Tara Campbell's Midnight at the Organporium

I'm pleased to announce the release of Midnight at the Organporium, a collection of short fiction by Tara Campbell, in both print and ebook editions, as the sixty-seventh volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series.

What do a homicidal houseplant, an enchanted office picnic, sentient fog, and the perfect piece of toast have in common? They’re all part of the world of Midnight at the Organporium. At turns droll, wicked, and surreal, these tales cover topics from white flight, to the Princess and the Pea, to marriage in the afterlife. Visit Midnight at the Organporium for a dose of twisted obsession, covert complicity, and peculiar empowerment—and don’t forget to pick up your spare heart while you’re there.

Advance Praise for Midnight at the Organporium

 Tara Campbell’s stories exist at a delightful quarter turn to the left from our world — places where CEOs turn into lions, and hearts are sold in the mall — while simul­taneously beautifully and deftly exploring exactly what it means to be human.—Tina Connolly, World Fantasy-nominated author of On the Eyeball Floor and Other Stories

So much unexpected happens in Tara Campbell’s weird and wonderful short story collection, Midnight at the Or­ganporium, that I didn’t want to let these stories go. From full-length to flash fiction, Campbell’s stories in Midnight at the Organporium sneak up on you with an exquisite hyper-realism, a sure-fire wit, and most of all, a daring sense of adventure and possibility.—Caroline Bock, author of Carry Her Home, Before My Eyes, and Lie

Sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, and always full of heart — in Midnight at the Organporium, the everyday and the fantastic conspire to create the authentic.—Erin Fitzgerald, author of Valletta73

You can read a sample from Midnight at the Organporium at http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-163-6.pdf.  And you can purchase a copy at www.aqueductpress.com. 

Vonda N. McIntyre (1948-2019)

Vonda N. McIntyre died yesterday. She was a person of many, albeit overlapping, communities, which makes it unusually difficult for me to give a sense of who she was in our world. The most visible aspect of her life, of course, is her published work, which includes Dreamsnake (winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel), the fabulous historical science fiction novel The Moon and the Sun (winner of the Nebula Award), a few other standalone novels, her four-novel Starfarers series, several Star Trek and Star Wars novels, and a host of short fiction, some of which was collected in Fireflood and Other Stories, and includes, from 2005, "Little Faces," which I especially loved, and which was a finalist for the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards.


Vonda was one of those authors whose work I read and loved long before I met her. In fact, her Dreamsnake was among the first science fiction books I ever read. I found it in a bookstore in Salt Lake City, when I was living there in 1978, and it gave me my very first taste of what I later came to call feminist sf. The idea of women being able to learn to control their reproduction through biocontrol enchanted me (and instantly raised the bar for what I expected from science fiction texts), and made me hungry for more such imaginative approaches to biology-- by which I mean the biology that society had told me was destiny--for girls and women. I suspect that that novel in particular helped prepare me for a different conceptualization of biology that I eventually picked up from feminist science studies. In short, I was an early fan of Vonda's. Much later, reading Joanna Russ's letters to Alice Sheldon (which can be found in the University of Oregon's Special Collections), I inferred, without surprise, that Joanna and Vonda must have had many intense conversations in the 1970s about all things feminist and science fictional because Joanna often referred to what Vonda had said about this or that when writing to Alli Sheldon.

I first saw Vonda in the flesh a few years later, after I'd moved to Seattle, at a women writers conference (graced by such stars as Maya Angelou, Joanna Russ, Toni Cade Bambarra, and Carolyn Forche). Vonda gave a reading as well as participated on a panel I attended. I don't think I'd ever before seen a woman wearing blue jeans and a blazer (which I'd often known male mathematicians and musicians to do), and seeing her do so instantly made me want to, also. What I recall most from both the panel and her reading was my impression of how deeply embedded her science fictional imagination was in her background in biology. She was, to me, a star in a dazzling firmament of stars--all women writers.

