Locus February 2014 Read online

  IN THIS ISSUE

  February 2014 • Issue 636 • Vol. 72 • No. 2

  47th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner

  Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman

  Terry Pratchett’s character, the Librarian of Unseen University, with a pile of the year’s best books

  Interview

  Terry Pratchett: Talking to Other Monkeys

  People and Publishing

  Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Kate DiCamillo, Neil Gaiman, Geoffrey A. Landis, Jo Walton, Neal Asher, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others

  Main Stories

  2013 Philip K. Dick Award Finalists • 2014 Prometheus Awards Hall of Fame Finalists • Simon451 • Penguin Random House UK Children’s • Hugo Nomination Period Open • Clarkesworld Ineligible for Semiprozine Hugo • Jay Lake’s Open Source Genome

  The Data File

  Asimov’s and Analog Raise Pay Rates • Quercus For Sale • Writing Workshop Applications Open • Barnes & Noble News • World Conventions News • Legal News • Publishing News • Awards News • Harry Potter Play • Pew Reading Survey • Announcements • Financial News • International Rights • Audio Rights • Publications Received • Catalogs Received

  2013: The Year in Review

  2013: Recommended Reading: Liza Groen Trombi (with Francesca Myman & Heather Shaw), Gary K. Wolfe, Faren Miller, Russell Letson, Graham Sleight, Adrienne Martini, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Tim Pratt, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Amy Goldschlager • 2013 Recommended Reading List • Locus Poll and Survey • 2013 Book Summary • 2013 Magazine Summary

  Locus Looks at Books

  Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois

  Interzone 11-12/13; Asimov’s 12/13; Extreme Planets, David Conyers, David Kernot & Jeff Harris, eds.; Rayguns Over Texas, Richard Klaw, ed.; Electric Velocipede, Spring ’13; Electric Velocipede, Winter ’13.

  Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton

  Analog 3/14; Electric Velocipede, Spring ’13; Electric Velocipede, Winter ’13; Lightspeed 1/14; Clarkesworld 1/14; Conservation of Shadows, Yoon Ha Lee; Cry Murder! In a Small Voice, Greer Gilman; Dangerous Women, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds.; Shadows of the New Sun, J.E. Mooney & Bill Fawcett, eds.

  Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe

  The Violent Century, Lavie Tidhar; Strange Bodies, Marcel Theroux; What Makes This Book So Great, Jo Walton; The Land Across, Gene Wolfe.

  Reviews by Faren Miller

  Arcanum, Simon Morden; The Bread We Eat in Dreams, Catherynne M. Valente; The Big Aha, Rudy Rucker; Broken Homes, Ben Aaronovitch.

  Review by Russell Letson

  Jupiter War, Neal Asher; Proxima, Stephen Baxter.

  Reviews by Adrienne Martini

  Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest, A. Lee Martinez; Under the Empyrean Sky, Chuck Wendig; Vicious, V.E. Schwab; Strange Bodies, Marcel Theroux.

  Review by Gwenda Bond

  The Burning Sky, Sherry Thomas.

  Reviews by Carolyn Cushman

  Masks, E.C. Blake; Curtsies & Conspiracies, Gail Carriger; The Lord of Opium, Nancy Farmer; Reflected, Rhiannon Held; The Year Without A Summer, Mary Robinette Kowal; Blood of Tyrants, Naomi Novik; The Misfortune Cookie, Laura Resnick; Ink Black Magic, Tansy Rayner Roberts; Royal Airs, Sharon Shinn.

  Listings

  Magazines Received: December • Books Received: December • British Books Received: November • Bestsellers

  New and Notable

  Terry Bisson: This Month in History

  Obituaries

  Neal Barrett, Jr. • Appreciations by Joe R. Lansdale and Al Sarrantonio • Janrae Frank • DEATH REPORTED: John Boyd

  Editorial Matters

  January, the Cruelest Month • 2013 • Visiting Guy • Poll & Survey • Locus Awards • This Issue/Next Issue

  Photo List and Ad List

  Masthead

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  Terence David John Pratchett was born April 28, 1948 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, UK. His first story, ‘‘The Hades Business’’, appeared in his high school magazine when he was 13, and was reprinted in Science-Fantasy two years later (1963). He left school to become a journalist, worked for various newspapers for several years, followed by eight years as a press officer in the nuclear power industry (1980-87), while writing and publishing novels in his spare time. He became a full-time writer in 1987.

