Locus, August 2014
IN THIS ISSUE
August 2014 • Issue 643 • Vol. 73 • No. 2
47th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman
Interviews
Ian McDonald: On Xenoforming
Ann Leckie: Silhouettes
Main Stories
2014 World Fantasy Awards Nominations • 2014 Science Fiction Hall of Fame Inductees • 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards Winners • 2014 Prometheus Awards Winners • Amazon/Hachette Battle Continues • New Allegations About MZB
People and Publishing
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Terry Pratchett, Guy Gavriel Kay, Jeffrey Ford, Michael Swanwick, Cecelia Holland, Sheri S. Tepper, Neil Gaiman, and many others
The Data File
2014 Chesley Awards Finalists • Hachette Acquires Perseus • Strange Chemistry and Exhibit A Shut Down • B&N Spins Off Nook • New SFWA Board Members • Publishing News • World Conventions News • Patterson Donation • World Book Night US Closes • Awards News • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights • Audiobooks Received • Publications Received • Catalogs Received
Special Features
Commentary: Kameron Hurley: People Don’t Buy Books They Don’t Know About (Even Great Ones) • 2014 Locus Survey Results
Conventions
Locus Awards Weekend • Readercon 2014
Locus Looks at Books
Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois
Reach for Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed.; Asimov’s 7/14; Asimov’s 8/14.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton
Granta Spring ’14; Harper’s 6/14; F&SF 7-8/14; Asimov’s 8/14; Interzone 5-6/14; Lightspeed 7/14; Reach for Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe
Beautiful Blood, Lucius Shepard; Academic Exercises, K.J. Parker; The Severed Streets, Paul Cornell; We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory; Unexpected Stories, Octavia E. Butler.
Reviews by Faren Miller
Acceptance, Jeff VanderMeer; Fool’s Assassin, Robin Hobb; The Bees, Laline Paull; Invisible Beasts, Sharona Muir.
Reviews by Russell Letson
Cibola Burn, James S.A. Corey; Reach for Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed.
Reviews by Adrienne Martini
The Silk Map, Chris Willrich; Full Fathom Five, Max Gladstone; Peacemaker, Marianne De Pierres; Fortune’s Pawn, Rachel Bach; Honor’s Knight, Rachel Bach; Heaven’s Queen, Rachel Bach.
Reviews by Tim Pratt
The Last Weekend, Nick Mamatas; Chimpanzee, Darin Bradley.
Reviews by Carolyn Cushman
Dust and Light, Carol Berg; Shifting Shadows, Patricia Briggs; Girl Genius #13: Agatha Heterodyne and the Sleeping City, Phil & Kaja Foglio; Shattered, Kevin Hearne; Free Agent, J.C. Nelson.
Listings
Magazines Received: June • Books Received: June • British Books Received: May • Bestsellers
New and Notable
Terry Bisson: This Month in History
Obituaries
Frank M. Robinson (1926-2014) • Appreciations by Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Robin Wayne Bailey, Richard A. Lupoff, Mike Resnick, Allen M. Steele, Tom Whitmore, Derryl Murphy • Other Obituaries: Walter Dean Myers • Nadine Gordimer • Mary Rodgers • Nancy Garden • C.J. Henderson • Matthew Richell
Editorial Matters
Locus Awards and Readercon • Staff • This Issue/Next Issue
Corrections
Photo List and Ad List
Masthead
Return to In This Issue listing.
Ian Neil McDonald was born March 31, 1960 in Manchester England. He moved to Northern Ireland at age five and has lived there ever since. He attended Bangor Grammar School and worked as head of development for a TV production company.
