It's rapidly approaching the end of 2009 and sadly my reading pile has only gotten larger. Looking over the books that I'm still considering fitting into my schedule, the following titles jumped out at me.

• Are You There and Other Stories / Harbinger - Jack Skillingstead
• Makers - Cory Doctorow
• Eclipse 3: New Science Fiction and Fantasy - Jonathan Strahan
• The Red Tree - Caitlin R. Kiernan
• Leviathan - Scott Westerfeld
• Finch - Jeff Vandermeer
• The Alchemy of Stone - Ekaterina Sedia
• Darker Angels (The Black Sun's Daughter, Book 2) - M.L.N. Hanover
• Ship Breaker - Paolo Bacigalupi
• Dead Men's Boots (Felix Castor) - Mike Carey
• Lovecraft Unbound - Ellen Datlow
• Old Man's War - John Scalzi

What books do I still need to read this year? Select as many as you think. Also, feel free to suggest any other "must-read" books that I left off my list in the comments.

I guarantee I'll read the at least the top vote getter and I'll try to get to the other top books as well.

I read Paul McAuley's first book, The Quiet War a month or two back. It didn't exactly leave me excited to pick up the next installment but it's hard to argue with the cover that Lou Anders posted over at Pyr. Wow.

I thought the first cover was great but this cover is a step above even that strong piece of art.

Lou also blurbed the novel:

The Quiet War is over. The city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have fallen to the Three Powers Alliance of Greater Brazil, the European Union and the Pacific Community. A century of enlightenment, rational utopianism and exploration of new ways of being human has fallen dark. Outers are herded into prison camps and forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of their great archives of scientific and technical knowledge, while Earth's forces loot their cities, settlements and ships, and plan a final solution to the 'Outer problem'. But Earth's victory is fragile, and riven by vicious internal politics. While seeking out and trying to anatomise the strange gardens abandoned in place by Avernus, the Outers' greatest genius, the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen is embroiled in the plots and counterplots of the family that employs her. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim soon discovers that profiting from victory isn't as easy as he thought. And in Greater Brazil, the Outers' democratic traditions have infected a population eager to escape the tyranny of the great families who rule them. After a conflict fought to contain the expansionist, posthuman ambitions of the Outers, the future is as uncertain as ever. Only one thing is clear. No one can escape the consequences of war - especially the victors.

I'm still undecided if I will pick up Gardens of the Sun. I wasn't impressed by the characterization in the first book but I felt a lot of the issues might have been caused by it being the first piece of a larger story rather than a stand-alone book. The characters that felt superfluous in The Quiet War may have instrumental roles in the sequel. Currently, Gardens of the Sun is the second book in McAuley's diptych as indicated by the author over in an Q/A session over at io9.

YetiStomper: I know the sequel Gardens of the Sun is coming out next year in the US, what is the overall scope of the series? Will it be a strict trilogy or are you planning something larger? 

Paul_McAuley: @YetiStomper: In one sense Gardens of the Sun is a direct sequel to The Quiet War, in that it picks up and follows the stories of the characters in the first novel through the aftermath of war and the development of new tensions. But I prefer to think of the two novels as a diptych. The first about the onrushing inevitability of war; the second about attempts to win some kind of conciliation and new direction out of war’s aftermath. The first is the lesson; the second is the lesson learned.

I'm kind of sort of thinking about a third book, set about a thousand years after the first two.

Note who asked the question. Wink Wink. I think I'll give the second book a try since it's only a two book arc. I sincerely hope that McAuley can bring the character quality to match his hard science.

It's just too bad you aren't suppossed to judge a book by its cover. Because this would be a guaranteed 5-star.

Amazon just came out with their Best Books of 2009 List. Aside from the fact that it's only November and there are two months of books to be read the list seems to be a little questionable.

Where are the women authors?

Just kidding. The problem I found with the list is that 7 of the books came out within the last 3 months (Sept,Oct,Nov) with 1 in August and another in June. Aside from Catherynne Valente's excellent Palimpsest (February), the vast majority of the books came out in the last few months.

While it's certainly possible that all of the best books came out in the recent months and I have no reason to doubt any individual book on the list as I haven't read them all, I find that to be coincendentally advantageous for Amazon. After all, chances are someone is going to be more interested in a new book they haven't heard of before rather than one they may have seen and passed on earlier in the year or one they already read.

And it's not just SFF. If you look at the distribution of Amazon's entire Top 100 books list. There are 31 books (31%) that have been released in the past two months (16.6%) with 1/5th of all books on the list coming from September. While this isn't as horrible as the SFF distribution I believe it's still statistically significant.

So what's going on? Picking 10 good books is easy. You could easily take 50 books for a Top 10 list accross the genre and have no clear argument for selecting or not selecting any individual book of the lot. So why did Amazon pick these 10? If you choose a bunch of old books or 1 book per month, theres a higher probability that readers have heard of these books and already read them. For example, a book that's been out since January will have had 10 months of shelf time to get through someone's reading list, particularly if they have the quality writing and critical acclaim that comes with making these types of list. Translation: No New Sales.

However, if you load the list with new books, chances are that people won't have had the opportunity to read them. I can read the best book each month but if all 10 books come out in October, chances are I haven't caught up yet, even if I am aware of all of the books. If I'm trying to read the good books, I might find myself clicking the add to shopping cart button a few times.

It's also certainly possibly that the recent books were the most fresh in the minds of those people writing this list. But if they really didn't do their homework and look at the full years worth of books (instead just picking the 10 good books they read recently), how worthwhile is this list? Is it fair to the authors who published their fantastic books earlier in the year?

There's also coincidence which while possible, doesn't seem likely. Do publishing companies try and put out their best books during September? Is there a publishing pregnancy period where authors get most of their writing done during the winter (or NaNoWriMo!) and they finally hit stores 7-10 months later? Are their simply more books in September? I don't know.

In my mind there are 3 options:

1) Coincidence/Publishing Schedule (Improbable but not impossible)
2) The Editors have the most recent books they read fresh in their minds (Possible but suggests that the editors didn't put in their due diligence)
3) Amazon wants eyes on the newest books so that people will buy books rather than simply seeing books listed that they have already read. (Borderline unethical)

So what is it? Is Amazon unlucky, lazy, or just plain evil?

21 Words or Less: An unwelcome addition to the already bloated ranks of Urban Fantasy, Child of Fire breaks no new ground with inconsistent characterization and bland writing.

Rating: 1.5/5 stars

The Good: Starts out firing with a rapid pace that doesn’t subside, author has no problem killing characters.

The Bad: No innovation within the Urban Fantasy genre, lack of consistent characterization, lack of plot resolution, overuse of the same solutions to obstacles, core writing fundamentals were lacking.

There are a lot of strong Urban Fantasy series out there. Based on Child of Fire, Harry Connolly's The Twenty Palaces Novels don’t appear destined to join that group. Mediocre at best and painful at worst, Child of Fire combines dozens of unsympathetic characters in a erratic plot that leaves as more plot points open than it manages to close. Child of Fire introduces us to one Ray Lilly, a gray character with a checkered past. When the plot hits the ground running on page 1, Ray is serving as the driver for Annalise, a senior member of the titular Twenty Palace Society. The Twenty Palace Society is a group of magicians who have taken it upon themselves to police the magical world preventing predators (evil spirits) and rogue magicians (as defined by the TPS) through executions and other zero tolerance measures. Ray and Annalise are investigating some curious activities in the town of Hammer Bay that include disappearing children, unusually successful toy companies, forgotten memories, and scorch marks. Unfortunately for the pair (and fortunately for the plot), Hammer Bay is hiding a lot more secrets than the average small town.

From the moment Connolly’s main characters enter Hammer Bay they are introduced to set after set of characters. Town bigshots who don’t want the balance of power disturbed. Police skeptical of outsiders. Local thugs looking to muscle their way to a few extra dollars. Connolly’s got them all, and multiple sets of them. The cast of characters in Child of Fire is huge and while that’s not a problem in its own right, Connolly fails to distinguish any of them beyond their stereotypical roles. If you’ve got only a half dozen archetypes you shouldn’t have two dozen characters. By the time they are all introduced, the plot gets extremely repetitive. Lilly gets kidnapped and escapes what must be a half dozen times while encountering the same sorts of people. While interactions with the local underground is a common occurrence in any type of noir fiction, changing the names and repeating the same sequence until Lilly has enough clues tires quickly. Especially when he uses the same method to escape throughout the entire book; his ghost knife.

The ghost knife is a magically infused piece of laminated paper that has the ability to cut through anything dead,inorganic, or magical. Guns/locks/magic tattoos: you name it, it cuts it. If you cut through a living person, it drains their life energy and they become passive and docile. Basically, it’s a magic lightsaber that turns opponents into coma victims instantly. Ignoring the fact that Lilly somehow keeps this object in his pocket without it falling out or stabbing himself, Lilly’s ghost knife becomes as much of a crutch as I’ve ever seen in a published novel. He uses it from the beginning of the book to the very conclusion without fail. It’s his only trick. The first time he uses it, it’s mildly intriguing (as a reference the other items in Connolly’s magic system are ribbons, tattoos and a piece of wood), by the end of the book, it’s laughable.

This in and of itself is a forgivable offense, the mischaracterizations and hanging plot points are not. One of the fundamental relationships in Child of Fire is Ray’s interactions with Annalise. The back cover blurbs that she “is looking for an excuse to kill him” but the story reads quite differently. She seems to harbor some resentment for Ray but with each passing chapter her attitude seems to change. Annalise’s feelings toward Ray rotate through several different states; hatred, indifference, acceptance, begrudging friendship, incompetence, and almost any emotion you can imagine. The reasons for the dramatic and repeated shifts in their relationship (if there are any) aren’t explained in any capacity. It reads like Connolly couldn’t exactly figure out how to make his characters interact and rather than picking one dynamic over another, he just used them all.

This haphazard style doesn’t just affect the characters, it also impacts the plot. Connolly’s interest in specific subplots seems to grow and wane throughout the book. This gets so bad that there is absolutely no resolution or closure for the third (arguably second) largest character in the book. She just exits one scene and is never seen or heard from again. Even the core plot of the book, the disappearing children which causes Ray Lilly to be physically sick with grief is left unresolved. As Ray drives away from Hammer Bay in the final pages, the true culprit responsible for the disappearances is still at large and the children and their memories are still gone. These aren’t minor dropped plotlines, these are critical elements that run through the core of the novel.

I hesitate at this point because I realize that my review is extremely long and extremely negative. To be fair, Jim Butcher’s debut novel wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t until he really developed his style and broke his repetitive plot outline that he really started to excel. Now Butcher is one of my favorite authors. Maybe future Twenty Palace novels will be better. Maybe we will finally get an explanation for all of the hints of Lilly’s back-story that Connolly drops but irritatingly never explains. Maybe he will decide that major characters shouldn't just disappear mid-book. Maybe he will realize that well-written dialogue doesn’t need repeated “he said, she said” dialogue tags to figure out who is speaking. If he does, let me know, because I won’t be reading the follow up to find out.

I’m not sure how I should end this review. Ghost Knife. That did it.

I saw this book trailer today. As I've said before, most book trailers are garbage but obviously the latest Crichton effort can afford a decent production quality. Have a watch, what do you think?



Honestly, I don't know if this makes me want to read Pirate Latitudes any more than I did previously (do book trailers ever do that?) but I did think it was very well done. The stylized animation is very sharp and it gets the basic plot of the novel across. It's clear that Pirate Latitudes isn't your typical Crichton novel. Sadly, its one of the last we will ever get. I hope its as enjoyable as the majority of his work.

Got my January 2010 Asimov's in the mail today thanks to the time traveling mailman and I see Chris Roberson has a story inside entitled "Wonder House"

It's very short with not much of anything in terms of plot (it's obviously not trying to). It's basically two publishers (in an alternate history) discussing their failing brand and what they can do to save it. What I found most interest about Wonder House was trying to figure out what Roberson was trying to say about the genre via these alternate history dopplegangers.

There are hints of publishing monopolies (Asimovs/Analog perhaps)? Mentions of genres getting overused to death (Vampires anyone)? Single language dominance? (The English market...) The comic book medium? The difficulty of being an author trying to make a name for yourself among the established greats.

Lots and lots to think about in only a few pages. Hmmmmmm....

Well done Mr. Roberson.

Vampire books need to be staked. Zombies novels are overripe and starting to smell. Even Steampunk is getting a little rusty. So what's the next big thing?

I'm seeing a subtle but growing trend of books I call the FuturePast.

I feel like this emergent genre is a natural result from the rise and fall of posthumanist science fiction in years past. While the Singularity is an interesting topic, it's intrinsic nature makes it almost impossible to predict. The Singularity assumes exponentially change until the resultant species can no longer be defined as human.

While it's fun and frightening to think about but in terms of motivations people who don't eat, don't love, and don't die are very hard to empathize with. It's also hard to come up with logical plots that could even be comprehended by our inferior minds. There's a reason why there aren't a whole lot of PostSingular novels.

But at the same time, the Singularity appears likely. At least as likely as the chances of humanity colonizing other solar systems as depicted in the latest, greatest space opera. So authors looking to write in the mid- to far-future (200+ years) have a decision to make: implausible Space Opera or cold, unrelatable PostSingularity.

But with the looming threat of resource scarcity, overpopulation, and global warming, another option has presented itself: The FuturePast. The FuturePast assumes that the rise of environmentalism fails, that the Green Revolution will be too little too late. Instead the world will experience significant but not catastrophic change. Wars will be fought for remaining resources. The current transportation paradigm will crumble without the lifeblood of oil. The population will fall as millions or billions are cut off from society and starve. But not permanently. Eventually, we will again reach a sustainable way of living and begin to pick up the pieces. We will start over again, hopefully learning from our original mistakes and making strides in different directions than before.

