Eleanor Arnason's Ring of Swords

I'm pleased to announce the release of a new edition of Eleanor Arnason's Ring of Swords as a volume in Aqueduct's Heirloom Book series in both print and e-book formats. Long out of print and short-listed for the Tiptree Award, many people, including Ursula K. Le Guin and Jo Walton, have wished for a new edition.

In her introduction to this new edition of Eleanor Arnason's Ring of Swords, Le Guin writes, "Ring of Swords is an intellectually fascinating science-fiction story told in the novel tradition, peopled by ordinary people content with their ordinary life, appalled to find themselves swept up into a social crisis, forced into acts and choices of historical consequence. Its ancestry includes not only The War of the Worlds but also A Tale of Two Cities and War and Peace.

"Having recently brought their own competitive, feud-ridden society into a fragile balance of peace, the Hwarhath have been facing an unexpected problem: the lack of enemies. Given the apparently innate male propensity for finding pretexts to fight, and the fact that their men were all trained as warriors, the women running things at home make sure the men stay out in space protecting the home planet. The drawback is that there seems to be nobody to protect it from. So, when in the vastness of space they finally stumble into another intelligent species, they rejoice. Enemies! At last!"

"The usual assumption," Le Guin notes, "is that if you threaten a war early in a novel, you'd better hurry up and get the bombs bursting in air. And they usually do. Novels that portray war as totally destructive and futile still focus on it--war is what they're about, war is central to them, just as it was central to the old epics that glorified heroes and battles. But a war not fought? What kind of subject is that?" Le Guin asks. Her answer? "It's a beautiful subject for a novel, and Ring of Swords is a beautiful novel."

You can read a sample of Ring of Swords here, and purchase it here.

Judith Merril's The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism (ed. Ritch Calvin)

I'm pleased to announce the release of the fourth volume in Aqueduct's Heirloom Books series, The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism, which collects Judith Merril's nonfiction, edited by sf scholar Ritch Calvin. Aqueduct is offering both print and e-book editions.

Although Judith Merril is best known for her short fiction and her novels (in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth), she wrote a great deal of nonfiction. She wrote about SF fandom. She wrote about space and space exploration. And she wrote about science fiction. This volume collects Merril’s nonfiction from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Extrapolation, and her Year’s Best anthologies. In these collected pieces, Merril works through and develops her definition of “S-F” and what makes S-F good. She chronicles changes within the genre, including the emergence of the New Wave. And she provides a history of the genre: its writers, its publishers, and its magazines.

Decades ago, Samuel R. Delany declared that “Merril…is perhaps the most important intra-genre critic the field has had and…the absence of any of her critical work in book form, in a field aspiring to take itself seriously, is preposterous.… [O]ne cannot know the history of science fiction from 1956 to 1969 if one has not read the brilliant commentary that runs through Merril’s best-of-the-year anthologies for that period.”
Now, in 2016, Aqueduct brings Judith Merril and her place in that history to today’s readers.

Gary K. Wolfe writes of the book in the February 2016 issue of Locus: The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism provides our first chance to see in one place Merril’s columns for the magazine [i.e., The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] between 1965 and 1969, plus appreciations of Theodore Sturgeon and Fritz Leiber, introductions to her groundbreaking ‘‘year’s best’’ anthologies of the ’50s and ’60s, and a more or less theoretical/historical piece from the academic journal Extrapolation. In an unusual strategy, Aqueduct has made available in the e-book full versions of some pieces that are only summarized in the print edition. ...Merril was ... a pioneer in assaulting literary moats and walls, as her anthologies insistently made clear, and it’s fascinating to find someone articulating a half-century ago some approaches to fiction that are only now beginning to look like common sense.

You can purchase either the print or the e-book editions at  http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/978-1-61976-093-6.php.

Heirloom Books to Launch at WisCon

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Aqueduct Press will be launching a new series, Heirloom Books, at WisCon next month. This new series aims to bring back into print and preserve work that has helped make feminist science fiction what it is today—work that though clearly of its time is still pleasurable to read, work that is thought-provoking, work that can still speak powerfully to readers. The series takes its name from the seeds of older strains of vegetables, so valuable and in danger of being lost. Our hope is to keep these books from being lost, as works that do not make it into the canon so often are.

The first title is at the printer now, and the second title is about to be sent to the printer. It Walks in Beauty: Selected prose of Chandler Davis, the first title in the series, is edited by Josh Lukin, who also provides three meaty essays about Chandler Davis and his work. The second title, Dorothea Dreams, is a novel by Suzy McKee Charnas, originally published by Arbor House in 1986; Delia Sherman provides a lively, insightful introduction for this volume.

Anna Tambour designed the template for the series's covers. Here are the covers for the first two:

I'll be posting more about each book shortly.