A Couple New Pyr Covers

Please not some of the covers below are probably not completely final. Info has slowly been leaking out about Pyr's Fall and Winter releases and so far it is looking pretty strong, but there is one debut and a sequel that definitely caught my eye.

Blackdog by K. V. Johansen, which I believe is her debut adult novel as she has published many YA titles over the last few years. The cover is certainly eye catching and might be by Raymond Swanland and has a very high action quality about it. Blackdog does have some relation to Johansen's other work as it is placed a few hundred years later in the world of her short "The Storyteller," with one character in common.  No official synopsis has been released, but the author had a bit about the book on her blog a few months back:

This is a novel set in the same world as “The Storyteller”, but a couple of centuries later. (I love having immortal characters who don’t tie one down to a single time.) Like “The Storyteller”, it’s someone else’s story, which Moth wanders into, in this case, a man possessed by an exiled lake-goddess’s guardian dog-spirit. There’s a wizard-warlord who has conquered her land and wants to possess her, and this poor caravan-guard, our hero, who against his will is forced to assume the role of her guardian — and father, as the goddess is incarnate as a child at the time of the conquest. If you’ve read “The Storyteller”, you know that in Moth’s world, gods and goddesses are bound to their place, their particular hill or water, so an exiled goddesses ought to be an impossibility. Lots of mystery, battles, a bit of romance, Moth and Mikki travelling the desert (poor Mikki — all that fur) and more camels, I can safely say, than the average fantasy novel.

There is even a rough map for this world available for you lovers of cartography.   Blackdog is one title I'll definitely be keeping an eye on as Lou at Pyr often has very similar tastes to my own. It also seems that there will be at least one other novel in this world, but the stories sound thus far to be standalone as they'll continue to be pushed forward in the future.  Blackdog should be out this September.

Boneyards is the third Diving book from Kristine Kathryn Rusch.  This one can't come out soon enough as I recently finished the second Diving book City of Ruins (out in a few weeks) and it left off on something of a cliffhanger. The art looks to be done by series regular Dave Seeley.  We should see Boneyards in January so the wait is not too long between books.

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REVIEW | Is Anybody Out There? ed. by Nick Givers & Marty Halpern

Theme anthologies can go one of two ways. Either they work really well or they end up feeling like the writers had to stretch themselves too much to create a story that worked for the theme. Is Anybody Out There? focused on the Fermi Paradoxes is decidedly in the camp of the former with a couple virtuosos in the short game truly standing out and a few others not working for me as they seemed a bit disorienting.

Paul McAuley starts things off well with an introduction for those not in the know about the Fermi Paradox with a grand overview and a bit of history and known theories. The paradox boils down to "Where are they?" The Universe is so big and that old if there is intelligent life out there why haven't they found us or we found them yet? Quite an intriguing idea for writers to sink their teeth into. This is ground that has been trod on before, but certainly never with such a diverse covering of new, established, and often fringe theories.

Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn, “Report From the Field” A very quirky tale done in field report style from an alien determining if Earth is ready for inclusion in Galactic Community.

This story had me chortling left and right like few other writer can do and the only funny story in the bunch. In many ways humor is more difficult to relay in written form than something dramatic or action oriented. Resnick and Robyn excel at the funny asides as well as the satirical while this particular alien sees us at an skewed angle from viewing our television, movies, and documentaries trying to make sense of what they selected. There are perfect examples of humanity's absurd and violent side, which make me question our place in the cosmos and the fact that if there is life out there we'd probably just screw up first contact.

Jay Lake's “Permanent Fatal Errors” takes us on a space voyage with a crew of altered human immortals who are guinea pigs for longer interstellar missions. Only who among the crew actually wants to achieve the objectives of this mission?

Told from the point of view of the lowest member of the crew who sees himself as a baby next to the rest of the very old and intelligent crew as he tries to make his way through their murky machinations. An astrological anomaly confounds the crew and a conspiracy is afoot, but just who is doing what? Lake certainly shows his suspenseful flair as there is something out there. And it wants to be found. The story definitely felt unfinished though, but some nice turns more than kept my attention.

