Introducing Arrate Hidalgo Sanchez

Hello all! This is Arrate speaking. I am Aqueduct Press’ new trainee, freshly arrived to Seattle to learn about and train in all things Aqueductian.

A few years ago I left my Spanish home for England, where I learned the ins and outs of publishing from a book’s conception through to its printing and delivery. This work made me happy and I had long been dreaming of applying my skills to literature I really care about, and hence it just seemed natural that my next step would be knocking at Aqueduct Press’s door.

My love affair with feminist science fiction began only a few years ago, although the preamble to it had been ballooning inside me since encountering Pamela Zoline’s 1967 short story "The Heat Death of the Universe," a very much discussed piece of subtle science fiction that showed me that there was another way, a different, exciting way to write speculative fiction—or just fiction, for that matter—that spoke directly to me as a woman and a feminist. Zoline’s Californian housewife Sarah Boyle put my world upside down and it has never been quite the same ever since. I have always been intrigued by liminal beings that inhabit several worlds and none at the same time. Creatures that we cannot quite pin down, neither evil nor good, that escape the constraints of human-animal, male-female dichotomies. The trickster Loki (without whom the surviving mythological Norse tales would not be half as fun) quickly springs to mind, but there are many more such characters, and I find that feminist science fiction is a world in which they thrive.

From Ursula K. Le Guin’s gendered-at-will citizens of planet Winter in The Left Hand of Darkness, to brave, compassionate Luciente in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, to the innocent but resourceful teenage girl Rachel trapped in a chimp’s body in Pat Murphy’s "Rachel in Love," to, more recently, the bodyspeaking nectar collector WaLiLa of Kiini Ibura Salaam’s James Tiptree Jr. Award-winning short story collection Ancient, Ancient: these are characters that inhabit margins and mezzanines of meaning, reassembling and dismantling constructions of humanity and gender. And these are the books I love: books that tear apart the conventions perpetuating unjust power structures, restrictive sexual roles, and finite expressions of humanity in beautiful, inspiring ways.

Aqueduct Press turns ten years old this year and I will be helping to celebrate the feat by bringing back the newsletter and organizing a party at this year’s WisCon. I will have lots of reading to do as well, and I will be digging for classic titles that may deserve a proper reappearance on our shelves.

I will also be looking to build bridges between Seattle and the feminist science fiction being written in Spain, which is little, but fierce. While a great deal of Spanish science fiction, both by women and men, faithfully follows the conventions of the canon, there are some voices—Elia Barceló and Lola Robles, for instance—that have been paving the way for the last couple of decades towards a change in the tradition. I suspect there will be more about this topic soon enough.

I look forward to putting my passion for books that matter to good use, and I can’t wait to get started.

Rebecca Ore's Slow Funeral now available as an e-book

Aqueduct has released another e-book: Rebecca Ore's Slow Funeral, the fifth of the titles in her back-list that Aqueduct is making available in e-book editions. This one was first published in the mid-1990s, and is dark fantasy, in which magic exists but is entangled with delusion and deception and practicing witches, though more powerful than the magically untalented among them, are, as protagonist Maude Fuller puts it, like cocks equipped with spurs fighting for the pleasure and profit of their owners.

Here's a brief description of the novel:

Bracken County, nestled in the Blue Ridge region of the American South, is like no other place on earth. Behind its facade of small-town Southern life, magic works and corrupts all it touches. Maude Fuller ran away from Bracken County when her parents were killed. She has been running ever since, trying to deny her innate magical talent. Now Maude's grandmother is dying, and Maude is drawn home and succumbs to the temptation to draw Doug, a Berkeley engineer, after her. Once home, she tries to see through the layers and layers of deceptions snaring everyone in Bracken County, including its most powerful witches. Can she resist using her talent and still find a way to save her grannie's soul and Doug's life?

Michael Swanwick blurbed the book:  "Slow Funeral is gritty and clear-eyed, unique and vastly entertaining."

And here are quotes from a couple of reviews:

 "Vivid and intense...It's good to find a book this dark that still make the reader think, as well as feel those usual shivers."
   —Locus

"Ore Portrays a magical world in conflict that is a superb reflection of the world in which we live."
   — Analog

The e-book is available now through Aqueduct's website, and will be available elsewhere (Wizard's Tower, Weightless, Amazon) in a week or so. 

Call for poetry submissions

This is from Rose Lemberg, who's editing...

...a feminist speculative poetry reprint anthology from Aqueduct Press titled The Moment of Change (referencing Adrienne Rich's "The moment of change is the only poem")*. I hope this anthology will bring feminist questions to the foreground, while featuring queer poets, poets of color, and international poets as much as possible. My interpretation of speculative is pretty broad, as is my interpretation of feminism; please try me.

To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first feminist anthology within the history of speculative poetry (for a list of speculative poetry anthologies, follow the link).

To this end, I would like to solicit reprint submissions at the editorial address, feministspec at gmail dot com.  Submissions are not limited by gender and sexuality, age, race and ethnicity, disability, immigration status, etc - everyone is welcome. Please send me your previously published poems that you think are feminist (maximum 5 poems per submission, please). Date of original publication does not matter, but please supply the  previous publication details for each poem.

If you have ideas for poems by others that can fit the anthology, please let me know at the editorial address ( feministspec at gmail dot com).

Rights: We ask for non-exclusive one-time reprint rights, non-exclusive promotional rights, and non-exclusive ebook reprint rights. These rights should be available when you send me your submissions (i.e. if the poem is under exclusivity period somewhere, that would be problematic).

Payment: one copy per contributor.

Submissions are open now, and will remain open until June 15th, 2011. I will respond to all submissions by July 15th, 2011.

Please ask any questions here, and please spread the news! A static website is coming soon.

* Thanks to Rachel Swirsky (rachel_swirsky ) for suggesting this title!

Jeff VanderMeer Helps Aqueduct Press Celebrate

Jeff VanderMeer has thrown a virtual party for Aqueduct on the occasion of our having reached the 50-book mark. Everyone's invited, so please drop by and join us. Though I'm a bit late arriving to it myself (our modem, which is up on the third floor in Tom's [attic] office overheated), I see the party's well on its way. Thank you for your felicitations, Rochita, Shweta, and Larry! Thank you, especially, Jeff! Thank you, everyone! As I say in my interview with Jeff, you all are part of the reason for our success.

2009 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees

Philip K. Dick Award Nominees Announced
(courtesy Karen Hellekson)

The judges of the 2009 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia SF Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, are pleased to announce seven nominated works that comprise the final ballot for the award:

BITTER ANGELS by C. L. Anderson (Ballantine Books/Spectra)
THE PRISONER by Carlos J. Cortes (Ballantine Books/Spectra)
THE REPOSSESSION MAMBO by Eric Garcia (Harper)
THE DEVIL’S ALPHABET by Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)
CYBERABAD DAYS by Ian McDonald (Pyr)
CENTURIES AGO AND VERY FAST by Rebecca Ore (Aqueduct Press)
PROPHETS by S. Andrew Swann (DAW Books)

First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 2, 2010 at Norwescon 33 at the Doubletree Seattle Airport Hotel, SeaTac, Washington.

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the NorthWest Science Fiction Society. Last year’s winners were EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD by Adam-Troy Castro (Eos Books) and TERMINAL MIND by David Walton (Meadowhawk Press). The 2009 judges are Daniel Abraham (chair), Eileen Gunn, Karen Hellekson, Elaine Isaak, and Marc Laidlaw.

* * *

Congratuations, Rebecca!