McDonald began publishing SF with ‘‘The Island of the Dead’’ (1982), and his stories soon began to appear regularly in Asimov’s, Interzone, and other magazines. His novels include Locus Award-winning debut Desolation Road (1988) and related book Ares Express (2001); Out on Blue Six (1989); Philip K. Dick Award-winning King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991); Hearts, Hands and Voices (1992; as The Broken Land in the US); Necroville (1994; as Terminal Cafe in the US); The Chaga series: Chaga (1995; as Evolution’s Shore in the US), Kirinya (1998), and Sturgeon Award winning novella Tendeléo’s Story (2000); Sacrifice of Fools (1996); BSFA Award winner and Clarke and Hugo Award finalist River of Gods (2004); Hugo and Nebula Award finalist and BSFA winner Brasyl (2007); and Hugo and Clarke Award nominee and BSFA and Campbell Memorial Award winner The Dervish House (2010). He began his YA Everness series with Planesrunner (2010), and it continues with Be My Enemy (2013) and Empress of the Sun (2014). Adult novels Hopeland and Luna (first in a duology) are forthcoming.
Notable short fiction includes Nebula Award nominee ‘‘Unfinished Portrait of the King of Pain by Van Gogh’’ (1988); BSFA Award winner ‘‘Innocents’’ (1993); Hugo Award finalists ‘‘The Little Goddess’’ (2005), ‘‘The Tear’’ (2008), and ‘‘Vishnu at the Cat Circus’’ (2009); and Hugo Award winner ‘‘The Djinn’s Wife’’ (2006). Some of his short fiction is collected in Empire Dreams (1988), Speaking in Tongues (1992), and Cyberadad Days (2009), a British Fantasy Award finalist and recipient of a Philip K. Dick Award special citation. He wrote graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch (1992, illustrated by David Lyttleton).
McDonald lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland with his partner, Enid Crowe.
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‘‘For the Everness books, I came up with the image of an airship that can travel between parallel universes, which is probably something every writer’s thought of at some point, and I just followed it through. It was a nice break to do something different. Steampunk without steam. Teslapunk. Steampunk without the messed-around Victorian values. Real Victorians would be completely alien! I didn’t want to get stuck doing the same SF books over and over, successful though they may be. I didn’t want to keep writing books about the developing economy of the year – India, Brazil. I could feel myself getting trapped in that.
‘‘There’s the whole Northern Ireland thing, living in a marginal country, which doesn’t seem that science fictional – I’m drawn to other marginal places. When I write about a place, I always go there. (I’m doing a book about the moon, which is problematic. You should see the flyer miles I get with that.) I try to be honest about my experience of the place, though one can lob grenades of appropriation around and back again. If I haven’t gone there, and I haven’t seen stuff and noticed little details, and put some money into the economy as well, I don’t feel I can write about it with any kind of degree of honesty, for myself. Of course I get things wrong – but I can write about what happens at the bottom of my street and get things wrong, too.
‘‘I think if you’re throwing a stereotype into your book you’re not a good writer, basically. You’re there to create three-dimensional characters who live and breathe. It’s not interesting to read about stereotypes. In a sense, every character I try and do is that bit out of the ordinary. Everyone’s take on their culture is different and personal. There’s no one way to be Indian or one way to be Turkish.
‘‘It does seem to me that, in some ways, the entire postcolonial argument is another form of Western colonialism as well. It’s the Western intellectual process of telling people how to look at themselves: ‘Your relationship to us in the West is the defining thing about you.’ I think a lot of Indians find that patronizing. They have their own country to get on with and their own economy to build; their own problems to solve. They’re not subalterns, they’re building a country.
‘‘Afric
a was the first part of the developing world that I visited, way back. We got sent on some exchange trip to Kenya. It was great. I was about 18 at the time and it was a complete eye-opener. I’d never really been out of Ireland before, and all of a sudden I was in Nairobi. It fascinated me because when I got back people would ask, ‘What about the poverty?’ But for me, it was much more about people doing things, building lives and families, building cities and towns. It left a lasting impression.
‘‘Colonialism is a kind of reverse terraforming in a sense – the southern hemisphere being terraformed into somebody else’s terra. Xenoforming, that’s the word. There was a display in our local museum and it was a little diorama of the seabed in the Permian epoch. That was truly bizarre – it looked like an alien world. What if that alien world was part of our world? What if the alien invasion wasn’t UFOs arriving over the White House, but foreigners arriving in the southern hemisphere at Kilimanjaro?