This FuturePast allows for authors to prognosticate into the future without straying too far from the present. It reintroduces the conflict of mere survival that is virtually gone from 21st century American life. It resets technology to 19th century standards while still allowing for exotic exceptions. It offers any number of geopolitical states resulting from a war for resources that could offer story upon story in its own right. And if you write it logically, it could even be plausible.

Along with it's sibling subgenres of EcoPunk and GreenPunk in which humanity successfully manages to avoid a technological Dark Age before the Resource War, the FuturePast is poised to be the next big movement in science fiction. People are interested in green technology; new authors will want to preach about the dangers of consumer culture and rampant ecocide and provide their own solutions; readers will want to read about the dozens of different ways the green revolution will change our lives.

Spaceflight defined the science fiction of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Computers shaped the SF of the 80s, 90s and 00s. Will the Green revolution influence the SF of tomorrow?

You can already see the seeds sprouting. There's Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl and Pump Six and Other Stories, and even possibly S.M. Stirling's Novels of the Change. There's a fun new playground out there for anyone who's willing. The FuturePast is coming. Or is it already here?

Feel free to add your own examples of FuturePast SF in the comments.

Last week, I participated in a "Inside the Blogosphere" group think via John Ottinger III over at Grasping For The Wind. The question of the week His question was "What are the best endings in science fiction/fantasy novels?"
My response was:

Ender’s Game hands down. The implications of the ending are just incredible. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it makes the book because the rest of it is so good but the ending really completes Ender’s character and takes his internal conflict to a new level. I don’t want to get into specifics but if you haven’t read it, you need to.

Other SF stories with great endings…I Am Legend, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Dune Not a whole lot come to mind. Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl had a great ending but I’m just in love with that book in general. A lot of Science Fiction is about the ideas and the set-up. I find myself a little let down more often than not.


In terms of Fantasy, there are so many unfinished series or series where quality has dropped off that it’s hard to really think of a solid ending. Joe Abercrombie’s Last Argument of Kings has one of the most memorable Fantasy endings I’ve read in the past few years. It’s memorable because it takes the standard Fantasy cliche endings and slits their throat with a rusty dagger. A lot of people have mixed feelings on the ending because it was so atypical but that’s what I found so refreshing. Not to mention the fact that the whole worldview the reader sees suddenly explodes into something entirely different. Paradoxically, I found it that it left me both extremely satisfied and hungry for more. 

My answer (and many others) were posted earlier today here. Head on over to see all of the other great responses.

Hot off the presses, here are the 2009 World Fantasy Award winners:

• Lifetime Achievement: Ellen Asher & Jane Yolen
• Best Novel (tie): The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (Morrow) & Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin; Knopf)
• Best Novella: “If Angels Fight”, Richard Bowes (F&SF 2/08)
• Best Short Story: “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”, Kij Johnson (Asimov’s 7/08)
• Best Anthology: Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, Ekaterina Sedia, ed. (Senses Five Press)
• Best Collection: The Drowned Life, Jeffrey Ford (HarperPerennial)
• Best Artist: Shaun Tan
• Special Award – Professional: Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant (for Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House)
• Special Award – Non-Professional: Michael Walsh (for Howard Waldrop collections from Old Earth Books)

 My Thoughts: I was rooting for Daryl Gregory's Pandemonium (best book I read last year) but I can't say that The Shadow Year or Tender Morsels didn't deserve it as I haven't read them. Maybe I will need to give them a chance. I've heard a lot of good things about both Jeffrey Ford and Margo Lanagan but I have yet to read anything by them.

Also, yet another nod for Ekaterina Sedia. The Alchemy of Stone is jumping up the reading list very quickly.

Finch - Jeff Vandermeer

Great cover. I'm ashamed to say I haven't read any of Vandermeer's novels before but I have read some of his essays online as well of some the stuff he's edited. Regardless, I'm very excited to give Finch a try in this Noir-ish murder mystery set in Vandermeer's Ambergris.

Makers - Cory Doctorow

One of the authors I've been Keeping An Eye On. Doctorow publishes his first fiction novel since Little Brother (a favorite of mine) and his first adult novel since 2005. In typical Doctorow fashion, Makers is being serialized over on Tor.com for free but if you want to read the entire story now (and with another great cover) you'll have to buy the book. I'd try to summarize the description in a few sentences but I honestly don't think I can. Click through to read it for yourself.

Under the Dome: A Novel - Stephen King

This Stephen King tome (1088 pages) is selling for $9.00 on Amazon.com. That's less than a penny a page. King's latest tells the story of a Maine town unexpectedly cut off from the rest of the world by unexplainable invisible force field. That's the elevator pitch, it will be interesting to see how Stephen King puts his own touches on it. Creepy children and dark secrets perhaps?

Total Oblivion, More or Less: A Novel - Alan DeNiro

Alan DeNiro, another author I've been Keeping An Eye On (coincidentally last week's author), is publishing his debut novel this month. Debut novels are always interesting as the author attempts to make the leap from short fiction to the long form. Total Oblivion follows the story of Macy, a sixteen-year-old whose suburban lifestyle is unexpectedly interrupted by an invasion of ancient warriors. And thats apparently only the start of the strangeness. I've read DeNiro's anthology Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead and if anyone can pull of this surreal sounding novel, it's DeNiro.

The Devil's Alphabet - Daryl Gregory

Yet another Keeping An Eye On author with a November novel. Despite the cover, this is the single novel  you should buy this month. Along with Paolo Bacigalupi, Daryl Gregory is the best new author I've read in the past 5 years. Last year's debut, Pandemonium, was absolutely fantastic. The Devil's Alphabet visits Switchcreek, Tennessee where a horrific disease killed a third of the population and mutated the remainder into one of three types of new subspecies of human. Look for my interview with Daryl Gregory to hit the web shortly before The Devil's Alphabet hits stores.

How to Make Friends with Demons - Graham Joyce

This book was originally published in the UK as Memoirs of a Master Forger under the pseudonym of William Heaney. The fake memoir details Heaney's fictional life as he reflects on his broken family and his experiences dabbling in the occult.  This book just won the British Fantasy award and Joyner has a great reputation as a literary fantasist so this is another book I've got high expectations for. How to Make... is also Joyner's return to adult fantasy after writing YA novels exclusively for the past 4 years.

Pirate Latitudes: A Novel - Michael Crichton

This is either Crichton's last or second to last novel. I believe the manuscript for Pirate Latitudes was discovered among his files after his death and it was considered finished. I don't know if he meant for it to be published but I've enjoyed a lot of Crichton's work so I'll give it a chance. Be aware that this is not typical Crichton. As the title suggests, Pirate Latitudes appears to be an adventure story of swashbuckling pirates and hidden treasure. As far as I can tell, there's no SF here.

Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt

A physicist discovers time travel and mysteriously disappears. His son, Shel journeys through time to discover what happened to his dad. Across his journey through time, Shel encounters "a diverse cast of historical greats, sometimes in unexpected situations." I'm not exactly sure how serious this is suppossed to be but if you enjoy McDevitt like I do, you might want to check it out. It sounds kind of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure mixed with Back to the Future.

Princeps' Fury: Book Five of the Codex Alera - Jim Butcher

If memory serves me correctly, Butcher wrote this book when his friend bet him he couldn't combine a story about a lost Roman legion with Pokemon. That's right: Butcher not only wrote Roman Pokemon he sold it to a publisher. But in his defense, it's a pretty good story. The final book in the Codex Alera series comes out this December so if you want to catch up, now's your chance. Also, if you haven't read Butcher's Dresden Files series, you should check it out. It's the premiere Urban Fantasy series out there, at least in my opinion.

Unplugged: The Web's Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy - 2008 Download - Edited by Rich Horton

A short fiction collection of work originally published online in 2008. For those readers like myself who enjoy short fiction, know its available online, but have no idea how to go about finding the diamonds in the dirt. This anthology offers fiction from Jason Stoddard, Cory Doctorow, and Hal Duncan among others.

The Alchemy of Stone - Ekaterina Sedia

Like Charles Stross's Saturn's Children, The Alchemy of Stone features a non-human protagonist albeit it in a steampunk rather than futuristic setting. Very interesting premise that I would recommend looking into. Sedia's a name I keep seeing around the blogosphere so I'm curious to see what the buzz is about.

The Authorized Ender Companion - Jake Black and Orson Scott Card

Here's a Christmas present for the Ender fan. Card has expanded the scope of his Enderverse tremendously since the brilliant Ender's Game. There are 9 or 10 Enderverse books by this time and so many planets, characters, and plotlines that a guidebook would be useful in keeping it all straight. This is by no means a must buy book but it would be something to add to the Christmas list.

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If you want to read 1 book this month, read Daryl Gregory's The Devil Alphabet. If you asked me to give you a second I wouldn't be able to decide between Makers, Finch,  Total Oblivion, More or Less or How to Make Friends with Demons. November is a very strong month, maybe in anticipation for the Christmas season.

Anyway, as always, if you are interested in more details regarding any of the above books, just click on through the Amazon links. I'm more interested in telling you why I recommended them rather than simply what the books are about. out there. Anything that might have escaped my genre nets? Which one of these covers is your favorite?

You can view previous installments of YetiStomper Picks here

Could the Jigsaw killer from the Saw series be an elderly Kevin McAllister? They say that serial killers start young...

I'm just saying that some of the Home Alone traps are a little more sadistic than what a normal 10 year old should come up with.

Just think about it...

While everyone probably things I'm a pupper blog for Pyr, I'm not. I enjoy their stuff and they do a great job of making announcement easily available. If you are an editor with book news, let me know. I love book news!

But back on topic, in the past few days Pyr has made a pair of announcements. The first is a Victiorian-set steam punk tale entitled Burton & Swinburne in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack or something to that effect. (It's a little long and not so easy to remember). This is the first book in a planned series by Mark Hodder. Anders provided a description:

It is 1861, and the British Empire is in the grip of conflicting forces. Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labour; Libertines oppose restrictive and unjust laws and flood the country with propaganda demanding a society based on beauty and creativity; while The Rakes push the boundaries of human behaviour to the limits with magic, sexuality, drugs and anarchy.


Returning from his failed expedition to find the source of the Nile, explorer, linguist, scholar and swordsman Sir Richard Francis Burton finds himself sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, employs him as “King's Spy.” His first mission: to investigate the sexual assaults committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack; to find out why chimney sweeps are being kidnapped by half-man, half-dog creatures; and to discover the whereabouts of his badly injured ex-friend (and new enemy), John Hanning Speke.


Accompanied by the diminutive and pain-loving poet, Algernon Swinburne, Burton's investigations lead him back to one of the defining events of the age: the brutal assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840; and the terrifying possibility that the world he inhabits shouldn't exist at all!

Now a poet doesn't sound like the most interesting of sidekicks but all the rest is pretty intriguing. Sex, murder, and politics, what's not to like. Plus chimney sweep abuse! Anders also gave high praise to Hodder's worldbuilding. Apparently it's less of a steampunk fantasy and more of an alternate history based on a singular key change. Burton & Swinburne is expected to debut sometime in fall 2010.

The second announcement concerns Jasper Kent, who has sold US rights for a pair of novels, Twelve and Thirteen Years Later. These are vampire novels, but not your Twilight brand of vampires. These are the unstoppable-evil monster type vampires, the kind that have lived for centuries and accumulated years and years of deadly combat experience and don't mind selling their services to the highest bidder. These are type of vampires I wouldn't mind reading about.

Lou Anders was quoted in the press release:

‘I'm thrilled to be welcoming Jasper Kent into the Pyr fold,’ says editorial director Lou Anders. ‘TWELVE is a magnificent blend of a historical novel and a dark fantasy novel, that could appeal equally to readers both in and out of genre. Jasper is a skilled storyteller, whose compelling prose had me hooked from his opening chapter. The book is "un-put-downable," and I love that he has brought back a real sense of threat and danger to the classic monsters, something that has been lacking with too many vampires lately. I cannot wait to spring this on US readers.’

Now somehow or other I ended up with a UK copy of Twelve. Probably something to do with the great cover and killer summary. And no more emo vampires. That's always a plus.

November is a big month for Keeping An Eye On authors. Out of the half dozen authors publishing work this month, none has more to be excited about than Alan DeNiro. On November 24th, DeNiro publishes his debut novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less. Debut novels are always exciting and you never know what a up-and-coming author is going to do . If I've learned anything from reading the early work of the authors on SF Signal's Watchlist, it's that they knock the ball out of the park when it comes to debut novels. It's almost as if the editors and genre professionals that nominated them did so for a reason. But other than quality, I'm not sure what to expect out of Alan DeNiro. As I started following these developing authors, one of the first things I read was DeNiro's first collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. Some authors do one thing and do it well; others dabble in different subgenres but never find their niche. And then there are the writers like Alan DeNiro or Neil Gaiman who do things in every genre and then invent several of their own and inexplicably their stories work. Skinny Dipping was a veritable cornucopia of ideas that was as creative and memorable as it was unpredictable and unique.

So when I had a chance to talk to Alan DeNiro I took advantage of the opportunity to find out a little bit more about Total Oblivion and how he manages to write such unique material.

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SoY: If we are keeping an eye on you, what should be looking for in the near future? What have you been working on recently?

ADN: Well, there has been quite a lull for the last year or so but I do indeed have some things coming out in the remainder of 2009. The novel of course (Total Oblivion, More or Less) which drops 11/24. I also have some stories coming out in Strange Horizons, Interfictions II, and Paraspheres 2. And an essay on Van Vogt which is coming out in an Aqueduct Press critical volume. I've been working on more essays on speculative literature lately.

SoY: If a reader has never heard of you before reading this, what is the one single piece of work of yours (novel, short story, etc.) would you like them to read?

ADN: It's really hard to say, so I'll hedge my bet with two answers: Total Oblivion, More or Less, and The Stations, which is a 165 page speculative poem. Those are the two works that I'm likely most proud of--which hopefully has a good correlation of what people would like to read (or is at least indicative of the different things I like to write). Also, I'd love to get into some cave paintings someday.