  Pratchett’s first novel was YA humorous fantasy The Carpet People (1971; revised edition 2013), followed by satirical SF novels The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981), before launching into his humorous Discworld series with The Colour of Magic (1983). Originally intended as an ‘‘antidote’’ to the bad fantasy so widespread in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Discworld has run for 40 volumes so far, including several for young adults, notably the Tiffany Aching sub-series that began with The Wee Free Men (2003). Pyramids (1989) won the British Fantasy Award, Night Watch (2002) won the Prometheus Award, A Hat Full of Sky (2004) won the Mythopoeic Award, Making Money (2007) won a Locus Award and was a Nebula Award finalist, and I Shall Wear Midnight (2010) won an Andre Norton Award.

  Discworld is a huge phenomenon, with its own dedicated conventions, and spinoffs that include games, guides, diaries, cookbooks, quiz books, cartoons, and TV movies. The books make prominent bestseller lists in the UK and the US, and have won major literary awards: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) received the 2002 Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for the 2002 Guardian Children’s Book Prize. The next title in the series is the forthcoming Raising Steam.

  His other non-Discworld books include satirical fantasy Good Omens (1990, with Neil Gaiman); two humorous young adult SF/F trilogies: Bromeliad or Book of the Nomes (1989-90) and the Johnny Maxwell series (1992-96); and standalone YA novels Nation (2007) and Dodger (2012), the latter set in a fantastic version of Victorian London.

  Pratchett was made an officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998 in honor of his services to literature, and has received seven honorary doctorates from British Universities and is Professor Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin. He lives in Wiltshire with his wife Lyn (married 1968). They have one daughter, Rhianna, a journalist and video game and comics writer, who is working on developing some of her father’s works for television.

  In 2007 Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, specifically Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA).

  •

  ‘‘I’m not allowed to say who it is, but someone wants to make The Wee Free Men into a movie. My daughter Rhianna asked if she could write the screenplay. Dear old dad has told her that she’s got one shot and it’s gotta be bloody good. It’s got to pass muster. But she wrote the most recent Tomb Raider game narrative, and she knows her own mind. A father must talk like this anyway. My daughter and I tend to be just like me and my old dad. We’ll see something droll on the television and both of us will get it at exactly the same time. Things that are just for the family. The little signal that a particular person we’re with is possibly a person we wouldn’t like to be without.

  ‘‘As an Englishman, Dodger was what I call low-hanging fruit. There’s a famous book by Henry Mayhew called London Labour and the London Poor, all about life in the Victorian era. I knew that book word-for-word almost from beginning to the end because I used to steal stuff from it, as writers do. It’s almost a birthright to use that book for reasearch purposes, when you’re English. It’s all in there – here’s Dodger, and here’s how he works, and all the gruesome stuff about the inhabitants of Victorian London. I really like the gruesome stuff. I’d gone through that book as an adolescent (I was that kind of adolescent) so I just knew it. It’s the ki
nd of stuff we know, it’s steeped in our British DNA, but you never know if it will work with American readers. Some of you are smart and some of you are really bloody smart and you go around kicking our backsides when we get it wrong.

  ‘‘Writing Dodger was wonderful and I enjoy writing books other than Discworld books. Not too many, but sometimes it’s nice to put it all to one side and do something else. I’m hoping if I can get some other things out of the way I’ll write another Dodger one day.

  ‘‘In Discworld, Lord Vetinari is the ruler of Ankh-Morpork. He’s the Patrician and he’s a tyrant who believes in a particular type of democracy where one man gets one vote. Well, as long as he is the man and it’s his vote. It’s like the old Athenians. If you have a truly good man at the top, then things will be okay. Although, yes, sometimes people get hanged and Lord Vetinari would definitely have you hung, but not hanged all the way. A good hangman who knows how to kill a man on the rope, but also knows how to make you sweat a bit, but not actually break your neck. The idea of hanging is obviously to break the neck instantly, because there’s no suffering – but Vetinari would give you just a taste of it. ‘You’ve been very bad, and next time Mister Trooper the hangman, who really likes his job, will do it properly.’