David Langford's “Graffiti in the Library of Babel” is a most unusual first contact story.  Someone or something has been marking up an important world database with odd notations. What do they want?

An intelligence has downloaded our history and science and are trying to communicate with us through it. This reminded me a lot of a Robert J. Sawyer story in the making with some very nice dialogue. I couldn't connect with any character though, but the situation grabbed me from the first page as the character tries to write back somehow.

In Kristine Kathryn Rusch's “The Dark Man” a shadow shaped like a man shows up every decade or so on the steps of a very old Cathedral in Italy.

Rusch's background as a mystery writer shines through this tale told in a very different tact than the rest as an investigative reporter takes on paranormal events to find out the truth behind them, but she has finally found a case she can't explain away as a hoax. Rusch takes the idea of a classic conspiracy and twists it into Sci-Fi spectacularly. This was my second favorite story of the bunch.

Pat Cadigan, “The Taste of Night” delves into the mental contact aspects of alien communication with people supposedly suffering mental illness and one of my favorite disorders synesthesia. If you don't know what synesthesia is than go read the wiki as I'd love to see more stories working it in.

Synesthesia causes the senses to get crossed and people associate colors with certain numbers, words, or even days of the week. What if people who had this ability were able to be contacted by aliens? Would we believe them or just call them mad? A really well done story all around. Wonderful psychology angle questions the sanity of people and how we could be missing something right in front of us.

Ian Watson's “A Waterfall of Lights” again takes the tact of alien contact through our minds, but gives it a good twist.

If there are aliens they could have died out millions of years ago, but what if they left a legacy behind that was still out there? What would they look like? A surprisingly good story from a writer new to me despite having been around for decades. The story is very similar to the work Robert Charles Wilson has been doing with his Spin books, which is probably why I like it so much.  The ending was left hanging quite a bit, but watch out for those eyes.

James Morrow, “The Vampires of Paradox” put us in present times with a religious order that is keeping a terrible event at bay by contemplating logic paradoxes along the lines of "if a tree falls in the woods with no one around does it make a sound?" The paradoxes mentioned are further reaching though and even more mind-bending.

No one does philosophical conundrums as well as Morrow and his stripes are still more than up to the task but ends up feeling a bit of heavy handed at times.  Still it fits the given setting and style. Morrow is still a master of short fiction and this was by far the strongest story of the lot and was rightly chosen to end the anthology. The inclusion of this story along makes the book worth picking up. This could also be seen as the best paradox lecture you've ever attended. I could definitely see it being referenced in some logic classes.

Is Anybody Out There? is great cross section of Fermi Paradox ideas packed with wonder. Wonders of science. Of confounding mysteries. Of what could be's. Of what should be that is well worth dipping into. A few stories left me indifferent or just plain lost, but the Morrow, Rusch, and Watson's stories more than make this volume worth grabbing. Visit Marty Halpern's blog More Red Ink for serializations of a few short stories from Is Anybody Out There? including Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Sheila Finch, and Jay Lake.

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What is the Weirdest Book You've Ever Read?

Every so often a book comes along that leaves you shaking your head. Whether that shaking is a good or bad thing can often be very subjective as well. In some ways aren't the books that confound you the very books that stay with you because they provoke much thought even long after you've finished? Well, I am always curious about these books, which is why I asked more than a dozen authors: What is the weirdest book you've ever read? The earliest response by Lavie Tidhar is already up, but seeing all the different takes gives some wonderful perspective of what people consider weird.

The last entry is my own as Gail Carriger politely asked whether I was going to participate.  Me thinks she was merely goading me into taking a bit of my own medicine, but I laud her for it.  Please feel free to chime in with your own weirdest read in the comments.

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Mark Teppo

In many ways, I prefer weird, but at the same time, there are levels of weird. Jeff Vandermeer's Finch is weird, but it's a comprehensible weird. William Burroughs gets really weird, but you sign on for that ride when you open one of his books, and part of the ride is the alien landscape. The truly weird are books that I realize I don't have the right cipher keys to completely decode. Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books fall into this category. I understand the words on the page, but I'm very conscious that I'm not fully grokking the sub-text. You have to keep coming back to these sorts of books because they test your growth as a reader and as a thinker. It's only been in the last year that I feel that I've finally unlocked most of the secrets in Gene Wolfe's Books of the New Sun and Philip K. Dick's Valis.