SoY: Some of the stories in Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead almost defy classification. What sub-genres are you most interested in? Is there a difference in what subgenres you read and the ones you write?

ADN: I really don't think in subgenres. Occasionally I'll try to start in a subgenre and then it goes woefully awry. I mean, awry in terms of the subgenre, but all the same it will go where the story needs to go. I have a recent story called "Moonlight Is Bulletproof" which is theoretically a futuristic detective story but it somehow throughout its drafts wended into narrative topography involving Persian gardens and little imps with swords jumping around. I pretty much read in the same fashion that I write, so I don't really dwell on categories all too much.

SoY: Can you tell us anything more about your upcoming novel? Is it set in the same world as your short story “Our Byzantium”?

ADN: That's a great question--I would say no, although there are definitely similarities. In the short story, the anachronistic invasion was more of an extended metaphor. The novel is much more "lived in" with the invasion, although I deliberately tried to avoid much of what would be called "classic" or traditional fantasy world building. So I guess in that sense there is a similarity.

SoY: Whats on your plate after Total Oblivion, More or Less?

ADN: I've started working on two novels, I mean, not EXACTLY at the same time. But two "in the mix" as they say. One set in a near future MMORPG, and another one involving dragons. Aside from that, the usual peppering of short stories, poems, essays and reviews.

SoY: What are your writing habits like? Do you have any peculiar writing habits that somehow work for you but everyone else would find quirky (and/or insane)?

ADN: No, I'm pretty normal in that regard (whatever that means). I do most of my writing on the weekends because of my day job, and just squeezing time here and there during the week. In terms of actual practice I've been all over the map, trying to find what works and what doesn't. I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to the actual techniques and structures of storytelling.

SoY: An incident occurs resulting in your removal from the list of up-and-coming genre stars. What is the most likely cause of that incident? Who do you nominate in your place?

ADN: Haha...maybe people suddenly decide I'm not much of a genre writer. There are a ton of great writers out there, overlooked writers. Although he's certainly not "up and coming", one person I can definitely think of is Mark Rich, who people should read if they haven't had the chance to. He has a marvelous range--everywhere from Analog to the small press genre zines. He has two recent collections out--great stuff!

SoY: One of my favorite things about your shorter fiction is how it is undeniably genre fiction but the narrative style still feels very “literary” (albeit in a very hard to describe way) As an author who has dabbled across genre boundaries, do you have any opinions on the “ghettoization” of science fiction/fantasy/horror?

ADN: I'm fully against it. I actually don't think it happens as much as people within the genre suppose. And when it does happen it's usually self-imposed.

SoY: What has been the highlight of your career so far?

ADN: Meeting readers at readings, online, wherever. That has been the real trip. I have been very lucky in my writing life.

SoY: What will the short fiction marketplace look like in 5 years? Would a iPod-like fiction device/delivery system represent a game changer?

ADN: That would be very cool. But I think it's going to somewhat different, not radically different. The biggest change, which I already see happening, might be the blurring of the line between blogs and online magazines. Is that good or bad? It is certainly different. I think it's going to disappoint writers who are craving the stability of a "pro", "semipro" and "fan" hierarchy. I'm not really into that, so it doesn't make too much difference to me. The more potential readers, the better.

SoY: I’ve avoided asking this so far but where do you get your ideas? Cuttlefish? The Friendly Giants? If I Leap? Your stories work from some of the strangest premises I can recall.

ADN: The first I think began in the exploration of that voice. The second came from the epigraph. The third...wow, that was written so long ago, I don't even remember. I think it had to do with thinking of the character of the Goodbye Girl, and what that could mean. As you can see, it's really different for each story. (And thanks, I think?)

SoY: Along the same lines, what authors have been most influential toward your own personal writing style?

ADN: Let's see...Gene Wolfe, Cordwainer Smith, J.H. Prynne, Lorine Niedecker, Gogol, Alejo Carpentier, Jack Spicer, Simone Weil, W. B. Yeats, James Tiptree, the Old Testament prophets. These writers are really deep in the DNA, so it might not be apparent with specific projects.

SoY: What’s the best thing you’ve read this year?

ADN: If you mean the last 12 months, Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani. One of the most baffling books I've ever read. But I love it.

SoY: [Obligatory pimpage] Is there anywhere online that readers can follow you and your work? [/obligatory pimpage]

ADN: Why yes, yes there is. My blog, Goblin Mercantile Exchange, is probably the best place to start. With the novel coming out I'm definitely planning some online shenanigans (er, content) in the upcoming months.

---

Go buy Total Oblivion, More or Less: A Novel on November 24th. I still don't know exactly what to expect, but chances are you'll like it.

In the words of the immortal Malcolm Reynolds...ooooooo, shiny. This is a great, great cover. Stephan Martiniere is responsible as usual. I can't count the number of times I see a cover and think to myself, "Wow, I wonder who did that" and then go on to find its a Martiniere. The computer circuitry gives a subtle touch to an image that otherwise appears fairly timeless. I also really dig the text box and the way the horizontal banners and building interplay with the sharp angles of the title and author borders. Sometimes great cover art is ruined by bad font choice or placement. This is not one of those times.

Lou Anders put up this cover over on Pyr-o-mania, where he also gave Ian McDonald's latest a brief overview:

In the sleepy Istanbul district of Eskiköy stands the former whirling dervish house of Adem Dede. Over the space of five days of an Istanbul heatwave, six lives weave a story of corporate wheeling and dealing, Islamic mysticism, political and economic intrigue, ancient Ottoman mysteries, a terrifying new terrorist threat, and a nanotechnology with the potential to transform every human on the planet.

If that alone isn't enough to sell you, I've previously read Brasyl and River of Gods which are McDonald's futuristic takes on Brasyl and India. The Dervish House appears to do the same for Turkey. If its as captivating as his two previous cultural excursions, it is not one to be missed.

The Dervish House hits shelves next July

I just got Doctorow's Makers, Vandermeer's Finch, Cherie Priest's BoneShaker, and Eclipse 3 all in the mail.

Any advice?

21 Words or Less: Bacigalupi's debut novel delivers on the promise of his early work with a complex portrait of an environmentally influenced future Thailand.

Rating: 5/5 stars

The Good: Bleak but believable future setting that begs for further exploration; a diverse set of interesting characters that are human, sympathetic, and unique; Prose conveys complex technological and cultural details in an elegant manner that reads amazingly well.

The Bad: A fair bit of Thai words had me running to Google on a frequent basis; there aren't any more Bacigalupi novels to read offhand.

There's a reason Paolo Bacigalupi's name came up the most when discussing promising new authors. To understand why, you don't need to look any further than The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi's debut novel. Set in a future Thailand that struggles to survive in a world devastated by pandemic and crop failure, The Windup Girl depicts five characters who are poised to influence the country's future whether they realize it or not. As their actions weave together through the complex tapestry of the future setting, Bacigalupi creates a story that both excites and frightens.

The Windup Girl is part of the new wave of environmentally influenced science fiction that places one foot in the future and the other squarely in the past. Anticipating the end of cheap energy and global resource shortages, these novels are equally recognizeable and difficult to accept. In The Windup Girl, the advancements of genetic manipulation of viruses and seedstock, hyper-evolved animals built for performance, and even humans scientifically engineered for beauty and obediance are balanced out by the regressions resulting from the end of cheap energy. A return to animal labor, the expense of communication or computation, the financial power represented by dependable electricity, and even subtle touches like a scarcity of ice. One especially poignant scene shows a team of poor workers running up flight after flight of stairs only to serve as ballast weight for the rich man's elevator. All of these details taken together makes the world feel exceedingly real, moving into the future while retaining the links to the past.

My only complaint about Bacigalupi's constructed world is that I want to see more of it. I want to travel Europe's great cities to see what they've become, return to an America originally built upon bottomless wells of oil that have since run dry, and see if the pristine jungles of South America still survive. This setting begs for more stories, and I hope we get them particularly if they are as expertly crafted as The Windup Girl.

It's not only Bacigalupi's setting that impresses, it's his characters. He expertly maintains half a dozen points of view characters without resorting to anything that feels overly stereotypical on contrived. There is more (and better) characterization in The Windup Girl than some books twice as long with half the number of characters. Each character is fully realized with their own motivations, history and failings. I would warn you that if you are looking for black-and-white conflict, this isn't a book for you. These are realistic people, not comic-book characters. They aren't perfect but they are human (even the ones that aren't). I'm tempted to get into more specific details but I'd rather let you get into the characters yourself.

The one thing I think that would benefit the book would be the inclusion of an index for the many Thai words. A lot of them you could guess at but the early chapters were a little jarring as you tried to suss out the meaning of the Thai slang. I would draw comparisons to Ian McDonald's Brasyl in terms of cultural details. The Windup Girl is full of them, from big picture regional politics and religious conflicts to more subtle details like clothing choices and food items. Similar to the little touches that connect the present to the future, these cultural details link the words on the page to a real place.

In fact, I would say that Ian McDonald's Brasyl is the closest thing to The Windup Girl in the last few years. Except that this book is better. Where Brasyl and similar books focus on the cultural details or the delightful little world they've built, they often do so in a way that's a little bit too much infodump or not quite enough plot structure. Bacigalupi wraps all of these brilliant pieces into a cohesive package that reads effortlessly and with a literary style uncommon in genre fiction. It's got all of the complexity you would expect from genre fiction but without any of the heavy reading. It's hard to describe exactly what Bacigalupi does, or how exactly he does it (if I knew I'd be writing right now) but it works.

If it isn't clear to you by now (or the 3 week wait after I finished the book), I had a incredibly hard time writing this review. I simply can't exactly illustrated why The Windup Girl resonated the way it did with me. The simpliest way I can put it is that Paolo Bacigalupi has written a novel that delivers everything I look for in science fiction and more.

Go read this book.

M. Rickert is one of the quieter authors I've been Keeping An Eye On. In fact I would say she seems to be the most reclusive of all the authors on SF Signal's watchlist. (I couldn't even get a picture for her). She's keeps a very low profile in an attempt to let her work speak for itself. And speak for itself it does. Unfortunately for us readers, M. only has one short fiction collection but that collection and the stories within won a World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, a World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, the 2007 Crawford Award, as well as being nominated for a Nebula Award, another World Fantasy award, and an International Horror Guild Award. That's a pretty reputable resume for any author's career, and Rickert managed to do all that with just one collection's worth of stories. Obviously, Rickert is a stickler for quality over quantity.

Either that or she wants to give other authors a chance to get nominated which wouldn't be surprising given how nice she was when I conducted the interview which, coincidentally, starts below

---

SoY: If a reader has never heard of you before reading this, what is the one single piece of work of yours (novel, short story, cave painting, etc.) would you like them to read?

MR: I suppose if this reader could find a copy of “Map of Dreams,” my short story collection, she could page through that and see if anything sticks.

SoY: What's something about you that no one would ever guess from your writing?

MR: I have been told that some people are afraid of me. I’m not sure what that’s about. Almost all my anger, despair, fear and bitterness exists in my fiction and therefore has a rather light presence in my life. I was a kindergarten teacher for almost a decade and I still harbor much of that attitude in my demeanor.

SoY: To date you haven’t published any full-length novels but you have written several excellent shorter works. Will we see a full-length novel from you sometime soon? Or perhaps another anthology?

MR: Thanks for the kind assessment of my shorter work. The novel has been a big challenge for me. I have been trying to write novels for twenty years. When I look at my attempts I see that in each case I had fairly large stories with big themes, this is why I thought they were novels. I struggled for years believing that a novel is determined by the subject matter. I now have reason to believe that this was incorrect. Another painful mistake I made in pursuit of novels was working under the impression that each sentence, as it existed as a foundation for all the many sentences that follow, must be perfect. I thought this was very sensible because who wants to throw out all those unused sentences, or make a two hundred page wrong turn? Because of my lazy attitude I have made so many wrong turns that I have filled several boxes with them. I recently finished a project that with fits and starts, abandonment and engagement took me eight years, and it still was not a novel.

Once I finally let go of that folly I began working on a short story, which all by itself, and certainly with no encouragement on my part, made itself known as a novel. This was evident by the pacing, and the expanse of characters. The story, itself, is actually rather small. For the first time since I’ve started trying to write novels, I seem to be actually writing one. Most importantly, I have given myself permission to write a first draft, to have inconsistencies, unfleshed themes and unresolved issues, trusting that I can fix all of this later. I feel like I’ve been really stupid. Why did I think that writing a novel had to be an entirely different process than writing a short story? All those years I struggled with the form, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, and the answer was right there, in the way I approach short stories. I probably could have really benefited from a teacher. At any rate, I feel like finally, after so many years, I am writing my first novel. I think. Maybe.

In the meantime I have a collection coming out next year with Golden Gryphon, called “Holiday.” All the stories have holiday themes, with a twist. Tom Canty is doing the cover and some interior art as well.

SoY: You are one of the few female authors (and one of only 5 on this list) in a genre dominated by male authors and male readers. What are your opinions on gender parity in speculative fiction today? Do you feel like being a woman viewed as a negative (unjustly so) by some readers?

MR: I know that being a woman is viewed as a negative by some readers.

I think this sucks.

SoY: As a follow-up, did these issues influence your choice to abbreviate your name to just the initial “M”?

MR: I was completely ignorant of this issue when I decided to abbreviate my first name. I have found it annoying how often people assume that they know why I did it, and on that basis hold opinions of me, my work, and also, weirdly, my name. Most spectacularly annoying of all was the suggestion that I was ashamed of my sex by choosing to present myself as a letter rather than a word.

I don’t mean to suggest that your question is in any way rude or inappropriate. I know people are curious about this, but it’s been educational for me how narrow the view is of possible reasons for it.

I really wanted to disappear in my work and have as little identity tied to it as possible.

When I made this decision I was quite young and given to fantasies of great writing success where my poor hand would be much relieved of the burden of those three extra letters.