  ‘‘In Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari doesn’t waste useful people. Moist von Lipwig, for example, from Going Postal, Making Money, and Raising Steam. He went through that same thing with Mister Trooper. You might be given another chance, but you have do what Lord Vetinari says. That’s not so bad, really. Ah, what the hell, anyway. I’m never running for government.

  ‘‘Some fantasy is overblown. It becomes too much fantasy. I mean, with Discworld, it’s fantasy, but it’s real. In Ankh-Morpork, the largest city on Discworld, you can buy contraceptives. I don’t think you can do that in Mordor! Anyway, you’d need a number of different sizes, I suspect. The whole thing, all the way around, is to make the fantasy real. And if you make the fantasy real, you change it. You fill in all the bits that make people people. There are books where there are lots and lots of people, lots of drama and stuff like that, but where’s the reality?

  Terry Pratchett interview continues after ad.

  ‘‘I just love steam engines. Even here om Britain, if a steam train goes through the countryside, it never spoils the countryside! Oh, there’s all the stuff it’s chuffing out, but we nod that off. The old fashioned railways, the steam engines, they lived and they breathed. Indeed, the whole thing about Raising Steam is that you have the prototype, shall we say, Iron Girder, and she comes alive. There’s a scene where a thief gets in to sabotage her and a bit of his skull is later seen embedded in the roof. He’d inappropriately touched Iron Girder. How’s that for bad manners? There are also a couple of blacksmiths, and they have a go at making their own steam engine. They don’t really understand how to do it, but Mister Simnel the engineer has worked on the prototypes and knows how to do it properly. Both of the blacksmiths die in the steam, and it’s the pink mist all over again. That’s what live steam is all about. It slices through metal sometimes and strips flesh from the bone. You must have read your Mark Twain? Down the Mississippi is about that, the little old boilers. When they blew up it was incredibly nasty. Bits of people everywhere, well, if you could ever find them.

  ‘‘I want to do another Tiffany Aching novel, too. Have you heard of Steeleye Span? They’re an English folk group, and they’re putting quite a lot of Tiffany Aching in an album inspired by Wintersmith. When you see her again she’ll be a bit older than she was in the last novel, of course, because I can do that sort of thing, butI think she’s going to have different problems from now on. I write these days in what I call ‘carpet squares.’ I do a bit, noodle around, see what it looks like. I’ve got carpet squares all over the place! I know there’s a story in there somewhere. I’ve got most of it in my head, but I don’t know what the ending is, although I think she’s going to tell me what it is when I’m good and ready. Like Commander Vimes, Tiffany writes her own dialogue. Well, not actually writes it, because if I believed that I’d be in the nuthouse, but you know what I mean.

  ‘‘The program I use to write, Dragon Dictate, has a program on top of it called Talking Point. There were three guys in Britain who were selling Dragon Dictate and they found out that a large percentage of users stop using it pretty quickly. They looked at what was going wrong and they talked to people and they came up with Talking Point. If you use that in addition to using Dragon Dictate, it’s a whole lot better and easier to use. I just grabbed what they gave me with both hands. We poured in everything I had ever written and stirred it up in my big computer and it worked out how most of the unusual words should sound, , so when I say ‘Granny Weatherwax’ and things like that, they actually come out right on the screen. The program is very good. We are monkeys, so we don’t think that talking is work, but typing is work. I wouldn’t be without it now. All my machines have it.

  ‘‘I have time to write. Because with Dragon Dictate it’s really as simple as this interview, if I’m doing a carpet square I simply tell Word, ‘New work in progress.’ And it will transcribe anything I say. I’ve wanted all my life to have something like this. What’s science fiction for? I mean, I kept saying to the guys at Talking Point, ‘I want to live in a world where I go into the office and I say, ‘‘Put up the piece I was doing yesterday and get me Dave on the phone.’’ And the computer would say, ‘‘Yes, Terry, I’m giving you the last thing you wrote yesterday and I believe you mean Dave Busby because he’s the Dave you most often speak to.’’’ Regrettably the technology hasn’t got me there yet, but at least when I walk through the office door the computer starts up and Word is already there on the screen, waiting for me to start talking. It’s not difficult to do. We are monkeys, so talking to other monkeys comes naturally. Some people say there’s no charm in dictation. To hell with that, it’s down there on the page. You can write a whole lot and the beauty of the process is that it’s so so easy to repair and rework if you don’t like it.

