Two new e-book editions from Aqueduct Press

Aqueduct Press has released two more volumes in the Conversation Pieces series as e-books:

--Spring in Geneva, a novella by Sylvia Kelso

--The XY Conspiracy, a novella by Lori Selke


 You can order them now, DRM-free, for $5.95 at http://www.aqueductpress.com/.


They'll soon be available elsewhere.

Spring in Geneva by Sylvia Kelso

I'm pleased to announce the release of a new volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series: Spring in Geneva, an original novella by Sylvia Kelso. (Sylvia, as you'll recall, has published with Aqueduct before-- as editor of the fourth volume of the WisCon Chronicles, and as author of Three Observations and a Dialogue: Round and about SF.)  In her new novella, Mary Shelley, a young banker's son, and William, an excessively tall man with a "lividly hued visage, watery eyes, and blackened lips within a straggling beard," pit their wits and derring-do against Lord Byron, master of steampunk technology, and his thuggish minions.

"...my beloved Percy’s ardor bore him to lengths I could not go. There were plans, between him and Byron, that I could not condone. I nerved myself to protest: you may conceive how difficult, against such visions, such intellects. When protest failed, I forced myself to act.” She took her hand quickly from my arm and drew out a handkerchief. I paced beside her, managing not to exceed my position as mere listener, until she recovered herself. “Then—I was forced to depart, in haste, and to choose between discovery, outcry, wrath—perhaps, retribution—and my child.”—from Spring in Geneva

“I loved it! By heaven, this woman can tell a story. I was entirely gripped, right from the hyacinths.”
—Caroline Stevermer, author of Sorcery and Cecilia
“The voice and character of Anton render it delightful; haven't seen that much earnest gallantry since Reepicheep. “
—Lois McMaster Bujold, author of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance 

Aqueduct is selling it for $9 at www.aqueductpress.com. We'll be releasing an ebook edition soon. And of course the book will soon be available in the usual places you can find our books.

New e-books from Aqueduct Press

We've just released e-book editions for four volumes in our Conversation Pieces series:

Vol. 5: Rosaleen Love's The Traveling Tide ($5.95)

Vol. 15: Lesley A. Hall's Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of Her Life and Work ($5.95)

Vol. 24: Sylvia Kelso's Three Observations and a Dialogue: Round and About Science Fiction ($5.95)

Vol. 34: Christopher Barzak's Birds and Birthdays ($5.95)

You can order them now at http://www.aqueductpress.com/.

Links for the Weekend

 --On October 4, SF3, WisCon's parent organization, passed two motions on the Elizabeth Moon situation.

--Inspired by 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Swanwick revists Poughskeepie (Part 1 here, Part 2 here). He writes:

Now, either you want this book (I did and now I have it) or you don't, and you already know which camp you dwell within, and no amount of descriptive analysis will budge you one way or the other.

So I'm not going to review the book. Why bother?

However, I was inspired by Lisa Tuttle's heartfelt contribution, "'From Elfland to Poughkeepsie' and Back Again, or, I Think We're in Poughkeepsie Now, Toto," on how important a single seminal Le Guin essay was to her, to go back and revisit said essay.

--Tansy Rayner Roberts reviews The WisCon Chronicles, Vol.4.

A snippet:

The highlight of the book for me was “We See What You Did There,” a group chat among various POC about their various experiences at the convention, and discussing their relationship with WisCon as a continuing event. This, combined with several standalone “My WisCon” con reports by different participants, definitely gives the impression that the book has achieved wide coverage as far as who and what WisCon is all about.

--Rex at Savage Minds writes about The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropoligcal Controversy by Paul Shankman, which examines Derek Freeman's attack on Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (after Mead's death, of course). (Link thanks to the Mumpsimus.) It did my heart good to read

Impartial, but not noncommittal. Shankman describes the personal stakes and intimate social networks on both sides of the debate, and is frank in his assessment of how people’s personal commitments and backgrounds influenced their arguments. In addition, a major part of the book deals with the question of who is right about Samoa and this involves making judgments about the scholarly adequacy of Mead and Freeman’s work. As judicious as Shankman is, then, you still get a sense of where he stands.

And where he stands is overwhelmingly against Freeman. Freeman’s bizarre personal life — including his mental breakdown — is documented here in a scholarly monograph by a major press for (as far as I know) the first time. The stories that had been circulating about his atrocious behavior, such as contacting universities and demanding that they revoke the Ph.D.s of his opponents, finally get their full airing. Freeman’s arguments about Mead are shown not to hold very much water, and his own claims about Samoa don’t seem to stand close scholarly scrutiny either. At times one feels the book should be called The Trashing of Derek Freeman. But Shankman’s criticisms never seem vindictive and his discussion of Freeman’s psyche never degenerate into ad hominems — despite how easy it would be to do so. In reality, Freeman’s own worse enemy is himself — or at least himself and a scholar willing to rigorously document his actions.