And I didn’t like my name very much. I liked the sound of “M.” She sounded like she could get the job done.

SoY: What are your writing habits like? Do you have any peculiar writing habits that somehow work for you but everyone else would find quirky (and/or insane)?

MR: I write longhand. My computer is in the office. I write at a table in the bedroom, then go into the office to type and print what I’ve written, which I bring back to the table to edit. I make faces while I work, basically acting out the characters. I talk over scenes and ideas with my dog, Watson, when we go on his walk. Nothing quirky here.

SoY: Some people (as well as the Barenaked Ladies) say that it's all been done. Are there still new stories to tell? Or has humanity been retelling the same stories since the first myths and legends were spoken into existence?

MR: I think that to say every story has already been told is to dismiss the temperament of words, to devalue nuance and meaning. Yes, of course, if stories are summed up into one or two sentence synopsis, then I imagine they all fit into certain categories. But stories are not just a matter of summation; if they were, the summation would be enough to satisfy that need for story. In fact, every word matters. I don’t know why people are so eager to diminish stories. You don’t hear architects bemoaning that every building has already been built. Within each field of creation there is a structure that exists as the foundation of that creation. The opportunity for expansion and artistry lies within that structure and is not diminished by it.

SoY: What’s the best thing you’ve read this year?

MR: Ok, I can’t possibly pick just one and I don’t even want to stay in this year.

First, Christopher Barzak’s “The Love We Share Without Knowing” is hauntingly beautiful and should be read by more people. I consider Chris an Emotionalist, which is what I am as well. So if you’re looking for something to read where emotions matter, you can’t start in a better place than this.

A book I recommend to everyone, which came out a few years ago and was, I believe, the victim of poor marketing, is called “Strange Piece of Paradise, A Return to the West To Investigate My Attempted Murder and Solve the Riddle of Myself” by Terri Jentz. This was promoted as true crime but I think would have been better served as memoir. When she was twenty, Terri and her friend were attacked by a man with an axe. Both survived. Years later, Terri goes back to Oregon to solve the crime. I was really struck by how much of the author’s personal healing was resolved through finding her story, pieces of which were held by others.

Another book I loved that seems seriously under-read was “The Tattoo Artist” by Jill Ciment. If you are interested in beauty, art and sacrifice, and if you want to read a book about a strong woman, read this book. It has stuck with me ever since I read it, which was years ago. Really, everyone who reads this book tells me how much they love it.

Finally, I recently read Alice Hoffman’s new book, “The Story Sisters” and I loved it. She’s one of my favorite authors.

---

That's it from M. I have a great respect for her for wanting her work to be the focus. However, she could benefit from being a little bit easier to get a hold of; she's very pleasant to talk to and she has some very interesting thoughts on writing. That's been something I've noticed throughout all these interviews.

Just a few more interviews are left. Then I'm not sure what I'll do.

There is a point in my reading/review cycle that always makes it difficult for me to blog, especially if I don't love the book I'm reading. Child of Fire isn't the best Urban Fantasy, in case you were wondering. It's not bad, it's just unremarkable.

I know I need to get a review of The Windup Girl up but I'm finding it hard to do the book justice in my review. I think I need to impose a write review before reading the next book rule.

The new TV season doesn't help either.

The Amazon Kindle has a new lower price: $259 for the US model, $279 for the International model. There's also a $489 Kindle DX. $259 is $40 off the $300 price which was $100 off the introductory price of $399.

Carry the 2, add some sales tax, factor in shipping, divide by book, adjust for inflation, and round up the remainder and the final price is:

Still Too Much.

Amazon is getting closer but they still don't have it. It's not the price of the device, it's the price of the content you put on the device. I'm willing to spend a lot for a large, touch-screen, video capable iPod but that's only because I have the ability to fill it with content that I previously own and that I can get for a reasonable price. I don't have that ability with the Kindle. I can't burn my existing library onto a Kindle and rebuying everything is cost prohibitive. It's not necessarily a deal breaker because of the nature of books (many of which I will only read once) but it's still enough of a disincentive to keep me from attempting a Kindle transition. But even that isn't a huge deal in the long run.

eBooks are expensive.

Until the eBooks themselves are priced for what they are, nontransferable DRMed copies that can be endlessly reproduced at zero additional cost with miniscule storage and distribution fees, I can't get on board with them.  I don't know all the ins and outs of the publishing industry but I do know that the raw materials/printing/warehousing/shipping/etc. physical fees are significantly larger portion that the discount they are offering to the readers. After you make back your initial investment to the editors/digital production/author advance, everything (minus an almost zero per unit cost for servers/bandwidth) is pure profit split between Amazon, the publishers, and the authors. Unless the authors are getting more than they are letting on, the Publishers and/or Amazon are making a killing. And the market will only going to grow.

So why doesn't Amazon try to aggressively pursue the market before Apple/Microsoft/whoever debuts their inevitable devices. Why don't they cut the eBook prices and get everyone on Kindles before competitors can release their own next gen eReaders? It doesn't make a whole lot of business sense if Amazon is in it for the long haul. The only rational explanation I can think of is that Amazon is trying to set themselves up as a distribution network across 3rd party platforms, similar to what they already offer as an iPhone app. They want to be the iTunes for books. Not the iPod for eBook readers.

Now I don't know if Apple would go with Amazon or with a new iTunes substore but Amazon already has a tremendous head start when it comes to selling, marketing, and recommending books. Internet books are synonymous with Amazon in the same way that internet music is synonymous iTunes. Microsoft on the other hand would be crazy not to go with Amazon. As of right now they don't have anything close to Apple's iTunes distribution system unless Windows 7 is hiding some stuff. They would get a proven distribution system that would rival iTunes level of exposure.

So is Amazon sitting on high margins and slowplaying the device market rather than developing that killer eReader and aggressively pursuing market share with low profit margins for the heck of it? Or is it more likely they are going to keep the price points high, monopolize the distribution system and split the high profit margins with Apple/Microsoft and anyone else willing to sign on to Amazon's whispernet eBook delivery system and proprietary format while getting out of the expensive and continually demanding hardware market.

My money is on the money.

A few days ago I recieved an e-mail from Wikio which promotes itself as the number 1 news aggregator and blog-indexing website in Europe, indexing nearly 200,000 English-language source. I've never heard of Wikio before as I don't go through visit too many European sites.

But apparently they visit me since I am the 16th ranked blog in the literature category. I'm not sure how exactly Stomping on Yeti qualified but I'm excited to know that someone thinks I'm doing a good job. If I can help people find good authors and and good books, I'm accomplishing my goal.

Thanks Europe!

After what feels like forever, I was finally able to get in touch with one of the first authors I approached in my Keeping An Eye On Series. Out of all of the names on the SF Signal Genre Watchlist, Vandana Singh was one of the authors I knew least about and I wanted to correct that. After doing a little digging and reading a few stories, I realized that Vandana was doing some very interesting writing that stood out as unique against the majority of my reading experience. This inspired me to see what the highly regarded author was currently working on and to learn more about her as an author. Unfortunately, I initially had some trouble getting in touch with Vandana and my interview with the author responsible for such brilliant pieces as "Delhi" and "The Wife" was unfortunately put on hold.

However, after a few months trying to track her down, I've finally got some answers which I'd like to share with you.

---

SoY: If we are keeping an eye on you, what should be looking for in the near future? What have you been working on recently?

VS: I’ll have two short stories out in early 2010, and possibly a couple of novellas next summer. I tend to write mostly in the summer, since I have a very intense college teaching job, which, while it feeds my writing, also prevents it for most of the year.

SoY: If a reader has never heard of you before reading this, what is the one single piece of work of yours (novel, short story, etc.) would you like them to read?

VS: This is a hard question! Perhaps the answer would be my novelette “The Tetrahedron.” Or, if I were allowed to offer a choice, my novelette “Infinities.” The reason I pick those is that the stories are familiar to me like an old shawl or coat might be. If I can inhabit them so easily, perhaps a reader will find more of what makes my fiction my fiction in those stories. If that makes any sense.

SoY: Describe your writing style in haiku-form.

VS: Ask a crow

How it flies; look! A feather

Sails down.

SoY: To date you haven’t published any full-length novels but you have written several novellas and novelletes. Will we see a full-length novel from you some time soon?

VS: I have two novels in my head. But they each require about three months of dedicated writing time, and freedom from various responsibilities, which isn’t going to happen any time soon. On the other hand a novel might sneak up unexpectedly on me. When writing my novella Distances (Aqueduct Press) I came the closest I’ve ever been to 40,000 words. It was like almost falling off a cliff! So you never know.

SoY: What sub-genres are you most interested in? Is there a difference in what subgenres you read and the ones you write?

VS: I don’t really think in terms of sub-genres as much as I think in terms of authors I like to read. I like reading authors with interesting, deep, thoughtful ideas couched in elegant language with or without strong plot elements, such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Jeffrey Ford, Ian R. Macleod, Molly Gloss. I love stories in which science is taken seriously but used with imagination and sensitivity to the human dimension (Kim Stanley Robinson, or Geoffrey Landis, for example). I love stories about alternative ways humans and human societies could be (Ursula K. Le Guin, Eleanor Arnason to name just two). I love stories that challenge comfortable, conventional ways of looking at the world (L. Timmel DuChamp, Karen Joy Fowler, Carol Emshwiller, for instance). Put in terms of sub-genres, I like urban fantasy and some traditional fantasy as well as good hard SF (scientific more than technological), enlightened space opera, pretty much everything if it is well written. The sub-genre I have the hardest time with is alternative history. So I find myself not reading too much of that.

SoY: How does your Indian heritage influence the stories you write? Are there any thematic elements that resonate strongly in Indian culture that may be overlooked by the uninitiated?

VS: My being Indian is possibly the biggest thing that influences my stories. Not just in terms of settings --- most of the settings in my stories are Indian --- but also in terms of characters and plot. I think growing up in India grew my imagination in certain ways that would not have happened in any other place. I’m also fascinated by the idea of India, and writing stories allows me to explore this. As for thematic elements, they are probably pretty obvious in my stories. Non-Indians might miss a few cultural allusions and will probably misunderstand some things because they are generally viewing them through the distorted lenses of stereotypes, but I’m going to be optimistic and say that the main ideas are likely clear to all readers unless they’ve been hiding in a cave somewhere. I also hope that my stories bust stereotypes at least to a modest extent.

SoY: What are your writing habits like? Do you have any peculiar writing habits that somehow work for you but everyone else would find quirky (and/or insane)?

VS: I write like anyone involved with a family and a full time job: in stolen moments. I’ve had to adapt because I have so little writing time, so I write while dinner bubbles on the stove, and get away to cafes when I can. It is good to have a small laptop to haul around. I wish I could admit to bizarre writing habits, you know, like “I can only write in the presence of my favorite pet elephant, who is my fount of inspiration,” but the truth, alas, is far more mundane.

Perhaps if there is anything remotely interesting about my writing style, it is this: more often than not I have no idea what the story is going to be about. Sometimes I have a fuzzy vision, or a glimpse of one scene, or a character. But mostly all I have is a random first sentence, and I follow it to see where it might go. I know there are writers who plan everything down to the details of every scene, and more power to them if that works for them. For me, if I attempted that, my Muse would run away screaming and I would bore myself silly. It is the process of discovery, of gradually figuring out what happens in the story and how it ends, that makes writing an interesting process for me.

SoY: An incident occurs resulting in your removal from the list of up-and-coming genre stars. What is the most likely cause of that incident? Who do you nominate in your place?

VS: I write my novel, and it is a best seller, and I am up-and-coming no more --- I have arrived! Or: I am abducted by aliens, return after an amazing space-operatic adventure and achieve instant celebrity status! The two are about even in probability I think. But anyway rather than appointing someone in my stead I’d like to name at least one person who should be on the list anyway: Anil Menon.

SoY: You’ve written some short-stories specifically for children. What do you find are the major differences in writing for children versus writing for adults?

VS: For me it is less a question of decreasing the sex or violence because there isn’t much of those things in my adult fiction (with some exceptions). One difference is that there are kids in my children’s stories, but the stories are not only about kids. Also, I think my style changes somewhat. The themes I am interested in exploring are mostly the same, but I tackle them differently. My Younguncle books are at the surface comic adventures of the eccentric title character but they are also serious beneath the fun and frolic. And I use Big Words, like “ambrosial,” which bothers some children’s book reviewers. The children’s short stories you mention are mostly quite serious.

SoY: I’m largely unfamiliar with the world of Indian Speculative Fiction. Is there an Asimov, Heinlein, or Clarke of Indian SF? Are there any seminal authors who have been translated into English?

VS: Indian speculative fiction has quite a history. The first SF story in India was probably written around the late 1800’s in Bengali. The problem is that we have 18 languages apart from English and there are very few translations, so we don’t really know where the next Clarke or Le Guin is hiding. One writer who is brilliant, whose translations from Bengali to English were done some years ago, is Premendra Mitra from the 1940’s. I’m waiting to find more such writers in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and other languages. Writing in English are Anil Menon, Manjula Padmanabhan, Samit Basu, Priya Chhabria, Payal Dhar, to name just a few.

The Indian spec fic scene is full of promise. There are annual conferences, there is an Indian Science Fiction Association, and this past summer I co-taught at a science fiction workshop that was bursting with talent. I’ve written extensively about it on my blog (see below).

SoY: Every writer has a favorite word. Mine’s plethora. What’s that unique word that tries to find its way into everything you write?

VS: Oh I don’t know. I’ve lately become fond of concatenation but haven’t had a chance to use it much, yet.

SoY: What has been the highlight of your career so far?

VS: I have a pretty modest career as far as writing, but among what you might call the highlights is a recent review of my story collection “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories” by Paul Witcover in Locus. And there’s a teeny picture of me in that issue as well. Also four of my short stories have been reprinted in Years’ Best anthologies, most recently “Oblivion: A Journey” in Year’s Best SF 14 (eds. Hartwell and Cramer).