These are the sorts of things that are constantly fascinating to me: how a writer can bury story in their language, how much meaning can be imparted by a single word choice, how they rely on the knowledge of the reader to supply context and meaning. These books stop being story--a defined tale with a beginning, middle, and end that communicates a linear progression of events that lead to a authorial summation of human nature--and become a clandestine transmission--a secret message passed between two people that is unique to their connection. What is written and what is read are never the same thing, really.

Mark Teppo is author of the Codex of Souls series which includes Lightbreaker and the recently released Heartland both published by Night Shade Books.

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Blake Charlton

Okay, so, so far the strangest book I've ever read I'm actually reading right now. It's titled Kill as Few Patients as Possible: and Fifty-Six Other Essays on How to be the World's Best Doctor by Oscar London.

It's a bit dated, creative-nonfiction humor. Sometimes funny, sometimes not. Never laugh-out-loud funny. But it is often insightful--albeit sometimes in an ironic or roundabout way--regarding the medical life (so far as I know as a med student). But what's odd about it is how earnest it is. One gets a sense of how much the author cares about and loves medicine. Most other medical humor I've encountered (many will be familiar with the laugh-out-loud House of God by Samuel Shem) is cynical and ultimately corrosive, using medicine's foibles to tear medicine into pieces. Reading London, however, is both frightening and encouraging.

I'm presently writing a novel with a physician protag, and I'm hoping to make her cynical, witty, and yet sympathetic (i.e. _not_ House MD). Add on to that the fact that in a few years I'll enter the hospital as a clinical med student, and try to get a hold on when and how to use humor appropriately. So reading this book feels a bit like my present is smashing up against a possible future in a disconcerting but at least interesting way.

Currently, Blake Charlton is writing fantasy novels, science fiction short stories, and academic essays on medical education and biomedical ethics. His debut Spellwright is due to be published in March by Tor. His short story Endosymbiont is featured in the anthology Seeds of Change.

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Lev Grossman

I initially said The Falls, by Peter Greenaway, but I'm reneging. It is, undoubtedly, a strange book, but I think some of the strangeness comes from its connection to the film of the same name. (Which I haven't seen.) Seems like cheating.

So instead I'm going to go hearken back to a time when I actually almost knew French well enough to read novels in it, at which time I read Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style. It's about a guy who sees another man, a stranger with a long neck, get into a disagreement with somebody else on a bus. Later that day he sees the same man in a railroad station. The man is explaining to a friend that he should get a button put on his overcoat.

That's it for action. It takes about two pages. For the rest of the book Queneau goes on to retell the same pointless story 99 times, in 99 different literary styles. He tells it from all points of view, in all tenses and moods. He tells it as a sonnet, as a word game, as a telegram, in anagrams, in different dialects, as a blurb for a novel, without using the letter 'e,' and on and on and on.

It's also impossible to say, when you're done, whether or not you enjoyed it, or what it meant, or if it meant anything. But it is unquestionably weird.

Lev Grossman is the New York Times best-selling author of The Magicians and Codex.  He is hard at work on the sequel to The Magicians currently titled The Magician King.  Grossman is senior book reviewer for Time and also the creator of the Nerd World blog.

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Ekaterina Sedia

Boy, that's a tough one. I have to say, for me it's a toss up between Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes, and Michael Cisco's The Traitor. Both are difficult to describe, but manage to create a very profound sense of surreal displacement within one's own skin -- these two books permanently tilt your point of view some imperceptible degrees, and you feel like you have a new set of eyes to look at the world with. This is not a pleasant feeling, necessarily, but for me these two books were terribly effective. They were so strange that they could not exist in the world as I perceived it, and thus the world needed to be expanded to accommodate them.

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Dark Wisdom, and Clarkesworld, as well as Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. She is also an award-winning editor of Paper Cities anthology, with Running with the Pack forthcoming.