Shankman is not uncritical of Mead and points out the ways in which Coming of Age reaches conclusions about American life that Mead quite liked but which were not really supported by the Samoan data. Still, it is clear from his book that Mead was basically a decent fieldworker and a careful scholar while Freeman was, frankly, a nutcake.

--And finally, I can't resist mentioning the recent research on great bowerbirds, which are apparently as common in Australia as black-capped chickadees are in my region of North America. When a report on this new piece of research was published in Current Biology on Sept 9, several magazines and newspapers leaped on it, including Science and Discover. Birds, of course, are wondrously various in their sexed division of labor (which variety should, really, be a lesson to to humans). In the case of great bowerbirds, the male spends a good chunk of the year building an elaborate nest for attracting females. Discover Magazine has a post about it on their blog that sums up some of the interesting bits. For instance,

Bowerbirds are relatives of crows and jays that live in Australian and New Guinea. To attract mates, males from each of the 20 or so species build an intricate structure called a bower, which he decorates with specially chosen objects. Some species favour blue trinkets; others collect a mishmash of flowers, fruits, insect shells and more. Surrounded by these knick-knacks, the artistic male performs an elaborate display; the female judges him on his skill as a performer, builder and decorator.

The great bowerbird’s taste for interior design seems quite Spartan compared to his relatives. He creates an avenue of sticks leading up to a courtyard, decorated with gray and white objects, such as shells, bones and pebbles. The male performs in the courtyard while the female watches from the lined avenue. Her point of view is fixed and narrow, and according to Endler*, the male knows how to exploit that.

He found that the males place the largest objects towards the rear of the courtyard and the smallest objects in the front near the avenue. This creates forced perspective. From the female’s point of view, the bigger objects that are further away look to be the same size the smaller objects that are close by. If bowerbird vision is anything like humans, the courtyard as a whole looks smaller to a watching female, the opposite effect to the one that Disney visitors experience.

Science, the biologists "mapped the positions of thousands of objects in front of 33 male bowerbirds' avenues. [...] When the researchers rearranged the designs, the males put them back in the original order. This behavior suggests that the birds are making deliberate choices, possibly implying some kind of cognitive talent."

National Geographic, by the way, has a wonderful gallery of photos of the nest males have built to woo females, here.
_______________
One of the authors of the research paper. The abstract of the paper can be found here, and here's a quote from it:

Males make courts with gray and white objects that increase in size with distance from the avenue entrance. This gradient creates forced visual perspective for the audience; court object visual angles subtended on the female viewer's eye are more uniform than if the objects were placed at random. Forced perspective can yield false perception of size and distance [12,15]. After experimental reversal of their size-distance gradient, males recovered their gradients within 3 days, and there was little difference from the original after 2 wks. Variation among males in their forced-perspective quality as seen by their female audience indicates that visual perspective is available for use in mate choice, perhaps as an indicator of cognitive ability. Regardless of function, the creation and maintenance of forced visual perspective is clearly important to great bowerbirds and suggests the possibility of a previously unknown dimension of bird cognition.

The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 4

The WisCon Chronicles Volume 4: Voices of WisCon, edited by Sylvia Kelso, is now available from Aqueduct Press. (Our apologies for our delay in getting up.) This volume chronicles WisCon 33, held in 2009. In her introduction to the volume, Sylvia writes of "the voices of WisCon":

They are widely diverse, not only in what events the writer attended, what he or she saw and felt, but in the writers themselves. There are first-timers and long-termers, there are women and men, there are POC and whites. There are reports in prose and reports in verse, reports from people who went to panels and reports from those who ran parties, reports that rhapsodize about WisCon 33 and reports that critique it, or indicate that it is not always a coming-home and recognizing-the-tribe experience. These are strong, clear voices showing that the experience of WisCon is multi-hued and complex.

The volume's contributors include a mix of writers, scholars, and fans, among whom number Nisi Shawl, Nancy Jane Moore, Andrea Hairston, Jennifer Pelland, JoSelle Vanderhooft, MJ Hardman, Julie Andrews, Elise Matthesen, and Beverly Friend. It also, notably, includes a handful of short stories. And as with previous volumes, it does not shy away from controversy. You can buy your copy here.

WisCon Chronicles 4: The Cobbler's Toss

When I was a kid growing up in the bush, and they were branding calves, my father would often say, as the final sufferer was let up from the ropes or out of the branding cradle and hurtled away, "Well, there's what the cobbler threw at his wife." And it amused us kids mightily to ask, "What did he throw, Dad?" And be told in reply, "The last."