SoY: You are one of the few female authors (and one of only 5 on this list) in a genre dominated by male authors and male readers. What are your opinions on gender parity in speculative fiction today? Do you feel like being a woman viewed as a negative (unjustly so) by some readers?

VS: I don’t have the data on how readers view female authors, so I don’t know. But I know there is gender imbalance in the spec fic field, and it concerns me very much. We live in a gender-biased world, so how could that not be reflected in our field? There have been some fascinating discussions and studies on this on the internet in recent years. There seem to be a lot of women writing spec fic and not as many getting published, or getting their works reviewed, or otherwise taken seriously. While it seems there is less overt bias against women writers compared to a few decades ago, there are still institutionalized biases, subtler biases that are harder to discern. I think these are serious issues that deserve examination by the community.

SoY: You are approached to write a tie-in novel in an existing (and your favorite) SFF universe. Which universe is it? Do you take the offer?

VS: No. I can’t imagine playing in someone else’s universe without changing it too much. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other universes. I haven’t had a TV for years but I remember being fascinated by Babylon 5, and Stargate Atlantis, and, always, Dr. Who.

SoY: What’s the best thing you’ve read this year?

VS: I can’t pick just one thing because my mind doesn’t work that way, but I’ll restrict myself to two things: Ursula Le Guin’s novel Lavinia and Carolyn Ives Gilman’s novella Arkfall.

SoY: [Obligatory pimpage] Is there anywhere online that readers can follow you and your work? [/obligatory pimpage]

VS: There’s my website, http://users.rcn.com/singhvan which also has information about my recent short story collection and how to order it, and my blog, http://vandanasingh.wordpress.com/. There is an older story of mine archived at Strange Horizons: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040105/sky_river.shtml.

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As much as I've enjoyed talking to some of my favorite authors, discovering and getting to know new authors has been one of the highlights of this interview series. Vandana Singh is no exception. Hopefully, she can find the time to sit down and write one of those two novels sooner rather than later.

Here's a first look at it over at gizmodo. It seems to correct on a few of the things I don't like about the Kindle.

It also appears to be a horrible time to put this out with Kindle with an established marketshare and everyone else waiting for Apple/Microsoft devices.

It's going to be interesting to see what kind of files are supported/DRM/etc. There is so much potential for bad decisions here!

DRM device specific formats.
Exclusive publisher deals with Amazon vs. B&N.
Ridiculous price points.

Hopefully, the people behind the device put some thought into this. Either way, tune in next week when the device is official announced.

Also, a thought inspired by the dual eInk/multitouch screen design: What if Apple released a eInk reader that you could plug your iPhone iPod Touch into?

Saw this article from the London Telegraph which suggests that the future experiments on the LHC could be sending ripples through time which impact it enough to damage it.

That's a very interesting concept and one that begs to be explored but I would take it one step further. My idea would involve a time traveler trying to sabotage the machine in the past because it screwed up the future (and also helped them invent time travel) but doesn't want to get exposed as it would be met with disbelief and/or renewed efforts to invent time travel. I'd write it from the perspective of a physicist working on the project that keeps encountering setbacks that seem almost too coincidental...

I've got kind of a love/hate relationship with io9. On one hand, they have a lot of news, some of which is interesting. On the other hand, they steal quotes from my interviews without attribution.

That being the case, I was interested to see how their attempt at a Book Club would go. Would they only endorse books that the publishers had advertised on io9? Would they allow negative comments? Would anyone participate?

io9's first book was The Quiet War which I also recently read and reviewed. Since I had already read the book, I decided to participate. I was also interested to see what others thought as I felt there was a disconnect between the ammount of hype the book got and what I thought of it. The overwhelming consensus agreed with my review: Science good, characters bad. I wasn't missing something, the book legitimately lacked enjoyable characters/character development and people had no problem saying so.

io9 also is holding a Q/A session with McAuley himself tomorrow. There have been some pretty blatant questions about the characterization problems so I'm very interested to see what he says on that front. I myself offered a question regarding the overall scope of the series as The Quiet War felt like the first part of a bigger story rather than a stand alone novel.

Not to mention the fact that io9 stopped deleting my commments. That's at least a step in the right direction.

All over the blogosphere people have been discussing the new FTC regulations placed on testimonials, celebrity advertisements, and, most relevant to me, bloggers.

 

Unless I'm reading it wrong, it basically states that you need to disclose any "material connections" between advertisers and endorsers. If I say the product is wonderful because I have a 30% stake in the company, that's not honest.

While I don't think that I'm the targeted audience for this regulation (I'm guessing they are looking for examples like this, it can't hurt to be open with my readers. My end goal is to establish Stomping on Yeti as a blog that people trust for honest reviews and if there's any shady dealing going on, that can't happen.

I write this blog for a number of reasons:

• To help people find good books by interesting authors
• To participate in the genre community that up-to-now has been a one-sided relationship
• To practice writing (even if it doesn't directly apply to fiction)
• To become more conscious of what I'm reading and why I do or don't like it
• To help promote authors whose work I enjoy (it doesn't hurt that if they are more successful they will write more books)

I don't write this blog to get free books. At the same time, I'm also not going to say no. Writing this blog takes time and the occassional free book is a perk. But I'm not going to let free books change how I review my books. To date, I've reviewed 4 books that I haven't personally bought myself. I've also included my rating for each book.

 

Moxyland - 4.5/5
Nekropolis - 2.5/5
Unclean Spirits - 4/5
The Quiet War - 3/5

 

In 3 out of 4 cases, I requested the book from the publisher with the intent of reviewing. For the 4th, Unclean Spirits, Daniel Abraham was willing to stand up for the quality of his work so he sent me a book I wasn't willing to buy. Turns out he was right but that's not the topic for discussion. Now two of the books rated "really liked it" or above on the YetiStomper scale and the other two rated "Okay" and "Didn't like it." I give a book what I think it deserves. Read the reviews, I think they speak for themselves

But in the interest of maintaining government compliance, I'll keep you informed when I am reviewing a book I didn't buy myself.

 

 

Tuesday, October 13th marks the debut of a highly anticipated novel in these here parts: Joe Schreiber's Death Troopers. Look at that cover; what's not to be excited about? It's a Star Wars horror novel and the first Star Wars horror novel at that. It's also Joe Schreiber's first Star Wars novel. I didn't know a whole lot about Joe other than Del Rey was really throwing their support behind Death Troopers so I approached him to see if he was interesting in answering a few questions here on Stomping on Yeti to help readers get to know the man behind the book.

Joe graciously took some times out of his busy schedule (he's going on tour) to answer some questions about Star Wars, his current projects, and his opinions on writing horror.

---

SoY: October 13th appears to be a big release day for you. Can you tell us a little bit more about your two new books?

JS: No Doors No Windows is a novel that I’ve been working on, on and off, for almost five years. It’s my attempt at a haunted house novel, somewhere between Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. On the other side, Death Troopers is an amped-up, high energy horror novel set in the Star Wars universe. I feel that it ought to come with its own action figures; apparently that wasn’t in the budget.

SoY: What else are working on right now? What can we hope to see from you next year and beyond?

JS: Another Star Wars horror novel in the fall of 2010, along with an original horror novel based on the characters from TV’s Supernatural. I’m doing that one for DC Comics.

SoY: Your debut Star Wars novel is just about to his shelves (if it hasn't already). Star Wars hasn't really done horror before so a lot of fans aren't sure what to expect. How did you approach writing a horror novel written in the Star Wars universe?

JS: We jumped off the idea that this would be a George Romero story set in a George Lucas universe. From there, I wrote it like I wrote my other books, focusing mainly on crafting a compulsive impossible-to-put-down reading experience. I really wanted to take the reader by the throat and take them for a ride. Getting to play in the Star Wars sandbox gave me extra thrusters; it was also a hell of a lot of fun.

SoY: Star Wars has some of the most complex continuities of any cross-media franchise out there, not to mention a fanbase that can be "less than kind" to authors who rock the metaphorical continuity boat. Was the transition from writing within your own creative worlds to writing in such a massive universe difficult? What did you do to prepare yourself?

JS: It wasn’t difficult at all, actually. I got nothing but encouragement and support from my publishers and from Lucasfilm, and I really got the idea that they wanted to try something new—that they trusted me to give them something really scary and a little bit subversive. I wrote a couple outlines, ironing out the plot until we were all pretty comfortable with it. Then I plunged in. As far as continuity, Lucasfilm supplied me with all the reference material and resource guides I could ever need, and I made sure to keep them right next to my desk as I moved through the story.

SoY: Based on your first few books you seem to blend supernatural horror with psychological horror as they feature apparitions as well as abductions. What's your preferred subgenre of horror (if you have one)? Do your two new books continue the hybrid trend?

JS: I don’t tend to think in terms of subgenres and categories—I read all over the map, and I guess my writing reflects that. If anything I’ve always worked to create a believable world with sympathetic characters, people whose anxieties and thoughts resonate in a familiar and human way. You need to do that before the reader trusts you enough to follow along…whether you’re writing about New Hampshire or a Star Destroyer. To that extent, I guess these new books uphold those same basic themes.

SoY: To get an idea of your own sense of horror, what (characters, concepts, locations) do you find scariest? What's the scariest movie or book you've ever seen/read?

JS: Sometimes the scariest situations are the familiar ones with some element of the unexpected thrown in. Lying in your own bed at night can become unbearably frightening once you hear that first thump from downstairs…the one that you know is coming from your living room. As a parent, I can tell you there’s nothing scarier than a mall, the moment you realize you’ve lost your child.

Although I’m a sucker for horror movies, there aren’t many good ones…and even fewer scary ones. I think the last good scare I got was watching The Descent. And that was probably because I was watching it with someone who screamed like crazy every time something happened. It heightens the experience. I found Exorcist III pretty scary…the one that William Peter Blatty directed. I don’t read much horror fiction these days, although the stories of Thomas Ligotti are quite disturbing.

SoY: Is writing a horror novel any different than normal fiction? Do you have to place yourself inside the story/setting more when writing horror?

JS: No difference for me—it’s all fiction. It either gets you off, or it doesn’t.

SoY: When writing a horror novel, what kinds of literary tools do you use to make the novel frightening, creepy, etc, and how are you able to effectively shock/surprise your readers in as non-visual a medium as the written word?

JS: Again, so much of this depends on creating people that the reader wants to spend time with. Nothing’s less scary than a zombie on page one. You can structure short chapters with single-sentence paragraphs in an attempt to simulate shock and surprise, but without establishing some recognizable sense of place and emotion, it’s all joy buzzers and whoopee cushions. Like the horror movies soundtracks that insist on blasting a sudden sharp squeal to startle the audience rather than genuinely unsettle them.

SoY: What's been the highlight of your career so far? In the statement "If I could write a book that ________________, I would consider my career a success." what would you put in the blank?

JS: I used to want to write a book that would inspire a pinball game. Now I want to write a book that inspires a haunted house.

SoY: Do you have any weird writing habits that somehow work for you? (i.e. sitting in a recently dug grave in a cemetery writing by candlelight with the blood of a Trekkie)

JS: Coffee. Silence. Time. Ass plus seat equals book.

SoY: Del Rey/Lucasbooks was so happy with Death Troopers that they've asked you to write another unrelated SW novel to be released October 2010. Can you provide any information at all about the new story idea, even if it’s a teaser word or two? Has the time frame been established? How is the writing coming?

JS: It’s scary. It won’t be a sequel. I sent in my first draft of the novel to my editor yesterday.

SoY: During your SW research, did you find any other Star Wars horror concepts that jumped out at you (pardon the pun) as needing a story of their own? Ancient Sith abominations or rituals? Imperial bioengineering gone wrong? In other words, if you were offered a SW novel, what story would you write?

JS: I’d love to do an “acid Western” style story of Imperial deserters on the run, trying to get work as outlaws. Kind of a stormtrooper version of the movies Robert Benson and Hal Ashby were making back in the ‘70s.

SoY: There's been an ongoing contest to create a suitable Book Trailer for Death Troopers over on Suvudu.com. If I’m not mistaken, I believe you were in one of them as a Storm Trooper. Have you seen any of the other trailers? What's your opinion on book trailers in general?

JS: I love them. I love the idea of creating something relatively cheaply that people can look at and get a sense of what the book is about. I’ve seen all the Death Troopers trailers and I can tell you that I loved them all. Some of them gave me chills.



SoY: Recent "horror" movies seem less scary and more just torture porn, Japanese remake, or Halloween knockoff/remake film 231,138. What is Hollywood Horror doing wrong? Are they doing anything right?

JS: As always, Hollywood is making money—they do that right. As far as quality goods, I think it’s great that they chose not to remake Paranormal Activity and promote it as an ultra-low budget scarefest that really delivers the goods. It looks pretty good. The others….eh. I know the guys who make the Saw movies, and they’re nice guys, but I don’t think we need much more of that.

SoY: This will be many Star Wars fans first foray into the horror genre. Suppose someone loves Death Troopers and immediately churns through your catalog of books. If they enjoyed what they read, what other authors would you recommend? What's the best thing you've read recently?

JS: I’d suggest the stories of Richard Matheson and the crime novels of Duane Swierczynski, Peter Abrahams and Jason Starr. Everyone should read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Also E.L. Doctorow’s Civil War novel The March is excellent.

SoY: Where can we keep an eye on you and your work?

JS: I’m on Facebook and I’ve got a website: http://www.scaryparent.blogspot.com/

---

Go buy Death Troopers. Seriously.

You should be scared if you don't.

I've read in the neighborhood of 40 books so far this year. I'm just starting Child of Fire by Harry Connolly.

This is the 1st MMPB I've read this year. Everything else has been TPB or HC.

It actually feels weird to hold such a small book. I can't honestly remember the last MMPB I read. Maybe I've got a subconscious aversion to MPPBs. Or I just can't wait to read the books I really want.