‘‘My next books are Luna parts one and two, a duology set on a moon base – Game of Domes. In the Luna books, I’m still writing about developing economies, it’s just that this one happens to be on the moon, about 2089. It was basically Gary K. Wolfe who was responsible for it. On an ancient Coode Street podcast about invigorating stale subgenres in science fiction, he said he’d love to see a new take on the moonbase story. I don’t know why, but I’ve always loved moon stories. John Varley did one, Steel Beach. I thought about it, and Enid, my partner, was watching TV, the new version of Dallas. It wasn’t very good, but the old version was great. My book is Dallas on the moon, so it’s got five big industrial family corps on the moon, called the five dragons, and it’s about their intrigues and battles. It’s also developing in parallel as a TV project with a company I’ve worked with before. There’s a gap in the market for an SF series that doesn’t look like science fiction, if you know what I mean.
‘‘There are a couple of kickers that keep the story running along. On the moon there’s no criminal law, there’s only contract law. Everything is negotiable in some form or another. You can be married to three different people at the same time with three different contracts; they don’t have to live with you. Every part of life is negotiated. There’s also a ticking clock: if you’re on the moon for more than two years, your bone structure and musculature will degenerate to the point to where it’s not safe to go back to Earth again, so everyone who goes there to work has to decide, ‘Do I stay or do I go?’ And there’s corporate intrigue, with a family matriarch getting old but not ready to pass, because there will be a power vacuum. There are battling brothers, basically the Thor/Loki relationship, with the charismatic older brother and the clever younger one. It’s a lot of fun to do. I watched the hell out of The Godfather several times, parts one and two. It’s the same structure, really. There’s been a first look at the world of Luna already: Jonathan published a story ‘The Fifth Dragon’ in his Reach for Infinity anthology, which is part of this world.
‘‘They basically mine metals. This is an actual proposal for lunar development. They have this massive mobile smelter that runs on rails and constantly positions itself under the sun. It moves at about four miles an hour, and they use mirrors to smelt metal.
‘‘We’re seeing an almost reverse zoom through the cosmos, in that we’ve had big galaxy-spanning space operas, then came the new solar system stuff, with Paul McAuley and Stan Robinson, now I’m retreating back to the moon. But it’s a load of fun to write. Everyone dresses in 1950s fashions. And why not? They look great, because the robots do all the hard work. They don’t really live in domes. They’ve hollowed out these massive underground caverns a kilometre tall, so it’s like living in a cathedral, in a sense.
‘‘I was at a convention in Belfast talking to the English horror writer Adam Nevill. There’s one of his books I loved, a fantastic book called The Ritual. The first half is the most perfectly sustained piece of tension I’ve ever read. I asked him how he did it. He said he’d read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and he’d read McCarthy talking about the book and saying basically every page has a matter of life or death in it, so Neville put that into his book. I said, ‘That’s exactly what I want for Luna. The moon knows a thousand ways to kill you, and it will if you’re careless.’ I wanted to have that sense of life or death on every page.
‘‘In a sense, laws are a social contract negotiated by your representatives. On the moon, you can kill someone, but the injured party will come after you in a variety of ways, because everything is negotiable. As I was writing, I was thinking that science fiction tends to be either economically liberal and socially conservative, or socially liberal and economically conservative, but the society I’m building on the moon is economically liberal and socially liberal at the same time, because everything is negotiable. You can be straight, you can be gay, you can still be married to someone of the same sex, you don’t have to have sex with them if you don’t want to, if it’s in the contract. But there is a power hierarchy, exactly. In a way, it’s the web of contracts that bind society together. You can be married for a certain amount of time as well. One of the main characters is a wedding lawyer, it’s kind of the opposite of a divorce lawyer. She draws up the contracts. You don’t get married unless it’s contractually based, and her job is negotiating contracts.