So with WisCon Chronicles 4, I'm now at the cobbler's toss. This is the final update post. The submissions are all in, all edited, all typeset. The Table of Contents is laid out. The permissions to print are received, the errors and addenda fixed, the comma wars over (don't ask Kath about that!) The cover is designed. The photos are cleared for use, those on the cover and those inside. Last week the printer received the entire ms.

Now it's time for me to repeat, Thanks so much, to all the people who answered my calls for submission, and patiently followed all my requests for revisions. Also thanks to Kath Wilham at Aqueduct for typesetting the lot, picking up syntactical and other errors, putting up with my punctuation and other crotchets, and coming up with the idea of pictures for the cover, along with the sub-title.

WisCon Chronicles 4 is sub-titled WisCon Voices. It will be available for sale at WisCon 34 at the end of May, at the Aqueduct table in the dealer's room. If you're a contributor, one more reminder that you have a gratis copy coming your way. For everyone else, I hope you'll buy a copy, at WisCon or elsewhere. Here's a preview of the cover:

I hope you'll enjoy what's inside.

WisCon Chronicles 4 - Pushing Up the Ceiling

The first submission deadline for WCC4 was August 1st, and a good number of people made that. Some delayed subs. were still straggling in by September 1st, often with v. good cause, and there are still a couple of items outstanding -

BUT!

We have now exceeded the notional top cap. of 60K words for the volume, and are prodding hard at the absolute ceiling of 70K, because in fact the submissions are already up to 68K words approx. And there may be another 6-7K still to come.

Thanks so much, well done and congrats. to everybody who sent me material, and there will be some really cool stuff in this one, from Nisi Shawl's exchange of letters with her mother, who was at WisCon too, if you hadn't heard, to Elise Matthesen's account of the Haiku Earring parties, with a package of stunning poetry from people well-known and not yet known - bet you never knew Pat Murphy and Sharyn November wrote haikus, or more correctly senryu, did you?

There will also be some very strong and thought-provoking panel reports and MyWisCon impressions, particularly from POCs. The POC presence in this volume is one of the things I'm really happy about.

And now, the second round commences. The editor stops soliciting, um, requesting material and starts snipping, then sending revisions for OKs so they can go off to be typeset. Important notice here:

If you have contributed material to WCC4, you are a pearl. If you have my editing requests, be a diamond and get them back as fast as possible.

The production sked is laid out, and we are already in danger of falling behind. So this round of first-edits needs to be telescoped. This is particularly important because we have the excellent cap. fill, BUT if edits don't get back in time for me to send away by end of September - not get to me but get on past me by then - I may have to jettison those pieces to stay on sked.

The WisCon Chronicle publishing sked. is a little more rigid than most , because it has an absolute back-wall - the volume has to be ready to release at WisCon 34, end of May 2010. No delays, no failed deadlines and cancelled publication, no nothing. And while that sounds centuries away, in actual working time, it's not very far at all.

Soooo, if you've had one of Those E-Mails with a revised file attached, please open it up, run down the Mark-ups, tick or X, and send it back. Then the happy but still anxious editor will be able to get on to the more delectable worry, sorting out the Table of Contents. And will that be a dilemma of feasts, oh, yes, indeed...

WisCon Chronicles 4 - Fiction with Tails

A faster than usual update here ...

There’s still some room in the Chronicles plan, so we’re calling this time for anyone who read at WisCon 33, who would like to give us an excerpt or completed piece of fiction – reprints are fine if with permission of your publisher – up to 4 thousand words. And with it the option of a tail.

It isn’t mandatory, but we’d love to have up to five hundred further words with the writer’s own comments/take on the piece. What you wanted to do here, what worked or didn’t work, what was the most interesting or exciting or taxing part of writing this one. If thinking about race, class and gender proved to be important parts of this process, so much the better, but what we’d really like is to showcase some of your work inside a personalized frame.

I already have a number of pieces of fiction in, and I’ll be offering those people this option in retrospect. We still have space, though, so if you’d like to join the party, do!

My contact e-dress is still

sylvia.kelso@gmail.com.

WisCon Chronicles 4 - There's Still Room

The initial deadline for material to be considered for WisCon Chronicles 4, aka MyWisCon, passed last Sunday, 1st August, and things are shaping up pretty well. The academic component is up to projected capacity, with some very interesting papers, and more to come: parts of what may become a conversation on Women Warriors, an academic paper, response, and further response from the papers' authors.
Panel reports and My WisCons are looking good, with four My WisCons in and some very interesting things promised for mid-August, including a couple of long-attendees’ perspectives and two full panel transcripts. Some people have needed extensions, and I’ve had a few bright ideas along the way as well. We’re also hoping for some party reports.
Fiction and poetry are behind the other two, but what we have is of great quality, and I have ideas for more. Guest of Honour speeches are still promised, along with the WisCon ethnography. As things stand, we will comfortably reach our middle-range capacity for the volume, with the contributions coming or already in hand.