  ‘‘As I always say, I’ll write more if I’m spared. We haven’t talked about my Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t bother me at all. I mean, I have it. But a lot of better writers than me, born around the time I was born, are now lost. Do you remember David Gemmell? He died of cancer from far, far too much smoking. In fact, there was one time when I was doing a gig in Australia, and he was doing one in New Zealand, and we eventually met in the outback somewhere. We were wandering around, and he told me he was going to die, and he was going to die because he’d been smoking too much. I said, ‘Bloody well, Dave, don’t smoke, for Heaven’s sake, man!’ He said, ‘I can’t not it. I can’t stop smoking.’

  ‘‘I was told that PCA, the rare form of Alzheimer’s that I suffer from, has been called the Rolls Royce of the disease. I didn’t want to go to meet other sufferers, but eventually I gave in, and it was fun, because we could all have a laugh at our predicament. We could laugh at the silly little things that no one else would dare find funny. Last time I was at a gathering I was telling them about Talking Point and how I’ve kept working. One of the guys is a retired surgeon, and the day he found out he had PCA, he just said, ‘No, I can’t do this anymore.’ He saw the writing on the wall immediately. I felt very sorry for him.

  ‘‘But I’ve got Terry Pratchett’s PCA. You see, it appears that each PCA is subtly different. Mine seems to be very good at leaving me alone to use the computer to write. I remember when Douglas Adams died, I was in America. I thought, ‘He was so young!’ There have been so many lost. To worry about having PCA is silly… sooner or later something will get you in the end. I am just grateful that I can keep going and with the help of Rob, my assistant of many years, everything seems pretty normal.

  ‘‘I’ve done a lot of work promoting the idea of assisted dying and changing the law here in the UK. Knowing that I could die with some dignity at a time of my choosing would give me peace of mind right now. And I do have the means to do it and knowing that I c
an do it means that I would probably never, well, do it. I’d be too busy writing! One of the things I like to say to people is that there’s nothing like red hot anger to get things done. I enjoy being really angry. Ask Rob!

  ‘‘But I believe that the UK will have assisted dying before very long. We have the House of Lords, and actually they’re quite useful because they’re elderly men and women and they’ve seen a lot of things. They can be of any faith or no faith or whatever. I rather think they will be on our side next time the issue comes up. The thing is, everybody dies. My dad was a stoic. He died saying, ‘That’s what happens. No bother, good innings. Had a good time. Hope to see you in the next world.’ Almost laughing about it as he went.

  ‘‘The whole thing with the dignity in dying issue is that everyone dies, and no one wants to die nastily. Somehow being able to die when at time of your choosing seperates a human from an animan. In Oregon, for example, I understand people can be given a magic potion, and can use it in their own home when they feel the time is right. The interesting thing, very interesting to me, is that they have the stuff to hand. It’s in the cupboard, but a very significant number of them die without ever using it, although they had the means to do it. Every day they found a reason to be alive. In Britain we’ve had people with locked-in syndrome, very nasty, very cruel, meaning their whole world is entirely in their heads. They want to die, but the authoroities won’t let them. We’ve seen some very nasty scenes. One gentleman went on a hunger strike, taking control of his life in the only way he could. Hunger can be a very nasty way to die. If someone is compos mentis – and that’s quite easy to find out – and you know it’s what they want, and they’ve made their peace with their God and their family, then let them die if they want. It’s their life, so it’s their death.

  ‘‘One of the problems is that once you become particularly well known as a writer, everything drops on your head. Schools want you to go and visit and an awful lot of my life I’ve been touring and touring and touring and touring. Neil Gaiman has the same problem. Forever getting on the boat and getting on the plane. I think, ‘I used to have a life once.’ Both of us have got the technology to carry on writing on the road, of course, and so I could take Talking Point to Australia if I wanted. However, I’m rather older than Neil, and you know you’re getting old, and the clock is ticking. So while I still can, I write every day.’’