The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 1: Octavia Cade

 

Fascinating Reads in 2022

by Octavia Cade

 

I can’t honestly say that 2022 has been an easy reading year. I seem to have fallen behind in my reading goals, and I’ve left a number of books unfinished. They weren’t even bad books. I wanted to finish them, but I just didn’t. There were, however, some books that really stuck out for me—books that basically forced me to finish them, no matter how lazy or distracted I was. Five of them are below.

This isn’t a complete list. Some of them I read for work, some of them I stumbled over at the local library. The books you don’t know you’re looking for, I find, are often the books you end up liking best. In no particular order, then:

 

(1) Homegoing  by Yaa Gyasi. This was absolutely outstanding, and this author’s a must-read for me now. She had an uphill battle, to be honest. Intergenerational, historical family narratives can often be a hard sell for me, as they tend to be longer than I care to tackle. Homegoing, however, created an epic in less than 400 pages: two sisters are separated by the slave trade. One is sold to the United States, the other gets involved with a slaver and remains in Ghana, and the novel follows both families, generation after generation, until they come together again. The considered illustration of trauma, and how it lingers through generations, is just so well done. It’s not an easy read, but it is an enormously compelling one.

(2) Another not-easy read is The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea, by an author known as Bandi. These short stories, smuggled out of the country and into South Korea, are both excellent and horrifying... primarily because they are likely inspired by real life. The story that sticks with me most, I think, is that of the young mother who is punished because, instead of attending a mandatory parade, she chooses to stay home to look after a sick child. I don’t know who the author is. It may well be safer for them if their name never becomes widely known. I do know, however, that they have both enormous bravery and enormous talent. 

 

(3) Challenging in a different way is the ongoing comic series Pretty Deadly, by Kelly Sue Deconnick and Emma Ríos. I’ve read much of the series before, but pitched a last-minute paper to an academic anthology called Visions of Death, which was looking for chapters about death in speculative fiction. These comics, featuring Deathface Ginny, reaper of vengeance and the daughter of Death, are a weird mix of historical fiction, western, and fantasy. What most appeals to me about them, however, is that they are like little puzzle-boxes. Pieces fit together in interesting and reflective ways, and it can sometimes be quite difficult to decipher what’s actually going on. I enjoy that, and I can’t wait for the next volume!

(4) Another paper I wrote this year (forthcoming in Hélice journal early next year) includes a close reading of Locust Girl: A Lovesong by Merlinda Bobis. It’s a sort of magical realist dystopian novel, where a little girl is buried alive in the desert, after her community is destroyed by bombs. She wakes up, ten years later and still the same age, with a locust embedded in her forehead. The locust dreams, and little Amadea is the recipient of those dreams, traveling through a desperately impoverished landscape and trying to reconcile that destroyed environment with the people who scrape a living there. It’s a weird and fascinating book!     

 

(5) Finally, I read a collection of horror short stories by Carlie St. George. You Fed Us to the Roses is clearly heavily inspired by young women in horror films, and each story here follows a girl who could herself be the heroine of a slasher film, as she tries to navigate the tropes and make a life for herself and the people around her. I was absolutely riveted all the way through; this is the best collection I’ve read in ages. I want every horror fan I know to grab a copy and read it for themselves, because the way that these stories illustrate trauma, and (crucially) ways of surviving trauma, is just incredible. I knew the second I’d finished it that this was a book I’d read again and again... I can’t emphasize enough just how good this book is. Walk, don’t run! You’ll love it too.