However, before we hit the top cap., there’s still room for more panel reports or My WisCons, as in overall impressions and thoughts on the Con, and if you have poetry or fiction, and you read at WisCon and would like to have something published in here, I have room. Complete poems, fine, excerpts of fiction, up to 4K words, or shorter complete fiction – Nancy Jane has given me a great flashfic – road stories of the future. Nisi Shawl is putting in a story from Filter House too! Thanks so much, Nisi. I have a couple of ideas for fiction presentations, but if you have something as yet unpublished, or something out which the publisher will allow you to reprint or excerpt, here we are.
Contact me with thoughts, queries or material at
sylvia.kelso@gmail.com

WisCon 33 WisCon Chronicles 4

Hello Everyone.
As you may know, I've just become an Aqueductista, with my collection of SF essays coming out from Aqueduct at WisCon 33. And you doubtless also know, every year Aqueduct produces a volume covering the previous WisCon. Timmi has asked me to edit the 4th WisCon Chronicles, covering WisCon 33. It's an honour, but it also feels like a very big responsibility!

Chronicles 4 will concern me in my second hat, as editor, formal or informal, up to and including academic volumes, and I hope to blog, if sporadically, on the Chronicle's progress. For now, though, here’s a fullscale call for materials for WisCon Chronicles 4. In this volume we’re looking to include

Some academic papers,
Some extracts from work by people who read at the conference, including flash fiction, excerpts from longer fiction and poetry - especially Aqueductistas, of course.
Guest of Honour speeches, one already promised.

We’re also looking to include some panel reports.
Panels are the core of WisCon, where the important, the sensitive and the new issues for the SF and F and feminist scenes and increasingly, fandom in or out of the Blogosphere, come to light.
And we are looking from input from everyone who attended WisCon 33.

Panel reports could be on a single or several panels, or thoughts about such, any length under 4000 words, about any panel you felt was important, to you in person or to the feminist SF and F scene, or in general.

If you’ve posted such reports already, please consider passing them on to us to consider for printing. All contributors will be acknowledged, under whatever name they wish, in the Chronicles
We also want overall personal views. The notional title for the 4th Chronicls is My WisCon, and we would love to have as many of these as possible.

My Wiscons would ideally
Be under 4000 words but longer than 400
Possibly overlap with My WisCons from people who went to the same events
Need not cover everything, just your thoughtpoints
Could come as straight reports, but also as poems, letters, dialogue, recipes, and so on.

The only thing we can’t manage is illustrations, they are too expensive, so actual art or photos, sadly, might not be the best choice.

The current deadline for Chronicles 4 turn-ins is the 1st of August. Please send your thoughts and/or impressions to me at
sylvia.kelso@gmail.com
Attachments are possibly better, but in the body of the post will do.

Thoughts and queries cd. also be sent there. I hope to establish an LJ community for discussion as well.
Hope to hear from you!

Three Observations and a Dialogue: Round and About Feminist SF by Sylvia Kelso

Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the publication of Three Observations and a Dialogue: Round and About SF by Sylvia Kelso, the twenty-fourth volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series.

After WisCon 20, Sylvia Kelso engaged Lois McMaster Bujold in a rich, snappy correspondence about Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels. “You ... remark that ‘[my] post-modern despair is not [your] emergency’ over the failure of feminism to transform SF,” she wrote to Bujold. “My postmodern despair OUGHT to be your emergency, buen' amiga, because one of the reasons you are being ignored is that ... you don't fit the male canon either in the community or the critical industry; so unless you catch their eyes with a sand-blaster like The Left Hand of Darkness, the male academics are also gonna find you invisible...”

That correspondence became “Letterspace: In the Chinks Between Published Fiction and Published Criticism,” which is published here. Also included are “Third Person Peculiar: Reading between Academic and SF-Community Positions in (Feminist) SF,” a critical essay discussing the intricacies of an Australian feminist scholar writing about science fiction; “Tales of Earth: Terraforming in Recent Women’s SF,” which considers colonialism in science fiction by women; and “Loud Achievements: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Science Fiction through 1997,” which closely examines Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels.

The volume is available now through Aqueduct's website here. And just a reminder: Subscriptions of ten consecutive volumes (beginning with the volume of your choice) may also be purchased through the site for $80.