Anyways, just thought that was strange.

Just finished Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl

1 Word Review: Wow!
3 Word Review: Read this now.
5 Word Review: Best I've read this year.
7 Word Review: Bacigalupi is no longer up and coming.

Look for a for a normal sized review sometime soon, but in the meantime go read something by Bacigalupi. He's really really really good.

Really.

This week's Keeping An Eye On author is poised to have a big 2010. For the past few years, Jason Stoddard has been slowly building a very respectable portfolio in the science fiction circles. His work was impressive enough to catch the eye of Ellen Datlow, Jonathan Strahan, and Gardner Dozois and to stick out in their minds when asked to name the writers of the future by SF Signal. After making a splash in the short fiction markets, Stoddard is publishing not one, but two(!) novels next year. And that in addition to his usual short fiction output. Stoddard is also a member of the generation of authors who have at least partially used fiction websites, blogs, and other forms of internet publishing to establish their name within the genre market. That's not suprising given his day job which he still maintains despite a blossoming writing career.

To find out just what Stoddard does for a living and how it affects his writing career, read on...

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SoY: If we are keeping an eye on you, what should be looking for in the near future? What have you been working on recently?

JS: The big news is that I have two novels coming out in 2010 from Prime Books: Winning Mars and Eternal Franchise. The titles sound familiar, don't they? More on that later.

As far as what I'm working on, ha! Most is work-work. But, with luck, I'll soon finish the rewrite of my new near-future novel Hello World, and I'm working on a script based on my short story Willpower--which appeared in Futurismic--and you'll be hearing about another story or two soon.

SoY: If a reader has never heard of you before reading this, what is the one single piece of work of yours (novel, short story, comics, etc.) would you like them to read?

JS: Actually, Willpower is a good place to start. It was originally published by Futurismic, and will show up in Rich Horton's anthology Unplugged: The Best of Online Fiction, and it's had some (tiny) love from the Hollywood crowd. Here's where you can read it for free:

http://futurismic.com/2008/12/01/new-fiction-willpower-by-jason-stoddard/

Your day job involves working with social media and virtual worlds. Can you expound on this a little more? Is it as interesting as it sounds?

Yes! And, well, no!

In a broader sense, what my day job involves is marketing. Frequently we work on the bleeding edge. Frequently we work for companies doing interesting stuff, like nanotech or mind-controlled toys or kids' virtual worlds. This is the exciting part--getting to see a broad swath of what's happening tomorrow. Getting to have drinks with some of the people who are shaping the future.

But, guess what? It's always still about results. The campaign has to get results. The site has to work. So there's plenty of detail work, plenty of keeping-up stuff, plenty of grind. Not complaining--it goes with the territory.

SoY: How has your experience with social media influenced the content of your writing? The way you market yourself to potential readers?

JS: Ha. Yeah, I write what I know, and you could look at a lot of my recent output--especially the story Monetized, which appeared in Interzone this year, and the upcoming novel Hello World--as taking social media (and monetization of social media) to logical extremes. Social media is so powerful on a personal level, it's a fairly profound change.

As far as social media for marketing myself, sure, but tempered with a huge dose of lack-of-time, and another strong dose of caution. People don't want to be marketed to when they're hanging out with their friends. It's like me coming into your house with a sandwich board and bullhorn, saying. “Buy my book!” Because of this, I concentrate mainly on blogging. Facebook is more or less for friends, Twitter is dedicated to one-line wine reviews.

That said, I do have some interesting ideas for marketing the book when it comes out--but they aren't entirely social. I'm going to keep my hat on these for now.

SoY: What's the most innovative example of “social media” you've come across this year? What's at the bleeding edge of the market?

JS: When we're talking social media, I think we need to concentrate on “most relevant,” rather than “most innovative.” And only one thing really comes to mind as an example of a company doing it right. Google “Extreme Shepherding” and watch the video. This is the way to do it. It's so well-done I didn't think to ask myself “Hmm, did they really just find these guys and pay them to do this, or did they engineer the whole thing (maybe even to the point of CG?)”

Bleeding edge? That's easy. Augmented reality is the bleeding edge. It's kind of a marketing fad at the moment--only Ray-Ban has a good use for it, which allows you to model virtual sunglasses via your webcam. But augmented reality is going to mature, it's going to be big, and it's going to be pervasive. But before that, it'll have to go through its Second Life moment, where it's savaged by the press.

SoY: What's been the highlight of your career so far? What would you have to do to consider your writing career a success?

JS: The high point was getting contacted by Sean Wallace of Prime Books. The conversation went something like this:

Sean: “So, are Winning Mars and Eternal Franchise available for publication?”

Me: “Well, uh, yeah, but I've released one as a Creative Commons PDF and one's being serialized on my blog.”

Sean: “Doesn't matter. More publicity for the physical product.”

Me: “!!!”

So there you go. Two novels, both released into the wild. Now both will be hardbacks. From an unknown author. Or, in other words, what a whole lot of people said could never happen. I'm very happy about that.

And, as far as long-term success goes, I'll be thrilled if I can just keep writing stories and books (and, hopefully, screenplays) that people like. Everything else will come.

SoY: Like Cory Doctorow, you appear to be a proponent of Creative Commons, giving away PDFs of your first novel, Winning Mars. You are also serializing your second novel for free on your blog. How has the free revolution worked for you?

JS: I'm absolutely all about Creative Commons. Giving away my stuff got me a two-book deal from a reputable publisher!

SoY: Combining your career in new marketing techniques and your experience in short fiction circles, do you have any idea on how to modernize/fix the genre short fiction market?

JS: Oho, wow. That's a loaded question. The short answer is, “Yes, I have some ideas, but . . .”

On the “Yes, I have some ideas,” side, the publishers can go a long way to improving their fortunes by taking a lesson from niche marketing: take care of your fans, actively. You do this by keeping people informed, holding special events, and encouraging people to tell their friends. There's no magic here. I'm talking newsletters and Q&As and giveaways and contests. There's no need to go out and have a Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and YouTube and Flickr presence and frantically post and fan and friend. Though Facebook ads would be an interesting test. A more interesting test would be a more visual magazine targeted at people who hang out on i09 and BoingBoing (amongst others), but that takes much deeper pockets.

The “But,” comes from the fact that I've never done a mile on a publisher's Segway, so I can't claim any great expertise. And, like all marketing, any program would take testing and optimization--which means it could end up somewhere very different than where it started.

SoY: What are your writing habits like? Do you have any peculiar writing habits that somehow work for you but everyone else would find quirky (and/or insane)?

JS: I'm an isolationist. I can't write in a coffeehouse. I can't write while listening to music with lyrics. I also frequently don't remember big pieces of what I wrote a week before, so the first rewrite can be a big surprise (both good or bad.) Is this weird?

SoY: An incident occurs resulting in your removal from the list of up-and-coming genre stars. What is the most likely cause of that incident? Who do you nominate in your place?

JS: If I'm removed, it'll probably be due to me skewering some sacred cow of science fiction groupthink. I'm amazed at how such a forward-thinking group of people can sometimes seem so sad and morose. Maybe it's because I'm in contact with a lot of leading-edge technologies and the people who are creating them, but I'm hugely excited about the future. I think that yeah, there's some scary stuff, and yeah, it ain't necessarily going to be easy, but, I think it'll work out in the end. And it'll work out better. Which some people simply don't want to hear.

The person I'd nominate? The guy who skewered the sacred cow of the reputation economy. Currently with only one Futurismic story to his name, this is a name to watch: Adam Rakunas.

SoY: What are your opinions on eBooks? Are they the future of publishing? What's the biggest deterrent toward eBooks changing the market the same way digital downloads changed music?

JS: Having your whole library in one device beats “the look, the touch, the feel of paper.” Wireless distribution beats shipping slabs of wood pulp all over the world. Yep, ebooks are what make sense for the future.

What doesn't make sense is the pricing. Sorry, big publishers, knocking three bucks off the hardcover price for an ebook simply doesn't work. eBooks make sense at $1-5. Just like iPhone apps.

When the upward pricing pressure falls away, then ebooks take over. It's that simple.

SoY: Your fiction has some interesting ideas about funding the future of spaceflight. What's your opinion on the current state of the Space Program? Where is it going to be in 20 years? Where should it be? What needs to be done to get from where it is to where it should be?

JS: Even when hamstrung, the US space program has achieved some very cool stuff. That said, we're hamstrung. The news of water on Mars could have come in 1976. It took an Indian space probe to confirm water on the moon.

The future, at the least, should look a lot like Zubrin's presentation to the Augustine Commission: Reclaiming the American Spirit Through Mars. In short, he's proposing that we go back to being destination-based, and the destination is Mars. The push is for a number of missions, run continuously, which would put a largely self-sufficient, permanent presence on Mars. And it would be done fast. And it would pay off in terms of a new frontier, and a new focus on science and engineering.

Beyond that: multiple private companies competing to build the first space elevator. When we get low cost to orbit, then everything opens up. Everything changes. And even our biggest fears suddenly seem very, very small.

If we wanted to, we could have Zubrin's Mars presence, workable space elevators, and a lunar colony in the next 20 years. Remember, the original plan for Project Orion was to be on Mars . . . in 1965. I'd love to see some of that spirit back, whether it's in the public or private sector--but, ah, with less nuclear weapons involved.

SoY: If you were offered a one-way ticket to be the first human on Mars, would you go?

JS: Yes. Even if I am The Man Who Lost the Sea.

SoY: You get to choose a single SF/F author (can be living, dead, or zombie) to write one additional book. Who do you choose and why?

JS: I'd love to see what Cordwainer Smith would do if he was living today. His work was so off-path from, well, almost everything else at the time, I used to think he must be a time-traveler hiding in the past.

SoY: What's the best thing you've read this year?

JS: You're assuming I read. Kidding. Though time has been at an extreme premium. And perhaps that's reflected in how long my backlog is--the best thing I've read this year is Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge . . . which yeah, I know, I should have read in 2007.

SoY: [Obligatory pimpage] Is there anywhere online that readers can follow you and your work? [/obligatory pimpage]

JS: You can usually keep abreast of what I'm doing at http://www.strangeandhappy.com/ (that is, provided I'm not buried in work and unable to update it!) There's a ton of links to free stories and social media-y stuff, as well.

---

That's it from Jason. He had a lot to say on a number of interesting topics (ignore the fact I was asking the questions) and if this interview got your brain whirling, you should definitely check out his fiction. Even if you don't I'd keep an eye out for the name Jason Stoddard, by the end of 2010 you're most likely going to see it whether you want to or not.

Congrats to Joe N. from Phoenix, AZ.

Fortunately for him, the odds weren't quite Han Solo levels of improbable. 50/50 is pretty easy to beat. I know I have 12 readers, why didn't you other 10 participate?

I'm generally not one for Book Trailers. For the most part, they are underbudgeted and underproduced. The only books with enough marketing behind them to afford a professional trailer are the books that don't need trailers to sell copies (i.e. Harry Potter, Twilight, Dan Brown, etc). The other alternatives are fan produced/amateur trailers and for that you need someone with a lot of skill, a lot of free time, awareness of the authors work, and a desire to help them. For your average author, that's not going to happen.

There are only a few fanbases out there that meet those 4 criteria. One of which is Star Wars. They've got a lot of tech-savy fans who enjoy making Stormtrooper costumes and fan films in their spare time with publishing schedules that are known and dissected years in advance. These guys love Star Wars and go so far as to digitally edit Jar Jar Binks to make a vastly superior edition of The Phantom Menace. Other than SW, Star Trek, John Scalzi, and a few other groups I'm sure I'm forgetting, the majority of books aren't going to have that level of amateur support. Not to mention the fact that the Star Wars publishing empire could afford to buy a professional trailer (and probably a 1:1 scale Death Star).

So when I saw that Random House was holding a Book Trailer contest for Joe Schreiber's Death Troopers over at Suvudu I was immediately interested. These book trailers could be interesting. These book trailers could be, dare I say it..., good.

So I watched the trailers. For the most part they are pretty meh. Inferior computer animation, bad dialogue/acting, and absolutely terrible costumes/sets. Even the official Del Rey trailer, complete with Joe Schreiber cameo, isn't anything special. The majority of book trailers simply don't work. The most stunning scenes of the movie can be spliced together to make a killer trailer in a way that you can't cheaply replicate off the page.

But this one, this one I liked. It's simple. It knows it's limitations and it works with them rather than trying to hide them. Have a look:



What do you think?

My December issues of Analog and Asimov's arrived on Sept 30th. The only logical explanation is that their editors possess some form of Time Travel.

 

Why don't they use it for saving the short fiction market rather than publishing issues through time. Here are ten ideas to use their time travel powers to prevent the collapse of the genre short fiction market.

1. Go to the past invest in Google/Microsoft/Apple until you can pay your authors $10 a word and enough editors to scour the resulting slushmountain for gems.





2. Go back in time and destroy the internet in it's infancy like it's Skynet.





3. Go to the past and buy Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling and serialize the novels for the next 30 years at $20 an installment.





4. Go to the future and obtain a copy of A Dance With Dragons and promise to release it when subscriptions reach a certain level. Also consider obtaining the answers to Lost or the Blu-ray copies of the 3rd Nolan directed Batman movie.





5. Go way, way back and teach foreign cultures English. A potential reader base of 6 billion has to be better than what you've got now.





6. Bring several copies of Harlan Ellison to the same point in time, put them in a room together and sell tickets.





7. Re-create Heinlein classic "-All You Zombies-" and sell the memoir as non-fiction/go on Jerry Springer.





8. Go to past and pay Stephanie Meyer not to publish Twilight. I will throw in $100 bucks. You don't even need to publish anything. Also consider: Saving Firefly or Preventing "Everybody Loves Raymond"





9. Tape bacon to your issues. It worked for Scalzi.





10. Publish the January issue in September. Genius!

What's your solution?