Later, of course, after Nicola Griffith dragged my isolated, introverted self into Seattle's community of sf writers, I came to know her, at first as a crusty, trenchantly witty personality and then as a generous force helping make things happen and run smoothly (always unobtrusively). She was, for instance, one of the founders of Clarion West. Later, she helped found the Bookview Cafe and helped produce their ebooks, which I became aware of only when Kath and I were referred to her for much-needed advice for Aqueduct. Her community was larger than these, though, as evidenced by her being a GoH at the 2015 WorldCon, held in Spokane.

I thought a great deal about her last month, while in Port Townsend, because I knew she had only weeks to live. I was stunned by the volume of memories I have of my encounters with her. Like many other people, I know, I'm thankful to have enjoyed her friendship and will miss her actively intelligent presence in the world..   

Sofía Rhei's Everything Is Made of Letters

I'm pleased to announce the release of Sofía Rhei's Everything Is Made of Letters, a collection of short fiction translated from Spanish, as the sixty-sixth volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series, in both print and paperback editions. The stories' translators include Sue Burke, James Womack, and the author herself (with assistance from Arrate Hidalgo and Ian Whates).

A man risks his life by carefully forging bibliographic references in a parallel Barcelona; at the Cyclotech, a woman strives to keep the storytelling different engine safe from ignorant hands that could get words lost; off-planet, an interpreter gives an account of her language learning process involving a realistic alien doll that claims to be a sentient being… Words boast a heavy, at times disturbing, weight of their own across these alternative realities in which language rules supreme, fleshed out by the mind of one of the most prolific writers in contemporary Spanish genre fiction.

You can read a sample from the book here:  http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-149-0.pdf.

You can purchase a copy of the book here: http://www.aqueductpress.com

The 2018 Tiptree Award

Congratulations to Gabriela Damián Miravete! Her story, “They Will Dream In the Garden,” translated by Adrian Demopulos and published online by Latin American Literature Today (May 2018), as been named the 2018 Tiptree Award winner.

“They Will Dream In the Garden,” a beautifully written and translated story, uses the future tense to imagine a Mexico in which femicides are already part of history. In a collective attempt by survivors to preserve memory and justice, traces of the minds of the women murdered are encapsulated in interactive holograms “living” in a beautiful garden. The story looks at the economic, social, and racial dimensions of violence against Mexican women today, focusing on indigenous women, poverty, and unemployment, on repression of women’s educational opportunities, and of women’s ability to move about freely. The story hints at positive change as some women decide to fight back through collective action, mutual support, and self-defense, eventually shifting the public perception of gendered violence and improving the actions of the next generation. By offering a possible look into the future, far from giving the sense of a closed chapter, the story itself is a device of memory preservation, a call to action, and a fine example of science fiction as a tool for feminist exploration and social change.

Gabriela Damián Miravete is a writer of narrative and essay, a film and literature journalist, a professor at CENTRO university, and (according to her bio) the imaginary granddaughter of Ursula K. Le Guin. Miravete was part of “The Mexicanx Initiative,” a group of Mexican and Mexican American artists who attended WorldCon 76. With other authors, artists and people from different scientific disciplines, she co-founded Cúmulo de Tesla, a collective that wishes to strengthen the relationships between art, science, and science fiction. She has published short stories in several anthologies in Spanish. You can find her work in English in Three Messages and a Warning, an anthology of contemporary Mexican stories of the fantastic (Small Beer Press, 2010) and in A Larger Reality. Speculative Fiction from the Bicultural margins, an anthology of 14 stories, presented in both Spanish and English.

In addition, the Tiptree Award judges have recognized Adrian Demopulos, the translator of “They Will Dream in the Garden,” with a special honor for her translation.

In addition to selecting the winners, the judges choose a Tiptree Award Honor List. The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list. These notes on each work are excerpted and edited from comments by members of this year’s jury. This year’s Honor List is:

• C. Buchanan, ed. Capricious Magazine: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue (January 2018)

A collection of delightful, thought-provoking stories that fulfill the intended purpose of normalizing diverse pronouns as well as suggesting that the binary can be broken or even left behind. Buchanan writes: “In English, the personal pronouns we’re most used to are he and she. Not only do these require the speaker to know the gender of the person they’re talking about, but they only properly cover two genders. Humans don’t always fit in these boxes.” This collection addresses the complaint that people find it hard to learn new pronoun sets. Buchanan writes that the answer is to normalize new pronouns — “in conversation, yes, but also in our stories, in fiction, in all media. In stories about spaceships and about magic, heroism and exploration, families and home.” As an added bonus, the authors and editor make recommendations for other works to read.