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Lou Anders

The weirdest book I ever read was Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, his debut novel, published in 1984 and written without the middle initial. Oddly, it's the only Banks I've ever read, but it made a huge impression on me. It's impossible to talk about without spoiling, but its a deeply disturbing novel with a most unusual, and most unreliable, narrator/protagonist. I think if I didn't work in SF&F, I'd be a Chuck Palahniuk kind of reader, and Banks was in that space before there was a space. But since I do work in SF&F, I'll take a moment to shameless plug James Enge's Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way. As books that evolve directly out of the sword & sorcery stories of the Weird Tales tradition, these would be the "Weirdest" books we publish!

Lou Anders is the three-time Hugo nominated editor of Pyr Books, as well as the editor of 9 critically-acclaimed anthologies. He has been nominated for the PKD and WFC awards, and won the Chesley Award for Best Art Director.

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Sam Sykes

Probably the weirdest book I've ever read was Talyn by Holly Lisle. It had a very cool setting (two armies at war) with a very neat premise (fought entirely through magic). Somewhere along the line, though, the story began a very dramatic change that I will describe through my reactions in parentheses: it began as a war story (cool), a war story with MAGIC (COOL), a sudden peace breaks out (oh), a brief view of soldiers trying to cope without the war that gave them identity (very cool), a romance story (uh), a bondage fetish story (wait), a betrayal by a bondage fetishist mind controlling wizard (I said wait!), and then the last hundred pages were basically any excuse to do a strange sex scene at all points. By the time I read a character say (paraphrased): "Shit, she's (the main heroine) in shock! Get her naked! GET HER NAKED RIGHT NOW!" this book had basically secured the top list in my most unforgettable reads. It wasn't so much the weird sex fetishes that came out, but rather how abruptly they came out. Basically, it was like going to a dinner theater to watch a magician, only instead of seeing the magician pull a rabbit out of his hat, my waitress hopped up on my table, hiked up her skirt and peed on my steak. I was surprised, but not necessarily in a good way.

I also keep a running list of weird sexual phrases from books I've read. Currently topping that list is the phrase "his clockwork balls" from Andy Remic's Kell's Legend, with "the whorl of his anus" and "the root of his cock" from Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold coming in second and third, respectively.

Sam Sykes is the author of Tome of the Undergates, published in the UK by Gollancz in April of this year. He once wrestled an African White Rhino to the ground, can defeat nine out of ten Prime Ministers and is largely suspected to be the chief culprit behind reality television.

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Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I have a lot of contenders for the weirdest book I ever read. I thought of including some truly strange books, including things I’d read in galleys that were nearly unreadable, but then decided that wouldn’t be fair. Then I decided to define “weird” my way, which is “I can’t believe someone published this” primarily because the book breaks a bunch of rules. The problem is that most of the books that I define as weird in that way have become classics or familiar to us now, but they were so revolutionary in their time that people talked about them. I’m thinking in particular of Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries, which is all diary entries, homework assignments, and e-mails, and yet manages to have a great voice and a riveting style. (Now everyone is doing this.) By that definition, though, the weirdest book I can remember reading is Flowers in the Storm by Laura Kinsale. It’s an historical romance novel, so our handsome hero and our beautiful heroine should suffer the slings and arrows of love, separating and getting together again, with a happily ever after. But...her hero, while handsome and rich, has just suffered a stroke. In Regency England. While alone. So everyone thinks he went crazy—and he’s put into Bedlam, the insane asylum, where our heroine, a Quaker, helps her father care for the demented. Kinsale portrays the insane asylum in a historically accurate way—in other words, it’s a horrible place—and the romance continues from there, as our hero slowly recovers from the stroke, but doesn’t really recover the power of speech. It goes from there. It’s now considered a romance classic, but when it was published, it was revolutionary. (I really love this book—and recommend Kinsale to everyone who likes to read. She did some paranormal stuff before it became popular too, for you who like fantasy with your romance.)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written some weird books in her time as well, including a romance (as Kristine Grayson) whose hero is a garden gnome, kinda. (Completely Smitten) Her current novel is Diving into the Wreck, which is science fiction adventure, and was published by Pyr. Her next book is a collection of her award-winning short stories, called Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories to be published in the spring from Golden Gryphon. An even weirder Grayson novel, The Charming Way, in which Prince Charming (one of them, anyway) falls in love with the Evil Stepmother, will be published in Spring of 2011.

