing in reviews of her work, and that’s because it’s so beautifully crafted that it seems to glow from within.

The first three paragraphs of a piece set up so much. Here’s the first three of Ammonite, to give you a taste:

Marghe’s suit was still open at neck and wrist, and the helmet rested in the crook of her left arm. An ID flash was sealed to her should” “Marguerite Angelica Taishan, SEC.” The suit was wrinkled and smelled of just-unrolled plastic, and she felt heavy and awkward, even in the two-thirds gravity of orbital station Estrade.

She stood by the airlock at the inside end of A Section. THe door was already open. Waiting. She rested the fingertips of her right hand on the smooth ceramic of the raised hatch frame; it was cool, shocking after two days of the close human heat of A Section.

The sill of the airlock reached her knees; easy enough to step over. No great barrier. The lock chamber itself was two strides across. THe dar door was still closed, sealed to another sill, like this one. Four steps from here to B Section. Four steps. She had recontracted with SEC, endured six months of retraining on Earth, traveled eighteen months aboard the Terragin, and spent the last two days on the Estrade bumping elbows with the three-member crew, all to take those four steps.

#sfwapro