 

 Octavia Cade is a New Zealand speculative fiction writer and science communicator. She has sold close to seventy stories to markets including Clarkesworld, F&SF, and Asimov's. Her latest book is the climate fiction novella The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, published by Stelliform Press. Octavia attended Clarion West 2016, and will be spending the first half of 2023 as writer in residence at Canterbury University. Aqueduct Press published Octavia's Mary Shelley Makes a Monster in its Conversation Pieces series in 2019, which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award in the "Superior Achievement in Poetry Collection" category.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 2: Eleanor Arnason

 

The Pleasures of 2022

by Eleanor Arnason

This is the third year of the epidemic, and I continue to be careful, avoiding crowds. I do go to the Minnesota Opera, always wearing a mask. The first opera this season was Edward Tulane, based on a children’s book by Kate DiCamillo. It works for adults as well as children. I enjoyed it. The second opera was Handel’s Rinaldo. I had seen a spectacular production of this by the Metropolitan Opera decades ago. 

 

The Minnesota Opera’s production was a lot less good, done in a new auditorium that reminded me of a concrete bunker. The stage was small. The sets were mingy. The singers and musicians did the best they could. The production was made worse by an attempt to avoid the anti-Moslem material in the original, which was based on Jerusalem Delivered by the Italian Renaissance poet Tasso. So the two contending forces – Crusaders and Moslems – were turned into two capitalist families contending for something. Control of a company?  In the end of the opera, the two families are reconciled and join together to oppress the working class. I am pretty sure I heard that. This fits in with the fact that the opera company has laid off 40% of their musicians, since they don’t need them – or have room for them – in their new, awful auditorium. 

If you get the chance to see Edward Tulane, it is probably worth seeing. Rinaldo is also worth seeing, just not this production. 

I finally lost interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The last three Avengers movies were not good. They could have stopped at Age of Ultron, when Thor flies off to Asgard to deal with problems there, and Tony Stark decides to retire as Ironman and buy a farm. The movies after that were simply not as interesting: more than anything else a way to get rid of old characters and bring in a new generation of superheroes. I am not going to get involved in this new generation. I have already spent enough time on Marvel. 

Most of my fiction reading has been manuscripts submitted to my two writing groups. Good work, but not yet out. My nonfiction reading has been a lot of science, especially paleontology. Reading about mass extinctions has been reassuring. It is not likely that humanity can equal the end-of-the-Permian mass extinction, caused (many paleontologists think) by enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. The planet will recover from whatever we do to it, given ten million years or so. 

I guess my favorite book at the moment is The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte. A good description of how paleontology is done, plus a lot of info about dinosaurs. I like dinosaurs, which are not extinct. They fly and sing all around us.  Brusatte wrote another book, which I like less well: The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. But he gives us the long, long history of mammals and their ancestral line, which began with Synapsids in the Permian, 250 million years ago. 

Science fiction writers can often see what’s wrong with a society and what kinds of changes are needed. But we don’t have a good sense of how long the changes will take. I remember sitting with a couple of friends, both SF writers, in 1992 or -93, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. “It will happen here,” I said. They agreed. One of them said, “I give us maybe three more years.” Now, 30 years later, the US finally seems to be crumbling. Everything takes longer than SF people expect. 

 

 Eleanor Arnason has written several novels and many short stories. Her fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People (2001), won the James Tiptree Jr. award for gender-bending science fiction and the Mythopoeic Society Award for adult fantasy. Her fifth novel, Ring of Swords (1995), won a Minnesota Book Award. Aqueduct Press published her collection Big Mama Stories in 2013, her Lydia Duluth adventure, Tomb of the Fathers, in 2010, and her collection, Ordinary People, in 2005. In 2016 Aqueduct released  e-book editions of The Sword Smith, To the Resurrection Station, and Daughter of the Bear King. In 2017, Aqueduct published a collection of her Hwarhath stories, Hwarhath Stories, which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and was named to the James Tiptree Award's Honor List. Next year, Aqueduct will bring out a new edition of Eleanor's Ring of Swords, with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin, as the fifth volume in its Heirloom Books series. 