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Gail Carriger

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is my first pick. It wasn't until I read this book that I realized how utterly acid-trip bizarre a story could be and get away with it, especially if it also happened to be side-achingly funny. Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is right there in the same arena.

Ms. Gail Carriger began writing in order to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She is fond of teeny tiny hats and tropical fruit. She is the author of the Parasol Protectorate series, Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless.

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Jeffrey Thomas

I've read a lot of bizarre books, perhaps more bizarre than my choice, but I also have to consider literary merit...so the book that comes to mind is the novel The Other Side of the Mountain by Michael Bernanos. Bernanos was the son of the well known French author, George Bernanos, and if I recall correctly he was a troubled soul who died young. My aunt gave me this novel when I was a teenager, and its haunting imagery and desolate atmosphere have remained with me over the decades. The story itself is simple: a merchant vessel becomes becalmed at sea, and then wrecked, the only survivors being the young protagonist and an older cook. They reach an eerie island, where the trees all bow down to the ground at night, and where the statues (or are they statues?) of human beings can be found on the slopes of the island's ominous central mountain. Did the characters survive the wreck after all, or are they actually in Hell? Their efforts to survive are both depressing in their futility, and inspiring, in that the characters never cease to struggle against their circumstances, and their friendship sustains them where nothing else can. The story can be seen as a descent into madness (the author's?), and its hellish feel may have been inspired in part by the fact that Bernanos' father was a devout Catholic. The novel was republished a few years ago by Cherokee Publishing Company; it's a short read and I encourage readers of horror, dark fantasy, and the surreal to check it out.

Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Blue War, Deadstock, Punktown, Letters from Hades, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers, and the forthcoming The Fall of Hades. He lives in Massachusetts.

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Alex Bledsoe

The strangest book I've run across is a slender little volume called Dragons: The Modern Infestation, by Pamela Wharton Blanpied, first published in 1980.  I discovered it in one of those remainder stores that pop up every so often in otherwise abandoned shopping centers. This one was in Florence, Alabama, in the late 80s. They had two big stacks of the book, probably fifty copies in all. I picked it up because the title seemed intriguing, and when I flipped through it, it perplexed me even more. It seemed to be a straight non-fiction book, complete with diagrams, a bibliography, and photographs detailing the current efforts to understand dragons, real fire-breathing dragons, throughout the world. Yet even with helpful arrows indicating where the dragons were supposed to be in the photos, I couldn't see them. Or could I? Because if you stare at anything long enough, you start to see what you're looking for....

It wasn't until the advent of the internet a decade later that I finally learned the book was intended as a parody of scholarly works poking fun at their seriousness by applying it to a ridiculous topic like dragons. And I guess in a sense the joke was on me, because even after reading the book and realizing it couldn't be legitimate (one dragon converses, Pern-like, with a researcher) I still didn't understand the point.

When I began researching dragons for my novel Burn Me Deadly, I tried unsuccessfully to track down Ms. Blanpied. She is evidently as elusive as the beasts in her book, if she even truly exists (if you read this, Ms. Blanpied, I'd still love to talk to you). But whoever she is, wherever she is, I hope she finally got her laugh.

Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He has been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. I now live in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls. The author of the Eddie LaCrosse high fantasy/hardboiled mysteries (The Sword-Edged Blonde, Burn Me Deadly and the forthcoming Dark Jenny), two novels about vampires in 1975 Memphis (Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood) and the first Tufa novel, The Hum and the Shiver, due in 2011.

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Victor Gischler

In the broadest sense of the word "weird" I shall pick Joe Meno's wonderful The Boy Detective Fails. I think there are many books that are much, much weirder, but Meno's book was an odd, strange little fairy tale that I enjoyed so much it still stays with me. What struck me as most "weird" was less the story itself and more the way I enjoyed the book. Usually I want to be driven through a story. I want the pace to keep me flipping pages. But I found myself sort of gently floating through The Boy Detective Fails as this gentle, whimsical story unfolded.