Canticle (The Psalms of Isaak) - Ken Scholes

Canticle is the 2nd book in Ken Scholes "Psalms of Isaak" sequence after last year's Lamentation. I haven't had a chance to read Lamentation yet but it did get a lot of rave reviews. I'll be interested to see whether Scholes can keep up the pace. Once the series finishes, I'll be hoping on board.

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel - Bill Willingham

Keeping An Eye On author Chris Roberson (interview here) and Bill Willingham were both part of the same writing group. Now it seems they are switching roles as Roberson has been writing comics and Willingham is making the leap to novels. Fables is simply one of the best comic book series out there. It will be interesting to see how it holds up in novel form.

Star Wars: Death Troopers - Joe Schreiber

Star Wars. Horror. Stormtrooper. Zombies. Look at that cover. What else do you need? I also might have an interview with Joe Schreiber sometime this month. If I had to pick one book on the list I would be sure of completing by the end of October, this would be it.

Star Wars: 501st: An Imperial Commando Novel - Karen Traviss

One of Karen Traviss's last SW novels (after she announced she was leaving the universe due to continuity concerns). 501st continues the story of Traviss's Republic Commandos once they find their employers have undergone some restructuring. Out of the two SW novels this month, I'd check out Death Troopers first but Traviss is a great author in her own right and her Republic Commando novels were always excellent.

Leviathan - Scott Westerfeld

Leviathan is a young adult novel portraying WWI in an alternate universe that took a steampunk twist sometime down the line. Prince Aleksander Ferdinand and girl-posing-as-airman Deryn Sharp adventure the world in the titular airship, Leviathan. This book features stunning black and white steampunk drawings throughout the book. Recommend buying the book, reading it carefully, and giving it a child for Christmas if you can part with it.

Eclipse 3: New Science Fiction and Fantasy - Jonathan Strahan

I have neither heard of this book or any interest in reading it. The table of contents has WAY too many women in it. Kidding. This is the third in an absolutely fantastic series of anthologies. If you are looking for quality new authors accross the entire genre, this is the singular anthology for you.

Lovecraft Unbound - Ellen Datlow

Lovecraft + Datlow + Laird Barron = Anthology Cthulu might come back to Earth to read. I'm not particularly well read in the horror subgenre but I've always been interested in the Cthulu mythos/dark SF kind of thing. This is another highly anticipated one.

My Dead Body: A Novel - Charlie Huston

The final book in Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt Casebook. That's right; a urban fantasy series that ends. It will be interesting to see how the 5 book arc ends and how Huston finalizes the transition from episodic plot to an overarching one. I'm planning to read/review all 5 now that the series is complete.

The Secret History of Science Fiction - James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel

This is another anthology but a very interesting one. SHoSF offers to a slate of stories blending science fiction and "literature", two things which aren't always paired together. With stories by Ursula K. LeGuin, Michael Chabon, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, and others, this anthology might be one to have your "literary" friends read after you smack them over the head with it. They deserve it for dismissing some absolutely incredible authors who manage to tell a story and write literature at the same time.

The Devil's Eye - Jack McDevitt

In the 4th Alex Benedict novel, Jack McDevitt takes his main character to the dark recesses of the universe. This book has been out for a year but I like the books to line up on the shelf so PB for me.

The Umbrella Academy: Dallas - Gerard Way & Gabriel Ba

The Umbrella Academy got a ton of critical praise last year. This is the follow up series by the same team. I enjoyed the first one and there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Here's hoping the quality stays up.

October is filled with a lot of series installments and anthologies but there aren't too many big name SF stand-alones. I wonder if there's a good time a year for that? Anyway, as always, if you are interested in more details regarding any of the above books, just click on through the Amazon links. I'm more interested in telling you why I recommended them rather than simply what's out there. Anything that might have escaped my genre nets? Which one of these covers is your favorite?

You can view previous installments of YetiStomper Picks here

This week's Keeping An Eye On Interview is with none other than Tim Pratt. Tim is one of the more established authors of the SF Signal's watchlist, having published genre work since 1999. Over the past 10 years he has slowly put together a very respectable writing career publishing 5 novels and 2 short story collections. If you've been reading these interviews, you know the drill. Lots of reprints in Year's Best Anthologies, award nominations (among a few wins) and other praise. I'm running out of ways to say it but it's more of the same with Pratt. High quality writing, and lots of it. If you don't take my word for it; take Neil Gaiman's. Pratt beat Gaiman for a Hugo (2007 Hugo for short story "Impossible Dreams". That doesn't happen. You could write a short story where Gaiman doesn't win an award but you'd have to shelf it in the genre section: cause you're writing fantasy.
But Pratt did the impossible. Let's see what else he's been up to.

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SoY: If we are keeping an eye on you, what should be looking for in the near future? What have you been working on recently?

TP: I've been publishing a series of urban fantasy novels about a character named Marla Mason (the latest, Spell Games, came out this past spring), but that series has come to an end (the publisher's choice, not mine). I am, however, publishing an online serial novella called "Bone Shop" set in the same world, at my website: marlamason.net/boneshop

And it's always possible, though not likely, that some other publisher will want to continue the series. Time will tell.

Apart from that, I have a couple of finished novels out to editors, and a couple of proposals I'm polishing up to send out to more editors, and I'm hoping some or preferably all of them will be published sometime. And there are always more short stories coming out, including an SF novelette called "Troublesolving" that will appear in Subterranean magazine sometime and a new Marla Mason story in an anthology next year.

SoY: If a reader has never heard of you before reading this, what is the one single piece of work of yours (novel, short story, etc.) would you like them to read?

TP: My most famous story is "Impossible Dreams", my Hugo winner from a couple years ago, which can be listened to in podcast form at Escape Pod.

Or else "Little Gods", which can be read (in glorious texty form!) at Strange Horizons.

Both are pretty representative of my short work -- that is, if you like these, you might like my other stuff, and if you don't, maybe you won't.

SoY: As you most likely mentioned, you are currently writing an Urban Fantasy series centered around sorcerer Marla Mason. Can you tell us more about the series? Is it a set storyline or open-ended? What makes the Marla Mason novels distinct in the world of Urban Fantasy?

TP: It's an open-ended series, with each novel intended to stand alone, though the characters do develop and change a bit as the series goes on. The books follow the adventures of Marla Mason, the brusque, tactless, violent chief sorcerer (sort of a cross between a mob boss and a superhero) of an East Coast city called Felport. She contends with various menaces, supernatural and otherwise.

As for what makes the book distinct... people tell me Marla differs from many UF heroines in that she doesn't have much of a love life (or even a sex life, really), doesn't suffer from low self-esteem, and doesn't spend much time angsting; there's not a lot of distance between her thoughts and her actions, and she's almost always sure she's right... even when she's wrong. One reviewer described her as "the world's bitchiest superheroine," which I liked.

SoY: I’m generally critical of the Tramp Stamp Sex Warriors that shame the covers of a disturbingly high percentage of Urban Fantasy novels. Your Marla Mason covers are very stylized and much stronger than the typical book. Who does the covers for your books? How did you manage to escape the UF curse?


TP: I had zero input into the covers, really (most authors don't get a say, so that's not remarkable). I don't know how I got so lucky, but I had amazing cover karma with Daniel Dos Santos. He did all four covers. I named a character in Spell Games in his honor -- Danny Two Saints. Dan's a super nice guy. I have a big framed signed print of the art from Poison Sleep hanging over my desk. All credit goes to the good people at Bantam Spectra who brought him on board.

SoY: What authors would you describe as your primary influences in developing your personal narrative style?

TP: When I was young I read a lot of Stephen King, Charles de Lint, Clive Barker, and Jonathan Carroll, and I think they influenced me a lot, in obvious and subtle ways.

SoY: Some of the other up and coming authors I’ve interviewed have mentioned how hard writing a novel is compared to their experiences writing shorter fiction. What did you find hardest about making that transition? Has it gotten easier with time?

TP: Eh, I've been writing novels since I was twelve. (Well, trying to, though I tended to stall out around 100 pages in those early days.) I actually finished my first complete novel when I was 18, and completed five more books, all failures and learning experiences, before I finished the first book I actually got published, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. Writing novels and stories are different, but I don't find either harder than the other. Novels take longer, of course, but you return every day to write with characters and a world you've established, so that's simpler in some ways -- whereas, with stories, you have to invent a new world and new characters every time. They each have their own challenges and rewards. I love both. (But freely admit I'm better at writing short stories. I've written hundreds of them, though, so I've had more practice)

SoY: I’m calling you out on the gender neutral pseudonym. What are you feelings toward the importance of gender in Urban Fantasy (both for authors and characters)? Do you think its comparable to the relatively male dominated Hard SF market?

TP: My first novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, sold like crap. Thus, my publisher wanted the new books to appear under a different name so bookstores wouldn't look at my existing sales record and refuse to buy any copies. Such renaming is a pretty common practice these days to deal with lackluster sales. They chose a gender-neutral pseudonym because the books were urban fantasy with a female heroine, and most such books are written by women. I had nothing to do with the decision, really, though it didn't bother me. I don't care what byline my work appears under, so long as I can keep publishing it. There are probably more pseudonyms in my future. That's life in the midlist.

I know very little about the current hot trends in urban fantasy, honestly. After my agent and editor told me Blood Engines was UF, I read some of the popular stuff (Charlaine Harris, Kim Harrison, etc.) in the genre, saw the broad similarities, and decided I shouldn't read much more lest it influence my own work!

I come much more from the earlier urban fantasy/contemporary fantasy/mythic fiction tradition that includes Charles de Lint, Jonathan Carroll, Emma Bull, Megan Lindholm, Terri Windling, etc. etc.

SoY: You and your wife edited a twice yearly ‘zine by the name of Flytrap which unfortunately was discontinued in November 2008 with issue 10. What was the hardest part of trying to maintaining a regular release schedule?

TP: Paying for the printing and forcing ourselves to do the tedious mailing. :)

Everything else was easy. My wife and I both have editorial/slush reading experience, and I do layout/production all day long at my day job, so it was only the logistical administrivial stuff that was difficult. We did delay an issue or two, due to impending childbirth and such unavoidable scheduling conflicts. The 'zine was great, but with a kid and our own other writing commitments, we just didn't have time to keep it going.

SoY: What are your writing habits like? Do you have any peculiar writing habits that somehow work for you but everyone else would find quirky (and/or insane)?

TP: I just write whenever I feel like it. Fortunately, I enjoy writing, so I feel like it often enough to produce a quarter million words or so every year. No rituals, no habits. Sometimes I write longhand in the park, sometimes I type on a laptop on the balcony, sometimes I type at my desk. I've been writing fiction since I was in third grade. It's just a part of my life, no more remarkable than eating or bathing or napping.

SoY: Who wins in a fight between Harry Dresden, Sookie Stackhouse, Anita Blake, and Stephanie Meyer?

TP: Stephenie Meyer, since the other three are fictional, and real people usually have an advantage, being corporeal and all.

SoY: An incident occurs resulting in your removal from the list of up-and-coming genre stars. What is the most likely cause of that incident? Who do you nominate in your place?

TP: Oh, I suppose someone could notice that my publisher decided not to continue my urban fantasy series and decide I'm actually already a has-been.

I think Meghan McCarron and Alice Kim are too of the most interesting and exciting short fiction writers I've encountered in recent years.

SoY: Is there a difference between the genres you read and those you write? What are you favorite subgenres to read?

TP: I read SF of most varieties, fantasy of most varieties, and horror of most varieties, and lately I've been reading a lot of mysteries and crime novels. Crime novels are probably my favorite at the moment. Westlake/Stark, etc.

SoY: [Obligatory pimpage] Is there anywhere online that readers can follow you and your work? [/obligatory pimpage]

TP: I blog at http://tim-pratt.livejournal.com/, my website is timpratt.org

---

That's it from Tim. Not to take anything away from any of the other authors but Tim was one of the friendliest and accessible authors I've interviewed (he ties for 1st with about 10 other authors).  I hope to see more Marla Mason books in the future and I'd encourage all of my 12 readers to go check out his stuff.

I'm thinking of making October "Urban Fantasy Month" here at Stomping on Yeti and Marla Mason might be one of my featured series. Hope to see you back here for more.

After the dense and somewhat disappointing The Quiet War (review) and the light, fun The Lost Symbol (review), I'm plunging back into the Sci-Fi deep end with paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel The Wind-Up Girl.

I already gave my feedback on the cover in a Covering Covers post (quick summary: absolutely fantastic cover except for the top left and bottom right text) but I have to say I'm excited to finally get my hands on a Bacigalupi novel. His Pump Six and Other Stories simply blew me away. It was bleak, depressing, and I couldn't get enough. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that this is my most anticipated book of 2009 and I guarantee it's in the Top 5.

I'm a bit late in posting this as I'm already a hundred or so pages in but so far The Windup Girl has not disappointed. Bacigalupi paints a future landscape with such deft brushstrokes that you don't even notice as he gives you the tour of the place. It's world-building but it's top-notch and expertly subtle. I would go on further but I want to save some of my thoughts for the review.

My only complaint so far are the frequent use of Thai words. While they're probably accurate, I've only picked up only some of them so far and it bugs me not to know the exact context of the words. Much like Ian McDonald's Brasyl, The Windup Girl could definitely benefit from a glossary at the end of the book. And unlike Brasyl, I looked for a glossary first so I didn't struggle through the cultural elements for the majority of the book before finding it.

Expect a review up sooner rather than later because I am loving what I've read so far.

Just a reminder that the contest for Galileo's Dream ends midnight on Wednesday, Sept 30th. There's still time to enter and as the contest only has 2 entries, you've got a spectacular chance at winning.