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022

 Our annual Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening series will begin tomorrow. 2022, that is to say, is nearly over. For me, it went by fast. In some ways, I experienced it as more of the same as the previous year. COVID19 is still here, extremities in weather continue to ramp up, the line between politics and ethics has become even more blurred, and the right-wing's war on women an the non-cisgendered has inflicted significant damage with a promise of even worse to come. & yet, the struggle continues, especially in our youngest generations, and I'm hopeful for the changes I'm seeing in the way we're thinking about the world.

As a writer, critic, and publisher, I'm dismayed that so many people I know tell me they don't have what it takes to read novels any longer--even when they themselves are continuing to write them. Still, our aesthetic pleasures can take many forms, whether stimulating or comforting, and continue to nourish our moral imaginations. For me, this is always a reason for hope, however thoroughly entangled with our neoliberal economy they may be.

This series in past years has shown, repeatedly, that reading, viewing, and listening pleasures vary widely. (Another reason for hope!) I'm pleased to announce that this blog's annual series of posts on reading, viewing, and listening is about to begin. Once again I've solicited pieces from a bevy of writers and critics to tell us what they particularly enjoyed reading, viewing, and listening to in the last year. This year's edition will include posts by Eleanor Arnason, Andrea Hairston, Lisa Tuttle, Christopher Brown, Nisi Shawl, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Cheryl Morgan, and others. As usual, I'll be adding links below as I upload each new contribution, to provide a list for convenient reference. 

I hope you'll enjoy reading these as much as I have, and that they'll swell the presumably always growing list of titles you want to read. Sometimes it seems that the volume of books published is so tremendous that it's no surprise that really wonderful work often slips below one's personal radar. 

1. Octavia Cade

2. Eleanor Arnason

3. Xian Mao

4. Erin K. Wagner 

5. Tara Campbell

6. Suzy McKee Charnas  

7. Elizabeth Clark-Stern

8. Tansy Rayner Roberts

9. Lisa Tuttle  

10. Gwynne Garfinkle

11. Lesley Wheeler

12. Holly Wade Matter  

13. Susan diRende

14. Sheila Finch

 15. Nisi Shawl

16. Caren Gussoff Sumption

17. Mark Rich  

18. Cheryl Morgan

19. LaToya Jordan

20. Sarah Tolmie

21. Andrea Hairston

22. Lynne Jensen Lampe  

23. Isabel Schechter

24. Christopher Brown

25. Cesi Davidson 

26. Jaymee Goh

27. Nancy Jane Moore

28. Christina M. Rau  

29. Lesley A. Hall

30. Rosanne Rabinowitz

31. Ritch Calvin  

32. Arrate Hidalgo

33. Kiini Ibura Salaam

34. Cynthia Ward

Erin K. Wagner's When Home, No Need to Cry

 

 I'm pleased to announce the release of When Home, No Need to Cry, a collection of short fiction by Erin K. Wagner and is the eighty-fifth volume in our Conversation Pieces Series. It is available now in both print and e-book editions at www.aqueduct press.com. 

 

 

A child spells away the changeling that haunts her. An Appalachian girl marries young and learns that men don’t die easy. A dying astronaut yearns to return to space and the alien dreams that crept inside her head. An old woman chases down her most elusive prey and realizes the hunt isn’t worth it. From sunny kitchens to arid Mars, this collection of stories traces the quiet things that haunt us, whether it be suspicions of neighbors, the failures of memory, or the ghosts of planets.

You can read a sample of the book at http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-232-9.pdf.

 

Reviews

 Wagner collects 10 speculative shorts loosely connected by a quietly brooding aesthetic and themes of how humanity is changed by brushes with the supernatural or extraterrestrial. “Blowflies” calls on the author’s Appalachian heritage and evokes a lonely mood, while “How to Tell the Future by Tea Leaves, Stars, and Cards” uses a child’s limited understanding of her weirdly unsettling environment to set a scene both luminous and stifling. The standout, “Blood & Formalin,” follows an embalmer in a time of war as he is confronted with what caring for the dead really means. The last three stories move the collection to outer space: an astronaut waits to die in a space shuttle in the title piece; the human population of Mars has developed a different sense of priorities than their Terran tourists in “A Planet Like Earth”; and “From That Sea of Time” takes readers to an entire planet abandoned in mournful memorial. Wagner’s writing seats itself deeply in each individual narrator’s perspective and explores the tension between individual agency and the undeniable pull of the strange. Readers are sure to be enthralled. --Publishers Weekly