Victor Gischler is the author of author of 4 hard-boiled crime novels. including his debut novel Gun Monkeys which was nominated for the Edgar Award, and his novel Shotgun Opera was an Anthony Award finalist. His fifth novel Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse and most recent novel Vampire A-Go-Go actually have nothing to do with one another. He is also hard at work on many Deadpool comics for Marvel.

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Jesse Bullington

Upon first being asked my mind started turning to William S. Burroughs and other experimental authors that seemed way out on the outer fringes, but upon reflection I think that one book that really struck me as intrinsically weird when I first read it was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Unlike Naked Lunch, which is a weird book full of weird stuff, sure, Invisible Cities actually caught me off guard as a teenager--it wasn't that crazy stuff happened or the style was unusual, it was that the entire book as a whole seemed alien to me. The book consists of Marco Polo describing cities he has supposedly encountered to Kublai Khan but the novel is so much more than that--in addition to being a superficially fun read it's also an intricate puzzle, an incredibly nuanced work passed off as a casual series of descriptions. While not as well known as Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (the single best piece of post modern fiction ever written) or The Baron in the Trees (a comparatively straight-forward fable), Invisible Cities remains a masterpiece, and quite possibly the weirdest book I've ever read--it was certainly the weirdest I'd ever read at the time, and don't know of any book that has matched it since.

Jesse Bullington is the author of the novel The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, as well as numerous articles and pieces of short fiction.  He is currently at work on his second novel The Enterprise of Death.

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Michael, The Mad Hatter

For me it would have to be The Shape We're In by Jonathan Letham. It is a bit of a cheat as I asked everyone else to stick to novels, and The Shape We're In is a novelette at best.  Yet, it is the story that had me scratching my head days after finishing.  Told from the point of view of an alcoholic garbage man charged with moving trash from one section of a giant immobile vessel shape of sorts to another it is cynical yet hilarious at the same time. In search of his missing son the garbage man ventures into far off sections of the shape and meets hordes of odd cultures that have evolved there. I hesitate to say more as there is a big reveal that is worth uncovering on your own.

Michael, The Mad Hatter is an elusive hat and book collector spending far too much money and time on both.  He is secretly planning to open the world's first Haberdashery and Book Emporium. He also runs a little book review blog of some sort.

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Table of Contents for Is There Anybody Out There? Edited by Givers & Halpern

One of my reading goals of 2010 is to get to more short fiction.  Part of that will surely be accomplished with Is There Anybody Out There?, which I mentioned in my 2010 anthology round-up.  I was tipped off to the TOC release from the always helpful Marty Halpern.  As soon as I saw the list I was shocked by the inclusion of James Morrow. That was all I needed to make sure to pick-up a copy. As if I needed another reason.  It is quite a line-up of wonderful short story writers such as Jay Lake, Paul Di Filippo, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch all checking in on the idea of why if there are aliens haven't we heard from them already?

Paul McAuley, “Introduction: Here Comes Everyone”
Michael Arsenault, “Residue”
Pat Cadigan, “The Taste of Night”
Paul Di Filippo, “Galaxy of Mirrors”
Sheila Finch, “Where Two or Three”
Matthew Hughes, “Timmy, Come Home”
Alex Irvine, “The Word He Was Looking for Was Hello”
Jay Lake, “Permanent Fatal Errors”
David Langford, “Graffiti in the Library of Babel”
Yves Meynard, “Good News from Antares”
James Morrow, “The Vampires of Paradox”
Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn, “Report From the Field”
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “The Dark Man”
Felicity Shoulders & Leslie What, “Rare Earth”
Ray Vukcevich, “One Big Monkey”
Ian Watson, “A Waterfall of Lights”

Halpern has done a long post about the anthology including descriptions of each story that is worth checking out.


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INTERVIEW | Kristine Kathryn Rusch author of Diving Into the Wreck

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Diving Into the Wreck (review) was recently release by Pyr and is easily one of the best Sci-Fi reads of this year. Kristine has won two Hugos (once for Edtior and once as an Author) and a John W. Campbell Award in addition to her many other accomplishments. She is author of the popular Retrieval Artist series, which is now on its seventh volume as well as being an author of a veritable who's who of Sci-Fi tie-in novels for such franchises as Star Trek: Classic, ST: TNG, DS9 as well as the novelization of the first X-Men movie.  Even with all of she has done Kristine was a new author to me that I had to learn a bit more about. For all the writers out there be sure to check out her Freelance's Survival Guide, which has all kinds of useful tips.