Contest Rules

• 1 entry per person (total, not per day)
• US Residents Only (Excluding Hawaii and Alaska) - This is my own money here, and I'm not made of it. I'm already shelling out for a free book.
• Contest will run until midnight, Sept 30th, 2009.
• Winner will be selected via random number generator

If you want to enter, send an e-mail to YetiContest [at] gmail [dot] com (replace [at] with @ and [dot} with .) containing the following:

• Name
• Mailing Address
• Favorite Up-and-coming Genre Author (who has published less than 5 novels)

21 Words or Less: Everything you expect from a Dan Brown thriller plus a extra helping of preachiness intended to start controversy

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

The Good: Typical Dan Brown Thriller; Well-researched, interesting asides about American history and Freemasons; Fast-paced, popcorn read full of hidden messages and secret history.

The Bad: Preachier than previous thrillers in what appears to be an attempt to recreate Da Vinci controversy; Formulaic (although in a way that works)

I'm going to keep this quick because everyone knows what this book is all about and Dan Brown isn't going to see any increase in sales from me mentioning The Lost Symbol on Stomping on Yeti. On the other hand, I'd be more than willing to reciprocate if he felt like mentioning my site in one of his books. I'm not going to say no to an increase in viewership of... How do you divide by zero? Anyway, this past week I breezed through the 500 odd pages of the newest Robert Langdon adventure. Was it a great book? No. Was it a fun book? Yes.

I rate books based on expectations and with Dan Brown it's easy to know what to expect. You're going to have short chapters, fast pacing, and lots and lots of short asides disguised as conversation between characters as they attempt to decipher the latest clue in a series of connected mysteries. I wasn't disappointed. In the Lost Symbol, Brown brings the action back to America, where Langdon and friends explore the rich history of the nation's capital.  I'm not going to delve into the plot much as half the fun is trying to figure out whats really going on. My recommendation is simple: If you liked Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code you will most likely enjoy The Lost Symbol.

My only caveot is that Brown seems to be struggling to find controversial material. The main "concept" with The Lost Symbol is tenuous at best and Brown tends to expound upon it to drive home it's importance. He does this by having characters who believe preach to characters who don't and their "arguments" are suprisingly one-sided for people intelligent enough to solve mysteries that have endured for centuries. The short infodumps work well for Brown; prolonged discourses? Not so much. I also think that controversial plotline was tacked on. The thriller would have been exactly the same without it and it didn't raise the stakes or impact the plot at all. If anything it was a poor attempt to bring the female lead into the story. I had to take away a half a star for deliberate trolling.

That's it for my review of The Lost Symbol but I'd like to talk a little bit about my feelings on Dan Brown in general. His writing is very deceptive but he knows exactly what he is doing and he excels at it. First he writes short chapters. In The Lost Symbol he divides 510 pages into over 130 chapters. That's less than 4 pages a chapter. Doing this tricks the reader into feeling like they are reading faster and also boosts the page count as almost half the pages contain less than a full page of text. It's easy to assume that the book is captivating when the pages just fall away.

Secondly, Brown switches point-of-view any time there is about to be a discovery/action scene/revelation and he doesn't get back to it until a few chapters later. Since the chapters are so short, the reader keeps turning pages until they find out what happened. However, if you read to chapter 36 to get the resolution to the cliffhanger from chapter 33, you are left with the cliffhangers from chapter 34 and 35. It's a never ending cycle of teases and it works. It's especially apparent when Brown introduces time lapses mid-chapter which would serve as natural breaks but aren't exciting enough to keep the pages turning.

Brown does excellent research (although he could be making it all up) but he tends to write it in "tell don't show" fashion. It's infodumping but interesting infodumping in very small packets. If Langdon wasn't obsessed with explaining every little attribute. I feel like he would be very irritating to be around if you weren't solving a centuries old mystery. At least Brown has a thesaurus so Langdon doesn't ask "Do you want to know how I knew that?" every half a page or so.

All in all, Brown isn't the best writer and his books tend to be very formulaic if read closely together but I feel like he's got tremendous staying power. In order for his books to work he's got to do a lot of research and tie everything together. The research is going to prevent Brown from releasing books on a fast enough schedule for the vast majority of his audience to realize how formulaic the books actually are. This often happens with Grisham, Sparks, and other consistent NY Times Bestselling authors. They publish too fast and people catch on that they've read this book before. It doesn't keep them from selling a million copies, so I'm not sure they mind. A Robert Langdon thriller every three years or so will be a big hit. It's easy to see why the pieces work the way they do, but it's hard to resist their charm.

I first heard of Alex Irvine through my Star Wars addiction when his name was announced among the writers who were part of the next Del Rey contract. At that time, I hadn't really heard of him so I did a little more digging into his previous work to set some expectations. Based on what I found, those expectations were set and they were set high. So it came as no surprise when Alex's name appeared on SF Signal's Watchlist. Like so many of the authors I've interview in the Keeping An Eye On Series, Alex is just beginning what looks to be a long writing career, but already has a few of the awards and honors that aspiring writers dream of. He didn't have to wait long either as his debut novel, A Scattering of Jades, won several awards including the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2003. Since then he has gone on to write several more novels as well as some more diverse work, including comic books, non-fiction, and even some ARGs.

I hoped that Alex would spill the info on his secretive Star Wars book but Lucas has a lightsaber to his throat. Instead I had to settle for a great interview full of rabid fans, tree-hugging pinkos, and other information not bound by an NDA. Read on for more!

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SoY: If we are keeping an eye on you, what should be looking for in the near future? What have you been working on recently?

AI: I’m working on a couple of novels. One is a big historical SF book that starts off in the 2070s and moves back to 1913 before ending up in the 1960s. It involves HG Wells, nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and Europe during the two world wars, as well as a bunch of other stuff. The other one is a picaresque fantastical-historical novel that takes the form of a fake memoir written by a famous 18th-century hoaxer named George Psalmanazar, in which he gives the real story behind his real-life memoir in which he said he was giving the real story.

Also I’m doing a couple of other comics projects, writing a screenplay for Buyout, and working on two licensed projects—one a Dungeons and Dragons novel and the other a Star Wars novel set in the Old Republic period. And then there are the short stories, which I’m always pecking away at. So lots of things are on the boil.

SoY: If a reader has never heard of you before reading this, what is the one single piece of work of yours (novel, short story, comics, etc.) would you like them to read?

AI: I think Buyout is a good entry point. From my perspective, which is the only one I have, that book has most of my good qualities as a writer and manifests the fewest of my flaws. I have my own sentimental favorites for other reasons—I still love The Narrows because there’s one character I got absolutely right, and A Scattering of Jades because the research and story came together better than I had any right to expect, and various of my stories for various reasons—but if a reader really wanted to know what makes me tick as a writer, then Buyout would probably be the book to start with.

SoY: Describe your writing style in haiku-form.

AI: Eek. This one is tough. Maybe:

What is this feeling?
How would this person react?
Try to get it right.

SoY: Your first novel, A Scattering of Jades, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2003. Can you describe the journey between setting out to write A Scattering of Jades and getting it published? What was it like to win an award with your first novel?

AI: I started to write Jades in August of 1993, and had a complete draft by December of 1996. There followed a (retrospectively) comical series of miscommunications and resignations and lost manuscripts etc., by the end of which I was ready to tear my hair out because people kept telling me they loved the book right before they left publishing forever or were murdered by elements of the Black Hand or disappeared on an expedition to Lemuria or whatever. The first guy who ever read the book all the way through, John Klima, bought it—but it took nearly six years to get someone to read it all the way through.

Jades came out and won the Locus Award, which was terrific—it also won the International Horror Guild and Crawford awards for best first novel, which was extra terrific. This is where the ‘rising star’ appellation seems in retrospect a bit ironic, since I haven’t had a sniff of an award since then. I was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in I think 2003 for “Gus Dreams of Biting the Mailman,” but for whatever reason I don’t seem to get on awards ballots very often. When Jades was just out and all of that was happening, though, I was over the moon. I was convinced that stardom was imminent. The intervening years have maybe taught me otherwise. It’s a little odd for me to consider myself a rising star in a field where I’ve been working for ten years.

SoY: You’ve worked with two of the most complex continuities out there in Marvel Comics (Daredevil) and Star Wars. How do you handle starting a project in such an established universe? Do you approach writing differently if you are writing in a shared universe versus a universe of your own creation?

AI: There are differences to working with an established continuity, sure—but in some ways I think they’re akin to the differences between writing formal poetry and free verse. The strictures of the sonnet or villanelle or sestina drive you to see what can be done within those strictures. If you’re writing free verse, the only rule is that you do something good. Probably when I’m working on a story that I build from scratch, I can let myself go a little more, but established continuities are an exciting challenge, and because they’ve been around for so long and have such passionate followers, they inspire a writer to create work that deserves that passion. At least that’s how I approach it.

SoY: Similarly, with established universes come established fanbases with preconceived notions of what should or shouldn’t happen. Have your experiences with these often rabid fanbases been positive or negative? Any particular stick out in your memory?

AI: One thing I remember is reading on a couple of comics websites, shortly after Daredevil Noir was announced, that it was a stupid and redundant idea. People had already formed their opinions about it based on how they felt about the existing character without giving a single thought to the possibility that the story might be worth reading. Then it was interesting to see a number of those commentators change their minds and decide it was a pretty cool story. This is the dynamic you let yourself in for when you work in established continuities. But it’s all good in the end because the readers are interested and respond to what you do.

SoY: You’ve written both novels and comics. How did you transition from writing novels to writing for comics? Does working across multiple formats make it easier to stay creative?

AI: I find that working in different formats is great for creativity. Not only are you telling different kinds of stories, but you’re constantly discovering new ways to tell stories. Some of those discoveries are transitive across formats and some aren’t, but all of them get you thinking in unexpected directions, which is always great. There’s a learning curve, though. It was tricky for me at first to learn how to say less in a script. My instinct was to go into great detail about everything I wanted in every panel, but I found it worked better (at least in terms of my relationship with the artist(s) I was working with) if I wrote the script so that it had everything in it I really needed to see in a certain way, and left the rest up for discussion as the script gets transformed into a comic book. Until I find a better way, that’s what I’m going to do—and of course that interaction is much different from the internal discussions you have while you’re writing a piece of fiction.

SoY: You are contracted for a 6 issue miniseries but you get to pick the superhero/comic book character. Who would you choose and what type of story would you want to tell?

AI: I think I would do a story in which Dr. Strange and Wong fall in love and confront an occult menace accidentally brought into our world by Jack Parsons in 1950s San Francisco just as the Beat era is really coming into its own.

SoY: What are your writing habits like? Do you have any peculiar writing habits that somehow work for you but everyone else would find quirky (and/or insane)?

AI: The truth is, I wish I had writing habits. I write whenever I can snatch a moment or an hour. If you’re a single guy with no kids and no job, you get to have a writing schedule. If not, you sledgehammer it in wherever you can make it fit. That’s what I’ve been doing for eight years now, and it has sort of worked. In the end, it’s the writer and the blank page. If you want to make something happen, you will; if not, that’s a separate question. I do confess to a weakness for writing in bars because I like the background noise they provide. Beyond that, all I can say is that it may be bizarre, but I take time where I find it and I try to find time wherever it appears. It’s all pretty ad hoc.

SoY: Excuse my geek-out but I am a complete and utter Star Wars junkie. Can you provide any details of your upcoming Star Wars novel featuring Nomi Sunrider?

AI: I really can’t say much. The story develops the relationship between Nomi and Vima Sunrider and involves a resurgent threat from Sith and Mandalorian forces. Plus I introduce a new character that I’m really enjoying, a sort of interstellar scavenger who runs across some artifacts that are a little more than he can handle.

SoY: An incident occurs resulting in your removal from the list of up-and-coming genre stars. What is the most likely cause of that incident? Who do you nominate in your place?

AI: The passage of time is probably the one thing most likely to make me no longer up-and-coming. My first book came out seven years ago, and my short fiction started to appear two years before that. I’m a little surprised (pleasantly, of course!) to have been included on that list; I guess sometime in the last few years I had stopped thinking of myself as up-and-coming, and I’m glad that people disagree! If, however, I were to be removed from the list, I would nominate Vandana Singh to replace me. If she isn’t already on it.(She is)

SoY: Who wins in a fight to the death between Harry Potter, Optimus Prime, Tom Bombadil, and Boba Fett?

AI: Because I am a tree-hugging pinko at heart, I’m going to say Tom Bombadil.

SoY: You get to choose a single SF/F author (can be living, dead, or zombie) to write one additional book. Who do you choose and why?

AI: I want Philip K. Dick to write The Owl in Daylight. Or, if that’s not possible, I want him to write the sequel to The Man in the High Castle he began and apparently abandoned. There’s a chapter of it in his papers at Cal State-Fullerton. Either way—especially with The Owl in Daylight—I want Tessa Dick to stop her graverobbing.

SoY: What’s the best thing you’ve read this year?

AI: Probably Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It’s not new, and it’s not SF, but it really is the best thing I’ve read in the last year. Killer book.

SoY: [Obligatory pimpage] Is there anywhere online that readers can follow you and your work? [/obligatory pimpage]

AI: Funny you should ask. There’s the blog and the twitter and the Facebook, etc. There’s also a web site that is still in the process of being rebuilt. That’s at alexanderirvine.net and will soon have actual information on it.

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Unfortunately for me, Irvine's Star Wars novel won't be out for a while. Fortunately for me, and for anyone who isn't hopelessly addicting to Star Wars continuity, that Historical SF novel sounds might intriguing. H.G. Wells? I'm thinking time travel... The George Psalmanazar fake story about a fake book written by a conman sounds pretty good as well.

On a related note, I wonder if I stopped learning about new books now, would I finish everything I wanted to read before I died? Sigh. At least some authors COUGH* GRRM *COUGH give you time to catch up on your reading.

Anyway, thanks again to Alex for participating. And go out and buy Buyout!

I saw this little device over on Gizmodo and I must say it looks impressive. The dual touch screens and color display could really make for an excellent eBook reader. Granted it all comes down to functionality but I feel like I would enjoy reading from this more than a Kindle or an iPod Touch.



Who knows if this will every see the market but if it did, I might have to get one.