• Amber Dawn, Sodom Road Exit (Arsenal Pulp Press, Canada, 2018)

This ghost story set in a small depressed Ontario town in the 1990s explores concepts around sexual agency and slutdom with extraordinary doses of humanity, humor, and lyricism. With issues of women’s sexual autonomy being currently (and always) very much under the spotlight, the author presents myriad ways in which the book’s characters’ sexualities clash with (or struggle under) patriarchal power structures and lays them across queerness, whiteness, poverty, religious and moral values, and public opinion. Through the eyes of the protagonist and of the queer ghost who is haunting her, the reader experiences the pains and thrills of inhabiting a gendered, sexualized, queer body in this story full of caustic language and powerful images. WARNING: descriptions of child sexual abuse and adult suicide.

• L. Timmel Duchamp, Chercher La Femme (Aqueduct Press, USA, 2108)

This cerebral, investigative novel presents a future society in which humans have divided into Paxans and Outsiders. Paxans are committed to “a collegial, laterally organized meritocracy.” In this technologically advanced society, Paxans spend only a small portion of their lives in “meatspace” and the majority of their lives in virtual realities, inhabiting and conversing with their secondary and tertiary bodies, which represent selected and isolated aspects of their consciousness. Paxans have been given FTL travel by an alien race they call Delta Pavonians, and some women, cis and trans, are able and willing to undergo body modification and training to be able to communicate with the aliens. The story traces the mystery of a second alien planet, La Femme, and its telepathic inhabitants. The novel is an absorbing exploration of the many ramifications of the notion of gender and the myriad ways in which it is represented and exploited.

• Meg Elison, “Big Girl” Fantasy and Science Fiction (Nov/Dec 2017)

A story about a common problem in society—fat shaming. This is especially a problem for women, both white and of color, and for teens who lack self-confidence and easily fall prey to ads and movie portrayals. With satirical condemnation of society and media reactions, this story portrays how internalizing the perceived norms of “feminine” leads to low self-esteem.

• Joamette Gil, ed., Power & Magic: The Queer Witch Comics Anthology (P & M Press, USA, 2017)

As the cover promises, so the book delivers: 15 graphic short stories by “seventeen women, demigirls, and bi-gender creators of color.” The rich heart-warming fantasy stories deal with folk tales, fairy tales, disability, immigration, race, grandmothers, baking, depression, romance, and much more magic. This anthology is a good way to find authors you’ll want to read again, and a great display of the dramatic potential and innovative storytelling in contemporary comics today.

• Keffy R M Kehrli, ed., GlitterShip Year Two (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2018)

An anthology of over 30 short stories and poems. About half were originally published in Glittership Magazine, and all have queer themes and characters. “The Little Dream” by Robin M. Eames (in which a character wears a t-shirt that reads “IN SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU INSIST THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS”) and “Graveyard Girls on Paper Phoenix Wings” by Andrea Tang are particularly recommended. A wonderful variety of stories and a great way to find authors you want to read more of.

• Larissa Lai, The Tiger Flu (Arsenal Pulp Press, Canada, 2019)

Because of a plague that kills men more frequently than women, one society in this polluted future has mostly women. But men still have more power and women still need to fear sexual assault. The other society is all women — many with special powers, including doublers who have multiple clone births, “starfish” who can grow new body parts, and girls given special treatment so they can help breast feed the multiple babies. The religion is Mother-based. A beautifully written novel.

• Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer [visual album] (Wondaland/Bad Boy/Atlantic, 2018)

This album follows the struggles, joys, incarceration, and eventual liberation of a queer, Black woman who is punished by a system that seeks to “cleanse” her of all elements in her life that deviate from the norm. She is sent to a prison in which her memories (each of which is a separate music video and an ode to mutual love in rebellion) will be erased. The workers in charge of the erasure, who sit back and enjoy the memories prior to destruction, serve as a sharp metaphor of the white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal system that is obsessed with Black bodies and creativity while still remaining profoundly anti-Black. This concept album forms a cohesive science fictional narrative, introducing futuristic elements in a way that is rarely seen so explicitly in the medium, opening up new pathways for the musical exploration of feminist science fiction.