MH: Hi, Kristine.  Thanks for stopping by Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf.

KKR: Thanks for asking me!

MH: You’ve worn many hats in publishing from author of your own novels to author of shared world universes such as Star Trek and from Editorship of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy to Publisher of Pulphouse. What was the toughest job?

KKR: Editing in general. I’m good at it, but I don’t enjoy most of the work. I love finding new authors and telling the world about them, and I love putting a magazine together, but the business aspects—coordinating between publisher and writer, being in the middle, does not suit my personality at all. I am not a mediator. I’m an iconoclast through and through, so making nice all the time doesn’t really work for me.

MH: For those who haven’t read Diving Into the Wreck, what can you tell perspective readers to whet their appetites?

KKR: If you like space opera, you’ll like Diving. If you don’t know what space opera is, but you like thrilling adventure fiction, then this is your book. I deliberately wrote sense of wonder science fiction, and the readers tell me I achieved it.

MH: Diving Into the Wreck originated from a couple of novellas published in Asimov’s. Did you always have it in mind to turn it into a longer story or did the episodic feel just develop?

KKR: My brain is rebellious too. It never tells me what’s going on. I thought Diving was a stand-alone novella. Then I wrote Room of Lost Souls. It wasn’t working until I put Boss in it. But it wasn’t until I finished that novella that I realized this was all of a piece and it was a novel. This, by the way, is often how I write. Out of order and in pieces. Then I have to put the full story together like a jigsaw puzzle. I actually sat on the floor with pieces of my first novel and put them in different order, trying to figure out what way it made sense. I don’t have to do that any more, but mentally the process is the same.

MH: You’ve sold another Diving novella to Asimov’s and although you get closure on a lot it is clear Boss has more to do. Will there be another book that follows Boss’s exploits past Diving Into the Wreck?

KKR: Yes, there’ll be another book. I hope it’ll be with Pyr. They’ve been very clear that sales will determine whether or not the series continues. So buy the book quickly, folks! And of course, there will be short stories and novellas. It’s too big a universe. I’ll probably be writing stories in the “Diving” world forever.

MH: The cover art for Diving Into the Wreck certainly harkens back to the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Were you happy with the design and do you feel the woman depicted fits “Boss”? She looks a little like Kate from Lost to me, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

KKR: I love the cover. Dave Seeley did the art, and I was lucky enough to see some of the sketches as he went along. He did a wonderful job. This is the first sf cover I’ve ever had that would make me buy the book…if I didn’t know the author, of course. (vbg)

MH: In an article a few months back I lamented my dearth of Science Fiction reading and the fact I felt it has lost its specialness over the years due to fact so much technology has come to fruition. Do you think the mystery is going out of Sci-Fi as we advance technologically?

KKR: No, not at all. Recently I read that we’re all living in someone else’s future. When JFK became president, all that anti-Catholic stuff that stopped the careers of so many politicians went away. We don’t even think of it any more. When I worry that tech is going to ruin SF, I only have to think of my grandmother, who also lived an sf life. She was born in the 1890s and died in the 1990s. She could remember life without toasters(!)

I wrote essays about why sf lost its specialness, most recently in my Internet Review of Science Fiction columns (here)  and also in a column for Asimov’s called Barbarian Confessions. There’s more because I think sf wrapped itself into a tight bubble and stopped writing sensawonder stuff. If we go back to that, sf will grow again. So in some ways, “Diving” is me putting my money where my mouth is.

MH: You definitely achieved sensawonder with Diving.  You’ve been known to change and mix genres over your career covering everything from hard Sci-Fi, Mystery, Romance and even a bit in the non-fiction realm. Are you more inclined to challenge yourself with variety? What genre is your favorite area to work in?

KKR: I didn’t know what a genre was until college and my buddy Kevin J. Anderson enlightened me. (We met in a college creative writing class.) I thought everyone went to the bookstore and grabbed whatever looked interesting. I didn’t know that people went to sections. I didn’t. I still read that way, and so I write that way. If I’m writing something dark, then I read something light. If I’m writing sf, I read mystery. I’m a big fan of variety.