 

 

Nisi Shawl's Our Fruiting Bodies

 

I'm pleased to announce the release of Our Fruiting Bodies, a collection of short fiction by Nisi Shawl, in both paperback and ebook editions. It's available now from Aqueduct at www.aqueductpress.com. And you can read a sample from the book here: http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-224-4.pdf.

 Our Fruiting Bodies collects stories of old growth and fresh decay, of stubborn rebirth and the faint but nonimaginary paths connecting life and nonlife.From the sharp, sweet confessional of their Peter Pan-inspired “Awfully Big Adventure,” through the melting ambitextualities of “Just Us”—from the early, dizzy-eyed quest at the heart of “Looking for Lilith” through the newly unfurling tendrils that pierce the grounds of “I Being Young and Foolish,” Nisi Shawl’s search for the power of fiction’s truth puts pure, precious gifts right here, right in your hands, ripe and ready for reading.

Nisi Shawl's Our Fruiting Bodies is a wilderness of untamed magic to explore, ever changing underfoot, beauty thorned and fertile with meaning, nurtured by the most talented of keepers. Shawl trusts their readers to be attuned to the mysteries of the imagined, rather than sated by formula or convention.
 —Indrapramit Das, author of The Devourers 

Reviews

Rich in diversity and imagination, this will delight any speculative fiction reader.  (Read the whole review)
  —Publishers Weekly, Aug 15, 2022

"Nebula Award nominee Shawl (Everfair, 2016) presents a new collection of fantastical short fiction bound to delight speculative fiction and Afrofuturism readers."--Booklist, Nov 2022 (the whole review will be available when it goes online on Nov. 10.)

An Evening with Three Aqueduct Authors

This is a heads-up for an Aqueduct authors event I'd love to be able to attend myself. (I'm in Port Townsend for my annual sabbatical, so sad to say, I won't be there.) Over the years, I've seen many of Nisi's readings and know that she's a star performer, and so am confident she'll be brilliant. Also? This is the launch of her new collection, Our Fruiting Bodies, which Aqueduct will be releasing on November 1. Last summer, during a conference held via Zoom, I saw Tara reading from her collection, Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection, and found her performance of a delightfully creepy story enthralling. And to tell the truth, it was the memory of Holly Wade Matter's intriguing Seattle Public Library reading of an excerpt from what would become her novel Damned Pretty Things, that made me eager to read her novel ms when she offered it to Aqueduct years later. Which is to say, the evening promises to be a fun precursor to Halloween, full of feminist dark fantasy and horror. (Not to mention a chance for people in the Seattle area to see friends one hasn't seen in a while in the absolute, real-life flesh.)

Here are the details, and a little more about Nisi's, Holly's, and Tara's work to be featured at the event.

Thursday, October 27, 2022. 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM PDT
Third Place Books 5041 Wilson Ave S Seattle, WA 98118 United States

Next week, Third Place Books will welcome Nisi Shawl, Holly Wade Matter, and Tara Campbell to their Seward Park store. Our authors will be discussing their latest works of fiction: Our Fruiting Bodies, Damned Pretty Things, and Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required in advance.

Copies of Our Fruiting Bodies, Damned Pretty Things, and Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection will be available for purchase at the store. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A.

Per request of the authors, masks are required to attend. More about Third Place Books' COVID-19 policies for in-person events.
 