• E. Prevost, “Sandals Full of Rainwater,” Capricious Magazine: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue (January 2018)

This story portrays a culture in which gender pronouns change depending on a multitude of factors for each individual at any given time. This story shows a character at the beginning of a new life whose sense of identity is affected by this new language with a multitude of unfamiliar pronouns. The story also touches on issues of immigration, poverty, unemployment, romance, and building a new family. The reader is given linguistic issues and endearing characters in a well-done story.

• Maria Turtschaninoff, Maresi: The Red Abbey Chronicles, translation by A. A. Prime (Amulet Books, USA, 2017)

This young adult novel was translated from Swedish. In it, a society of women (in groups acknowledging the Maiden, Mother, and Crone) live apart from a patriarchal world. They populate their society by rescuing women and girls from poverty, evil men, and lack of education. The leader of the Abbey is the First Mother. This story is told in the time of the 32nd First Mother. The women of the Abbey preserve knowledge within a vast library. The novel ends with the narrator, a teenage girl, deciding to go back out into the world to see if she can help change how men and women see themselves and one another.

• Dee Warrick, “Me, Waiting for Me, Hoping for Something More” (Shimmer Magazine #41, January 2018)

This visceral story with vivid writing explores in a literalized way the dysphoria that can come with being trans. The monster in the basement works as both a powerful metaphor and a plot device.

In addition to the honor list, this year’s jury also compiled a “long list” of twenty-eight other works they found worthy of attention.

• Cabaret Rollo Rouge, Sydney Blackburn (Less Than Three Press, 2018)
• Starless, Jacqueline Carey (Tor, 2018)
• The Dragon of Ynys, Minerva Cerridwen (Less Than Three Press, 2018)
• Peter Darling, Austin Chant (Less Than Three Press, 2017)
• “A Robot Like Me,” Lee Cope (in Mother of Invention, Twelfth Planet Press, 2018)
• Vox, Christina Dalcher (Berkeley Publishing, 2018)
• “The Hermit of Houston,” Samuel Delany (Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sept/Oct 2017)
• The Heart of the Lost Star, Megan Derr (Less Than Three Press, 2017)
• The Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich (Harper Collins Publishing, 2017)
• The Breath of the Sun, Isaac Fellman (Aqueduct Press, 2018)
• “Logistics,” A.J. Fitzwater (Clarkesworld, April 2018)
• Beast, Rachel Frank (Less Than Three Press, 2017)
• Strange Grace, Tessa Gratton (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2018)
• The Mere Wife, Maria Dahvana Headley (McDonnell Douglas, 2018)
• “Ghosts,” Azure Husky, personal blog
• “Substance of My Lives, the Accidents Of Our Births,” Jose Pablo Iriarte (Lightspeed, January, 2018
• “The Heavy Things,” Julian K Jarboe (SmokeLong Quarterly, November 2017)
• Margins and Murmurations, Otter Lieffe (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2017)
• Ship It, Britta Lundin (Freeform, 2018)
• No Man of Woman Born, Ana Mardoll (Acacia Moon Publishing
• “Sexy Robot Heroes,” Sandra McDonald (in Mother of Invention, Twelfth Planet Press, 2018)
• “Afloat Above A Floor of Stars,” Tom Purdom (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November/December 2017)
• Winterbourne’s Daughter, Stephanie Rabig (Less Than Three Press, 2017)
• Theory of Bastards, Audrey Schulman (Europa Editions, 2018)
• “You Can Make A Dinosaur But You Can’t Help Me,” K.M. Szpara (Uncanny Magazine, July 2018)
• “Some Personal Arguments in Support of the Betteryou,” Debbie Urbanski (Strange Horizons, November 2018)
• “Body Drift,” Cynthia Ward (Analog Magazine, November/December 2018)
• Red Clocks, Leni Zumas (Little, Brown and Company, 2018)

The Tiptree Award winner, along with authors whose works are on the Honor List, will be celebrated at WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin during Memorial Day weekend. The winner will receive $1000 in prize money, a specially commissioned piece of original artwork, and (as always) chocolate.
Each year, a panel of judges selects the Tiptree Award winner. The 2018 judges were Margaret McBride (chair), Marina Berlin, Ritch Calvin, and Arrate Hidalgo.