‘‘The kids’ books series gives me a chance to play off the leash a bit. Though I enjoy the discipline of more realistic science fiction, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. It’s the little domestic bits I enjoy writing. The bits where you run around blowing things up I find a bit boring to write. I’ve had inquiries about adapting Planesrunner for television. It is aimed at the Dr. Who audience quite deliberately. The series has the go-anywhere machine, which is what the Tardis is, but I also wanted a crew like you have in Star Trek. That sounds awfully cynical. But it’s fun to do. I giggle when I write bits. It’s ‘parallel universe of the week,’ but there is a plot in the background.
‘‘I had to make quite a bit of changes in writing YA. Scaled back the language. Didn’t scale back the violence. These are actually more violent. I could gear it up a bit more, but I didn’t do that because I don’t want violence to be the natural response to any situation that the hero comes across.
‘‘I’ve written for kids’ television. I was a show runner on Sesame Street for Northern Ireland. I’d worked in television for years, and I moved to a new company that wanted to get into children’s TV. Sesame Workshop does versions of Sesame Street all around the world. They’re basically geared towards the particular country, so Sesame Street in Egypt is very much about empowering girls. It’s great. In the South Africa one they have an HIV-positive Muppet. They thought Northern Ireland could use one with an emphasis on conflict resolution. They put out the tender and they had a basic spine for the show. We managed to get a really great producer and director on board. We came up with a pitch, and we got the gig, beating out much more established people, and they were not happy. Sesame Workshop sent people over to teach us how to write in their style. I was showrunner of a team of four writers. All my episodes have hugs in them. The producers said, ‘There aren’t enough hugs in the show, apart from yours. You have hugs, hugs are good, we need more hugs.’ It was great, and I learned an awful lot doing that. Things like the fact that adults will always watch kids’ TV shows, so it has to work for them as well. If you watch any Sesame Street, you’re laughing at the second level humour that the kids don’t get. It’s the same with the Everness books. They’re selling pretty well to the target demographic. They’re actually selling better to the 20-and 30-somethings. It’s not a bad thing at all.
‘‘I’ve read a lot of YA, and a lot of it I don’t like. I don’t think a lot of it is well written, and it talks down or dumbs down, and that was the thing the Sesame guys said, ‘Never ever write down to your audience, always write up and they will follow you.’ There’s some big, head-melting physics in Planesrunner. You don’t need to understand it, but it’s there, and if you’re inter
ested you can find out about it if you want to. There seems to be a philosophy war inside YA, over the question of whether it’s a genre in itself? I don’t think it’s a genre – it’s a marketing category. Is it just a variant of romantic fiction? I don’t think it is either, actually; it can be more than that. But then again, I’m probably writing something quite different from what’s going on elsewhere. I’m doing these old-fashioned adventure stories.
‘‘Enid and I are foster carers. On occasion, we look after teenagers who need care. They all come in the same way. They’re all as good as gold for the first few days, and they don’t know what’s going on, and all of their emotional responses are a bit flat. Then, little by little, they relax and parts of personalities come out. It sounds terrible, but I do use some of that for my character Everett in the books. He’s gone through a terrible trauma, so everything’s going to be bottled up and repressed. He finds his place in this world. We don’t always have a kid. It’s usually emergency care. You see some stuff, you do. But it is interesting. It’s like having lots of little microfamilies.
‘‘The other upcoming book I have is a project that’s been rolling around for about 15 years now, called Hopeland. This is the science fictional equivalent of the kind of thing Neil Gaiman does with fantasy. That’s the nearest I can describe it. He roots his work very firmly in this world, and does little bits of weird in the everyday. Or like Graham Joyce, the kind of thing he does. We almost sold it as a mainstream novel – it could pass as one. I’ve been writing about very big societies, and now I’m writing about very small societies. The lunar societies have maybe three, four million people. It’s not a very big world. Hopeland is even smaller. It takes place inside a family. The premise is that back in the 1920s this guy invented a new kind of family structure that isn’t the nuclear family. It’s the family you never need to leave or never have to leave, the constellation family, which constantly adds new members. The idea is, it’s a social unit that will last for 10,000 years. Simon Spanton, my editor at Gollancz, loved it. I sent him about six chapters, and he said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this three years ago? What’s your agent been doing? It’s great!’