About Our Fruiting Bodies

Our Fruiting Bodies collects stories of old growth and fresh decay, of stubborn rebirth and the faint but nonimaginary paths connecting life and nonlife. From the sharp, sweet confessional of their Peter Pan-inspired "Awfully Big Adventure," through the melting ambitextualities of "Just Us"--from the early, dizzy-eyed quest at the heart of "Looking for Lilith" through the newly unfurling tendrils that pierce the grounds of "I Being Young and Foolish," Nisi Shawl's search for the power of fiction's truth puts pure, precious gifts right here, right in your hands, ripe and ready for reading.

About Damned Pretty Things

Fortune is an itinerant musician without a past who braids memories into her hair. Maud is a sheltered small-town girl and an unwitting heir to the notorious McBride family magic. The two young women meet when Fortune is commissioned to bring Maud to a rich man whose grandson she cursed. United by their love of music and their hunger for the road, Fortune and Maud form a friendship...one that is threatened not only by Fortune's mission but also by their mutual desire for a man called Lightning.

About Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection

Deep in the recesses of childhood memory, your old playthings await. Listen: don’t you hear them crying out for you? Come take a peek inside the Cabinet of Wrath to find out what really happens when toys go missing and the stark decision they must make if they ever want to go home again. Discover what doll heads really think about being separated from their bodies. Follow a skull-and-bones novelty ring as it assembles a full body for itself, bit by grisly bit, and learn how loving your doll too much can lead to grave consequences. Open the door to these fabulist tales of toys and vengeance for a playtime you’ll never forget.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series.
 
 

Cesi Davidson's Bilabials

 

 

I'm pleased to announce the release of Cesi Davidson's Bilabials: Short Plays to Nourish the Mind and Soul. Aqueduct is publishing it as the eighty-fourth volume in our Conversation Pieces series in both print and e-book editions. You can purchase it now at www.aqueductpress.com. And you can read a sample from the book at http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-228-2.pdf.

 

 .Bilabials is the third volume in Cesi Davidson's series of Short Plays to Nourish the Mind & Soul. The three anthologies of plays, Articulation, Fricatives, and now Bilabials are eclectic mixes of stories with surprises, tragedies, delights, and wit. Bilabials departs from the earlier books by its concentration on plays with some theme of love. She also places prose between each play that may sting or please or some modicum of both. This collection isn’t a how to manual. It isn’t a for-women-only, “Aha.” This often laughable, often tear-jerking collection if a label is needed, is a rousing cheer for asking the question, “What is love anyway?” The answer lies somewhere on the horizon between the earth and the sky. This is where Cesi Davidson dwells. She offers her heart in her hands and releases her voice inviting us to travel into the depths of a mystifying unknown. Love is. 

“Cesi Davidson’s newest book of short plays is at the same time revolutionary and hilarious in its content and delivery. Appropriately, the first play is titled “Juicy,” and this book has so much sweet, liquid fun within. From the beginning, the reader experiences a trickle of exquisite sensuality running through each page. Cesi gives a gift to those of us with female bodies—and that gift is permission to feel good, whatever it looks like, and to research what could feel even better.” —Kim Chinh, actor, screenwriter, playwright, author of “Reclaiming Vietnam”

“Cesi Davidson has collected for us here a wondrous trip around, through, and within the heart. These short journeys into the emotions of those who love and those who do not add to our understanding of what love is and what love isn’t. When you laugh, cry, and sigh with recognition, you will be reminded that you are not only a witness to, but also a participant in the emotional life of all those around you.”—Celeste Rita Baker, World Fantasy Award Winner, author of Back, Belly and Side

“Once again I was entertained, moved, and shocked by Cesi’s expansive imagination in this third collection of inventive and delightful short plays. Give yourself to Cesi’s words, and you’ll experience the true essence of love with plenty of laughter inside the rich world in which all beings are sentient, intelligent, and funny.” —Rachel Lu (Actor, Elite Match)

The 2022 Pride Bundle

 

THE 2022 PRIDE BUNDLE

 

by Catherine Lundoff and Melissa Scott

 The 2022 Pride Bundle Bundle - Curated by Catherine Lundoff and Melissa Scott

It's time for another queer-themed bundle to celebrate Pride! This year, we have five books in the main bundle, and another ten in the bonus, for a total of fifteen if you spring for the bonus. Once again, winnowing it down to a manageable number was ready hard — there are so many writers out there who are creating intelligent, nuanced and queer SF/F.