MH: Who are some under appreciated authors that may be flying under the radar of my readers and I that we have to check out?

KKR: Oh, gee. There are so many…I do a recommended reading list on my blog. Check that out because I’m always finding someone new in all of my genres. . Also, read the magazines and the short story collections. That’s where the new writers show up first—and you can discover them first. Right now, Asimov’s is going great guns and so is Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. And I read all of the Year’s Best volumes, so that I can catch what I missed. I know you wanted particular authors, but there are so many that it’s easier to point to venues.

MH: I think you just sold me on getting an Asimov's subscription for the first time in years.  If you fell down the rabbit hole what are the 2 books you’d want to have with you?

KKR: You’d limit me to 2? Just 2? Ack! (This is the only thing that scares me about Stargate Universe. They hurried onto the ancient ship—and they left their reading material behind! I’d die.) Two, huh? Okay. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I reread them every two years or so, so I guess I wouldn’t get tired of them. [sigh]

MH: In keeping with the name of this blog what’s your favorite hat?

KKR: My Cubs baseball cap. But I adore all hats, and wear them when I can.

MH: What are 2 things about you most people don’t know? Do you have a pet monkey you keep sequestered in the backyard?

KKR: I’m terribly shy. (No one believes that, but it’s true.) And my cats all have many, many names because their nicknames beget nicknames. People think we have more cats than we do because each cat has at least 5 names.

MH: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

KKR: I think we’re good. Thanks!


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REVIEW | Diving Into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Pyr)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has been writing under various names in multiple genres gaining accolades wherever she has ventured. Rusch was also an editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for a number of years winning a Hugo for her work there. Diving Into the Wreck is my first try of her work, but will surely be only the start to many others.

Diving Into the Wreck is like something out of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi as it feels like a timeless tale in the far future, which is an amazing irresistible and speedy read.  The book is broken into 3 interlocking stories that would have acted well on their own in novella form, but together form a rich universe and history.  It is a very personal book that ends up being quite a bit more than you expect.  The stories get bigger and bigger with the telling until you reach a somewhat intense culmination. 

Diving is very reminiscent of Pohl's Gateway or possible placed in something close to the Babylon 5 universe.  The stories are told from Boss's view in an almost journal like fashion.  She is not some hero archetype, but a loner who only has human interactions when she deems it necessarily and operates everything she does in a business-like fashion.  At first this can make her seem cold, but she has a lot more layers that come through.  Boss makes her living traveling through space looking for wrecked space ships, which she hopes can be plundered for treasure, sold, salvaged, or possibly toured with inexperienced divers out for a thrill.  Think of her job as an expert scuba diver, but only in space and with a lot more risk. 

Diving Into the Wreck is easy on the science for those who don't like amazing long scientific explanations to go along with the story.  But Rusch's science is well enough explained to suit the story's purpose. It is her universe's history and character building that you'll be drawn to.  The crux of the story surrounds Boss's discovery of mysterious ancient vessel that may have lost technology that could change everything in her sector of the universe.  She mounts an expedition of sorts into the vessel with a trusted group of divers and odd things happen.  From there we also encounter an eerie space station where people have been disappearing for years.

Perfectly paced and immensely readable Diving Into the Wreck will satisfy even the most jaded of Sci-Fi reader. If I had any complaints it would only be that it was over too soon and left me for wanting more out of Boss and her cadre of divers.  I give Diving Into the Wreck 8 out of 10 Hats.  I plan on reading more Rusch and have already ordered a copy of The Disappeared, which is book one in The Retrieval Artist Series a Mystery Sci-Fi series. Unfortunately, The Disappeared is out of print, but used copies are easily had. Maybe an omnibus is needed of the first 2 or 3 in the series to indoctrinate new readers as she only recently released the sixth volume in the series.  Rusch also mentioned on her blog another Diving Universe book is possible.  I sure hope it happens as there is at least one more major mission waiting for Boss.

Book Link: US | Canada | Europe 

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The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
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***Review copy provided by Pyr