The 2019 panel of judges will be chaired by Carol Stabile, and reading will begin soon. The Tiptree Award invites everyone to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the recommendation page. Full information on all the books mentioned above will be in the Tiptree Award database by late April 2018.

Feminist Futures 2019 Storybundle

Cat Rambo has curated another Feminist Futures Story Bundle. This one includes two Aqueduct Press books, Mindscape by Andrea Hairston and Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett. Here's the scoop:

The 2019 Feminist Futures Bundle - Curated by Cat Rambo

I always enjoy putting together StoryBundles, and particularly Feminist Futures ones for Women's History Month. This bundle brings together some terrific reading that is some of the best offered by independent and small press publishing. It's my attempt to celebrate the excellent work being written by today's female speculative fiction authors.

The first recorded writer is the Akkadian/Sumerian poet and hymn writer Enheduanna (2285 BCE-2250 BCE), a woman whose work influenced a group of others that includes the psalms and prayers of the Bible and Greece's Homeric hymns. Women have always been part of science fiction, whether it was Margaret Cavendish's beating Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs to the center of the Earth in The Blazing World, Mary Shelley's commentary on science, humanity, and the parent/child relationship in Frankenstein, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman writing an alternative — and often appealing — society in Herland.

But somehow women often — perhaps even usually — get erased, overall. A few figures linger, perhaps because their impact is so undeniable that they cannot be obliterated, or perhaps tolerated for some other reason, but many of the female figures — Miriam DeFord, Zenna Henderson, Judith Merrill, Katherine MacLean — fade away. Certainly it's not a phenomenon restricted to one gender — and it's affected by race, sexuality, and similar factors as well — but women seem especially prey to it and one facet of feminism is finding, celebrating, and amplifying those voices so they survive in order to inform and teach the world to come.

Another important facet of feminism — for me — is at least in part about valuing and encouraging inclusivity by reaching out to invite a wide range of voices. This is a nicely diverse bundle, including queer and trans voices, and as such it presents interesting, thought-provoking science fiction that talks about our future and how we'll remain human in it from perspectives that are comic, dramatic, sometimes tragic, but always engaging, imaginative, and compellingly told.

How do we preserve women writers in history? A lot of it is making sure part of the public conversation includes discussion of their work. If you enjoy these voices, let's talk about them! Let me know what you thought, and please spread the word via your social media, so others can join the conversation. I'll be doing some video interviews with authors about their books - look for the hashtag #thefutureisfeminist on social media or subscribe to my Youtube channel or newsletter to make sure you get notified when they appear!

The Feminist Futures bundle runs for three weeks only - pick up yours now! – Cat Rambo

For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you're feeling generous), you'll get the basic bundle of four books in any ebook format—WORLDWIDE.

•         Snapshots from a Black Hole and Other Oddities by K.C. Ball

•         Sunspot Jungle by Bill Campbell

•         Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett

•         Queen of Roses by Elizabeth McCoy

•          

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $15, you get all four of the regular books, plus SIX more!

•         Albatross by R.A. MacAvoy and Nancy L. Palmer

•         Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories by Naomi Kritzer

•         The Child Goddess by Louise Marley

•         Exile by Lisa M. Bradley

•         The Goodall Mutiny by Gretchen Rix

•         Mindscape by Andrea Hairston

•          

This bundle is available only for a limited time via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get multiple DRM-free formats (.epub and .mobi) for all books!

It's also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.

Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.

•         Get quality reads: We've chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.

•         Pay what you want (minimum $5): You decide how much these fantastic books are worth. If you can only spare a little, that's fine! You'll still get access to a batch of exceptional titles.

•         Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there's nothing wrong with ditching DRM.

•         Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to Girls Write Now!

•         Receive extra books: If you beat the bonus price, you'll get the bonus books!