Because this is for Pride, we looked for books that depicted queerness in all its aspects. You'll find profoundly hopeful work as well as darker themes, but what you won't find is stories in which being queer means you're evil, nor any in which it's purely a doomed and tragic fate. We've included newer writers and new work, reintroduced some older ones, and are offering a mix of novels, novellas, and short story collections; we have science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, solarpunk, cyberpunk, ghost stories, and more. These are stories that celebrate the multitudes within our queer community, all written by authors at the top of their game. You'll find a wide range of diverse characters, an equally wide range of styles, and stories that will hook you from first to last.

We can't claim that this is anything like a definitive LGBTQIA+ collection. There is too much wonderful queer writing out there for anyone to be able claim that. Instead, we're offering a collection that celebrates queerness, and shows off the work of some of the best writers working today.

StoryBundle has always allowed its patrons to donate part of their payment to a related charity, and once again we're supporting Rainbow Railroad, an NGO helping LGBT+ people escape state-sponsored persecution and violence worldwide. Especially at this moment, their work is desperately needed, and if you choose, you can pass part of the bundle's price to them — a gift that can save a life. – Catherine Lundoff and Melissa Scott

* * *

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 five books in any ebook format—WORLDWIDE.

•            Lord of the White Hell by Ginn Hale

•            We're Here edited by C.L. Clark & series editor Charles Payseur

•            The Adventure of the Incognita Countess by Cynthia Ward

•            Sanctuary by Andi C. Buchanan

•            The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones

 

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $20, you get all five of the regular books, plus TEN more books for a total of 15!

•            Unfettered Hexes edited by dave ring

•            The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum by Cynthia Ward

•            It Gets Even Better edited by Isabela Oliveira and Jed Sabin

•            The Hereafter Bytes by Vincent Scott

•            Water Horse by Melissa Scott

•            Friends For Robots by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

•            The Sea of Stars by Nicole Kimberling

•            Foxhunt by Rem Wigmore

•            Pangs by Jerry L. Wheeler

•            Depart, Depart! by Sim Kern

 

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, .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 Rainbow Railroad!

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

 

StoryBundle was created to give a platform for independent authors to showcase their work, and a source of quality titles for thirsty readers. StoryBundle works with authors to create bundles of ebooks that can be purchased by readers at their desired price. Before starting StoryBundle, Founder Jason Chen covered technology and software as an editor for Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com.

For more information, visit our website at storybundle.com, tweet us at @storybundle and like us on Facebook. For press inquiries, please email press@storybundle.com.

Queering SF: Readings by Ritch Calvin

 

I'm pleased to announce the release, in both print and e-book editions, Queering SF: Readings, by science fiction scholar Ritch Calvin.  It's available now at www.aqueductpress.com.

The essays in Queering SF provide an introduction to some of the shades of queer in SF writing. SF is not a monolith. Queer SF is not, either. Writers of queer SF approach it in a variety of ways, with a variety of end goals. The essays here aim to introduce readers to a wide range of writers and texts, some familiar, some unfamiliar.

These essays demonstrate some of the ways in which queer SF pushes at the very generic norms of SF. The idea of SF, the characteristics of SF, the content of SF have all been shaped (a) in a particular place and time, and (b) in one's own reading experience. Many of these writers want to challenge what SF looks like and does.

Finally, Queering SF points to some of these newly imagined futures, to a way to spend some time in differently imagined societies and families, and to think about the ways in which we would like to see that in our own reality.

Advance Praise

“Queering SF takes readers on a tour of science fiction’s imaginings and reimaginings of gender and sexuality, from the tentative explorations of the early twentieth century to the burgeoning diverse visions of the twenty-first. To read this book is to be transported into an ideal college classroom, where stories and novels are carefully contextualized, generously critiqued, and expansively engaged as contributions to the projects of queer, feminist, intersectional social transformation. Calvin's accessible, friendly style and deep knowledge of both SF and queer studies make this an essential read for anyone interested in exploring the queerness of science fiction and the science-fictionality of queerness.”  —Alexis Lothian author of Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility

Forkpoints: Stories of Decisions Made and Roads Not Taken by Sheila Finch

 

 I'm pleased to announce Aqueduct Press's release of Forkpoints: Stories of Decisions Made and Roads Not Taken by Sheila Finch in both print and e-book editions. You can purchase it now from Aqueduct Press at www.aqueductpress.com.  

One of our imperatives as humans is to communicate–with others, with animals, and eventually with aliens. Here, in Forkpoints, you will find stories of unlikely people–scientists and street people, athletes and musicians, the very old and the arrogant teen–meeting and connecting with others not like them at all. Another major interest of Finch’s is what Robert Frost called “the road not taken,” that haunting sense we all have from time to time that maybe there were other paths we should have explored, other doorways we should have passed through, forkpoints where our choices changed our lives forever. Science Fiction shows us many fantastic inventions that may come in the future, other worlds, other beings. But, even then, people will still be people, loving, making families, worrying about trifles, dealing with crises, making life-changing decisions as best they can.

Advance Praise

“Good reading for our hard times. These are stories of opportunities unseen, glimpsed, suddenly brought into focus—maybe to slip away, or be refused, or maybe just delayed. There’s a gentleness to them, a melancholy, that sets off the glints of new possibilities and hope. The last story gives us a child’s-eye view of the Blitz so clear and detailed—readers who loved Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight should have a look here.”
 —Suzy McKee Charnas, author of The Holdfast Chronicles and The Vampire Tapestry

“Sheila Finch is one of the treasures of modern science fiction. She’s literate, imaginative, and deeply insightful. Her contributions to the field include not only specific, awesomely good works, but her careful attention to how language shapes story structure and flow. Her short fiction works are like polished gemstones, with each facet reflecting and informing the central theme. Here is a collection of such jewels, each speaking to the profound transformative power of human understanding. We are more than our circumstances, these stories say, we have the ability to shift our perspective, to look and feel more deeply, and thereby to shift entire realities. From an elderly music teacher who could also have been an iconic physicist to an extraordinary communication across species to a time-traveler visiting his own ancestor during the World War II London bombings, each tale reaches deep into the mind of the reader, inviting us with Finch’s characteristically gentle wisdom to see the universe and ourselves in a revolutionary light.”
 —Deborah Ross, author of Collaborators and The Seven-Petaled Shield fantasy series

Reviews

Nebula Award winner Finch (Reading the Bones) delivers an impressive, career-spanning collection celebrating the power a single decision holds to change the shape of the world. Some of the 12 stories focus in on those pivotal moments; the gripping “Not This Tide” leaps between the inexplicable supernatural experiences of a girl and her father in WWII England, and the year 2035, in which the now-elderly woman is a renowned world peace activist. Others place the fateful decision in the background and chart the consequences, like the wistful “The Old Man and C,” which imagines a world where Albert Einstein followed his talent for violin instead of physics. Fans of Finch’s Xenolinguist stories will enjoy encountering the author at her lyrical best in “Sequoia Dreams,” about alien visitors who have a profound ecological message to convey, and “Czerny at Midnight,” in which a marine biologist’s autistic son communicates with an octopus through music. Though pieces like “Forkpoints” and “Where Two or Three” are weakened by plentiful hints that there are better stories happening in the background, this collection as a whole is delightfully cohesive and thought-provoking. It’s a showcase of a legend at her finest.  
  —Publishers Weekly, April 2022